Hello all, I have a personal ideal solution to fix this dungeon motivation problem that ANet is actively working on right now. This has nothing to do with bugs or difficulty, those will be fixed and addressed over time regardless of how ANet decides to fix dungeon rewards.
The Problem:
As of today there is undeniably a problem with the way dungeons in GW2 are incentivised for players at level 80. Using myself as an example, I have very little reason to run any explorable mode dungeons aside from Honor of the Waves and Ascalonian Catacombs. I want Honor of the Waves because it has tokens for my ideal gear and I want Ascalonian Catacombs because I will eventually need the tokens for a legendary one day. I have no real reason to run explorable mode for ANY of the remaing six dungeons. The tokens are almost completely useless for me and the experience and money rewards just are not very appealing for the time investment involved.
A Solution:
A two word summary would be “Daily Dungeons”. Yes, yes..this has been done before but I believe ANet has built themselves into a unique position to offer a meaty twist to the “Daily Dungeon” mechanic. That twist? The multiple paths you can take on exploration mode.
Most dungeons have three different exploration mode paths so this is being written with that design in mind. When a player completes a single path of the designated daily dungeon they will receive all the normal rewards plus an additional boost of extras. This boost could be anything ANet sees fit. High level crafting mats, special mystic forge reagents, karma, more money, more tokens, more loot (guarenteed rare?), a chance at unique mini-pets.. anything! It just needs to be enough to overcome the incentive hump for your typical player.
The twist with the paths comes in by offering stacking rewards for completing multiple paths of a dungeon the same day. When you complete the second path you get equivalent rewards to the first clear plus an additional bag of goodies. Completing the third path gives you even MORE rewards with perhaps something special guarenteed because it will absolutely not be a trivial task to run every single dungeon path in one day for most players.
The daily dungeon could be designated by having some sort of NPC or special emphasis placed around that dungeon’s vendor in Lion’s Arch. I’d suggest having the daily NOT be random but just follow a normal rotation through each dungeon in order. This will allow players and guilds to schedule their time because they KNOW that the CoF daily is coming up Thursday and they don’t want to miss it.
I feel that this offers a significant challenge to all players that enjoy running dungeons but find themselves lacking a reason to ever visit the paths they never play. To appease all players make sure that running just one of the daily paths offers significant rewards for their efforts. Don’t just backload everything to “total completion” because a vast majority of players would not be able to find time to finish all the paths of a dungeon in one evening. Full path completion should be a worthy be a daily goal for the “hardcore” dungeon runners among us.
Thank you for reading all the way to here. I’d love to answer/read any feedback to this idea. I feel that overall its pretty flexible, but it has a solid core of a solution to get peple to run those other paths that never get played.
Extra things:
The daily dungeon would be the same for all servers.
If the idea of completing ALL 3 paths in one day seems absurd to you keep in mind the rewards for completing even just one of the paths should be worth doing.
The extra rewards would only work for each path once a day. No grinding the easiest path all day for the bonus loot.
The daily reset time will HAVE to be different from 8pm est. That reset time is already terrible and needs to be fixed, but it would have to be adjusted before any form of daily dungeons gets added.