Now I'm not one to complain about GW2 because lets face it, it's a great game. However, this is something that bothers me greatly. What's that? Dungeon Explorer mode. It's probably the hardest thing I have ever attempted in any MMO. You think 25 man heroic with no debuff in WoW is hard? You haven't seen anything yet. Let me share with you my experience.
Mini-Boss: The first encounter you will see in the explorer mode (Catacombs) is a massive Lizard that summons adds. This little boss was pretty much a push over. Once we beat him, then NPCs took us to their camp and we got to choose which path to take.
Traps! Oh my: Next you will encounter some annoying traps that will literally one shot you. No big deal, they were easy to avoid.
Second Mini-Boss: So the second little boss you encounter is a spider queen. Now this is where the pain starts to happen. You walk into this room with statue heads on the walls that shoot our fireballs that deal AoE damage. While we are trying to clear out this room, the spider boss randomly spawns on top of you. No problem, right? WRONG. The spider boss spawns with about 50 baby spider adds that literally one shot you. The second the spider boss spawned we all died because we had no time to react to it. After about 20 minutes trying to kill those small adds, we finally got the encounter to where only the spider boss was up. He had simple mechanics and we beat him.
More fucking traps: Yup, more traps that one shot you.
One of the main bosses: We finally reached one of the main bosses for the patch we choose. This is where the dungeon turned from very hard, but doable, to impossible to do. This boss is a human ghost. He has two adds that are Monks, these monks are a pain in the ass because they heal and deal a ton of damage and are hard to kill. So for our first attempt, like any sane person we decided to kill the monks straight away. So as a Ranger, I pulled the boss for my group and we started to focus one of the monks. About 5 seconds into the fight, our entire part gets pulled into the main boss and we get one shot. So after a few attempts, we learn that if you stand far enough from the boss, you can't get pulled into him and get one shot. By the way, you can't avoid dying once you get pulled in because the second you get pulled in, the boss instantly does a whirlwind. You are unable to dodge this after you get pulled. So by this time after we learned how to avoid his pull, we lasted about a minute into the fight. Still trying to kill the Monks.. We got one of the monks to 3% health and then next thing we know, the monk was healed back to full health. Oh, and we all got pulled into the boss and died again. Next few attempts, the boss started pulling us literally across the map. You know how in WoW Death Knights have that deathgrip? This is what the boss was doing to all of us one at a time. After about an hour of not getting anywhere with this boss, we gave up.
I feel like the explorer modes are way over tuned. I mean, I love a challenge, but this isn't a challenge at all. It's literally impossible to do these dungeons in explorer mode at the recommended level (35). Remember we had 3 level 40s and two level 35s. Yes we all get down leveled to 35, but we are still stronger then a normal 35. I'm just wondering if anyone has actually beat a path on explorer mode yet for Catacombs. If so, I'd like to hear your strategy.