Guild Wars 2

So I’m one of the people who liked this update and enjoyed running through the tower with some guidies, it felt like a true open world dungeon. However I felt there wasn’t much incentive to come back other then finishing the meta (unless you count killing trehearne if you find the right pod) which is a shame because I’d like a massive version of a tower like this that provides awesome loot as you progress and it would make for a worthwhile addition to this game.

Perhaps there could be multiple branching paths with bosses at each of them which drop something nice. Perhaps the deeper you went, the hard things got the more people you would need to survive.

Either way I’d hate to see this type of open world dungeon content just disappear forever and never come back in any form again.

I feel Anet had quite a successful release with the tower and learned some areas where it can be improved upon. I don’t know about a tiered system in the future, but they’ll certainly have more open-world Living World stuff in the difficult style of a world dungeon.

I actually really liked the concept of the tower (aside from the third floor’s gimmick). It’s challenging, the event-gating, fake-golem-waypoints, and little instances help prevent it from turning into one giant zerg. That’s good.

My guildmate who’s usually very bitter and disinterested in LS stuff actually spent time doing it, and said he enjoyed it.

Agreed with this. I really hope they expand on this kind of content.

Heck, they could even have a huge dungeon like the Tower that includes a world boss-level boss somewhere.

This is by far my favourite open world content and one of the more enjoyable placed in GW2 period. I’m fine with the tower leaving but I’d love for the tower climb platform to return in a more robust and permanent form in the future.

• While zerging was still the easiest method, I had many times where I would be split into either solo exploration or small group co-operation. This is why I play MMOs – to play with other people. Unlike champion zergs or Scarlet events I felt like combat was interesting in the tower beyond auto-attack.
• The champions used diverse combat mechanics. Rather than just being a giant damage sponge the champions in the tower felt like dungeon bosses. Attacks to dodge and learn, people to res and different tactics for them.
• It encouraged partying. Even if it wasn’t a formal party, progressing with a handful of people was very rewarding. I often found myself in a two man unofficial party until we resed someone or solo runners caught up to us. Often we ended up creating a small group of players working together. Rarely does open world PvE feel like this any more. I felt like a hero when I came along someone downed and resed them and together we worked together to get to the next floor.
• Exploring was fun. The environments aren’t as diverse as they could be, but climbing the platforms, finding your way through the maze, discovering chests and taking on the different bosses, all these things were fun. I’d love to see that expanded later on in another form. A tower climb open world dungeon has so much potential.
• Elite mobs are so much more fun than generic champions because defiant is bad. The removal of defiant but still having powerful enemies means that CC skills are useful. Watching for a powerful charge attack (like the double dagger stab from the krait) and pulling, pushing, stunning etc was a lot more interesting that DPS the HP sponge or wasting CC on a weak mob that you may as well kill instead of control.
• Scaling worked well. Small groups were capable of taking on a boss and as more people bottlenecked it usually got easier, but it wasn’t just annihilated. Small party gameplay felt more co-operative than dungeons.

I still have some issues with the content.

• Solo runners can ruin your day. If you have two people (or you are solo) taking on several mobs, you are forced to run if a solo runner with a massive aggro tail drags mobs onto you. Because the AI just switches target, runners will often ruin the experience for everyone else.
• It can suffer from population issues. It sucks to play in if you go for 20 minutes at a time without seeing an ally come through. As the content dies down, I can see this becoming more of a problem. I like accessible content and this can easily become inaccessible if not enough people are coming through.
• The rewards are lame. I spent a lot of time in there and I have almost no rewards to show from it. I feel like I am using similair effort and skill to dungeon runes and a lot more effort and skill than champion farms but I have very little to show for it. I think tuning it into a champion farm would ruin it (zerging is incredibly boring) but at the same time I think the rewards are poorly balanced for this content. Even the content specific rewards (the mini, the recipes, the back pack) all feel unatainable because of the intense grind or the incredibly low RNG. If I want any of these I’m better of farming dungeons or champions for gold than spending time in the tower.

I think this was the best open world content we’ve seen so far.

overall a lot of the ideas mentioned above should be salvaged for future use, but this particular dungeon is a failure due to the outcome that the optimal strategy is to kitten over all other players and get your own rewards

Agree, I love the concept of “an open world dungeon”. It is fresh and really nice. Good job!

I agree that an open world dungeon is a very good idea. Not only can it be fun and challenging, but it’s a good stepping stone for players who want to try instanced dungeons but think it might be too difficult and don’t want to be a liability to a group.

This one has a few problems with spawns, scaling etc., but I’m sure Anet can solve such problems over time.