Guild Wars 2

An idea that some friends and I were discussing was to introduce a few different difficulty levels to dungeons. Not as extensive as Fractals (i.e. not infinite levels) but an easy, medium and hard sort of system.

Our idea was:
Easy – Normal enemy difficulty (pre-update) and being able to way point while a teammate is is combat. This allows first-timers to get a feel for the dungeon without being penalized for being new or having a group who is new to the dungeon. Maybe have slightly reduced rewards for completion (45 – 50 tokens instead of 60)

Medium – Basically post-update. A good difficulty for the average player.

Hard – Slightly harder enemies and you get slightly better drops or more tokens (maybe 75 instead of 60). Or even just more gold from bosses/completion. Enough to give players the incentive to try the hard difficulty.

At least this way it allows people to learn the dungeons and then move onto harder difficulties once they are more comfortable with it. It also gives the people who want more of a challenge a more challenging dungeon. I’m sure this has been suggested before, but I didn’t see it in the newest few pages, so I figured I would bring it up.

Having waypoints available during combat isn’t a good way to get used to the dungeons.

Why? Because there is no penalty to not learning the mechanics. Someone is more likely to learn the mechanics if they know they / their team will be going down if they don’t pay attention.

Things like increased charge-up animation time and reduced damage help teach the encounter, because you’ll then know what to look for.

There isn’t anything wrong with failing as long as you learn something from it.

Also, 10 less tokens? I’d say drop it down to 30, at least, otherwise people will just farm easymode for the tokens.

I agree with TheDaiBish.

Tutorial type levels (aka easy mods) are fine as long as the incentive to get to the non-tutorial mode or harder levels is enough that the tutorial modes aren’t farmed. That there is incentive to learn the mechanics without the pressure that dying would cause, since you can just immediately WP back in.

I agree there needs to be an easy mode so people (like me and other Casual) can have a shot at learning the encounters without having to tab out and watch a youtube video 5 times and hope the boss or mini event goes as it did in the video. It seems that lately the dungeons keep getting harder for instance a level 35 group cannot expect to survive long in AC without being geared and lucky. I also agree that there needs to be a harder mode for those that are crying for a challenge. and both would need their goodies adjusted. Maybe less money/tokens and lower chance of good loot on easy like 10-15 tokens and more of each on hard maybe 80-85 tokens or even special tokens that can only be received in hard modes.

Bump for the view of the devs.

I like the idea that in Hard Mode you get a different type of tokens. Maybe you can get ascended gear with it. Or you get laurels and they just add more stuff to the laurel merchant maybe?

But my numbers were just a rough estimate, again, easy mode would be more for getting the general lay of the land, then medium would be a normal run and hard more would be a challenge. E(20-30 tokens) M(60 tokens) HM (90 tokens and/or 1 laurel) Also, how about reduced money drops from bosses and the highest item rarity in easy mode would be rare? This way most people will do medium/hard once they get the dungeon down.

mmmm... im on the fence again! suprise! i weould prefer one more setting, jusyt one, a guild mission difficulty setting.

I know people seem to hate WoW references for some reason (I don’t get it, that game has been around the block pretty successfully) but I think the way they do the dungeons works well for this. There are “normal” and “heroic” dungeons, and they drop different kinds of tokens. You can’t farm a normal dungeon and get heroic gear. Heroics are harder, and the boss fights are harder, but you can get a feel for the boss and layout of the dungeon without having to go watch videos. Videos don’t teach a person how to really play their toon – only playing it does that. If we need to go watch videos just to run a dungeon, there’s something wrong there.

Kaylenn.5197:

I know people seem to hate WoW references for some reason (I don’t get it, that game has been around the block pretty successfully) but I think the way they do the dungeons works well for this. There are “normal” and “heroic” dungeons, and they drop different kinds of tokens. You can’t farm a normal dungeon and get heroic gear. Heroics are harder, and the boss fights are harder, but you can get a feel for the boss and layout of the dungeon without having to go watch videos. Videos don’t teach a person how to really play their toon – only playing it does that. If we need to go watch videos just to run a dungeon, there’s something wrong there.

I wouldn’t necessarily say there’s anything wrong with there being videos to help learn dungeons. Some people are highly visual learners so watching the video might be the best way for them to learn it. However, things could be done to help those who learn best by the hands on approach learn it without feeling like they’re slowing everyone down too much. Auditory learners probably need to find a guild or a group of friends who have a voice chat feature where someone is willing to tell them the things they need to do and what not.

I have been greatly missing hardmode in guild wars 2 and in an open world it would be very difficult to implement that however this dungeon idea i love! it would be the hardmode that i so missed

Isn’t this kind of already handled by the story mode vs. explorable mode convention?

Not to mention that giving an easy mode that still has decent rewards would create a new fad for speed farming with less challenge.

It might be worth considering awarding a small number of tokens for repeat story mode completions though. That way, people can still get tokens on an easy version of the dungeon, and explorable mode can still be what it already is.

One of the problems with the hard mode feature in GW1 (at least towards the end of the GW1 lifecycle) was that no one would run normal mode anymore, and you basically had to have very specific builds and gear and follow pre-defined instructions to not get auto-booted/blacklisted from any party. In some cases, you even had to display proof that you had run said content hundreds of times, which made it very inconvenient for new or returning players to find groups. CoF and some fractal groups are already very selective about party composition (i.e. only berserker warriors and mesmers in CoF) and I think that the introduction of hard mode might exacerbate this.

Yamsandjams.3267:

Isn’t this kind of already handled by the story mode vs. explorable mode convention?

Not to mention that giving an easy mode that still has decent rewards would create a new fad for speed farming with less challenge.

It might be worth considering awarding a small number of tokens for repeat story mode completions though. That way, people can still get tokens on an easy version of the dungeon, and explorable mode can still be what it already is.

I’d only be in favor of an easy mode is if they made it so it was more rewarding to do Normal or Hard mode. It still gives rewards, but no where near the same amount monetarily as Normal or Hard mode would. And definitely HIGHLY reduced number of tokens given. It should not be the go to dungeon difficulty for dungeon armor or legendaries.

TheDaiBish.9735:

Having waypoints available during combat isn’t a good way to get used to the dungeons.

Why? Because there is no penalty to not learning the mechanics. Someone is more likely to learn the mechanics if they know they / their team will be going down if they don’t pay attention.

Things like increased charge-up animation time and reduced damage help teach the encounter, because you’ll then know what to look for.

There isn’t anything wrong with failing as long as you learn something from it.

Also, 10 less tokens? I’d say drop it down to 30, at least, otherwise people will just farm easymode for the tokens.

False, there is a penalty for not learning the mechanic. It is called Repair bills and running back. Every death will teach you not to do that again. The old system was a great way in learning dungeon. It doesn’t frustrate veteran players because they aren’t affected by terrible player’s skills. It also more fun than not playing the game and lying down on the ground.

That is how I learned 99% of the dungeons when the game came out and I am glad that I learned from the old system before the new system came into place, I would’ve quit.

I agree with runeblade, when I started learning dungeons it was just my friends and me wiping over and over again for hours and hours, was an awesome time. The problem is, now if that happens everything resets xD Good thing we know a lot of the dungeons now or else it would’ve been a much harder learning environment in my opinion.

runeblade.7514:

False, there is a penalty for not learning the mechanic. It is called Repair bills and running back. Every death will teach you not to do that again. The old system was a great way in learning dungeon. It doesn’t frustrate veteran players because they aren’t affected by terrible player’s skills. It also more fun than not playing the game and lying down on the ground.

That is how I learned 99% of the dungeons when the game came out and I am glad that I learned from the old system before the new system came into place, I would’ve quit.

I disagree.

While you may have learnt that way, not everyone has. Why do you think people are asking for it back?

• Because they haven’t needed to learn the fights, and now are having difficulty because they haven’t got the crutch of ‘well, if I die, I can always run back’.
• Because they don’t want the ‘hassle’ of teaching new players, which is just as harmful to the community.

Considering you can make a gold or two on a run, a few silver for repairs is hardly anything. As for running back? That takes, what? Under a minute? Hardly much of a penalty.

Bad players aren’t going to get better if you pat them on the back, say ‘well, you tried’, and allow them to progress even if they play terrible.

Back in GW, if you all died, you’d have to redo the mission completely, even if your were on the final boss. If you died and got revived, you’d get 15% Death Penalty each time to a total of 60%, reducing your stats, and the only way you could get rid of it is either using an item, or killing mobs, which would reduce it by 1% every 72(?) xp you earned, or 2% for bosses.

Restarting at the last boss is pretty tame in comparison.

Like I said, slowing down / extending attack animations, as well as reducing damage (one-shot moves become three-shot moves) allows you to see what you’re looking for, and would be far more ideal for a learning mode.

If you don’t know how you got Downed in the first place, how do you learn from it?

I still think there needs to be some way for us newer or casual players to learn the dungeons without having to get rezed for dying to something we knew nothing about. I know a lot of you “Hardcore” players love the if you do something “Stupid” you should have to pay for it but all that does is make people not want to try at all. and as we all know doing dungeons is practically all there is for endgame content right now.