It’s possible that the dungeons are overtuned and have issues. I’ll readily admit that. Keep in mind though that this is the first real attempt an mmo style game has made at not having an overly simple combat system — it’s going to take a while to find the right balance. I think ultimately such a project is worth working on though and worth being patient about.
Keen posted on his blog recently that GW2 dungeons feel like that moment in other MMOs when the tank dies and everyone panics. I think that’s a very fair assessment of how it feels at this point.
Psychologically, GW2 dungeon combat is a lot more like real combat than anything you see in other mmos. If you’ve ever trained a martial art, you probably know how it feels when someone just comes at you and you are unprepared. You panic a bit and your defense is sloppy — and fine details make a huge difference between victory and defeat. A huge part of martial arts training is to get the body used to performing the technique correctly on an unconscious level — so when someone comes after you and you just react, you react well.
Right now, most GW2 players are in that phase where as soon as they see something coming at them they panic and just button mash. It’s going to take training and practice to get to the point where they get used to responding correctly.
Unfortunately, people hate having to learn something from scratch and I think ANet has not figured out the right way of easing people into the content. The initial difficulty/chaos level is a bit too high, but they compensate by allowing people to death zerg encounters and such.
As it is, when designing content it feels like the developers have asked the question “can this content be defeated with brute force even if the players play poorly?” Instead, I would encourage them to create content that requires players to play well but that makes it easier initially for that to happen.
I think they should make the early dungeons’ mechanics much more forgiving — cut down on the number of mobs and 1 shot abilities, but absolutely require players to get some portion of the movement mechanics right or else they don’t progress. So in the first dungeon or two you mostly get fights where you can take some hits but there are certain attacks that must be avoided/blocked/interrupted whatever.
Then eventually they build up to the kind of content that’s in the game now. The difference will be that players will feel a bit less panicky and will have some decent skills to bring to the game. They will feel more competent and have a frame of reference for building strategy etc. Thus there is difficulty but the difficulty feels surmountable. Along with this design philosophy, ANet should emphasize that the later dungeons are much more challenging than the early ones and that the early ones are intended to help you learn how to play the game. Thus, if players skip to the high level dungeons (and lets face it — many MMO players do this), they will be warned that they are in for a real struggle.