Guild Wars 2

Ran Caudecus’ Manor last night to help a new guildy through story mode after he just got to 40. All I can say is what happened? Used to be fun and challenging, now its gotten a little ridiculous. Packs now include 2 silvers, new gold level mobs everywhere. Bosses spawn extra guys. My core group used to be able to run the dungeon in about 15 minutes and now it took us 45. Walked in with 26 silver, left with 15 silver. And that’s with the 11 silver reward I got at the end. I understand nerfing the reward, but what’s with the extra difficulty. I think we wiped 17 times during the run.

I’ve read other posts after the dungeon changes and the concensus is that dungeons used to be challenging enough and now they are completely not worth doing with the time and coin needed for the wipe fests. Please reconsider this change.

15 mins to complete a dungeon, i haven’t tried that dungeon yet (will in about 4 lvls time) but no wonder they added more to it to lengthen it out!

I’m surprised they released it like that if people can complete it that fast!

15mins can not be called a dungeon run

The point isn’t that they need to reduce people doing speed runs, do that by lowering the rewards which they said they were doing. I’m not shocked about this. Doing a dungeon run in 15 minutes and getting 26 or more silver each time was insane. Coupled with the exp reward and you start wondering, why am I not just doing this to get insane gold/levels. I’m glad for that nerf. However, my question is WHY increase the difficulty?

Not it didn’t use to be “fun and challenging” it used to be super-imba-easy mode and it got fixed.

Moving on

The increased difficulty is a bit of a gyp in that it’s a bit lazy (just adding more champions, etc.). However, I’d say the difficulty is pretty moderate. My party (albeit all 80s and familiar with the dungeon), cleared it in 20-30 minutes with no deaths.

From what I’ve read they want to reduce the insane gold farming in quick time immediately which is understandable and so a quick fix is to add more mobs with higher difficulty.

You would hope that this IS just a quick fix while they consider the real long term improvements that will satisfy themselves and players.

Very disappointed with the dungeon difficulty upgrade. It was way too easy previously but all that is happened is extra mobs and more damage. Myself as a level 80 went in with 4 other 40-60s and constantly wiped. All the mobs just seemed to keep coming for me for some strange reason.

Like Sera said above I think this is all to do with a lazy buff, I know they haven’t had much time to quickly fix the difficulty but there is no strategy you can use just because more mobs with harder hitting damage have been added.

Was really disappointed when a friend hit 40 and I said I’d run it with them and we never even managed to finish the dungeon

Pretty sure a pug group shouldn’t be wiping to the point of rage quitting the dungeon considering that story mode is supposed to be for everyone and explorable is for the more hard core people. Just my 2 cents. :c

I agree that explorable should be where the hard core people go for “banging head against the wall challenge”. Wiping near 20 times on the introduction portion of the dungeon is not fun. Paying insane repair bills is not fun. Getting one shot’ed constantly and for no apparent reason is not fun. Case in point. First boss in Caudecus’. Golem launches missiles…which is fine. I died and respawned at the way point. Run back in and no sooner do I step through the door and I get nailed again by the missiles. The golem was down the stairs near the fountain at the time and I don’t even think had line of sight with me. How does aggro work in this game anyways? Is it a randomly determined every second? Does the boss or mob just select someone at random and hate them till they go down? How are we supposed to work as a team? I see someone getting focuses by a creature, I unload all my support abilities/healing abilities on that person and the creature never once considers me a threat. Only once my team mate dies for good does the mob change targets and now wants me dead. I’ve had several scenarios where a team mate goes into a downed state and I just walk up to him and begin reviving. The creature keeps pounding on my team mate and doesn’t go for me.

Where’s the AI?

In response to Dorn I think that the golem is fine, you can see when he is about to fire the missiles so its relatively easy to dodge 9/10 times but the repair cost I agree with but thats simply because of the difficulty I spent 40S on repairs on a run I didn’t even finish just to help a friend with the dungeon…

I don’t have a problem with the golem’s abilities. I’m more concerned about why I’m getting hit with them when he’s not in LOS and I shouldn’t even register on his threat meter.

Let me explain something else. I’m not looking for a scenario where the “tank” has aggro 100% of the time. I understand what Arenanet is looking for and am HAPPY to see a game with no “holy trinity”. I would much prefer this game to any other mmo on the market and have hopes that other mmo companies will soon follow suit. However, I would like to see situations that make sense in terms of who the mobs are attacking and why. If I open up with all my aoe abilities right from the get go, then I fully expect that every single mob hit will go for me. That’s on me as a player, not on the AI. If I am selective, and focus my spells/abilies on one mob, then if that mob goes for me then that’s also on me as a player. I earned that threat. But if I sit in the back, determining who to attack and all of a sudden the boss and his 3 cronies all turn and attack me out of the blue, what caused that? Did I insult them on some level because I wasn’t participating? I consider myself a knowledgeble average player. I am not “elite” but I know my class, I look at my abilities and know when and how to use them. I know to dodge out of the way and not stand in the fire. I’ve been playing MMO’s since the early 90’s. I’m looking for clarification as to why things are the way they are and what is being done to resolve them. Running from way points is not good dungeon design.

I also ran Sorrow’s before the dungeon update. My group was a pug and we progressed nicely up until we got to the golem boss and suddenly it was 40 deaths. I can only be grateful that he doesn’t reset completely on a wipe otherwise we never would have finished him. Is that good encounter design? Should we ensure that we have a huge pile of gold for the inevitable repair bill? Other than that one fight, the entire dungeon was enjoyable. The last boss was amazing! LOVED IT.

“I’ve had several scenarios where a team mate goes into a downed state and I just walk up to him and begin reviving. The creature keeps pounding on my team mate and doesn’t go for me.
Where’s the AI?”

This happens so much it’s not even funny. In one instance, two of us were reviving our engineer who was constantly targeted by the mob, while our guardian just stood behind it and gradually killed it while being ignored completely.

Yeah they nerfed difficulty AND reward. Should have just nerfed the reward. And that would have been fine. I won’t run CM story mode on account of how annoying it is that everything knocks me down over and over. Annoying.

Dorn.5867:

I would like to see situations that make sense in terms of who the mobs are attacking and why. If I open up with all my aoe abilities right from the get go, then I fully expect that every single mob hit will go for me. That’s on me as a player, not on the AI. If I am selective, and focus my spells/abilies on one mob, then if that mob goes for me then that’s also on me as a player. I earned that threat. But if I sit in the back, determining who to attack and all of a sudden the boss and his 3 cronies all turn and attack me out of the blue, what caused that? Did I insult them on some level because I wasn’t participating? I consider myself a knowledgeble average player. I am not “elite” but I know my class, I look at my abilities and know when and how to use them. I know to dodge out of the way and not stand in the fire. … I’m looking for clarification as to why things are the way they are and what is being done to resolve them. Running from way points is not good dungeon design.

Absolutely ditto.
CM was too easy but now its just kittening ridiculous.

Now no one is running CM at all hardly. Cant find a group. It used to be I would go into overflow everytime. Not anymore. Can’t get a group, cant even run dungeons. Maybe everyone has moved elsewhere. I don’t know.

I know this sucks really bad. Why in world Anet? What were you thinking? You can’t afford to have everyone just up and quit like that. Had you just been reasonable and listened to what people were saying.

Anet has hardly any time to get fix on this issue. They needed the dungeons to be in semi working order this weekend. If you ask me they cant afford to have the dungeons in this state this weekend. The amount of people that dropped off playing has been huge. The day before this patch it was pretty awesome. There were people playing.

I don’t think they just went somewhere else. I think they left. Or quit playing. Anet you need to show comittment to making these dungeons fun and a way to progress your character. You should not feel like you are getting punished for playing dungeons in lieu of just doing open world zergs and zone stuff.

I will give you my personal take on the patch. It seemed so out of touch with the state of the game, it seemed bizarre in its severity and complete lack of understanding of basic MMO dungeon design. It seems like you have a harcore group of very self assured individuals pushing a dungeon design that is completely horrid, they are focused in on a numbers driven statistical analysis which is not ever gonna translate into fun dungeons.

It makes it seem like you guys are hopeless, like there is no hope you can get anything in there worth even bother to load the game up to do. I honestly think this, I am a diehard 5 man group player, you have some great potential here, good artwork, lovely animations, good items, just wow get it together with the dungeon design.

Its like watching someone wreck themselves or sabotage their own game.