Guild Wars 2

Things I’d like to see changed in current dungeons (some of them were already mentioned):

• Reviewing HP of certain bosses – for example final bosses of HotW (all paths) and CoF 3
• Introducing more phases in boss fights – if you don’t like to decrease the hp because of some well organized groups. at least give the bosses several phases so that the fights aren’t just 15 minutes of boredom
• Reviewing the length and difficulty of certain paths compared to other paths of the same dungeon – again, HotW (first path is twice as fast as the rest) and CoF (third path is extremely unfriendly for a pug). I don’t ask you to nerf them, but perhaps introduce scaling rewards – the longer a path on average is, the more tokens we get
• Story modes as an introduction to dungeons – I haven’t done many story modes since I finished them all, but I’d rally like to see storymode dungeons (especially AC and CM) made more noob-friendly and scaled to low-lvl groups with bad gear, with difficulty increasing in the following storymodes. This should hopefully encourage more ppl to run dungeons and get experienced before switching to explorables
• Some fast ideas at the end: Show the current difficulty level of players in the group when entering FotM – it always takes us a while to figure out who’s lying about their lvl; personalized dps meter – I want to know how to optimize my spell rotation, that’s all I’m asking for; reveal current magic find to other partymembers – MF is an extremely selfish stat and other players in the group should know who’s the leecher they have to carry

I think the arah chest rewards in arah and other hiGh lvl dungeons are way too toned down compared to the fractals and the lower lvl dungeons. For example I think in two runs in arah I received one exotic and one rare and probably got less than 2g after sales of trash while by running fractals two times u at leat get 3-5 rares and maybe even an exotic in addition to better rings,etc along with at least 4g from trash. If arah is supposed to be challenging then there should be a better reward system for harder ones.

Kathias.8532:

• Some fast ideas at the end: Show the current difficulty level of players in the group when entering FotM – it always takes us a while to figure out who’s lying about their lvl

There’s a hoover toolip on the “create fractal instance” window on the number showing the maximum level allowed to that group that shows you one of the players who is the cause for that limit.

First thing you should do is a LFG tool. Your fixes, while appreciated, will be useless if i’m forced to sit in LA or dungeon zone trying to find group, instead of being listed in lfg tool and doing whatever I wish.

I like exploring and I like dungeons too but sitting one hour in LA trying to coerce someone into story mode takes all the fun out of the game.

Bottom line -

If I don’t feel like dungeoneering, this game is stunningly awesome and brings me much joy.

If I want to do dungeon the game becomes a chore and unpleasant test of waiting for nothing.

Optional encounters within the dungeon that provide ingredients that can be combined with others found in other dungeons (or even the same one) to eventually build personalised gear for your character, no RNG whatsoever make these items accountbound so the gear more properly reflects your character’s accomplishments.

I like the token system because at least you are guaranteed to get items where as I’ve always been vocal about my dislike of the RNG in games but when it comes to ascended items I think it’s a very bad way to go especially since it’s blocking progression for many people.

I barely even do fractals any more as much as I enjoy the individual fractals and the design of the dungeon I just have no desire to grind it every day in the small chance I get a ring that is most likely the wrong one anyway and I definitely don’t want to fork out an insane amount of gold for ectos for a backpiece, I need those for a legendary.

So yea my ‘steady’ dungeon group has pretty much stopped doing fractal at all because there’s no way to progress naturally or through skill.

One other thing that was mentioned by my party that I kind of agree with in a way is that the fractals are so short we can’t really ‘get into the zone’ that by the time we get to the end of a fractal and get into the environment and immersion we’re suddenly taken to another fractal and so it feels a bit rushed. As much as this keeps things flowing as well it comes at the cost of immersion.

I think it would be more fun if the fractals were twice as long but in stead have two random fractals each. It would still be shorter than current dungeons but without the cost of immersion (Maybe even add more fractals in this manner).

As for the dungeon design other than the length, I like the bosses and the mechanics, the unique feel of each fractal. I like the boss fights for the most part except that the jellyfish is a bit too easy, I do love the dolphins

I challenge Robert to make the next boss in an enchanted forest with a pink and white unicorn boss! (sorry getting off topic there and completely lore unrelated).

I do like that you could add special fractals for holidays like Wintersday. For example it could be about an explosion in Toymaker Tixx’ toy factory and it turns out the Skritt have been wanting all the shinies to themselves!

Again going off topic slightly….

As for current dungeons not fractal related, We could do with more rares, tier 6 mats and lodestone/cores dropping from dungeons. Currently the prices for ectos and other tier 6 mats (especially lodestone) is insane. The demand is far far higher than the availability. Unless this is intended?

As for dungeon design of course the various bugs should be fixed and some encounters could do with some balancing. Like the majority of HotW bosses have far too much health or the ones on path 4 in Arah or CoF path 3 end boss etc.

Also if you could, please give searing effigy a buff. I know I was vocal about it being made better balanced so more parties could complete it but the nerf was far too much. It’s the easiest dungeon path in game now (pretty much). Makes me sad that my once arch nemesis has fallen so low.

Whatever you do, be sure to compensate the changes with some adequately changes to world zones too, otherwise we will have even less players wanting to play in them.
Most of the times designers don’t analyze all of the consequences that a change could make. Luckily with Anet devs it hasn’t yet been the case.

Well, almost every suggestion i can post are already wrote. But here is my point of view.

1. Change money reward for materials reward: this is esencial. The gold farm in AC y CoF (just because the relation gold/time) just put a lot of gold inside the game (inflation) with no compensation in quantity of mats that the endgame offer to players. Consecuence: the mats T6, lodestones and ectos (the pilars of the endgame economy) just keep going up in prices. you constantly get up the demand of them via ascended/legendary/new-content, but the ways to get them are always the same (and with really low drop rate i must say). The option of change dungeon tokens for mats (both, T6 and lodestones) are a good choice too (just need to see what cost you put them).

2. Daily reward on every dungeon: The daily system you use in FotM have great potential to implement in all other dungeons. Just have some lack of sense in the implementation. You do FotM 1 for a 15 tokens reward, FM2 for 60 tokens, FM3 for 15, FM4 for 35… FotM must give always 40-60 tokens, and the daily chest must contain another things like ascended/exotic items/runes, or stack of mats T6/lodestones/ectos. If you implement daily in every dungeon, then for shure all people must try to do all dungeons at least one time per day. Changin the rotation from:
AC1 > AC2 > AC3 > CoF1 > CoF2 > FotM10 > TA(up) > repeat after a few hours with another character
to:
AC# > CoF# > FotM10 > TA# > CM# > and so with all other dungeons (with# as the easiest/fastest path).
At least you are half way to poblate the crap (crap=not competitive in comparison with others) dungeons at least for one of their paths.

3. Balance reward/time on all dungeons: take as base the AC/CoF reward/time (60 tokens every half hour with a party who known the path) and put the same r/t on all other paths/dungeons. There is no need to make complex calculations, just say that for example arah take 1,5 whit a known path party (and no problem whit lupi…), then rise the tokens reward to 150-180 (and same for exp/karma/gold). CoE take 45min, then rise tokens/exp/krm/gold x1,5 and so on.

4. Make some “consolation prize” for partys who dont finish the dungeon for xxx reason (bug 60%,hard 10%,lack of time 30% or so): i will explain whit an example. We take a party, go to AC2, reach the final stage (cannons), the dungeon get bug… We play for 20min for absolutly NO reward (several times). You known how anoying is this? i already post this example in another post and you just need to read it to untherstand how frustrating can be (sorry for that angry tread by the way). Back to topic: if you reach the 3/4 stage of the dungeon and your party dont finish it, when the party get out the dungeon, give them some % as a reward for the time spend in it. But you must watch the reward table to avoid make a “hit, leave and repeat” way like the arah path 3. Something like this:
Dungeon with 5 big acts:
Do first act and leave dungeon (1/5): 1/15 [1/(1+2+3+4+5)] of the full reward for finish the dungeon.
Do second act and leave dungeon (2/5): 1/10 [1/(1+2+3+4)] of the full reward for finish the dungeon (6 tokens, 1/10 exp, 1/10 karma, 2.6 silvers)
Do third act and leave dungeon (3/5): 1/6 [1/(1+2+3)] of full reward
Do pre final act (4 in this case) and leave dungeon (4/5): 1/2 of the full reward
This way you avoid reward in great way the spam first bosses and reward partys for their effort. This can be a really good way to open the dungeons to the base mass players, so if they fail for some reason, they dont feel abandoned and like crap and have that litle push to try again to win the full reward.

5. Make alive the story modes: as simple as this. Put tokens rewars for that players who already finish it, so they can help party members to make the story mode as well.

6. Disband all the mandatory pre-event dungeons: There is already hard to coordinate “play times” whit your group of friends, why we need to add more difficulty to this? Not to say that the first dungeons (AC, TA, CM) dont have this limiter and are the most successful (with the exeption of CoF, house of the farmeable berseker armor). At least put event that one party of 5 players can make in less than 10 minutes, and no the “go to hell” pre event of arah where you need 30+ peoples for at least one hour between wait the pre event start and make it. The idea of pre event its good, the implementation make me cry.

6. Drop to half the final boss CoF3 HP: Yup. A hole point to this one. Maybe you think that already have half HP of “base legendary type” but, hey, he is invulnerable 1/2 of the time. And its boring. And its ugly. And etc.

As always say, sorry for my english.

EDIT: totally agree whit Xehanort.4589 comment.

After the whole the dungeons are to easy the dungeons are to hard thing, I am pretty surprised the feedback right now is really consistant.

Fay.2735:

I challenge Robert to make the next boss in an enchanted forest with a pink and white unicorn boss! (sorry getting off topic there and completely lore unrelated).

I second this because this would indead be a truely terrifying beast.
[img]http://i571.photobucket.com/albums/ss160/starmz123/Aurora-WingedUniMLP.jpg[/img]

1) Add tokens to story mode… even if it is less tokens than an exp run.

2) I’d prefer a balance of RNG and token rewards for exotic dungeon armor. Maybe increase the tokens needed for armor. But, give each end boss a chance to drop an exotic armor piece (and please make them drop more than 1/100 runs, bad RNG is bad).

3) Create interesting/fun mechanics for boss fights. FotM is a step in the right direction.

4) Please for the love of God and all that is Holy and good in this world, disable waypoints during boss fights. This is a mechanic which is great for learning a dungeon. However, it greatly cheapens a boss encounter. If you have to adjust boss difficulties as a result, fine. Just say NO to corpse zergs!

5) Have minis or other vanity items obtainable from dungeons.

6) Please add dungeon finder tool.

7) Some how reduce the player base segmentation from FotM levels. I’m all for progression in content. But it’s hard to find group for my exact level.

8) Easter eggs are great. Pop-culture references are cool. Think outside the box

Thank you for making a great game.

Make the dungeons harder, most of them can be done brainafk.

It’d be way better if fractals progression was account wide. I really don’t feel like redoing all those levels on my three alts.

There is one main reason I don’t do dungeons. That they need 5, and exactly 5 people. Not 4, not 6, Not 3, Not 7, but 5. I don’t like to PUG, but how often do you get exactly 4 other friends for a dungeon and not be one short or one too many (thus having to exclude someone).

The FotM difficulty scaling should be modified for dungeons. The difficulty should scale both with number of players and some party chosen difficulty value. For example, you can choose (without need to do “previous” difficulties) a hardness value between 1 and 10 and that gets multiplied/scaled by some value depending on number of party members.

The exact parameters would require testing and such. Just so long as their is some player selectable difficulty, so groups of say 1 to 8 can find a suitable challenge. This could also be seen as a sort of graded method hard mode.

1. Add tiered levels of difficulty shared with the fractals and all dungeons.
Players would not need to be at the very same level to join and raise their cap, they’ll just have to be within the same tier. And they can increase those levels on any dungeon, they don’t have to raise them per dungeon.
The text in the same line as the number of the dungeon level would be colored, indicating difficulty level. These colors will appear both when picking a level and when the message to join is shown to the rest of the party.
- Tier 1, White, 1-9 : Enemies are just a bit harder than in explorable zones.
- Tier 2, Blue, 10-19 : Enemies are noticeably harder that in explorable zones, but not as hard as in dungeons now. Final bosses have agony skills from this tier on.
- Tier 3, Green, 20-29 : Even harder, but still not as hard as now.
- Tier 4, Yellow, 30-39: Current dungeon difficulty and rewards. Also, all champions in a level can apply agony from now on.
- Tier 5, Orange, 40-49: Harder than now.
- Tier 6, Pink, 50-59: Much harder than now. Also, all enemies have a skill that applies Agony from now on.
- Tier 7, Purple, 60-? : So hard that doing this once neats you enough tokens to get a single piece of equipment. Also, players get a permanent effect inside the dungeon that applies agony every 60 seconds, and every time they take damage from any source, or are struck by any enemy skill.
Story mode would also be affected by difficulty settings, getting token rewards when done.
Also, ALWAYS put a chest at the end.
There must always be a chest at the end.

2. Once you’ve beaten the story and at least 2 explorables of a dungeon on any difficulty, the persistent explorable zone version of it (always a Level 80 area) opens to you, adding a third button (e.g.: Persistent mode) to the panel, effectively adding 8 more small level 80 explorable zones, with vistas, skill points, dynamic events, one meta-event hat encompasses the entire dungeon, jumping puzzles and stuff.
Replace WvW requirements for world completion with with persistent dungeon requirements, and also add alternatives to the WvW requirements for the current Legendary recipes. PvE, WvW would get separate alternate exploration achievements, and PvE, WvW and PvP would get alternate legendary acquisition methods, along the current one that requires both WvW and PvE.

3. Add a proper universal party search feature. Not an automated one that forms the party for you, but one that allows you to set things you can do based on lists, so others can search players wanting to do that too, and then contact those in the search results, and so they can do any other thing in any other map while they wait for a party, and search for a party for anything while anywhere in the world. This would also apply to any other thing that might require or can be done in parties, PvE, PvP, WvW, personal stories… everything.

4. Add collector slots for dungeon tokens. Yeah, I know you’ll need more than 250, so you would still need more, that’s why stacks for tokens would be increased to something like 2000 (11bits), 4000 (12 bits) or even 8000 (13bits). That also includes any other token, like mystic coins and badges of honor.

Continued from previous post.

[...]

5. Add multiple equipment slots.
Remember the two icons at the top of the equipment panel to switch between armor and town clothes? You’ll make the following additions and changes:
- Add a "sword and staff icon", click that to see the ragdoll in fighting instance, and list of pairs of slots to place weapon presets instead armor, and water slots instead accesories to the right. Next to each pair or water slot there would be two checkboxes, one to each side, to select which ones are the currently selected primary and alternate presents.
Once you’ve picked you presents, right-click the weapon switch icon while out of combat to quickly select the two presents you want for quick swap. During combat, it’ll work just like now. All professions would get the weapon swap icon while out of combat, but engineers and elementalists would lose it during combat.
Characters start with 6 pairs of slots (2 water slots) and can pay gems to get more, +3 (+1 waterslot) each time, up to 15 (5 water slots).
The preview panel would aslo get a sword and staff icon, but this would be a toggle (like the light bulb in character creation) that puts the character in fighting instance.
- Extra equipment panels.
Each allows you to place different armor+back item combinations, but the other accessories are shared among all armor sets.
Players start with 2 and can use gems to get another 3.
A ’locked helm’ icon next to the helm icon when you can acquire more slots. Double click to get another PvE equipment panel.
- Extra clothing panels.
Items in clothes panel would get a little icon you can click to set if the item will be hidden always, automatically show in towns, and even if it’ll try to cover the armor in PvE (but not PvP and WvW).
Players start with 1 and can use gems to get another 2.
A ’locked hat’ icon would be added next to the hat icon when you can acquire more slots. Double click to get another clothes panel.
- Under the list of icons, in armor and clothing panels, there would be a ’select this set’ button, instead selecting them by picking them in the panel.
- And, of course, add clothing pieces to the list of items you can get with dungeon rewards: Commoner/Casual city pieces in Ascalon. Noble/Elegant pieces in Manor. Hiking/farming/Rutal pieces in Arbor. Warm clothes in Honor of the Waves, etc...

6. Add a way to collect PvE skins, like a PvE equipment locker. Even making skins shared for the account, like with a consumable you can use to transform an piece of armor or clothing item into a costume piece with no stats, that you could put in costume slots that would try to cover your armor.
In the case of turning armor pieces into costume pieces, costume panels would be added, each with a little icon on its corner to set it it’ll show, if it covers the armor or not, or if it shows automatically in towns.

There’s other good ideas in the thread, but this is mainly what would make me do more stuff in dungeons, as I’ll both have more fun and have more reasons to stick around gathering tokens to collect stuff I can use without discarding stuff I already have, and have an easier time forming parties.

How exactly are dungeons grindy? Tokens are super easy to get, you do three paths and thats 180 tokens….. I’m not sure how much easier one would want it.

The only problem with dungeons is some bosses hp are a tad bit too high. And then their is that tedious destroyer fight in coe path 3……

Other than that dungeons are a great source of money, mats and tokens.

Increase the rewards in other parts of the game, WvW, sPVP, exploration, etc so that we don’t need to do dungeons at all. Make them an optional path of gearing and getting gold, like they should be and were originally designed to be.

That’s the real definition of “grinding”. It’s okay that something takes a long time to get and is expensive, but I should be able to acquire it doing what I want to do. I shouldn’t be forced into doing something I hate in order to progress. That’s the definition of grinding.

• Bosses and mobs should not drop anything. All the rewards you get should be from the chests and be the same for everyone.
• Add an NPC at the end of each dungeon path with whom you can trade tokens for crafting materials.

I don’t care what your reasonings are for having people get different rewards, because no matter how you look at it, everyone did an equal amount of work to get the dungeon done, so everyone should get the same reward.
Stuff requiring a team should reward a team, not an individual.

Rhukong.9547:

I’d love to be able to get Lodestones with the tokens from that dungeon. Ex: CoE tokens can be used to get a Charged Lodestone.
I think with the right token price it could work well. It would encourage more people to do dungeons also. Right now I never get a group for a dungeon that is solely from people within my own home world server.

Also, it would drop some of the prices for them on the TP, especially the ridiculous Charged Lodestone and give people a way to obtain them rather then simply buying them or hoping for the RNG to favor them that day. It would make the progression of actually getting all the lodestones you need actually feel like your progressing towards your goal as you would KNOW that you will get another lodestone by getting enough tokens rather than hoping for it to drop randomly.

This would be amazing. Vote +1.

9) if a boss has a one-shot mechanic, prevent them from using it for the first 15-30 seconds of the fight. There is nothing more demoralizing than trying a new explorable boss and having him one-shot the whole group just 1 second after the initial pull. I gave up on exp paths for a long time because of this.

10) Exp paths seem to be designed for lvl 80 characters who are down-leveled. I like this design. However, I did not expect this as a lvl 35 going into AC for the first time. Scream L2P if you must, but exp paths are just more enjoyable when you’re an 80 in (at least) greens.

Mystic forge recipes to convert dungeon tokens at maybe a 1:3 or 1:5 ratio. Sort of like promoting materials, but more accessible.

Not a fan of universal tokens. Some armor, weapons and gifts are more desirable than others and should require more effort. Even if prices are adjusted, farming the easiest path of the easiest dungeon will be the route most players take. It will do the opposite of making dungeons more desirable and drive everyone to the speed run of the week. However, converting tokens allows players to make at least a tiny bit of progress in the dungeon of their choice when doing other dungeons to help friends or other players. Win , win.

More dynamic events in dungeons

Using the AC Troll as an example, it would neat if he had 3-4 different places he could ambush a party or just not appear at all. It would make dungeons more tense if you didn’t know where, when or if this bonus boss is going to appear. A few events like this per dungeon would make them less static would go a long way to keeping them fresh.

Bring back genuine problem solving

GW dungeons were great because they didn’t hold your hand through every requirements and lead you through every step. They were more adventure esque in the way that you had to find bosses that had keys to open doors, or look for a hidden map that would show you where these things are. There were few puzzles but the ones there were didn’t spell themselves out (looking at the Gwen and Urgoz dungeons as references). It might be too late for this now, but something it would be nice to move towards in the future.

Bring back interesting boss fights

One of the most memorable boss encounters in GW2 is one that was actually inspired by GW1. The Forgeman. His health is the perfect amount and the encounter encourages movement, focus and communication. Compare the Forgemaster to the Final TA explo boss, Fimbul, Kasha, or the Evolved Destroyer.

Adjust boss health but make it harder for the party to do damage and make it immensely painful for them if they are too slow or careless. Fights do not need to be artificially lengthened to be intense. Dhuum, Shiro, Varesh, The Drought, Duncan, Glint, Ilsundur, and the Lich are all great examples of bosses that didn’t need massive health pools to keep a party on its toes and working together. GW2 has sparks of that sort of spirit (Forgeman, COE story boss, War Minister Shukov, Lovers (pre-nerf)), but most bosses boil down to not being a genuine threat to the party, too simple to manage, and too much health.

Rewards

Dungeon only loot that isn’t tokens. I know this was added already in the form or accessories. But people like things they can see. Maybe a chance for a dungeon appropriate mini from chests (would be perfect actually since there isn’t a way to acquire them in game yet). Maybe a rare boss skin from the bosses ala GW1 green boss weapons. Perhaps a tablet outside of dungeons with the names of players from a party that did each path the fastest with no downs. Resets daily and there’s a title for each dungeon for getting on its tablet.

Those few things you have attracted the collectors, the speed clearing crowd and the title hunters.

Final Suggestion…a Fractal based on this…
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Rabbit_hole

First and foremost, I appreciate most of the recent changes to dungeons. Personally, I started doing dungeons actively a while back (when completion rewards was like what? 5 silvers? With no Karma at all). I was doing dungeons as it was more engaging than overworld pve environment and there was a good variety of dungeons to choose from.

With regards to reward system, I think there are 2 main progression paths (tokens) or RNG (loot). I personally would prefer if it steers away from RNG. More so if it involves Magic Find. And as previous poster(s) have mentioned, there is a difference between RNG and bad RNG. However, I think it is kinda difficult not to associate grind with these 2 methods – RNG with its law of average and Progression with farming tokens. I suppose its a matter of setting a reasonable benchmark… you can’t make everyone happy.

With trash mobs, simply put the effort spent in killing them vs killing a mob in an lvl80 area in the overworld have some discrepancies. Trash mobs generally have higher HP, higher damage, more dangerous skill combos but have comparable rewards to your good ol’ generic mob. There can possibly be adjustments to rewarding players for killing trash mob and again, I prefer to leave MF out of the picture.

I have only one complaint: dungeon story mode.

It’s incredibly hard to find a group for story mode!
Either there needs to be a solo option for dungeon stories (personal story instances are often done solo with the option to bring party members in, so why not story dungeons? I don’t see how it’s an exploit if the rewards are pretty meh anyway, you also do it once)

Or…

It needs to be made more appealing!
As other said before, add tokens to story dungeon for example.
Make story mode attractive again by making it worth going through with newcomers!

Lastly,
A LFG function would solve many problems! Some say it makes the game less immersive, but there are creative ways to still make it flow with the rest of the game
The LFG tool could be a magic mirror or a bulletin board in the main cities and near the dungeons. Or even more interesting: a dynamic Asuran “bulletin board” that displays LFGs a bit like airplane departure times, both seen in the world map and as a special window (like Black Lion Trading Company can be opened in a window) or as a separate chat. The format could be similar to gw2lfg.com

Ask yourself this: what kills immersion? Seeing LFG chat shouted in map chat and actually angering people by posting something different/fun/interesting?
Or an ol’ fashioned bulletin board actually meant for searching for groups, kinda like how you search for quick jobs?
LFG map chat kills immersion, bulletin boards can provide immersion!

First: revamp dungeon loot outside of fotm to reflect fotm loot. Bosses should drop loot with a good/decent/small chance at greens/yellows/oranges just like fotm. Chests should drop yellows/oranges/lodestones/tokens, just like fotm. In exchange, you could probably drop the karma reward for completion if you felt that was “too much” but you guys really don’t need to be so stingy with loot. Right now FotM drops the best loot AND has the best gear (Ascended) as its ‘token’ reward AND is the most fun. I guess it’s good that the most fun dungeon is the only one that’s worth doing, at least.

Second: make the dungeons more fun. Reducing the BS trash pulls would be nice. There are some trash pulls that everyone wipes on, some that everyone skips. I’ve never done a run of TA or CM that didn’t involve skipping more trash than we cleared. 7-silver-mob pack? A boss that comes with 3 instant-kill-knockdown-combo-knights? Currently the only viable strategies for these involve AI exploits (leash all but one, or skip them entirely). This is not the same as cutting all the hard trash pulls, but no one can deny that there are some serious BS trash pulls in some of these instances.

Third, slash the HP of gold/legendary NPCs in most dungeons by, like, 50%. Most of these are rinse-and-repeat but take so long people fall asleep doing them. Not fun.

Remove tokens as an item, and add them as a currency in the inventory tab; like the karma/gem/money indicators. Forcing players to buy bank slots doesn’t work; feels a lot of a money grab. The more players get that feeling; the less money they will spend on the game.

Also, integrate tokens into a single currency, or up to a maximum of 3 variants depending on dungeon difficulty: easy/medium/hard. Dungeon sets should then be available via the required currency. (You do not want to take the STO release version).

Remove RNG gating from fractals and allow players to exchange tokens for those atrocious rings.

Fix the fractal dc issue.

Re-work fractal level system.

Implement a more polished LFG system.

Change the boss mechanics in order to make melee classes/weapons more viable. Currently it’s more about staying far away and evaluating the players’ dodging skills rather than fun gameplay with whatever type of weapon that fun originates from.

Currently, a good number of boss fights are outright boring, monotonous and annoying; isn’t the point of the game to have fun? or did something change?

Fix the beyond ridiculous dungeon drops; we are all fed-up of the constant blues and the green here and there from bosses and boss chests. If you can’t manage to do that, remove item drops altogether and increase monetary rewards. It’s better that way, current loot is aggravating.

As a sidenote, you can even award 1 token for every trash mob pack; this would fix the “rushing by monsters” which has been claimed to bug dungeons up.

Be transparent < as bit off topic, but its essential.

I do hope you consider the feedback given. A good amount of players have been complaining on the above; taking action on these issues will increase player loyalty and word of mouth advertising == more money for A.net.

What a great discussion! Here are some of the points I’d like to bring up.

Story Mode

These should be soloable with AI henchmen-like party members, or at least much easily accessable with a much lower learning curve. Like in Guild Wars 1, the player can choose which henchmen they can bring with them. After all, most people who do Story Mode are probably just getting their feet wet in doing dungeons; or probably just in it for the Lore instead of the Challenge. Once they have a feel for dungeons, then they could find player-controlled party members to assist them in Explorable Modes.

Improved LFG

Whether this is going to be a full-fledged Dungeon Finder or an LFG Tool with many more features, it obviously has to be better than what we have. I think a suitable compromise is the Party Search feature that was in Guild Wars 1, but extended to work in across different zones and through different overflows. There could also be filters to restrict searches to specific dungeons so that finding a suitable party doesn’t have to feel like a chore.

Level Scaling in Fractals

The scaling used in Fractals really fractures guilds with members who may not be all on at the same time to complete them. It’s interesting but also very segregated. Instead, have guild groups or mutual friends (as opposed to random people) bring in their peers from lower levels to participate in higher levels. That way, a guild doesn’t feel torn apart because a few guildmates were left behind because they were not available for progression. That way, there’s always a feeling that a guildmate is always looking out for you.

Boss Dynamics

In the beginning, people complained that bosses were too hard. After a while, I bet you some of these same people complain that these bosses are too easy once they have learned a trick or two about them. As far as boss mechanics go, you really can’t stop people from learning. Instead, I would say make the boss more interesting. Out of all the bosses I have seen, I would say Giganticus Lupicus is the most interesting, followed by Subject Alpha, the Legendary Searing Effigy, then the Iron Forgeman (the latter is mostly because of the Lore than the boss mechanics). The Ghost Eater could be interesting if the three cannons around them were actually required for the fight.

Explorable Mode End-Bosses (and some mid-bosses) should have shifting or random dynamics. Giganticus is a great example in that there are three phases to the fight with different ways of getting through each of them. However, what if the boss was a bit more … random? What if there was a chance that Giganticus’ three phases were swapped around for each visit to Arah? As in one night, you would do 1-2-3, then next visit would be 3-1-2, and then a third time would be 2-1-3? By sticking Phase 1 in the middle or end, players would no longer utilize the accepted “safe spot” that they would use to get to the next phase; but instead expand their strategies to the very basic idea instead of the very specific.

Subject Alpha is somewhat like that but with abilities fixed to whatever path you choose. However, what if there was a random Subject Bravo or Subject Charlie that did a totally different set of abilities?

Also regarding Kohler and the Cave Troll— depending on which boss dies first should both bosses spawn within close proximity, the rest of the dungeon could either be full of Ascalonian Ghosts or smaller Troll minions. If the party becomes creative enough to skip the event, then the rest of the dungeon could have a mix of ghosts, trolls, and gravelings thus making the dungeon harder than it has to be. Then again, maybe better rewards could be given to compensate.

Trash Mobs

A lot of PUGs I have participated in have a tendency to skip anything and everything that is deemed skippable using whatever means necessary, even resorting to glitches and exploits. Most glitches revolve around using the terrain since most mobs still live in the times of Guild Wars 1 when nobody learned how to jump. So a simple suggestion would simply be to teach the mobs how to jump. That could solve a lot of things.

In addition, the mobs in dungeons should not break aggro, or should have an considerably large leash range. In this case, the key rule is: if you aggro it, you kill it!

At the same time, most if not all the mobs in the original eight dungeons have more health than they should have. The mobs in Fractals is a pretty good step in the right direction as far as the trash goes. However, should there be a Veteran or Champion in the way, give us a reason to not skip them. Perhaps they need to be killed in order to open a gate, or if we choose to skip them, the end-boss might be harder to kill and drops better loot. Or what if killing certain Champions gave the party a zone-wide Magic Find buff, which leads to my next point?

[continued]

Magic Find

This one is a bit more controversial when it comes to dungeons but I think we can all agree that Magic Find only benefits the person that is utilizing it and not their party members. Though I fear that Magic Find is here to stay, I think there should be a way to make it more “party-friendly”. Dungeons, after all, should be designed to be a great source of wealth like in many MMOs, but since it usually requires a group to complete them, each member of the group should somehow benefit from Magic Find.

For the original eight dungeons, I suggest that killing mobs that are of Champion (gold ring), Legendary (purple ring), or Ascended (enlarged portrait) rank would give everyone in the party a certain percentage of Magic Find. This means that bosses are less likely to be skipped and might even encourage some groups to kill all the champions in that explorable path, even ones that the average party would skip over. Likewise, there could even be a repeatable Vanquisher -style achievement tied to killing all the Champions in a given path.

For Fractals, that dungeon-wide Magic Find buff would be earned at the end of each Fractal and could extend to progressing difficulty levels if the same party has been retained. Meaning: if a party has completed levels 1 to 5 in one sitting, they would have accumalated around 85% Magic Find (5% x 17 Fractals), while a new party that starts at level 5 has no Magic Find. This might encourage some groups to start at lower levels just to build up their Magic Find stat for a much higher chance of obtaining better loot in higher difficulty levels. With that said, the build-up should also scale. Maybe levels 1~9 would increase Magic Find by 5% after each Fractal is complete, while Fractals completed in the 10~19 bracket would increase it by 10%, and so on. If a group is crazy enough to start at level 1 and make it all the way to level 30 in one sitting, they would accumulate up to 1090% Magic Find! I don’t know many groups who have the time to do that, but it might be interesting to see how far a dedicated “static” would go before they eventually go insane. This is also assuming that the party doesn’t fall apart due to random disconnects.

Lastly, should there be someone that has to leave the party in the middle of the run, the remaining members would retain their Magic Find accumulated buff but the replacement would have to start at zero Magic Find. The only time when the Magic Find buff should reset back to zero is when all three explorable paths have been completed for that day, when the entire party has disbanded, or when Diminishing Returns have reset.

Guild Cohesion

My guild is starting to run into situations where we would have more than five people that want to run something but we end up splitting up the roster and filling it in with randoms. There really should be some kind of content that would allow more than 5 people to participate in it. This would actually give a reason for guilds of moderate size to exist in PvE content (but PUGs could also access it for players who prefer to remain guildless). In basic terms: a Raid Dungeon.

However, it can also be flexible in a sense that instead of requiring a maximum number (eg. 10 or 25), the Raid’s difficulty should also scale based on how many members are in the Squad with the difficulty dynamically shifting if certain members have to leave in the middle of the Raid. The content itself, however, should be tuned for a minimum of 10 players, but like most dungeons, it should have a party cap.

With that said, there should be two kinds of Commanders: one designed for WvW and one designed for PvE Raids. The current Commander Book should be way tons cheaper but only work for Raids, while a different kind of Commander Book used for WvW should be purchased using WvW tokens and/or accomplish certain WvW-related achievements. I’m sure this part could be discussed with the team that handles WvW content— I don’t want to stray too far away from the main subject, which is dungeons.

Likewise, Raid encounters would have to be unique and interesting to prevent it from being a zerg-fest due to having a large amount of people in the Squad.

[continued]

“RNG”

I believe there can be a place for randomness but it should not be used to determine the statistical progression of individual character. Meaning, it shouldn’t be used to determine what kind of Ascended upgrade I would acquire at the end of the day. That’s what the Token System is for. However, I do agree that RNG could be used for ultra-rare skins, provided that they don’t give a statistical advantage over the highest-stat gear. I guess they could be faux-Legendary in that it takes a lot of time (or luck) to obtain them but like real Legendaries, they provide no statistical benefit. Going back to my suggestion about Magic Find, maybe obtaining one might be easier if one starts at the low end and builds their buff on their way to the top.

In addition, RNG should be used for the following:

• Determine what alternate paths (or Fractals for FotM) will be encountered in that dungeon: Pretty simple. In Fractals, we’re basically given 3 random ones out a possible eight, with the Solid Ocean fractal as the fourth one at the end of each even numbered difficulty scale. Perhaps this could be expanded to other dungeons by having an NPC change their mind and say “Nope! No easy path for you!” From personal experience, I have found that if a given path was not advertised upon the building of the group, one person will pick a path while the remaining four will follow. With that kind of psychology involved, what if the NPC made the first choice? In addition, if the path chosen is not the one the NPC wants to do, certain elements of that path could be different. Maybe the NPC would play a bit more recklessly and give the party a hard time. Congratulations! The Reincarnation of Killroy Stoneskin has joined your party!

• Determine what Boss(es) or Event(s) will be fought in a specific path: In most of Fractals, certain bosses are randomly spawned like either Dredge Gundam Mobile Suit or Legendary Ice Elemental for the Underground Facility Fractal, and The Bloomhunger or The Mossman for the Swamp.

Expanding that— Let’s say the Gate of Madness was remade to be a Fractal. In levels 1~9, RNG would determine whether you would fight The Undead Lich or Shiro Tagachi at the very end; but in levels 10~19, you might fight them both back-to-back with RNG determining which one will be fought first; and in 20+ both bosses will have to be fought simultaneously! In addition, RNG would determine which random environmental effects from one of the six shrines may be activated, which may require you to further evaluate your strategies against the monsters in said Fractal. If you’re extreme enough to be around level 50~60, ALL shrines would be active and the encounter might be balls-to-the-walls crazy!

Rewards

I seem to like the rewards so far: a good amount of Karma (including those from the Bags of Wonderous Goods), Coin, and Tokens.

The Token System is brilliant and should stay. However, I think more stuff should come from it, like exclusive crafting recipes that require rare materials that must be obtained from that particular dungeon possibly from the monsters there or as nodes in obscure parts of the dungeon. My second most favorite activity in most MMOS is crafting, and there should be something out there that distinguishes one Master Crafter from another Master Crafter. Therefore, there is less reliance on the Mystic Forge and more reliance on the player. Crafting recipes purchased with dungeon tokens would be an interesting start. I suppose this is something you should talk with the Crafting Team in regards to this.

In addition, Lodestones would be nice to have. That’s basically a challenge in itself in trying to obtain. It would be nice if I could trade in some tokens for a Lodestone or a Bag of Tier 6 Materials.

Closing Words

Overall, the dungeons should be interesting, challenging, rewarding, and (in some cases) unique. If I choose to do the same explorable path back-to-back, those two seperate runs should feel moderately different either with different boss mechanics or just simply a different boss all together. In other words, the same path should somewhat feel like two different runs.

I would like what I suggested earlier to be added as well. Most dungeons do not feel like dungeons without traps and intricate puzzles to make your head spin and force your team to think things through or possible wipe.

Its just point A to point B with trash and bosses in the way and getting there as fast as possible with no regard for anyone’s well being.

If dungeons were like real rpgs and Zelda-like I’d do dungeons all day long instead of, “I did my 3 routes, I’m done for the day. I’ll have to wait till tomorrow to do another same 3 routes for my armor/weapons!”

MAKE USE OF OUR ACTION KEY (Default is F) AND MAKE US HAVE A REASON TO WORK TOGETHER!

I’ve only done a dungeon once, and it was very difficult, but the rewards were worth it. The difficulty put me off dungeons for a while, but I think I’m about ready to try it again.

Most of the dungeons need balance, i ran CoF countless times, had two char with full set cof gears and not once did i ran path 3 because nobody wants to do it, each path difficulty should be equal, i don’t know if you guys wanted to make 1 the easiest and 3 the hardest, but it’s a mistake. I can guarantee you that very few people ran path 3. This goes to other dungeons like arah where players can just jump up wall and go straight to lupi, people only want to do path 3 cause the rest is too hard or too long.

Tweak incentives.

-Scale the boss chest based on how much content is completed. There is so much content-skipping in dungeons right now, this would be a nice incentive to run a path as intended.

- Harder explorable paths could have better rewards. Variety is desirable, especially when reward is commensurate to effort. Right now there are many examples of incentive being out of whack— some of the easiest paths in game are the most rewarding, which means some other dungeons/paths are ghost towns. Fix rewards and e.g. find people excited to take on Giganticus because he drops phat lewts and Arah is 80 tokens/ path! I think this philosophy would work in Fractals too. Cliffside is a nice design but it’s the booby prize right now bc it takes more than 2x longer for no additional benefit in terms of reward.

-Remove the RNG for ever
-Redesign agony, make it like a debuff (like those in the tempels of cursed shore). A debuff that cant be removed by condition removal only reduced by infusion. Something like: Cant heal for x seconds, increased CDs, cripple, chill, froze you encounter mechanics do more damage (like traps, lava,etc), boss stacks a debuff to players then targets a random one and get buffs and buff duration per stack on that player, lowered stats, etc (all of those attacks can be dodge). That will make agony easier to move to new dungeons.
- add more ascendet gear stat combinations, cleric, knight, etc
- make us able to put the gems we want in ascended rings.
- Dont use Ectos for everything in this game please.
- make better animation for the bosses agony attacks
- more skins
- make dungeons reward system like the DE, the more you help the more you get.
- dont make uneccesary content, thats why there are speed runs and ppl skip. Now that doesnt mean that you should force players to play 1h of a dungeon.
- reduce the amount of trash mobs in dungeons
- teach boss mechanics to players via trash mobs
- make some dungeons that requird more solo play, forcing players to separate.

I think that there are definitely some very creative suggestions above, I especially like the idea of putting DEs inside dungeons. As a bit of an off-topic note before I get started, my only complaint in terms of dungeons, besides bugs, is that too many bosses have too many hit points! The difficulty level is fine in my opinion, I just feel that some fights are too drawn out – if you can kill a boss in 10 minutes, nerfing it to 5 is just changing the dungeon’s pacing not difficulty.

Back to the relevant topic. I still run a dungeons now and then primarily to help friends and guildies, though not as much as I did when gearing up. After acquiring the skins they were a lot of people I know are pretty much finished with them; though a number of people in my guild speed clear as their farming method. The two big PvE things now are fractals (obviously!) and the ever ongoing legendary farm. From my perspective here, I’ve already finished my Twilight, and am now taking a very relaxed pace towards a Juggernaut. While revamping dungeons and making them more fun is definitely a great thing, I think you need to also lure in the crowd that is farming for their legedaries. I still need to run SE for the gift of quicksilver, but other than that, even if you totally revamped CM, I would probably still rather work on getting my Juggernaut than running this theoretical CM 2.0 – unless there was new fantastic loot!

A very simple idea to align these causes

1. Make more items purchasable for dungeon tokens:

The things that would get people to show up are: a small bundle of T6 mats, vials of liquid karma (especially now with Plinx RIP), maybe even lodestones (this might be too much). As a caveat here, since some dungeons are significantly easier than others (AC vs Arah!), prices should be different depending on the dungeon tokens being used. For pricing, make this comparable but not superior to other farming methods.

Two other very simple suggestions, but in a different vein from the first:

2. Dungeon Daily:

This is obviously taken from WoW and SWTOR. There already is a regular daily (and I love the jug of karma), but maybe add in a quest to complete a specific dungeon path for some sort of useful reward. I think that a karma jug is too much (maybe not if said path was Arah path 4!), but the reward can be scalable to the path’s difficulty. The downside of this suggestion is that there might be tooo many dailies, but as long as people are having fun doing them that should be a good thing.

3. Mini-Dungeon Daily:

I remember going to Vexa’s lab, and I think that mini-dungeon was really well-designed. The problem though is that people are lazy! I always have been meaning to check out more of these mini-dungeons, but other things are always higher on my agenda. The point here though is to get people out of Lion’s Arch to check out the great content you’ve made and reward them with a cookie.

I read through most of the other post and agree with several of the post. Personally I haven’t explored all the dungeons yet so I am basing this off of the ones I have finished.

Bosses have way to much hp. I understand its supposed to be a challenge but The Butcher in HotW is a perfect example not really a challenge but takes forever to finish.

Make dungeon bosses have chances to drop either gear from the set or other unique awesome stuff. That way players who have completed the set are more inclined to continue running stuff. There needs to be unique gear that can only be obtained from drops or a ridiculous amount of tokens.

I don’t really think an exchange system for tokens would work because I see that creating the same problem that already exist. Players will run whichever dungeon can be completed in the fastest time for the most reward (AC comes to mind). Then bank the tokens for the dungeons that they don’t want to run but want rewards from. The way I see it rewards from dungeon A should be earned in Dungeon A.

Personally the thing I would like to see implemented the most is something to make players want to do dungeons more often. Have a rotating daily dungeon with some sort of reward similar to the daily quest. That way players struggling to earn tokens for a specific dungeon have more chances to get groups because people will want to run the dungeon at least on the day of the daily.

Story Mode should reward tokens. As it is now most players have no desire to run story mode and that is a shame. ANet worked hard on that and its completely skipped by lots of players because the work to reward ratio sucks. At least if they gave tokens every player would be more inclined to run them at least once.

Random rare spawn bosses with interesting drops would be cool to make people more inclined to run specific paths.

Lastly and probably the single most useful thing that would improve dungeons is a looking for group tool. Similar to http://gw2lfg.com but in game. Have it draw from multiple servers to increase the pool of available players.

I write this as a player that has achieved Dungeon Master:
My main issues with the dungeons are not the length, or the item rewards. My problems with a majority of the dungeons are not difficulty or “impossibly high health” on bosses. My issues are instead with the boss mechanics. Or lack thereof, I suppose. In my experience running through all the dungeons, most of which I’ve run several times over, I would say that the general lack of interesting bosses is what I find most disappointing.
A portion of bosses are stationary targets that lack any mechanics other than the regular “stay out of red circles” that you do for any mobs. Aldus Stormbringer as well as Kulag the Fallen in HoTW, Mark T-B34RC3 in CoE, and Vallog in CM all stay still and don’t do much else. There’s also Gunpowder Morgan. Even though you can pull him out of the room, he still goes completely stationary as he fights you because his range is so large. You can definitely hit auto-attack and go AFK for these fights, relieving yourself of any boredom that they induce. I don’t count Impasse Mark IV in SE because he’s at least got the annoying infinite-spawning mechanic (which will be discussed further down..)
Aside from these stationary bosses, several bosses seem to use similar mechanics to one another. This makes them rehashed content, in a sense. Instead of having a fresh encounter with a new mechanic when you progress through dungeons, you’re reintroduced to totem bosses, for instance. Mark T-B34RC3 (who is on two paths of CoE), and Ginva The Butcher both use the totems in the exact same fashion. Another instance of rehashed mechanics is when you have to “defend X NPC from X threat while they X.” It’s not that bad of a mechanic, but it’s incredibly dull and loses the fun factor after 8th time or so.
A huge repeated “mechanic” in a ton of the boss fights is when a boss summons adds. Now, this mechanic in itself is fine. However, the way that a lot of the bosses just toss it out there for no reason is not. In my research, I’ve listed out a total of 31 bosses that summon adds as a mechanic. Out of the 31, I’ve counted 12 of them as actually having a purpose tied to them, so I’ll range it at about half of the encounters. So half of the encounters that deal with bosses with adds literally have adds just to have them. This is not a fun aspect of gameplay whatsoever. When the adds actually have a function, it makes them a part of the encounter. When they are just there to deal extra damage, it just seems like laziness. I’ll give a few examples.

One of the first bosses you can find using adds as a mechanic is Kasha Blackblood. I’ve counted her as a good use of adds, as they serve a purpose other than to hurt your team until you kill them. If you do not kill the adds fast enough, Kasha will heal up off of them. While she doesn’t heal up all too much, the idea behind the mechanic was sound.
A few bad examples are both the Howling King and the Ghost Eater in AC Explorable. They summon adds.. and you either accidentally kill them with AoE/melee, or you ignore them as you destroy the boss. They have no purpose whatsoever other than being spawned.
Let’s take another good example. Giganticus Lupicus, which has been a favorite encounter for many dungeon-goers, is an extremely good example of how to use adds as a mechanic. He will summon grubs via a debuff on a random player. The grubs give him a buff that can easily mean a wipe. So, the grubs are a core part of the fight (at least in the first phase). This is a good use of adds.
Now take the Nightmare Tree on any TA path. I can honestly say that I’ve never had fun during any of my fights with these bosses. It isn’t enjoyable to go max range, or to run and attack all day just because adds are following you. It’s just not an interesting mechanic.
I’ll end on a good use of adds as a mechanic. During the final boss encounter in the Fractals, he will drop his hammer and you’ll need to kill an add to activate the ability to destroy the seal. This makes for an engaging and exciting fight.
I’ll leave the rest of the bosses for another day, as I was only using these to cite examples of how to and how not to use adds in boss fights.
However, all of these issues are not even my biggest issue with dungeons. And don’t get me wrong, I really love doing dungeons and playing with friends. But in all honesty, the biggest issue (and my whole Guild feels this way) is that bosses do the same mechanics throughout the entire fight. Exception of Lupicus, (and in the Fractals) there are no bosses in the game that start new phases and new mechanics to keep encounters fresh and interesting. This is why so many people feel that Lupicus is such a good fight. Because there are several things to watch out for, but they are spread out so that it isn’t a giant mess of ideas that ends up just being a dodge-fest.
The issue that many people have, where they are saying that bosses have too much health, is not in fact because they have a ludicrous amount of health. It stems from the fact that the boss has no notable differences throughout the fight, and so once you learn the mechanic in the first minute or so, that’s it. You just auto-pilot from there. If there were more bosses with mechanics that trigger at different points, there would be a lot less people saying that bosses have too much health.
These are just a few of my thoughts on dungeons, but they are also the most important ones to me. Thank you for listening.
{As a minor gripe, I’d like to say that descriptions for bosses should be clear. There are so many bosses with either no description, or really ambiguous details. The biggest example being “Uses Frost Magic”. Please please please fix that.}

1.) One thing I’d like to see change is the nature of the chest rewards in explorable modes of other dungeons . By this I mean, I personally would prefer to swap rare tonics and soulbound rare/exotic runes for just high lvl rares. Whenever I run fractals, I can count on an average of 1-5 ecto per run (no MF gear, just 1 item of food). I like this, because I don’t feel like I’m losing out by not using MF gear, and I can help my team by trying to have the best gear possible. Rare tonics don’t feel nearly as rewarding as rare gear, because of the value and rarity of ectos. The issue is a little more complex seeing as dungeon tokens can eventually lead to ectos themselves, but just on the topic of opening sub-boss chests, I’d like to see a change there.

2.) More creative dynamics. Some of the creative dynamics I particularly love are the harpies knocking you off of the platform in fractals, the air guns pushing back missiles in CM, the spike trap/carpet room in CM, the spike traps in AC path 2, the hot potato orb in Arah, and actually a lot of the Arah story mode fights on the airship where you fight mobs on deck and hit dragons with the cannons. I think FoTM has done a great job at adding a lot of these (with Swamp, hammer in cliffside, dolphins in water fractal), but I just want to say I love them and hope to see it continue.

3.) HP on bosses. As others have said, the HP on the bosses can make the fights feel really boring. Just as an example, Bloody Victoria in CM is a subboss who is very unlikely to down anyone in a good group, let alone kill them. Any/everytime I fight her, it just feels like you’re wailing away on her for the longest time and there’s no excitement. The jellyfish from the underwater fractal is perhaps the worst example of this that I can think of. For the Jellyfish and Bloody Victoria, more HP doesn’t mean a harder fight, it only means a longer one. Sure-shot Seamus (also in CM) is more likely to kill an unsuspecting newbie in 30 seconds than bloody victoria will in 30 minutes, that’s because his shotgun spamming is what makes him deadly, not his HP.

4.) Give the bosses power through their abilities. I just mentioned Sure-shot Seamus, because he’s a nice example of how a sub-boss can be deadly with a single dynamic. Sure-shot will blast you with a knock down, and then continue to do so faster than you can get up, until he kills you. I love this dynamic, because he is deadly but you can plan for it. The more skilled players can dodge and block to avoid this attack. Even if he gets you, a stun breaker like the Mesmer’s Decoy can rescue you from inevitable death. Lastly, a strong team can time their CC moves so that if he manages to get someone, they stun him just in time to save their teammate. When I do CM path 3, I immediately change 2 of my utilities, and swap 1 weapon set out just to fight one guy, and afterwards I switch back to my default. This leads me to the next thing I think dungeons need more of.

5.) They could use more instances/bosses where skills and strategies need changing from one room to the next. A great example of this within a boss is Lupicus. My skills/weapons for phase 1 lupicus and phase 2 lupicus are totally different. The room is big enough that I can get out of battle and change, and I like that about the fight. Another possibility would be to make a similar boss fight but purposefully take away the players ability to change out skills. This would require some discussion of skill trade-offs as you can’t have everything you want, but you can do the best with what you got. This happened the other day when I ran some newer players through the Grawl fractal. Because of the constant burning by the end boss, a lot of the team was constantly downed when he entered his rock dome, which meant his healing was outpacing our DPS. After we failed the first time, I suggested that everyone use their utilities to bring condition removal (the warrior brought shake it off) and healing (the ranger brought healing spring). We were making the choice to let go of DPS and CC skills in hopes that our added survival would increase our DPS. Sure enough it worked, and afterwards everyone was cheering and chatting in team chat. The ranger admitted that he’d never even used healing spring before, but that he would bring it more often on dungeon runs. Obviously the grawl fractal has what I’m talking about, but I would like to encourage that we see more of this. More places where the room applies constant burning, the boss has constant retaliation, endurance in the room is slowed 50%, etc. This feeds back into the boss difficulty point, which is that I think the HP should be brought down in favor of the aforementioned environmental effects.

Let’s see here…

Mechanics

A lot of bosses are INCREDIBLY boring. Tank and spank. They only have 1-2 meaningful attacks, don’t change their strategies at all during the fight, and have incredibly large meaningless health bars.

This gets coupled with a lot of trash groups that are harder than the bosses! For example, there’s a trash pull in HotW path 3, the one just after the penultimate boss, that I’ve yet to have a group not wipe on(and I have full HotW armor). Yet, I’ve never wiped on a boss in HotW path 3. The trash should be challenging, but no where near as hard as the bosses.

Fractals of the mists actually fixes both of these complaints in a lot of cases. There are a few bosses with at least semi-decent concepts at low levels(I haven’t had enough time to see how these encounters evolve at higher levels). And the journey between these bosses is WAY cooler(examples like the jumping puzzles, or the hammer mechanic in Cliffside, etc.) Fractals however just shows how bad the design was for a lot of the explorable modes.

My suggestion is to make explorable modes more like Fractals from a dungeon mechanics standpoint. These mini dungeons encourage co-operation and have unique and cool mechanics. Regular exp modes don’t.

Drops

Can we get cool cosmetic drops from exp modes that aren’t the same as token gear? I know you’ve added trinket drops, but can we get weapons and armor too? It would add to the armor/weapon variety and give us reasons to run dungeons after we’ve gotten everything we want from them.

I have been delving into dungeon content recently and there are a couple of bits of feedback I would provide.

• Consistency of Challenge:

It’s an acknowledged fact that certain dungeons have much easier explorable modes than others, with most people rating Citadel of Flame and Ascalon Catacombs at the lower end and Crucible of Eternity and Arah towards the upper end of the scale. Even within these dungeons, however, there are certain paths that are more challenging than others. I would be perfectly happy to take a relatively inexperienced group into Crucible of Eternity Path 1, but would not be optimistic about their chances in Path 2 and Path 3.

This isn’t necessarily an issue. I think the addition of Fractals of the Mists has proven that many players, myself amongst them, enjoy experiencing challenging content. The issue from my perspective is that the rewards are the same regardless of which dungeon and path are selected. This, unfortunately, usually results in players avoiding the more challenging paths in favour of taking the easy option: particularly when it comes to farming tokens for their exotic gear. Most of the people running the harder paths are either in it for the challenge, like myself, or for a particular set of appearances or stats that are particular for that dungeon.

Given that Fractals of the Mists has introduced the concept of having better rewards for more challenging content, it seems a shame that the rest of the dungeons are left behind. Perhaps the more challenging paths and dungeons could have higher drop rates or reward more tokens? Or, more radically, the dungeons and paths could be re-balanced to be more in line with each other and additional ‘hard mode’ paths added in that provide more challenge and additional rewards (perhaps in the form of ascended items). Either way, some consistency in risk vs reward across the dungeons would be much desired.

• Awarding Completion:

This ties back in with some of my points regarding rewards, however at the moment a common theme in dungeons is to skip past many of the sub-bosses, champions and normal creatures in order to complete the dungeon faster. For many dungeon running groups this has become the norm rather than the exception. Why? Because the rewards for the dungeon are largely front-loaded in the chests awarded for primary bosses and the final reward for completing the dungeon. Given this fact, it is most beneficial for a group to finish a dungeon quickly rather than to clear it completely.

The recent patch to add bags of loot to sub-bosses has gone some way to rectifying this issue, however the bags have not been added consistently and some bosses (Subject Alpha in CoE comes to mind) reward bags on only some encounters and not others. What I would suggest is that rewards should be spread more consistently across the dungeon. Perhaps, rather than rewarding all the tokens at the end, the reward should be split and tokens awarded for the completion of each boss along the way? I would also go further and suggest that the bags of loot be made more pervasive and a low chance given for normal mobs to drop them. This would add additional motivation for completely clearing a dungeon, as groups who did this would receive additional tokens and rewards. You could go even further and perhaps grant an extra chest for killing all enemies in a dungeon path.

After 700 hours of gameplay I only played two dungeons in story and just one in explorable, I just don’t like or want to spend time forming groups.

Sorry if I am repetitive, but, add a Dungeon Finder, like the one in WoW. The few people against this idea could still use the normal way to form groups, with friends, guilds, etc., and ignore this feature, I can’t do that, I prefer to play some PvP/WvW instead of lose my time looking for group, after all, in WvW you play with hundreds of people immediately, no need for looking for group.

I want to play immediately when I log in, I can do that with PvP, WvW, most PvE, Story mode, maybe the only part of the game you can’t play immediately are dungeons, annoying. I want to play dungeons, they are well done and professionally developed, I die for playing all fractals, but I am NOT losing my time in LA LFG, sorry.

Dear Santa,

All I want for this Xmas is a LFG finder for every dungeon in game… Like an NPC that puts you on a queue and when full it portals you in with your party.

-Yours.. A very good boy this year.

Here are my suggestions:

• General Issues
  • Time to take a dungeon should exist between 15-45 minutes for a good run.
  • Most players skip mobs they can. If the mechanic of the dungeon isn’t a stealth game (like with the bees in TA) then you need to incentivize killing these mobs. Lower their health, increase their rewards, or remove them. Players skipping them indicate they are not fun or rewarding, and thus they are unnecessary.
  • Work on the AI. Many bosses have exploits that prevent them from attacking players (e.g., the centaur in CM being attacked from under the raft, and the Destroyer in SE being attacked from the rafters). This is not creative use of the environment as necessary for defeating the boss. I’m all for making bosses puzzles that need to be solved through the environment, which brings me to…
  • Better mechanics. Make more of the bosses puzzles to figure out.
  • Less reliance on bosses as culminating event of a dungeon. Dungeons don’t need to have bosses to be fun, they can be about obstacles and puzzles too.
  • More waypoints or checkpoints are desperately needed for some dungeons
  • Remove reliance on gear checks (e.g., Agony resistance). This is an uninspiring method of providing challenge. It would be different if you told a story why we needed to get empowered armors, and had a quest for getting a one time protection spell on our toons; but it’s not implemented that way, it’s implemented as a gear check.
  • Improve durability and AI of helpers, especially in story mode. Destiny’s edge is quite sad, and do not live up to their legend.

“We didn’t want the endgame to be something you could only experience after a hundred hours of gameplay or after you reached some arbitrary number. " ~Mike Zadorojny

• Rewards
  • Scale to expected length of the dungeon
  • Token exchange. I realize that this will cause players to go to the easiest dungeon, but your diminishing returns algorithms and general dungeon balancing should address any dungeon being perceived as “the easiest”.

• Grind (Any of these would work to address feelings of grind)
  • Lower token costs
  • Token exchange
  • More paths

- every boss in HOTW should have 30% less HP.

- we need you guys to improve the LFG panel into something useful. and please be sure to hype it up once it’s done so people are aware that it’s there.

- the mobs that spawn in SE path 1 really need to be changed to normal non-silver mobs, and their damage output reduced 20% each.

- adding new loot, better loot drop chances, money and tokens to bosses like Kholer have done nothing to stop skipping of them, so thanks for the changes and please from now on totally ignore all complaints about content like this being skipped and all the drama it brings. people simply want to get in and out in 5-10 minutes like in that other game where dungeons have been reduced to riding in an elevator with 4 strangers.

- add tokens as drops to all facets of a given dungeon, story and explorable. also increase the end reward Karma for doing story mode since it’s literally an act of charity these days.

Also, I had posted this in a thread a long while ago.. but since the devs are actually reading through this one, I’ll give it another go.

Before I start, I’d like to say that I’m not making this as a complaint about the difficulty of any paths or any dungeons. My group has successfully, and for the most part easily, cleared most of them already.
Now that that’s out of the way, onto the meat of this thread. Dungeons, as before we knew them for what they are now, were described to us in a very different way. They were pitched as these elaborate trials, filled with traps and puzzles, challenges and tricks. But.. as my group slowly cleared the dungeons one by one, we’ve found them to not quite be what we thought they would be.
For instance, I recall that dungeons were going to have three paths. This much is true. However, I also remember that these paths were supposedly going to have events that would ensure that each journey through them would not be a repeat. It turns out that these events are.. pretty lame. Each one of these events that my group has found is just.. “x mob spawned, destroy it!”. And it doesn’t actually affect the path in a significant way to make it seem any different than usual.
Moreover, dungeons were going to have three separate explorable paths. What they’ve actually turned out to be is just three paths in the same general area, sometimes even going to the exact same areas, where your party is stuck with linear progression. There is no actual exploring in the explorable paths. A lot of the time, in fact, doors are locked and paths are blocked off so you know where to go.
Wouldn’t it be a lot neater if your party could go through the dungeon and trigger events that would differ depending on what you’ve done or where you’ve gone so far? That would give a sense of actually exploring the dungeon, as well as a differing experience each time that you came back.
Again, these are just my thoughts and ideas on dungeons. I honestly thought that they would be a lot different than they are, and they’re just a tad on the disappointing side.

You know its an achievement when one of my guildmates begs on the guild forums and in guild chat for a week trying to get people to commit to Arah path 4 for FOUR hours to get his dungeon master title.

Even if the dungeon is suppose to take half of that. Two hours is too much commitment for a ‘dungeon’ run. Four hours is silly. Dungeons should not take longer then 30-45 minutes an hour tops for the hardest ones.

One of the larger culprits for the longer time frames is the sometimes insane amount of Boss HP. It can literally take 20 minutes to whittle some of these bosses down to zero. Clearly their fight mechanics have been mastered after 5 minutes, so how about toning down the HP some? 20-25%?

I’d rather boss fights be about avoiding or utilizing mechanics to succeed then just being forced to tick away at a large health pool.

Other then this, the loot situation is sorta ridiculous. Why would I spend all this time to get a chest with 4 blues in it. I’d rather it be forced into a chance for 1 rare/exotic, 3 greens/blues. Than at least you’d have a reason to go back to these things after the fact.

The bigger challenge for developers is how are you going to make these dungeons relevant after a year. Most players will find it impossible (its pretty kitten hard right now too btw) to find groups for these things. To be clear; I AM NOT advocating for a dungeon finder tool. I am very opposed to the side effects of dungeon finders in MMOs. If you want to hear more about Dungeon Finders and how opposed I am to them, start a new thread devs ;p

I did not do all dungeons on exp mode extensively but I did a good amount of them so i’ll talk about a few things and suggestions.

Some grind is necessary of course but that’s not really one of my main concerns.
I’d like to see extra variety in dungeons, even if it takes more time to implement more content in existing dungeons.
Like for example, you think you’d be doing the usual route in CoE exp mode where you fight the alpha and such but suddendly dragon minions are invading the Crucible, throwing the alpha surprised and obliterated by the dragon minion’s surprise attacks, then a new route or a change of plans occurs where you gotta finish the route in this new route without you expecting it, kinda like a big dynamic event in the dungeon itself.
Another suggestion would be more puzzle moments in dungeons, kinda like Zelda’s dungeons where you gotta stop and think for a moment and solve a puzzle to allow you to access the next area, you guys did such puzzles in some jumping puzzles so why not add more complicated puzzles or awesome puzzle mechanics in new upcomming dungeons or existing dungeons?

As for bosses, alpha, kholer, jade maw and lupicus were pretty amazing bosses especially lupicus with three phases (i was expecting him to be the final boss of the path to be honest), i’d like to see more different bosses where they don’t have huge defense or huge health pools but dangerous speed and agility, evading your attacks and dealing critical damage if your not careful of course there could be ways to stun them momentarily but i’d like to see humans, sylvari, asuras, charrs or norns being really evasive and speedy even if they don’t have the biggest health pool, make them hard boss to hit and make them challenging so we don’t just have to sit and spank some buttons, it doesn’t matters if it takes a long time to code or make em but i’d really like to see some bosses like that (take kholer for example since he’s the only i can think of being the closest to what I asked there but even more speedy and agile, leaving you no moment to counterattack unless you find his weak spot).
Of course there’s alot of suggestions we could ask to improve upon the current and new upcomming dungeons but i’d like to see more content and new things added in both the current dungeons thermselves and the dungeon rewards bought with tokens.

1) The price for an exotic backpiece from FoTM is too high, you can get a full set from other dungeons, that drop more tokens per run, for 1380. It’s 1350 for a backpack, I understand it’s a special backpack, but still that’s ridiculous

2) Collossus Fang, Plague, Tortured Root (probably more). I’m glad Anet added more stat combinations for trinkets into the game, but I’m not glad I have to “get lucky”/“grind” for the recipe, I would appreciate more if I were able to buy the recipe from the dungeon vendor or mystic forge stuff for it.

3) Please make a better LFG tool, the one that was in GW1 would be more than enough, it’d be super awesome if you could make it crosserver too

4) I would enjoy a “Zaishen” type daily for dungeons and paths, though it would probably be a good idea to award dungeon agnostic tokens for at least the Z-part, maybe there could be a new vendor with new armor?

As mentioned, some of the boss mechanic is simply – lazy. There is no other way to put it. It felt rushed and lacking in interest. And the huge amount of HP isnt helping to make it more exciting.

I wish to see more of the lovers mechanic. It even has lore attached to the fights. (Why are the boss acting in this way? vs Implementing phases of boss fight with no reason at all) AC , to me at least, felt the best and with the most polished, and Arah just felt really uninspired.

1. Dungeon rewards need to be better. In other words, add a way to get ascended items from the vendors.

2. Champion and legendary ranked enemies take a long time to kill (2 or more minutes, it seems that there is a 4 minute average) yet the rewards aren’t really what is drawing players to fight them. Not even the bags of wondrous goods and the chests with their pitiful loot can compensate.

3. Dungeon token rewards need to be reworked so that it’s not as bad as it is now. Implementing diminishing returns was a bad idea. Rewarding speed runs isn’t what I’d consider a good idea either.

4. The community is fragmented because there is no in game way to find group members across servers of the same region. A solution to address this issue is necessary for the game’s long term health.

5. Different paths take a different amount of time but give out the same end reward. Seriously, if a path takes more time than another path, make sure that it gives out more tokens or has a much higher chance for exotics/ascended items.

6. Revamp story mode rewards. This one is a big one. There is little incentive to play through story mode other than for players to get to explorable mode. Story mode needs a first time completion bonus such as a soulbound-level adjusted exotic weapon of the player’s choice or a moderate amount of tokens (equal to the average of all paths of a dungeon). A rare headpiece just doesn’t cut it since rare items are the 3 best ranking.

7. Some enemies are the sole reason why people don’t go through certain dungeons. Currently, I know Subject Alpha and the Giganticus Lupicus are two such enemies. It’s fine if people want to fight through them, but having them appear at ever single path (either once or multiple times) is annoying to the players.