Guild Wars 2

The current state of RvR in GW2 is all over the place at the moment.

This video goes over WHY RvR needs to be improved as well as offering an elite dungeon similar to the underworld in GW1 as a solution.

There’s a follow up video coming up soon covering why I believe we haven’t recieved any ‘endgame’ content like this already.

As always I’d love to hear everybodies thoughts on the current state of RvR in GW2 as well as foreseeable problems with the proposed solution.

EDIT: I didn’t do a very good job with the sound levels in that video, There’s a re Upload with the sound fixed here:

I agree with the RvR not being as good as it could be right now.
Before anything, and because it would be easy to implement, they should improve the other dungeons to be as rewarding as CoF, it’s gone to a point where CoF P1 is nearly the only dungeon people are running.

IMO CoF P1 needs to become HARDER or it’s rewards nerfed rather then brining all dungeons up/down to its current level of RvR.
Making every dungeon reward the same amount of loot for the CoF path 1’s RvR ratio would do more harm then good.

I agree with pretty much 500% of that video. One concern that i had since launch was the potential lack of endgame content, or at least the incentive to even play. CoE is quite possibly my favorite dungeon ever, but takes some effort to even get a group going. And everyone already knows the problem w/ CoF p1. I honestly don’t see the problem w/ higher difficulty content offering higher rewards. Then i’d finally be able to find a grp for all the dungeons/paths i’ve never done. We’ll see where gw2 goes, i love it, but it is VERY lacking in endgame content, we got fractals, but that gets excruciatingly boring after about 30 levels.

Pookiki.3154:

I agree with pretty much 500% of that video. One concern that i had since launch was the potential lack of endgame content, or at least the incentive to even play. CoE is quite possibly my favorite dungeon ever, but takes some effort to even get a group going. And everyone already knows the problem w/ CoF p1. I honestly don’t see the problem w/ higher difficulty content offering higher rewards. Then i’d finally be able to find a grp for all the dungeons/paths i’ve never done. We’ll see where gw2 goes, i love it, but it is VERY lacking in endgame content, we got fractals, but that gets excruciatingly boring after about 30 levels.

Add me to friends for CoE. It’s one of the better dungeons. (EU server)

Do you guys have any other challenges like this in the game (good rewards or not) that you feel are worth mentioning?

All I can say is the karma vendor at the end of the Temple’s (So far all I know of is Balthazarr’s vendor) He gave pretty good armor. What I hate about it is that we cant maybe get at least one armor part free. It’s really costy with karma, unless you never use your karma.

Derpula Stevens.8249:

All I can say is the karma vendor at the end of the Temple’s (So far all I know of is Balthazarr’s vendor) He gave pretty good armor. What I hate about it is that we cant maybe get at least one armor part free. It’s really costy with karma, unless you never use your karma.

The vendors as a reward for completing the events is a pretty nice touch. I also like how these bosses can drop som unique loot (I’ve only seen rings so far but it’s a nice touch.)

It’s become such a problem that most of the people in my guild refuse to run Fractals anymore. I like Fractals, I like the skins, I like Fractals 40+ because they’re somewhat challenging (although it’s a mixture of challenge and tediousness to be honest).

But my experience with Fractals and rewards is terrible. When leveling my warrior through <20 uneven fractals, I would get more rares and exotics (I actually got exotics, which was a first in a long time) than in 30/40+ even levels, which include the Maw chest. It’s absolutely preposterous how abysmal the rewards for Fractals are. Devs keep saying it’s not true, but ever since the Jan. 28 update, Fractal rewards got toned down, and it’s not just me, everyone is saying it.

Same goes with Arah. For what’s supposed to be the game’s hardest dungeon, the rewards are laughable. I like running Arah for the challenge and because the encounters are somewhat interesting, but it’s hard to get people to be motivated to join you if they’re better of PUGing CoF for money.

I’m going to go on and use DoA as an example of good RvR management that worked out really well. Both for PUGs and the hardcores. For the hardcores, it was a farm that would consistently net you an average of about 70-75k/run. For most guilds that attempted to speedrun it, runs would take about 50 minutes. For us and some other guilds like us, runs would take anywhere from 25-35minutes (most runs would be 30-35 though). A terrible run for us was 45 minutes or higher. But it was a good system, because we worked towards mastering the area and coming up with tactics that made everything easier and go faster. It wasn’t until late 2010, early 2011 that we started doing <40 minute casual runs, but after that, it started getting better, because people started getting better. You had classism, since you needed tanks, bonders, spikers and a monk, but it worked out really well.

Now, for PUGs, it was also a very good area, because eventually they developed a teambuild called ‘Glaiveway’ where they would abuse a skill that was insanely overpowered in a teambuild that required little to no coordination. It was risky, and many teams failed, and they had to do runs in Normal Mode usually, which meant half the rewards we got in HM, and they took anywhere from an hour and 15 minutes to an hour and 45 minutes, but they were able to clear the same area. Be it for HoM rewards, be it for the money. Their rewards were laughable compared to ours, but they were pretty good in comparison to others like Underworld PUG runs that would fail 60% of the time and ended up costing you money sometimes. It was a brainless, easy farm with a pretty significant risk of failure for PUGs, and decent rewards.

So, Anet needs to either change the rewards in GW2 for the dungeons, or balance the dungeon paths like CoF p1 and SE p1. Make Arah and high level Fractals actually worth the time and effort, because they’re alienating their hard core player base in favor of a playerbase of casuals that want mindless farms.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind the mindless casual-friendly farms. I’m totally fine with that. But they should not be the single most rewarding thing in the game.

Also, they need to bring back dungeons-specific SELLABLE skins that aren’t bloody accountbound on acquire. They will give incentive to both hard core players and casuals to clear hard content in favor of a nice reward at the end. Either bring back Bone Dragon Staff and the likes from GW1 and add them to specific hard dungeons, or make new design-a-weapon-contests to add new skins to the game. And for the love of everything that makes a good MMO work, DON’T MAKE THEM FLIPPING MYSTIC FORGE RECIPES.

People will whine about how the hardcore Speedclear guilds will clear those areas a lot faster than PUGs can, and how they make money off of it, but that will always be the case, but at least you’ll have a reward for challenging content, whereas this CoF P1 farm has completely broken the economy by now because Anet refuses to address this issue for some unknown reason, although it’s been shown time and time again in the past that it’s a system that works. Anet has by now proven that their system does not work, and that players simply refuse to do hard content and favor mindless easy content that gives higher rewards.

I agree that since the Jan patch rewards from fractals runs totally suck. If I had a good group and was able to use my MF gear for the trash mobs I would walk out of there with a lodestone or 2, couple cores, several Rares and the occasional account bound exotic (free ectos). Now I am lucky if get a few Rares and a core or 2. I went from 2-3g per hour to about 75s. I quit running them because of that and won’t run them until I start hearing that the rewards are improving. Maybe we are all being hit by bad RNG at the same time or maybe they unintentionally broke something or maybe they just ninja nerfed it and are trying to make us believe they didn’t.

Bright.9160:

SNIP

Pretty much summed up the video in a nutshell there Bright, But you went into more detail and used some differnt examples to prove the same thing so I thank you very much for that post.

BTW Anet if you want an example on why there needs to be challenging content in your game have a look at WoW.
They’ve been dumbing down the content so that everybody can play it in the hopes that they could bring more players into the game and make more money.
What has happened instead is the ‘Hardcore’ or even regular players that want something to aspire too have gotten bored and moved away from that game. Their subscription numbers have been droping for the first time since release.
And where are all thoese players? Why their looking for another MMO that can challenge them but since there isn’t really anything challenging around most are in limbo waiting for the next big MMO that will hopefully challenge them.
Wouldn’t it be in NCsofts finacial interests to get some money from these players in waiting before the MMO they want comes along?
You can do so without getting away from your current philosophy to the endgame grind so why not?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Dungeon-vs-Time-vs-Reward/first#post2162234

This is my topic on rewards received from dungeon just aint worth the effort.

@Kaaboose.3897
I only see bad in your idea if COF p1 is nerfed. Players run cof to make gold, the time it takes to run the dungeon and gold received at end of run (mind you the amount decreases the more you run it) makes the dungeon feel very rewarding.

The problem is that cof path 2 and 3 takes longer but you get the exact same reward. Arah takes VERY LONG but is rewarded the same, there is no incentive to run the other paths than to do the easiest path of the dungeon so that you can get your tokens and not come back. WoW dungeons had a herioc mode and normal mode, you can say fos/pos was icc dungeon paths but that you got rewarded in each of those dungeons something different (remember that they farm for gear).

I don’t mind grinding, but when last did you really experienced excitement about a drop? There may be a few that got a weapon ticket or a precurser (forge or drop). But in the dungeon is actual gold at the end of your run (not drops) your only excitement and thats not really an exciting reward. Nerfing dungeons will have a bad effect, making dungeons harder wil just have players doing those dungeon even less (there are difficult dungeons, just nobody bothers cause its not rewarding enough) There should be really a reason to do a dungeon other than just getting tokens at the end.

And remember even in wow lich king the dungeons was difficult at 1st but as you got used to it and learned the mechanics it became easy.

He’s not saying they should nerf CoF per se (although they really should, inflation is becoming a really significant problem right now), but that they should reward players according to challenge.

CoF is not challenging. A trained chimpanzee could clear that dungeon in <7 minutes. The problem a lot of people have with it is that it’s easier than any other content in the game, yet it’s the most rewarding. What we want is that they reward challenging content. Make fractals 48 actually worth our time. Make the harder dungeons like Arah have better loot tables in the chests. When the easiest dungeon of all of them is the most rewarding one, you have a problem. Because it takes away all incentive from players to a. try new dungeons and b. become better players, because they can get away with the easiest dungeon in the game and make the most money.

Anet is breeding a lazy playersbase composed of terrible players that have no interest in becoming better.

Yes cof path 1 is the easiest to run but how does it offer more reward than path 2 and 3? just because you can do 2 runs of path 1 in the time it takes you to do path 2 doesnt mean it rewards are better – it just mean you are able to do the dungeon more times and receive the reward in less time that it takes to do other paths. All I am saying is nerfing cof will not resolve anything.

Because it’s so easy?

If I someone tells me he’ll give me 10 euro’s for running a route and 1 route takes me 5 minutes to run, and the other takes me 20 minutes to run, which route is more rewarding to take then?

I see your point though, you’re saying that technically they reward the same, but part of a reward is also the effort put into it.

hehe another good post by kab
this is basically inspired from the newbie design from the fail D3 where you need to be efficient instead of overcoming hard content which is obviously the way to go . (i actually find it laughable that you have to be efficient in a game) – the thing is the only reason for it being like that is that the D3 developers got burned at launch for making the game extremely hard (and went from one extreme to another)

FalconX.9287:

hehe another good post by kab
this is basically inspired from the newbie design from the fail D3 where you need to be efficient instead of overcoming hard content which is obviously the way to go . (i actually find it laughable that you have to be efficient in a game) – the thing is the only reason for it being like that is that the D3 developers got burned at launch for making the game extremely hard (and went from one extreme to another)

Sorry but I do not quite follow you right now. Are you referring that the concept of making everything dificult is laughable or “easy content”

Torca.5162:

FalconX.9287:

hehe another good post by kab
this is basically inspired from the newbie design from the fail D3 where you need to be efficient instead of overcoming hard content which is obviously the way to go . (i actually find it laughable that you have to be efficient in a game) – the thing is the only reason for it being like that is that the D3 developers got burned at launch for making the game extremely hard (and went from one extreme to another)

Sorry but I do not quite follow you right now. Are you referring that the concept of making everything dificult is laughable or “easy content”

Traditionally in any reasonable game with decent game designers the harder the content the better the reward.
In D3 it is quite the opposite it doesn’t matter how hard or easy the content is you get the same reward and it is all in the RNG . so obviously people are doing the easiest content because it is the most efficient because by doing it several times it increases the RNG odds – which obviously is dumb/bad game design/not fun (not what the players are doing but how the game is designed)

Kaaboose.3897:

As always I’d love to hear everybodies thoughts on the current state of RvR in GW2 as well as foreseeable problems with the proposed solution.

I really feel that GW2 does need something like the Underworld. To be fair, UW wasn’t without it’s issues. There were some quests that were badly designed, or challenges that were simply unfair (trial and error). However, even trash mobs were a challenge, and had the chance of dropping rare weapons and the rare globs of ectoplasm. Not to mention that the final boss (which was added very late in GW1’s lifetime) was the best boss battle in the entire game. I had the good fortune to beat him several times, and it always was fun and challenging, if you could get a very experienced group together. That is what I would like to see in GW2. I want that excitement to be brought back.

For those of you wondering what the Underworld and Dhuum were like, see above video.

Not that I don’t want UW or a rewarding challenging area back, but that Dhuum fight was quickly trivialized by gimmicky builds and skills. In the end, it was just a case of your E/Mo tanking Dhuum and not sucking, while the Spiker used PI at the right time. There wasn’t much to that fight once people found out how to abuse the AI.

Bright.9160:

Not that I don’t want UW or a rewarding challenging area back, but that Dhuum fight was quickly trivialized by gimmicky builds and skills. In the end, it was just a case of your E/Mo tanking Dhuum and not sucking, while the Spiker used PI at the right time. There wasn’t much to that fight once people found out how to abuse the AI.

And this holds true for GW2 as well. I am SO sick of being told “Stand here and the boss won’t hurt you!”
All I ever heard during that First fight in the MF. And now all I hear with NULL as well.

Bright.9160:

Not that I don’t want UW or a rewarding challenging area back, but that Dhuum fight was quickly trivialized by gimmicky builds and skills. In the end, it was just a case of your E/Mo tanking Dhuum and not sucking, while the Spiker used PI at the right time. There wasn’t much to that fight once people found out how to abuse the AI.

To be fair, that was an exploit that was eventually fixed. Now Dhuum simply roams around the room, and teleport to random players. And you still have to deal with his minions first, before PI does anything at all. Also, you need to keep the reapers alive. So just tanking won’t get you there alone. I thought it was a very interesting and exciting fight. Especially if you just fight him as intended, rather than trying some cheesy exploit.

Kaaboose.3897:

Bright.9160:

Not that I don’t want UW or a rewarding challenging area back, but that Dhuum fight was quickly trivialized by gimmicky builds and skills. In the end, it was just a case of your E/Mo tanking Dhuum and not sucking, while the Spiker used PI at the right time. There wasn’t much to that fight once people found out how to abuse the AI.

And this holds true for GW2 as well. I am SO sick of being told “Stand here and the boss won’t hurt you!”
All I ever heard during that First fight in the MF. And now all I hear with NULL as well.

God, I hate this. Especially since most of those ‘glitch’ spots usually mean you’ll be ranging down a boss in 6 times the time it takes to melee him down, while melee’ing him usually isn’t harmful at all (Magecrusher in Arah p3 much?).

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Bright.9160:

Not that I don’t want UW or a rewarding challenging area back, but that Dhuum fight was quickly trivialized by gimmicky builds and skills. In the end, it was just a case of your E/Mo tanking Dhuum and not sucking, while the Spiker used PI at the right time. There wasn’t much to that fight once people found out how to abuse the AI.

To be fair, that was an exploit that was eventually fixed. Now Dhuum simply roams around the room, and teleport to random players. And you still have to deal with his minions first, before PI does anything at all. Also, you need to keep the reapers alive. So just tanking won’t get you there alone. I thought it was a very interesting and exciting fight. Especially if you just fight him as intended, rather than trying some cheesy exploit.

When was this, because when I stopped playing (right before GW2 release), people were still happily doing it that way. Your E/Mo just had to take off her armor or stand at exactly the right spot, or had to equip a caster weapon while everyone else was wielding a melee weapon etc. There were plenty of ways to trick the AI.

His teleporting around always worked, but he always spawned back to the same point after tunneling, so if your E/Mo stood between that point and the party, he would always aggro the EMo. Not to mention, everyone in that room was bonded, so his minions didn’t do anything, because there was no enchantment removal in that fight.

May want to tone down the music next time. Was hard to follow the arguments at points because it was almost drowned out, by what i guess was Mega Man boss anthems.

Great video and some great points.

I don’t mind that there’s a small variety of endgame content. Right now I am satisfied with fractals. They’re difficult, they require you to change your build and they drop some great loot to show off your skill. Honestly I hold players with a fractal weapon in higher prestige than I do legendary weapons. I really like how they designed fractals as well. Usually high end content is difficult to get into. If you don’t know the place you can’t get into a group, creating an elitist wall. You don’t run into this problem because of how it scales. I only wish there were stronger rewards for completing fractals. I’ve spent easily more gold outfitting my fractal runner than I gained back during the runs.

What I am concerned about is that there’s this spiraling death cycle when it comes to repetitive farms. When a specific farm becomes popular it drains population from other content. This makes it more difficult to find groups in other content and thus encourages more players to flood into the repetitive farms. It feeds back on itself. If unchecked the fires of CoF will consume all. The repetition will be a crutch to farming players who no longer know any other content and they can burn out on the game quickly because of the lack of variety.

GW1 did have the elite dungeons for as long as the game was alive. They were fun but there was another thing developers introduced to help with variety. Those were the books. You would obtain a book that would fill up when you completed unique dungeons/missions. If you finished CoF then you would fill the CoF page. You can turn in the book almost at any time but the more pages you filled the better reward you would get. This made it so players wanted to complete stronger varieties of dungeons. This didn’t always work so they implemented a 2nd idea that mixed well. They introduced daily dungeons/missions. Every day it would change and the rewards were fairly good. This bottlenecked players into certain dungeons meaning you could always get a chance to do them if you checked back on frequently. This synergized nicely and I want to know why anet didn’t decide to do this again. Bring back the old book system.

Another solution I thought of was to just make the living story/pseudo holiday events the new farm dungeons. Up their rewards and let some players go a bit nuts. It will be gone in about a month so you don’t have to worry about being burnt out.

digiowl.9620:

May want to tone down the music next time. Was hard to follow the arguments at points because it was almost drowned out, by what i guess was Mega Man boss anthems.

Yeah I Messed up the sound levels in the original Video. There’s an alternate version here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyKpyfkSspg

GKC.3851:

Great video and some great points.

I don’t mind that there’s a small variety of endgame content. Right now I am satisfied with fractals. They’re difficult, they require you to change your build and they drop some great loot to show off your skill. Honestly I hold players with a fractal weapon in higher prestige than I do legendary weapons. I really like how they designed fractals as well. Usually high end content is difficult to get into. If you don’t know the place you can’t get into a group, creating an elitist wall. You don’t run into this problem because of how it scales. I only wish there were stronger rewards for completing fractals. I’ve spent easily more gold outfitting my fractal runner than I gained back during the runs.

What I am concerned about is that there’s this spiraling death cycle when it comes to repetitive farms. When a specific farm becomes popular it drains population from other content. This makes it more difficult to find groups in other content and thus encourages more players to flood into the repetitive farms. It feeds back on itself. If unchecked the fires of CoF will consume all. The repetition will be a crutch to farming players who no longer know any other content and they can burn out on the game quickly because of the lack of variety.

GW1 did have the elite dungeons for as long as the game was alive. They were fun but there was another thing developers introduced to help with variety. Those were the books. You would obtain a book that would fill up when you completed unique dungeons/missions. If you finished CoF then you would fill the CoF page. You can turn in the book almost at any time but the more pages you filled the better reward you would get. This made it so players wanted to complete stronger varieties of dungeons. This didn’t always work so they implemented a 2nd idea that mixed well. They introduced daily dungeons/missions. Every day it would change and the rewards were fairly good. This bottlenecked players into certain dungeons meaning you could always get a chance to do them if you checked back on frequently. This synergized nicely and I want to know why anet didn’t decide to do this again. Bring back the old book system.

I don’t like the way fractals sclaes because it just makes DMG the be all and end all of your build since if you get hit by anything you’re going to get 1 shot anyway. But all that’s covered in Part 2 of this video “Fix The Guild Wars 2 (Un)Holy Trinity” so check that out for that.
As for the books they were a great idea and I really loved the idea behind it but I do recall people doing “Speed book” runs where they’d get select dungeons ran over and over then hand in all the books at once.
I recall the way I made most of my cakitten the end of GW1 was by running the final EoTN mission for these guys and getting paid quite handsomely for it.
But the idea behind the books was sound.

GKC.3851:

Another solution I thought of was to just make the living story/pseudo holiday events the new farm dungeons. Up their rewards and let some players go a bit nuts. It will be gone in about a month so you don’t have to worry about being burnt out.

But those dungeons will most likely be a walk in the park, like the Wintersday one. Not to mention there’s a lot of people like me who absolutely hate the Living Story.

If they make the Living Story dungeons challenging, they won’t hear the end of all the whining from their casual crowd, so that’s never going to happen.

I watched your video. Roles do come into play with higher level fractals. I would love to find the groups you run into that can burn through lvl 40 fractals using pure damage. That is nuts. I always seem to bring projectile blocking skills, blinks, mass invis and whatever I can to survive the mess. There might be some groups out there, but certainly not pugs.

I also wouldn’t call a dps gear warrior wielding a hammer as damage either. Her gear might allow him to damage more but the hammer is not a high dps weapon. She’s control.

You are correct, however, about the laziness of how it scales. Past lvl 10 there’s no new content, the mobs only deal and take more damage. There is some merit to that. Suddenly you NEED projectile blocks and AoE damage against the lava wurm waves. What I would like to see instead is new abilities. They don’t need to be that unique. Imagine if one of the grawl mobs pops endure pain. Now the zerkers can’t do any damage until it drops adding new flavor. Or what if the Mossman put down some thief styled traps while he was invis? Something to think about.

GKC.3851:

I watched your video. Roles do come into play with higher level fractals. I would love to find the groups you run into that can burn through lvl 40 fractals using pure damage. That is nuts. I always seem to bring projectile blocking skills, blinks, mass invis and whatever I can to survive the mess. There might be some groups out there, but certainly not pugs.

We run 1 AH Guardian and 4 berserkers in 40+ Fractals. Usually it’s 2 guard (1 zerker), 2 warriors and a 5th that is whatever. But everyone runs Zerker stats, except for the AH guardian.

You are correct, however, about the laziness of how it scales. Past lvl 10 there’s no new content, the mobs only deal and take more damage. There is some merit to that. Suddenly you NEED projectile blocks and AoE damage against the lava wurm waves. What I would like to see instead is new abilities. They don’t need to be that unique. Imagine if one of the grawl mobs pops endure pain. Now the zerkers can’t do any damage until it drops adding new flavor. Or what if the Mossman put down some thief styled traps while he was invis? Something to think about.

Yes, because Mossman isn’t annoying enough when he stealths, and invulnerability is such an imaginative mechanic.

Oh wait, it’s not. It will just force us to twiddle our thumbs until it wears off, effectively making the dungeon take more time rather than more skill.

But it seems like that was Anet’s idea all the time with Fractals.

“Hey guys, these Fractals things, anyone know some ways to make them harder?”
“Give mobs more HP and more damage, but no new mechanics?”
“Won’t that just make the fight take longer?”
“What do you want us to do then, be creative?”

Bright.9160:

“Hey guys, these Fractals things, anyone know some ways to make them harder?”
“Give mobs more HP and more damage, but no new mechanics?”
“Won’t that just make the fight take longer?”
“What do you want us to do then, be creative?”

You want another example of this? Ever play Streets of Rage 3? The janpanese version actually has 1/4 of the amount of enmies with 1/2 the amount of life.
Because of this in the Japanese version (Bare Knuckle 3 if you want to compare) you can mix around your attacks and stragies, especialy with a friend.
In the american version you’re forced to dupe the AI with the same attacks over and over again because if one of these guys hits you that’s pretty much it.
Sound familiar?
I’ve compelted both versions and guess which one I’d recomend.