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Ascalon Catacombs changes = fun ?
Voiidiin
Member Posts: 817
For me i generally run AC at least 3 times a day when i login to play. Granted it did get stale but i used all the tokens to break down lvl 80 rares for ectos.
So i was sitting in Lion's Arch (Borliss Pass) and a bunch of guys started moaning over the changes that were introduced with yesterdays patch. I had yet to go into the dungeon so i said screw it and formed a group of players who were in the same frame of mind and liked to run AC, this was a pure PUG, no guildies involved all level 80's. (Warrior, Ranger, Elementalist, 2 Guards)
Path-1 The Howling King.
1st- Spider boss and her poison wells now last 3x longer than before, the hatchlings are not 2 shotable and can really mess up a group that does not pay attention.
2nd- The gravelings in the hall after the spider, no more scavs (unless they are randomly generated) the gold howler is replaced with a gold stalker. The stalker has a new blast knockback, that seemed to be on a 15-20 second timer. No more scavs means killing the breeder is alot easier but the KB by the stalker is rather constant.
3rd- We did not get a troll (random, was told you can still have troll and Kholer fight) but wanted to test things so we pulled Kholer. Pulling Kholer away from his "helpers" is not really needed now, since he just summons them at every 30% health decrease. So fighting him at the top of the stairs is just as hard as pulling back to the Gargoyles. His spinning death attack that normally came after his AE pull seems to happen without the AE pull now, and still happens at the end of the pull. This can get really chaotic with the summons now but it seemed like his health was reduced as we seemed to kill him pretty quickly. His summons are random (2 at a time) the worst was getting the necros.
4th- Protecting Hodg at the table/killing 6 mounds event. This was pretty much the same with one huge exception, stalkers now suck, and suck more with bigger numbers, you will get chain KB'ed if there are alot of them spawned from the mounds. The KBs will hit you in downed state making you look like a grounded fish. This along with the scavs from the 5th mound can make it very scetchy. We ended up having 2 guards defend Hodg and the other 3 worked on killing the mounds (having an ele with icebow/flaming greatsword helped with this tons),
5th- Assembling the 5 scepter pieces was not really changed with the exception of the new stalkers and the large amount of scavs in this encounter, getting chain KB then feasted upon by the Scavs really sucked and i got killed on my second scepter piece. We finished this with only my death.------------Ok once this part is done we chose to run to the last boss, again the new stalkers made this part alot harder, having as many stability skills up are what made this run through mobs easier, i get the strong feeling Anet is really trying to get us to fight our way through not run.
6th- The Howling King, you will find one huge difference, all the breeders that surround the Boss and in the nearby areas (the hallways leading to him still have mobs in them) are now gone. so we barreled into the boss and attacked. He now does a very narrow scream attack, but still can kill you if you are in the direct line of it, this attack will come in quicker intervals than before. Summons on a 5 second or faster basis flaming circles of death, i think there were a total of 3 up at any one time. Then the hard part happens, i was in too much of a frantic mindset but he summons large groups of Scavs, Stalkers, Hatchlings, and i think howlers. The combination of Stalkers and Scavs really made this part hard. Best thing we did was just circle strafed him and used ranged attacks. Also, this was either a bug or a new mechanic, but one of us died, not downed but greyed dead, no one could revive him not even after we killed the boss, in fact the guy ended up spawning dead outside the dungeon.
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For me it was fun, i had a good group for a PUG, and we were all interested in testing out stuff not just attempting a fast completion. The dead guy at the end was not a happy ending but i did get 2 rares and 1 exotic from the whole run, no MF gear on me.
TLDR: Bad players who have skated by on others will hate the new AC, good players who are not just DPS whores and work well with groups will love it.
edit: Added colors to break up the monotony.
Lolipops !
Comments
Good news
It was a bit easy. Hope they do the same to CoF 
And the colour coding is much appreciated. I wish all posts were as concise as this one.
<Welcome to my world>
Thanks for reading it, gonna run the other 2 paths today, if a few more express interest i will post those runs also
Lolipops !
Path 3, at the beginning I thought it was impossible and insane, but then our party realized that the guardian NPC use shield and players need to stand in it to survive. Actually now p3 boss is easier, which is bad imo
You are right about Ac and CoF. All we need is Hard Mode!!!
run anything else in this case...
I'm glad to hear that pro runner finally got some difficulty with lvl 35 dungeon! /sarcasm
I'm glad you all love anti-casual policy of A-net!
try before buy, even if it's a game to avoid bad surprises.
Worst surprises for me: Aion, GW2
I would not consider myself a "pro runner" I pug almost all of the time. A pug group of competent players can do dungeons, hell most of the content can be done with only a couple of competent players in the group. I don't rage quit so even if the run is taking a "long time" I typically stick it out with the group until the team figures it out. That is what I call casual. I don't expect the content to be so easy that anyone can just bumble through it. There isn't really any fun in that, at least IMHO.
I did AC path 1 last night with a casual group and it did take us some time to get used to the boss battle. We did get it down but it was far from a speed run. And it was fun.
I think all of the boss changes were an improvement.
I was actually bitching just last week to my guild, that the path 2 Ascalon Catacombs boss was a horrible design because you could literally afk while auto attacking it. No reason to move, no need to use the mortars. It took more time to set up the mortars you never even used, than it did to fight the boss.
Now it actually REQUIRES teamwork, using the ghost traps, and dodging the boss.
... now they just need to fix CoF path one like that.
Kohler is still a good method to tell if your PUG really sucks (Let's skip him!) (Oh god, it's YOU guys again.
), and now he's a little more variety, which is good, because his whole mechanic was 'dodge his pull', having to dodge his pull WHILE killing adds makes it a bit more entertaining.
Spider was kind of a joke too, so glad they fixed her up a bit. Troll I'm not sure needed to be changed, but I guess it makes the fight a bit more interesting (Not significantly easier/harder that I could tell).