First of all I am not putting this in the ascended gear thread because I personally dont care about all that and I dont want this being thrown away as “just another topic about ascended gear”. Mods can move it if they must But I feel this warrants its own thread.
Suggestion:
Put the new rewards from FOTM into the Exp modes of all the other dungeons. In fact, put a manditory peices of gear for the BIS ascended gear as a Grindable reward within each of the other dungeons. This will effectively keep those dungeons useful and allow FOTM to last longer as a useful peice of content.
Let me explain why you should do this; Since you have launched FOTM, nobody runs the other Dungeons anymore at all. Nobody. It takes longer to get a group for Arah or CoF, including doing the event to make it uncontested then it does to actually run the dungeons themselves now. This is particularly harsh against new lvl 80 players who want a cool look such as the Visual gear of TA, these players have a very hard time finding groups now. Even thier own guilds are running nothing but FOTM all day everyday.
Your entire design plan was to Keep all content current and useful, and now, nobody cares about the Awesome visual gear that comes from the other dungeons so those of us that Do care about that cannot find a group for them at all. Everyone is just running Fotm because it has the BiS gear.
So to sum it up again:
1. Give people a reason to run ALL the other dungeons as a way to progress further into Fotm.
Ex: In order to get that new back piece you need to run CoF about 10 times or so to get the craftable peice, the new back peice would be required to get past lvl 10 or so in FOTM, therefore more players would still run all the dungeons.
2. You can add more ascended gear this way, adding a single peice of the over all progression puzzle to each dungeon.
3. Make the drop rate for decent/new gear the same across all areas of the game be it Fotm, Dragon fights, Old Dungeons, WvW, or running a lvl 80 in a lvl 55 zone to help a guildie or just explore the world. That way you dont have 90% of the Pve population in Lions Arch spamming “LFG FOTM LVL X”. Sure alot of people will still run it because its new, and it will be the only way to “Use” the Ascended gear. But at least players can all be equally rewarded to some extent for doing all aspects of the game. I dont want to grind the exact same dungeon over and over and over again all the time. If i wanted that I would still be playing WoW/Swtor or whatever other mmos.
I dont mind progression, but I do mind not being able to complete any other content then the “Cool new thing with the BiS gear” becuase you guys decided to go verticle progression instead of horizontal. So rather then ask you to change what you’ve allready decided to do completely, I’m merely adviseing how to build on the combination of a Verticle and Horizontal progression.. to merge them into one being that allows us the players to Still enjoy all parts of your game world and not just FOTM.
On a side note, the way you designed FoTM as a dungeon is very good. You guys have done an amazing job with this game so far and even with the introduction of FOTM and all my complaints, This is still the only MMORPG i want to play. But just because Im a loyal player and I really like Arenanet does not mean you guys should settle with the way things are now. I want to run other dungeons and get that cool gear on Multiple toons, I want to be able to explore all the zones and all the content of the game without being the only person in the zone or at an event because 90% of the players are standing around Lions Arch screaming for a FOTM group.
Thank you for listening to your players. Please dont cater to the wow locusts to much. Stick to your guns and your original design plans and keep innovating your game.
-Faithful Player