Guild Wars 2

I remember my first runs of AC around the first few weeks after game launch. There was just one path that the people who tried running it knew to complete: Detha’s Route. My favorite boss was Lieutenant.

It seems now people can just face role AC and every other dungeon. Ways to bring the challenge back :
-Constant dungeon meta monitoring and balancing similar to games like League of legends, which is also a 5-man game. The bosses should be buffed/debuffed/reworked to require frequent changes in rotation and builds similar to what happens to Champion builds (in league of legends).

Agony should be an interesting game mechanic to make the new dungeon hard.

So far as I know agony is applicable to just the new dungeon. I only hope they don’t ignore the old ones between all this controversy. And I hope the new dungeon is awesome. :P

Yup, overcoming the challenge of equipping my new gear to negate the new condition will be legendary. Never will my skills as a player have been pushed further to their limits. Ah well, we’ll just wait and see how hard double clicking my better gear really will be. I bet it’ll help making existing dungeons more challenging too. After all, having higher stats on my character totally doesn’t make me stronger.

If you actually want your dungeons to be challenging, run anything that isn’t a level 80 dungeon with as many trait points as you would be allowed at the recommended level (In the case of AC explorable, you only get 25 trait points and you’re not allowed to put more than 10 in any one line) and unequip your accessories.

As for dungeons that the recommended level is 80, I can’t comment.

Remember that lots of casual players are still kinda bad at avoiding AoE in dungeons, surviving against dungeon bosses in a more general case, and bad at avoiding Lieutenant’s pull skill.
Also remember that AC and following dungeons are designed to give challenging content to players without having to reach lvl80+max stuff before having fun in dungeons. As a result, there are, of course, easier when you are lvl80 with all traits and max stuff.
Last, remember that a first run will always be more challenging. Just because you don’t know the place, the strategy, how to avoid being OS by each boss … Whatever Anet could do, the difficulty will always decrease with the number of times you will clear a given dungeon path. I remember Thunderhead keep in GW1, everyone had a very hard time when first going through that mission. And everyone could do it semi-afk with heroes after some years (even if it was still hard for beginners, at least before they made each profession too powerfull).

And as a players who played enough by now to be well trained against above threats (I’m often the last survivor in a boss room after 2-4 people in my team are dead), I still see challenge in those dungeons. One part because I don’t play with overtrained players only, but with guild teams (so they die, not everything is easy, and I have to survive so prevent reset. Note : they are not bad players, just not very skilled and not very trained yet) of 5 random profession (so we don’t just build some kind of “sc” teams that is the most efficient in a given dungeon – for example last days we have done paths 1 and 3 in AC, and had a hard time killing the sepulturian nests before the npc/collectors die).
One part because some dungeons are still not easy even with max stuff and lvl80 (ok, I didn’t try them with a full nolife team). For example
- AC path 1 & 3 if you don’t have a team with big raw dmg output.
- Some parts of SE (especially path1 which became impossible when waves of grenadiers were updated to spawn every 30 seconds and didn’t just stop after 10 minutes anymore – I may be wrong, this has been updated again and I didn’t try after last update)
- CoF path3 needs good coordination and players that are capable of fighting 3-5 monsters alone (it’s ok for trained players with max stuff, it is hard if the team contains casual players)
- CoE has subject alpha, which kills easily the players that are not trained to avoid AoE. And surviving alone while they come back is a challenge.
- Arah … contains that Lupicus which we just couldn’t defeat with my guild. Ok, only 2 tries long ago, probably not everyone with full exotic stuff, probably 2-3 players bad at avoiding poison… and couldn’t try again because Arah is perma-blocked on our server. But still, this is a very challenging boss and I doubt that just having a full team of trained/exotic stuffed players will be enough to beat him easily. (and again, even if the team was not perfect, the players were not complete noobs, they had gone through all other dungeons at first try)

So, as a conclusion : YES, many of us like challenging content, YES the new dungeons that will offer a new challenge each time will be a great thing, but NO, they shouldn’t make all dungeons harder. Because we don’t want to make them too hard for half+ of players, and because most of them have a fair amount of difficulty as long as you don’t build a “sc” team (with some exceptions, for exemple CoF path 1, which end boss was nerfed directly from “impossibru” to “what is this joke ?”)

@Milennin.4825 : there is a big part of truth (especially for existing dungeons that will be easier once we have full high gear), but I want to point out 2 things : (a) the dungeon will not necessarily be easy even with 2 new rings and a back item. (b) The new level of gear is supposed to be a waiting lvl to give us new goals between the moment when we get lvl80+exotic, and the moment when we get legendary (which are a long term goal). This means that not all players are supposed to equip them immediately when they reach lvl80, many of us/rerolls will still have exotic for a while and have to do the new dungeon with it in order to get pink items.

Softspoken.2410 : very good idea. Either we want challenge or we want easier instance to get dungeon armor. Using Softspoken’s idea, everyone can choose : if we want challenge we equip masterwork and reduce traits (just like lvl35 characters for AC), and if we want faster tokens we go through them as full lvl80.

I believe AC exp is a level 35 dungeon. Run it on level 35 toons and tell me there isn’t a challenge.

Lassiter.6325:

I believe AC exp is a level 35 dungeon. Run it on level 35 toons and tell me there isn’t a challenge.

There’s no point as you’re level 35 only 1 run. Then you level up and get stronger. You spend maybe 1-2 hours as level 35. You spend 100’s of hours as a level 80.

They are bringing back challenge. To overcome the new challenge, grind the dungeon enough to equip the new dungeon gear (which makes your “old” stuff redundant) and you have overcome the new challenge. Game balance is fun.

Honestly, with a decision like agony and it’s gear solution, ArenaNet is beginning to feel like a lost cause when it comes to wanting a developer to design truly challenging content.

Such a contrast from the initial launch A.net dungeons are to hard nerf them make them more accessible. Oh the Irony !

Now it’s please A.net make them harder !

A.net should just not listen to anyone for the 1st 2 months of any new content feature that is introduced, except for bug fixes of course.

Give the packs of silver mobs solid AI and abilities like the thieves summoned by thieves guild, or the npc’s in the mist. Personally I like the thief in the mist. Why can’t we have more of that?