Feedback:User/Hong/Revamp Prophecies explorables

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(This was originally posted a couple of years ago, but everything still holds.)

While vanquishing all three campaigns, I was struck by just how much more fun the Nightfall and Factions explorables are to fight in, compared to Prophecies. It's apparent that Anet learned a lot about area design in the time between the first and the third campaign, and it would be nice if some of this knowledge could be incorporated back into Prophecies. I assume a wholesale redesign of Proph isn't on the cards, but the following changes should be feasible:

  • Put another resurrection shrine or two in large areas like The Falls, Lornar's Pass and Mineral Springs, so that a wipe doesn't send you all the way back to the beginning.
  • Trim the patrol routes for minotaurs in Anvil Rock, and for the hydra boss in Prophet's Path. While tracking down wandering groups can make vanquishing tedious in general, this is most pronounced in Prophecies.
  • Mix up the composition of the mobs in certain areas. Big homogeneous groups are just annoying to fight if you have a balanced group, and are easily farmed by specialist builds.
    • Hydras in the Crystal Desert
    • Riders and scarabs in the Maguuma Jungle
    • Ice imps/golems in the southern Shiverpeaks
    • Inferno imps and skales in Kryta
  • Speaking as a melee player: reduce the amount of shutdown/punishment/snaring, especially in the southern Shiverpeaks. Spending an entire fight on your butt due to volleys of Water Tridents from golems is amusing to watch (once, anyway), but not much fun to play. Note that this isn't a complaint about excessive difficulty; the golems can easily be taken down by your heroes. The issue is that often, the heroes end up taking them down without any contribution from the player, who is reduced to the status of a spectator.
  • Reduce the healing for certain mobs where a monk boss can also be present. Too many monks generally turns the fight into a frustrating stalemate. I'm thinking of Jolo Lighthaunch's group in Anvil Rock and Deldrimor Bowl, specifically; having 2-3 centaur monks is fine, but adding him takes it over the top. The damage output of the mob can be bumped up to compensate.

None of these changes should really affect the difficulty level of vanquishing, but they would make it a lot more enjoyable. The most dangerous groups -- the Stone Summit and the charr -- are also, in general, the most fun to play against. That's not necessarily because they because they offer more challenge, but because you can actually do stuff against them. Similarly, I'd far prefer to vanquish a Kryta area when the WiK mobs are active, because they're simply more fun than the regular mobs.