Guild Wars 2

Another dungeon – another bugged fiasco

I keep hoping, against large body of evidence, that not all dungeons are choke-full of broken mechanics on top of buggy mess.

Today I went into Twilign Arbor (sp?) story mode dungeon. My group just hit 50, we are all mostly in crafted yellows, so better geared than regular level 50 would be.

Summary:

1. Boss that turns you into cats – bugged. Killing pups does not turn you back. Ended up killing him with 4 cats and 1 person kiting. Took long time.
2. Fish boss is AFK fight.
3. Packs 3-4 packs of dogs with knock-back are ridiculously hard. We have 3 stabilities in the group, we were still losing to chain knock-downs.
4. 2 well necromancers – chain fear. They drop well that fears you, if you get feared running into the wall you end up with 20+ seconds of fear. They cannot be pulled out of the room.
5. Random trash mobs with fear – fears you half across the room. Fear way too long.
6. Pod mobs that spawn and charge you and knock you down can kill people in a single knockdown. Way too brutal to deal with.
7. Boss that spawns legions of nightmare spiders – nothing in the game tells you how to approach this fight. We had to Google it, then it was simple.

Overall -dungeons in this game feel like an undiminished afterthought, something that does not hold up to competition (WoW, CoH, DnDOL, SWToR I have tried and can compare to). If PvE content (fractials) going to be the end-game content, Anet needs to clean up their act.

Major problems:

1. No way to manage mobs. Your 1-2s CC does not matter when it takes 60s+ to kill mob. At the same time mobs CC you for 10+ seconds at the time. This should be reversed. CC needs to be much, much stronger in PvE to compensate for lack of tanking and healing.
2. Trash is way too hard, too many abilities, too much damage, too much HP. As a result everyone attempts to “skip” all trash, just run past it. Weird way to play.
3. Environmental traps are too obnoxious. Flowers that constantly spawn. Traps that you can’t turn off. Trip wires.
4. Boss fights with fight mechanics that are not explained.

Many of the dungeons are buggy and some of the trash is hard. But some of the stuff is simply a matter of practice, do it a few more times and you will breeze through it.

The dogs and knights can be slowed/crippled. Players will always try to skip mobs when they can.

As for boss mechanics, you should click on the boss and there is a description on his HP-bar. For that spider boss, i thought it was pretty obvious. The first time i did thhis dungeon, i was with a group with ppl who never did it before. We did wipe the first try, but the mechanics were very simple. Kite suicide spiders, kill boss.

And i don’t remember any description of boss mechanics in SWToR.

While i do enjoy doing dungeons, Anet does need to fix the bugs and balance out some of the trash mobs and bosses.

The worst thing is the massive amount of Fear spam. It’s not fun, it’s not hard. It’s plain annoying and frustrating.

Regrets of Sini.6083:

Another dungeon – another bugged fiasco

I keep hoping, against large body of evidence, that not all dungeons are choke-full of broken mechanics on top of buggy mess.

Today I went into Twilign Arbor (sp?) story mode dungeon. My group just hit 50, we are all mostly in crafted yellows, so better geared than regular level 50 would be.

Summary:

1. Boss that turns you into cats – bugged. Killing pups does not turn you back. Ended up killing him with 4 cats and 1 person kiting. Took long time.
2. Fish boss is AFK fight.
Not a bug
3. Packs 3-4 packs of dogs with knock-back are ridiculously hard. We have 3 stabilities in the group, we were still losing to chain knock-downs.
Not a bug
4. 2 well necromancers – chain fear. They drop well that fears you, if you get feared running into the wall you end up with 20+ seconds of fear. They cannot be pulled out of the room.
Not a bug
5. Random trash mobs with fear – fears you half across the room. Fear way too long.
Not a bug
6. Pod mobs that spawn and charge you and knock you down can kill people in a single knockdown. Way too brutal to deal with.
Not a bug
7. Boss that spawns legions of nightmare spiders – nothing in the game tells you how to approach this fight. We had to Google it, then it was simple.
Not a bug

Overall -dungeons in this game feel like an undiminished afterthought, something that does not hold up to competition (WoW, CoH, DnDOL, SWToR I have tried and can compare to). If PvE content (fractials) going to be the end-game content, Anet needs to clean up their act.

Major problems:

1. No way to manage mobs. Your 1-2s CC does not matter when it takes 60s+ to kill mob. At the same time mobs CC you for 10+ seconds at the time. This should be reversed. CC needs to be much, much stronger in PvE to compensate for lack of tanking and healing.
Not a bug
2. Trash is way too hard, too many abilities, too much damage, too much HP. As a result everyone attempts to “skip” all trash, just run past it. Weird way to play.
Not a bug
3. Environmental traps are too obnoxious. Flowers that constantly spawn. Traps that you can’t turn off. Trip wires.
Not a bug
4. Boss fights with fight mechanics that are not explained.
Not a bug

So, not such a bugged fiasco after all? Could you change your title?

I personally love dungeons like these. They are hard to complete and ask allot of team play. Mostly a ranger just pulled the mobs one by ones and we could kill each easy. I have a guardian full toughness/support build and don’t really have a problem tanking and kiting hordes of mobs around, letting my party AOE kill them.

Maybe most dungeons need some tweaking. But as a IT guy we always say: The world is our testing ground.

With just a team you cant test everything. Every play style, skill level, gear, skills, weapons, etc. You just cant. Thats why they are always patching things after a release.

^ Its you and your party that failed You need practice and proper builds for trash and bosses. You can change skills on the run, you know. Gl and HF next time… or times

Bunmaster.9734:

But some of the stuff is simply a matter of practice, do it a few more times and you will breeze through it.

No, dungeons are not impossible, they are simply unfun. Way they work you end up in the end “oh, this way too much work and not that fun, lets not doing again” instead of, This Was Great!

Often you wipe, and when you analyze why, it always boils down to RNG. Something like I got chain knocked down and killed full to zero, or I got 10 second fear and it moved me into next room and agro adds or environmental traps respawned on top of us and wiped the group… This is all in the STORY MODE.

Plus whole grave yard zerging content. Ugh. This is absolutely wrong way to do content.

I have a lot of dungeon experience to compare to. Some games have excellent dungeons (WoW/CoH), some are mixed bag (D&D/ToR), but GW2 is clearly near the bottom. Considering that Anet plans to make dungeons end-game (see fractials) and compete based on this, they have to put puppy-lot more work into this and play test a lot more than they did.

my issues are that im always dc ing at the jumping map with harpies in fractal; not even 2-3 mins into it. i do not lag or dc in the game. just in fractal only and esp that map. also the map with the green jade maw bonus map, i have fallen and died into another map that looks like the grand canyon and therefore another time waster for me as no one can revive me and my party falls apart. pls work on FOTM dungeon esp when i dc and i cant rejoin the dungeon. Please stop wasting my time.

3. For the packs of dogs, AoE blind or any type of interrupt/stability can help. It’s quite sad really how easy they can be decimated when a Necromancer pops Plague and 2’s the entire time or an Elementalist uses Glyph of Storms in Earth. Mesmers can Time Warp and you can haste AoE everything to death. And on it goes.
6. As for the pods. Besides the required quest ones, don’t open them.
7. The first time my party did this (completely new), we wiped a few times. You shouldn’t have to Google the boss fight. Just realize what the boss does after awhile, learn from your mistakes and adjust.

Trash mobs are pretty much the hardest/and or most time consuming part in almost all of the dungeons.

Regrets of Sini.6083:

Bunmaster.9734:

But some of the stuff is simply a matter of practice, do it a few more times and you will breeze through it.

No, dungeons are not impossible, *they are simply unfun. *

So because your personal opinion means you dislike something, it is true in all regards for everyone else? If you read what people are writing in this thread, the majority of responses say that it is not bugged and ENJOYABLE, especially if done right.

I know a lot of people that enjoy learning, the hard way, how to do things properly. Try it sometime, you might actually like it.

If you want spoonfeeding, however, GW2 is not for you.

I have to agree with moosie on this. One thing you mentioned was a bug, the rest are just things you need to learn to handle. Yes, some story modes are a little over tuned. But you should never be able to just go into a new dungeon and zerg lol the whole thing without learning some strategies through wipes or close calls, if it were too easy you would just be on these forums whining about there not being any challenge.

Dogs and necro’s are very manageable with the right skills equipped and strategies to manage fears and KD’s. You mention WoW a lot and you mention that there is nothing that TELL’s you how to do boss fights in GW2. You’re right, you have to figure it out for yourself(or google it), GW2 doesn’t spoon feed you strategies like WoW does…sorry. Once you learn the correct ways to deal with mob abilities things get far more manageable, not faceroll easy but manageable.

Some tips for TA specifically would be to bring CC of your own and time it with the CC of your group members, or time it to save group member that have been CC’d. Bring at least one stun breaker for trash packs and don’t use it unless you are going to die if you don’t. If one dog jumps on you, wait a second to see if more dogs jump on you before you use the stun breaker. Have a dedicated blossom killer in the areas where blossoms are dangerous.