Guild Wars 2

So I have been seeing all this talk about how could dungeons be harder or even have a hard mode and this idea would be easy to add I think and would add some difficulty to them requiring more support healing types and defensive types to complete them.

I think a really cool way to add a hard mode to dungeons would be to.

1. Remove the repair anvil in the dungeon this way if you die and respawn you have to live with the broken armor.

2. You do not get the out of combat hp regin this would then require more support healers and a more defensive type of play to it.

3. If you die you do not recover from resurrection sickness till you finish the dungeon. This way there is more risk to dying if you do not have the support to keep you from death.

And that is it with these 3 things your dungeon run then need more support type play and even a little more defensive type builds not tanky but defensive types. And this would also be interesting to see what people would do with some builds.

They could also have the rewards be something like at the end boss of a path instead of getting tokens you get a piece or a skin of the dungeon gear related to it. That way its a little more rewarding with out causing to much of an issue.

I also did a video explaining this so enjoy.

Video link.

https://youtu.be/Ths2_FkyZlE

1) Repair canisters. Also, if you’re dying enough that your gear needs repairs, you need to rethink what you’re doing.

2) This only serves to be a nuisance. It doesn’t make combat any harder. Parties would just wait for personal heals to come off CD before moving on.

3) I’m assuming you mean the downed health penalty (unless the effect from revive orbs actually does something), but this generally isn’t an issue with how difficult the current content is. Stack in a corner, wreck things as they run over. If people are coming remotely close to being KO’d, how much health they have when they go down generally isn’t the concern nearly as much as the fact that they went down to begin with. This suggestion sort of makes things more difficult, but only if the group doesn’t burn things down quickly enough, which is the problem with content now – stack and burn. Content needs to require more thought than stacking.

Edited because downed penalties apply when downed, not KO’d.

i actually like this idea, make it so it is better to bring a healer rather than forced to bring one. Never liked the contents that force a party to bring tank and healer. Your suggestion actually suggest party to bring supportive role just incase.

Also if aggro will not break unless foes are dead will also help to make healer role more desired.

Crossaber.8934:

i actually like this idea, make it so it is better to bring a healer rather than forced to bring one. Never liked the contents that force a party to bring tank and healer. Your suggestion actually suggest party to bring supportive role just incase.

Also if aggro will not break unless foes are dead will also help to make healer role more desired.

We already have supportive roles. Reflects, aegis, condi cleansing, banners, might, fury, swiftness, stealth, defiance stripping, stability, quickness, and more.

I seriously don’t understand why there are so many people who think the literal only possible way to support somebody in an MMO is to cast healing spells on them. There are already classes which you only take for supportive roles, like guardians and mesmers for example. Both have fairly below average DPS, mesmers especially, but we still take them in groups!

Warriors have lower output than elementalists and thieves do but we still want one in nearly every dungeon because they bring so much offensive support.

Why do we need to encourage people to use healer builds in dungeons? You can already do that but they’re not necessary when players know how to play because they can heal themselves. Why is this bad?

If you want to play a build that focuses on heals, make your own groups for it and find likeminded people. You’ll find them way less in abundance, however, because this game is not a holy trinity based game. It should stay this way, as that’s why we’re all on GW2 afterall – for something different than that. The only way to change this is to change much more than the simple design suggestions outlined in the OP of this thread.

this would make it harder for new ppl, who wanna learn dungeons, the ones, who wanna get challenges dont care all, due to they usually dont die.

Hard mode has been asked for over and over and over again and we’ve been told it won’t happen.

Purple Miku.7032:

Crossaber.8934:

i actually like this idea, make it so it is better to bring a healer rather than forced to bring one. Never liked the contents that force a party to bring tank and healer. Your suggestion actually suggest party to bring supportive role just incase.

Also if aggro will not break unless foes are dead will also help to make healer role more desired.

We already have supportive roles. Reflects, aegis, condi cleansing, banners, might, fury, swiftness, stealth, defiance stripping, stability, quickness, and more.

I seriously don’t understand why there are so many people who think the literal only possible way to support somebody in an MMO is to cast healing spells on them. There are already classes which you only take for supportive roles, like guardians and mesmers for example. Both have fairly below average DPS, mesmers especially, but we still take them in groups!

Warriors have lower output than elementalists and thieves do but we still want one in nearly every dungeon because they bring so much offensive support.

Why do we need to encourage people to use healer builds in dungeons? You can already do that but they’re not necessary when players know how to play because they can heal themselves. Why is this bad?

If you want to play a build that focuses on heals, make your own groups for it and find likeminded people. You’ll find them way less in abundance, however, because this game is not a holy trinity based game. It should stay this way, as that’s why we’re all on GW2 afterall – for something different than that. The only way to change this is to change much more than the simple design suggestions outlined in the OP of this thread.

If you follow any of my post, i am a hater of trinity.

But enhancing healing usefulness doesn’t mean dedicated healer, or requesting trinity.

It is great that Reflects, aegis, condi cleansing, banners, might, fury, swiftness, stealth, defiance stripping, stability, quickness is very useful, but why not also adding healing into the list?

I hate a party being locked into healing and tanking style as much as you do. I don’t want healing to be the only method to help the team. I prefer hybrid build to be much more desired.

Hybrid build like warrior shout heal will become more useful, not only PS build is desired. As long as we have no dedicated healer and tank, i don’t opposite to enhance the needs of every supportive action in party contents.

If you’ve ever run Fractals of the Mist you will see first hand how not being able to repair armor inside the instance does not actually make the instance more difficult – it just makes it more annoying for the party and the individual who has to log out + WP to an anvil and join the group again. Most of your suggestions serve as a consequence to dying to somehow make the instance harder. This doesn’t actually increase the difficulty of the content, unless you’ve died multiple times, and then it just turns into a snowball effect where content becomes impossible after a couple deaths and/or party wipes (and that will inevitably just turn into kicking whoever has broken armor since they are giving absolutely no team support outside of 3 utility skills since stats are tied to gear.)

And as far as support goes, Guardians and Mesmers have that covered by far. Blinds and reflects completely trivialize content, while elementalists and warriors give so much offensive team support.

Combat is over. Everyone is at 75% hp.

Both berserker staff eles place down an Eruption. Swap to water. Drop a water field. Team is now at full health.

What were you trying to accomplish again?

Rymer.4017:

1. Remove the repair anvil in the dungeon this way if you die and respawn you have to live with the broken armor.

They tried this in fractals — people just log out/log in/repair/re-enter instance. It’s been broken like that for 3 years, I wouldn’t expect ArenaNet to fix it, and we’d just see the same thing in dungeons.

Also, this would just make it harder on newer players. Those who are complaining about stale, easy content never touch the repair anvil, except maybe at the beginning of the dungeon. Wipes are rare these days in experienced groups, and having enough wipes to break armor completely is almost unheard of.

2. You do not get the out of combat hp regin this would then require more support healers and a more defensive type of play to it.

Nope, it would require people to leave combat, wait for their self heal to come off cooldown (if needed) and heal. This just adds wait times after a fight, it doesn’t make healers necessary.

Heh, and like Nike said — full DPS spec’d classes can do a ton of AoE healing, too. “Requiring a healer” in this game just means “require a water field and blast finisher” :-)

3. If you die you do not recover from resurrection sickness till you finish the dungeon. This way there is more risk to dying if you do not have the support to keep you from death.

Again, experienced groups looking for “the next level” of challenge wouldn’t be affected by this. That said, having some consequences/possibility-of-failure in the dungeons would be a nice addition, though folks would still find a way around it, like the FotM relog-to-repair trick.

Just my 2c — remember that the people who are bored aren’t dying, or really taking that much damage during the fights. We need new content to challenge us — not gimmicks added to make the stale, old content more frustrating and slow.

As others have alluded to, these suggestions do nothing but increase tedium, and if there is any increase in difficulty, it is only for the players of the lowest skill level brackets, as even moderately/poorly skilled players can trivialize GW2’s PvE content.

The only thing approaching a respectable challenge is undermanned content, but even then two/three-manning dungeons is not difficult enough that it cannot be completed in one sitting, even bugging paths to combine events/boss fights in 2-3 man dungeons isn’t something that’s going to stop decent players. (another issue being that these desperate attempts of providing challenge are basically forfeiting any in game rewards, when they should be far, far higher).

Also healing builds are already incredibly overpowered. Some bosses can literally be two-man akitten in a Clerics build, more challenging bosses can easily be beaten with added hourse-rules such as “no dodging or evade/block skills”.

The biggest problem is that much of the time, it appears as if PvE enemies in this game are not designed with Player Characters in mind. PvE needs to act more like PvP.

Actually the number 3 does increase the difficulty. Count how many pugs down and instant rally. People think they are good because they complete the content in zerker fast, but a lot wouldn’t be able to do it without the rally system. They yolo their way into a fight, stack, do dps, down, rally, finish the boss. Good zerker group actually use their support to keep themselves alive because downing slow your dps.

Personally, I would like to have zero rally in hard content. But it wouldn’t be enough by it’s own to make the content challenging.

Another person who thinks good game design is based on healers and tanks, god bless.

I was just suggesting some ideas of how they could make them harder. One of the things I left out was if you leave to repair and restock you have to start it all over even if one leaves they can not rejoin. You can also not kick that person and re-invite this would make it a one run type of thing.

The reason for this is so you bring more of a support type along with being more defensive besides bringing active defense and skills for it. It just adds more of a difficulty that many have been asking for dungeons because we also do not know what HoT changes will effect old content with from the break bars to many other AI changes that they talked about at the 2015 GDC that are coming in HoT.

See we only know of minor things from it like mobs moving out of danger spots from things like lava font and fire wall there are many other things that could also becoming that might require you to play more of a support role not healer but support healing plays a role in support as someone stated above with water attuned ele’s dropping water to heal there team back up and moving on.

These things are used now but with the dungeons changed you would have to heal more often because you would not one to go down at all because then they would have negative effects on the group and if more of you died the tougher the dungeon would become. That is all this is saying nothing more. Dungeons are a challenge or people would be running all paths instead of just 2 out of 3/4 of them for speed clears the hard mode would give you a little extra challenge is all not make it only playable by a select group and makes it still fun with challenge. Hope this explains it a little more.

I think most of these ideas would not accomplish what you think they would.

1.) This is already a failure in fractals. Players just log out to LA to repair. I don’t think there is a real way to accomplish what you want without making it impossible for people to join a party mid dungeon. In which case any time someone dc’s the whole party might quit. Even if you figure out a way to do it. People are just going to be forced into stupid stuff. For example, unequipping their armor for the COE jumping puzzle, or carrying extra armor sets. This stuff happens in mmos with expensive armor repair such as secret world.

2.) Why would this require more healers? It only affects out of combat healing. We don’t need healers in combat right now, so why would we need them out of combat? After every fight, have everyone swap weapons, put down a water field, and blast away. This isn’t making the actual fight more difficult, its just forcing us to do one more thing before we run to the next fight. Worse yet, we could carry another set of healing armor, equp that after a fight, use our healing skills, etc. The out of combat regen system gets rid of a lot of that silly stuff.

3.) Your only making the dungeon more difficult for those who fail. I think that’s the wrong way to go. Make the individual bosses more challenging.

p.s.1 Group support already prevalent in dungeons, I promise.

p.s.2 I do agree, bosses should have a chance of dropping the dungeon specific gear. Tokens are a great system, guaranteed progress towards a goal. Now just add a little rng bonus progress and players will really be enjoying themselves. Eagerly looking at their drops after a boss dies, etc. Silverwastes’ carapace armor is a good example of this. Guaranteed progress in the form of crests, with occasional bonus from the loot boxes.

In your video you complained that certain paths are not ran. That is because those paths have not been balanced to be rewarding for the amount of difficulty. I don’t know how to fix this.

You want to bring guardianway back to the meta?

Honestly, the suggestions in this post won’t accomplish anything other than make dungeon running more frustrating.

PvE dungeons don’t follow the model of traditional MMO dungeons/raids in that our GW2 dungeons promote proactive behaviour rather than Reactive behaviour. For the most part, we don’t stand around in Dungeons and soak damage; we instead try to mitigate or prevent it altogether.

In a traditional MMO if my party keeps wiping I consider the following

• Is my Tank holding aggro
• Is my Healer healing/cleansing adequately and timely
• Are my DPS-ers dealing enough damage so that the team is not burning out on skills/mana
• Did we bring the right team comp
• Is our positioning correct
• Am I using pots in critical situations

If my team is wiping too many times in GW2 I consider the following

• Are we blinding when possible
• Are we avoiding strong bursts with dodges, aegis, distortion, etc
• Do we need projectile control
• Do we need condi cleanse/resistance
• Are we using appropriate boons/buffs (stab, prot, nourishment), and is everyone within boon/buff range
• Is our team comp overlapping (e.g. two warriors both running EA)

These are just a few things off the top of my head, but there’s really no need for dedicated healing support. If needed there are ‘panic buttons’ for healing (6 skill, water fields, class features), but we should never need to resort to those if we are well equipped going into the fights. Again, support in this game for PvE shines when you’re being proactive rather than reactive.

Now, PvP and WvW, those are definitely areas where more tanky/healing specs are welcomed because you have to be both proactive in gearing correctly for the fights but also be able to recover from the sustained hits.