Guild Wars 2

To put it bluntly, I believe the dungeon experience could be greatly enhanced if mob health was drastically reduced, their attack damage was increased, their attack speed was reduced, and if their swing/delay animation timers were slowed.

Why? Most dungeons aren’t worth clearing because of how long it takes to clear elite mobs. When it comes to champion/legendary mobs in random events, they’re certainly not time efficient and tend to drag on far past the point of being a rewarding experience.

If mob health was drastically reduced (maybe 33% or so), players would be more motivated to actually kill trash and complete side quests/random events. By increasing their damage (~20%) while slowing their attack speed (~15%) and animations (~0.75 second global delay, players would be challenged to more actively participate in combat; dodging, using skills/abilities tactfully, etc.

And that’s more fun, in my opinion at least. Guild Wars has a very fulfilling combat system so it’s a shame that time efficiency tempts players to skip content.

Honestly, more people than not will say skipping > clearing. There are people out there who will join you to fight everything in there, but even with the suspected nerfs people would still skip. It’s just efficient for a lot of us with limited play time who don’t have hours to spend on a path. Sometimes when I do have time I don’t mind a good, long dungeon, but in the end I just want to get some badges and some money and have time to do some other things instead of just dungeons.

That’s what I’m saying. If mob health was reduced down to where killing them was just as fast as skipping them or at least closer to that time frame, we would have a more fulfilling experience, even with limited time. The dungeons themselves are all pretty short; it’s just not uncommon to spend 10 minutes attacking a single mob. Which is a bit excessive.

10 minutes to take out a champ? you need more damage. Most should be done with a “balanced pick up group” inside of 5 or so, and that’s not much time. Most bosses have gimmicks already that reduce the experience down to stack and spam tactics. A reduction in health would just mean fewer people on the servers for less time in the long run. This will not pay for the game.

Instead, how about a reduction in mob toughness? If the vast majority of the playerbase is going into zerker style squishy builds, eventually the enemies should learn from this and follow suit. Lower defense and increase offense. The fights will be faster, more intense, and more engaging, without any time really lost.

They did something similar in GW1 with several expansions, following the build trends and making mobs dual-classed in some of the favorite methods. It forced everyone to change their tactics.