Guild Wars 2

First: What’s wrong with dungeons
So, I was in HOTW last night, and did Paths 1 and 3. Path 1 has some changes that have convinced me that GW2’s dungeon design for explorables is fundamentally not working. Specifically, in Path 1, there’s a boss version of an Icebrood Seer who used to be a boring DPS slog because he had high HP and no really threatening damage. Rather than add damage or any interesting mechanics to the fight (the boss literally does not and, by all appearances, cannot move) they just added some adds. All this did was make us move closer together, as the summons also did such low damage and came in such small numbers that we simply grouped up and let the passive AoE we were dishing out on the boss take them down. It was, in short, no different from how the fight used to go – we all stood in one place and smacked the boss as hard as possible.

A lot of the fights in HOTW are boring. The Butcher is easily the worst offender – two of his totems (Protection and Regeneration) do nothing but prolong the fight, even if you do everything else perfectly; the third buff (Retaliation) does so little damage my group safely ignores it completely; and on top of that he has a giant boatload of HP. We killed his Regen and Prot totems some ten times last night, each. The fight lasted in the range of eight minutes. Eight minutes, and the only skill we were required to use was to dodge-roll out of melee range when he did the spin attack. If it’d been eight minutes on the edge of my seat, fine — but it wasn’t, it was eight minutes where I figured out the boss in thirty seconds, and then had to do a bog-standard DPS rotation while our ranger destroyed the totems.

Another great example from HOTW P3 is Fimbul. Fimbul’s got 2 mechanics: first, an easily-dodged knockback, and second, his healing ice shield. He goes into the ice shield, you beat on it til he comes out, but he heals all the while. Again, it’s an unavoidable mechanic that does nothing more than prolong a fight that was too long to begin with, due to Fimbul’s buckets and buckets of HP and the inconsistency of DPS on him due to the need to dodge his knockback. There’s not even a way to say you’ve “mastered” this fight — whether he’s in the ice block or out, you’re best off just doing the max amount of DPS you can in a given moment. There’s no way to interrupt the ice block heal, or force him to reflect the knockback at himself. Compare to a dungeon that’s done right — the Dredge fractal final boss. While still probably having more HP than he needs, these bosses at least let you avoid their fight-prolonging heals. They punish you for screwing up, and reward you for doing well with a shorter, more satisfying fight. Unlike Fimbul, who is going to enter his ice block at least 3-4 times during a given fight. Our relatively low-DPS group had it happen 6 times last night. Six unavoidable, fight-prolonging healing sessions. Great fun, guys, lemme tell you.

Next post: How to fix it.

So, my suggestions for fixing dungeons are not specific to one dungeon, but rather general rules of thumb that I think are lacking in basic dungeon design.

Dungeons should reward learning (and not in a “I can safely skip this pack of trash” sort of way). Bosses should be difficult because they have avoidable or manageable mechanics that encourage you to pay attention during a fight and use a varied skill set. Boss does lots of big wind-up attacks? Bring interrupts. Boss does increasing damage over time? It’s a DPS race. Boss summons adds? You’ll need a fair bit of AoE. Boss insta-kills with a wind-up? You’ll need to conserve endurance and dodge appropriately. The thing is, all of these encourage you to learn the fight and use your class in new and interesting ways.

The main crop of explore dungeons does not do this, with very rare exceptions (the “wind-up to instant-kill” one is very common, but also the lowest possible skill threshold to pass in a game like GW2, and something that should be layered with more mechanics). The story dungeons often do it better, surprisingly — Ralena and Vassar are an example of a fight that actually rewards you for recognizing threats and responding to them, rather than arbitrarily punishing you because it can. Every boss should have a mechanic that is harsh and punishing, but either avoidable or manageable with skilled play.

Further, dungeon bosses should live no longer than needed to demonstrate mastery of their mechanic. If you can dodge Kohler’s pull-then-spin three or four times, you can dodge it ten times. Giving him heaping mounds of HP does nothing but prolong the fight and make it a hassle. That Butcher fight I described takes some eight to ten minutes. Eight to ten minutes of dodging a whirling attack every 30-40 seconds, and otherwise doing a standard DPS rotation, because you don’t need anything else. I alt-tabbed several times to chat with people, immediately after the whirl, and never went down, despite wearing my DPS gear and removing my best survivability trait (Altruistic Healing). It really is ridiculously easy, and thus ridiculously boring. We had already killed his totems a half-dozen times, and dodged the whirl attack – what more was gained from making us do that fifteen times, instead of six or eight? Nothing but a waste of time.

Next, every fight should be interesting – especially trash. There are way too many fights in dungeons that are just another generic group of gravelings, or (oooh!) some Icebrood Claymores, and there are more reasons than just the bad loot that these get skipped. First, they also have way more HP than they need, in general, to allow you to demonstrate mastery, and second, they tend to be just boring, un-threatening fights. Twilight Arbor actually does this well on one of the paths, having 3-4 different mixes of Nightmare Court with varying target priority and difficulty (Knights I found most difficult, while Duelists never really bothered me, but sometimes they’d throw 2 Knights at you at once and things got hectic between knockdowns).

The best way to make each fight interesting? Have every fight teach you something about the instance. LOTRO did this well in some of its later dungeons, with each fight having a specific mechanic — and even better, those mechanics were often scaled-down previews of what the boss would do, meaning that you got scaled-down training before you got to the boss in which of his attacks to interrupt, which to ignore, which adds to target first, etc. One fight would have you facing summoners, then a second would have knockback, then a third would have points on the ground that trigger summoners, with lots of knockback so you needed to learn how to avoid the summon-spawns. Then a fourth, the boss fight, would have summons, knockback, and another new trick to learn (in this case, it was shared damage and adds you didn’t want to kill). Layers of difficulty teach you the skills you need, then demand mastery of them in the boss fight, which acts as a sort of test of how well you’ve learned the skills the instance is testing. (This, of course, requires that you have specific player skills you expect each instance to test).

The explorable dungeons lack many of these. Most bosses take 2-3 minutes longer to kill than is needed to demonstrate mastery of their shallow mechanics, and every fight you can skip, you do. Explorables need a revamp to be interesting, to have some mixture of fun, challenge, and reward. Right now, they have inconsistent, uninteresting challenges (mostly staying awake while DPSing), so people just run the ones that get the quickest rewards, unless they want a particular armor or rune set.