Guild Wars 2

I found this recently:
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-endgame-reimagined/

Mike Zadorojny

For people who love structured and difficult content, we developed the explorable mode for our eight dungeons. A dungeon’s explorable mode has at least three different paths that players can choose to conquer—and each path is a five-character delve into tough content that we designed to push the limits of teamwork and communication.

I was surprised by what I read because I already lost faith in ArenaNet team being able to provide any difficult content due to an “average player” not knowing what are traits and being forced to provide a content in a way that all customers are happy and currently the most customers (as I read on forums) would like to use just auto-attack and does not like to be forced to use anything else and changing their playstyle. Also most of customers does not want to learn what are traits since this is too complex and they want to be able to wander around without having to worry about combat. At least this is what I understood from developer comments after general whine on Twisted Marionette being too hard.

So my questions are:
1) Is the above article still valid or is it just an old vision of how the game should look like?
2) If the above article is valid then why on earth 1.5 year after release, all dungeons are still having serious bugs and design errors that allow for completing them using simple algorithms without any challenge in very short time? Same question goes for a few skills in the game that allow for making the dungeon content extremally easy.
3) If ArenaNet is still looking for a ways to provide difficult end-game content, what is the progress after over 1 year?

The problem is that the average player seriously thought that twisted marionette was difficult content when in reality it was a joke. Imagine introducing actual difficult content. So your answer is no. Dungeons are incredibly easy provided you aren’t a terrible player.

That quote is the funniest thing I’ve seen in days. lol

Back in september 2012 the quote was fairly accurate, explorable dungeons were so hard that people did not like partying with anyone who had the courage to get into melee range.

Since then we’ve learnt every trick possible (and some nerfs) for almost every challenging encounter, reducing them mostly to dps burn dungeons. What happens in other games when you outgear/outlearn the content? You drop healers and take dps.

Depends in a good party no. But if you are stuck with the pug short bus team it is.

There’s always fractal. I tried to get it up. But give it up after lvl31.

A guy rage quit after we got dredge fractal. He didn’t even try. And apparently he is leader and kicked everyone out.

I have the greatest fun with dungeons when i do them solo/duo/trio , with full grp its just speedclearing.
I rly hope they will do something about many dungeons but keep the possibility to solo.
I actually like the difficulty of Tequatl and the Wurm and would love to see such dynamic in dungeons

If players in general wanted dungeons to be challenging content that required communication they wouldn’t be so fussy about who they accepted into a group. At least that’s what I assume looking at most lfg’s.

Truth to be told is, at least for me, that all “stacking” and “speedrunning” and “meta” is ruining the climate, when everyone sit on top of each other so the spider would not cast poison etc. If you want content that you simply grind to get your daily gold, find a job…

Hrothgar.1658:

Truth to be told is, at least for me, that all “stacking” and “speedrunning” and “meta” is ruining the climate, when everyone sit on top of each other so the spider would not cast poison etc. If you want content that you simply grind to get your daily gold, find a job…

I do to.. I would rather have my efforts rewarding…

IMO Anet should add a bonus to each dungeon path, something along the lines of “kill everything that spawns in this path” and the group will be rewarded with extra loot…something along the lines of “better reward for a real FULL clear”

It was supposed to be challenging end-game content. Anet just dropped the ball on that one.

Yeah it was supposed to be challenging, care bears didn’t like it got scared and never went underground, dungeons got left in the dust.

NCsoft said cater to your money makers, and the dungeon team was dissolved.

This is why the dungeons are rarely touched upon and when they do add one things go sour because they add it through LW and most of the LW crowd are casuals. It doesn’t mix well.

Only Arah and FotM may be a little challenging.Well Arah is very buggy but none the less.
Everything else is very zergy and speed clearing..

Cormac.3871:

If players in general wanted dungeons to be challenging content that required communication they wouldn’t be so fussy about who they accepted into a group. At least that’s what I assume looking at most lfg’s.

That doesn’t make easy content hard o.o . People ask for certain things so they can get speed through things for max g/hr rewards. Plus, people who have subpar builds or just do things slow will just make it boring I mean like most bosses in most dungeons are extremely easy. Taking a few extra minutes to just bash an easy boss’ hp isn’t what I would see as challenging, hard, or interesting.

What is really challenging is the RNG difficulty from the level of pug.

RakaNishoo.6071:

3) If ArenaNet is still looking for a ways to provide difficult end-game content, what is the progress after over 1 year?

In the last year or so, it turned out that the small population of players who want harder dungeon content do not, as a whole, spend nearly enough money on the game as the majority of carebares who’d rather autoattack/afk on outdoor enemies or immerse themselves in LS content. As an avid dungeon runner, I wouldn’t be surprised if we were outnumbered 1:100 or even 1:1000.

Anet is, afterall, a business, and their bottom line is best serving the profitable majority with the least amount of effort.

tl;dr we’re probably never going to get hard dungeons

Even fractal 50 isn’t exactly challenging.

What’s the challenge? Mobs have 10 times the hp and hit 10 times as much.

Sadly, the only challenge left in GW2 is pitting your skills against other players.

I want to get one thing clear here, cause i read it one time.
the AC spider queen doesnt do her poison in a certain range (melee) if you just are 0,5sec in its trigger range, she maybe uses it .

Stacking in that corner has following uses :
FGS and WWA dmg bosst against wall.
the Queen will not get punched back (like it does when u fight it) which may triggers the poison.
I know its visually not the funniest way to kill it, but it has its uses.
For example , i killed her solo here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKSNmeyO3h4 and as you may see i fight her through the whole room cause i have to keep pushing forward or she triggers poison, now how do u think will this work with 5 ppl? poison almost garanteed.

And stacking mobs is just to allow cleave dmg and pull maybe spreaded range enemies together.
Most ppl which are against stacking rly dont have the slightest clue how certain mechanics work
But good thing you can make your own grp with like minded peeps.

btw here is a ranged solo i found on youtube, as u can see she uses her poison all the time, but not her melee atack (which is exploiting/ ignoring the game mechanics)

RakaNishoo.6071:

3) If ArenaNet is still looking for a ways to provide difficult end-game content, what is the progress after over 1 year?

Colin Johanson lays out their plan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy7CcwnfUdU#t=16m19s

Two reasons to be disappointed. First, they thought they were at least partly rolling out this plan with Fractured, and we all know how miserably they failed there.

Second, Colin’s reasoning is at best difficult to follow. As far as I can tell, it’s this: Hard mode dungeons would fracture the playerbase into the people who play hard mode and the people who don’t, which would be very bad for the game. Instead, we want to make high level fractals and/or some dungeons harder than others, which somehow won’t equally fracture the playerbase into the people who do high level fractals/hard dungeons and the people who stick to the easy ones. (Or maybe it will equally fracture the playerbase, but that fracturing won’t be as bad for some reason.)

Edit: Two other things to keep in mind about old blog posts by Anet. First, as people have said, two weeks after release, dungeons really did take effort to complete! So the post wasn’t quite as laughable when it first went up. But second and more important, they’ve done a complete 180 on plenty of things they said around release. There’s really no reason to think anything they said in 2012 has any bearing on the direction the game’s taking now.

a t s e.9614:

Anyway I think its ight when its easy , its mostly to farm gold anyway. Nobody wants to wipe over and over just to get a bit of gold . Challenge its good once in a while but the game is supposed to be rather relaxing . I remember playing an FPS where I had to try extremly hard to win , it was fun but I couldnt play like that for more than 1 hour.

Edit: look at that ty hard picture.

lol check out my cameo in your chat though

Just think about when Anet’s internal tester group barely managed to beat Liadri, 50% of the playerbase killed her or even more. It’s hard to make challanging content when your testers aren’t that great.