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bosses that I'd say is "unfair", but I feel like the easiness comes from how long the wind-up everything has in Season 3. I remember playing against enraged thor back when that first came out and it felt like I had to be super human to dodge his charge attack. The difficulty from Season 3 is artificial. If you don't have 10k+ defense the bosses weakest attack will 1-shot you. With a level 80 +8 2x rA enchant weapon it took me around 50 minutes to solo regina. I wouldn't say it was difficult though.
Luckily for me I had very good gear I could easily move over from other characters, so the stat increases don't really affect me after I did that. Though after playing gw2 and being able to swap top-level gear between characters for free I felt like I was getting scammed by having to spend $20 on unbinds to move over gear from 1 character to another.
I agree completely, it's still going to be a shock for a new player to go from being able to just carelessly facetank everything and therefore never learning how to dodge, to just getting blown up in one or two hits by attacks that you can't even invuln through (which IIRC is never actually explained to you anywhere in-game, you just have to trial and error it).
Also, the long attack windups don't actually "help" anything. This is a huge pet peeve of mine. New bosses are designed horribly. Old bosses had attack animations that were smooth so you could wait until it was about to hit you and dodge it. Instead of standing there for 2 seconds announcing "I am going to attack soon!" and then basically releasing their attack instantly. Instead of dodging being intuitive now, you basically, again, just have to trial-and-error it until you memorize the attack timings. It isn't reacting to enemy attacks so much as it is repeating a pattern.
Of course this is another problem in and of itself: with few exceptions most new bosses are just garbage, as far as I'm concerned. Now, all of the old content is so easy you can kill anything in under a minute with a trainee weapon. New players will never experience what I still think is the best the game had to offer. They'll have a cakewalk followed by - IMO - the worst season. Season 1 had some really good, memorable raid and non-raid fights; honestly beyond the really slow start of the early episodes, only a few of them were duds - and even then you can find someone that likes every raid (I personally always hated Colru but some people love it). Season 2 was a real mixed bag with some really terrible bosses but still had a few rather good ones. Season 3, honestly, I just hate. The only fight that stands out to me at all as good is Lugh. Glas doesn't count because he's really just a reskin with a new gimmick and slightly different/faster attack patterns. Abomination is my least favorite fight of all time because it takes dumb map gimmicks to a whole 'nother level and makes me pine for Season 2's awful gimmicks. Hell, Season 3 even has gimmicks in the non-raid bosses. Season 1 never had to rely on **** like that, it just had good bosses (though there were some gimmicks towards the end, they weren't overbearing, and were generally just a skill based extra mechanic that added to the fight rather than distracting from it).
By phasing out the older content I can really no longer recommend the game to anyone, frankly. Before I would say it was worth playing just to run through the old content; whether you ended up liking the endgame enough to stick around or not was another issue. Now, if anyone asked me whether Vindi were worth getting into, I couldn't in good conscience say yes. (less)
I'm really surprised you even felt challenged in S2. All the content is nerfed to hell - S1 the most, but S2 and S3 as well. I just ran through the story even beyond S2 without ever … (more)stopping to equip the new gear I'd gotten or level up skills and everything was a cake walk. In S2 you can at least take damage, but the bosses still die insanely fast.
Nerfing the difficulty of the game pre-level 90 so much is going to drive new players away even more than the slow leveling and impossible grind for low level gear did before, I guarantee it. They should've done the streamlined leveling experience without making bosses die in one hit. Why would anyone play this game if they don't experience any challenge at all before level 90? That's the entire point of the game, without the skill based combat system you might as well play any other F2P MMO on the market (or any P2P MMO, since Vindi's cash shop is so bad the game may as well be P2P).
Even worse, they're going to be totally unfamiliar with their character's skillset and the game's mechanics when they do reach actual content, so if they do slog through all of the pointless pre-90 **** they'll suddenly be thrown into the deep end. Even **** Cromm is pathetically easy compared to even the most basic Wood Elf boss now. Going from barely having to dodge attacks and killing former raid bosses instantly with no gear to dying in a couple of hits from basic bosses is an enormous difficulty spike, especially when you're suddenly having to deal with unblockable attacks as well. Before it felt like too much of the game was a tutorial, now it's like there is no tutorial stage at all, you just breeze through non-content and then get dropped into the deep end.
If anything, this update was only good for existing players because now it's really easy to level alts. I can only see new players either being turned off by how easy the game is, or going along with how easy it is until they reach end game and get their asses kicked and quit because of the huge difficulty spike. (less)
Hey OP (& others), the problem is after the change in management that came with Season 2 the game started to go to **** and everyone knew it. Now instead of actually looking at what … (more)they did right in the past and what got people playing the game and made it a success, they decided to just essentially delete all the old content people used to enjoy and pretend it never happened, so that the new content won't look so bad by comparison. This is why only level 90 content is relevant at all now, so that you don't play any of the older stuff and think "Huh, the game used to be a lot better. What happened?" They don't want you actually enjoying the skill based combat the game used to offer, because that might make you think you can play it without buying infinite amounts of enhancement runes etc. and going for the new +20 equipment. Face tanking your way through the game is what they want to encourage, because less skill = more gear reliance and therefore more cash shop transactions.
Hope you understand their logic now! Have fun out there. (less)
