Guild Wars 2

Posted this on a topic a while back, but figured I should post it here:

Minute.7293:

I am no expert in designing dungeons, but as someone who has to experience them I don’t like the current state of them. This was intended to be a short rant, but as I started writing it kind of grew.

I’ve done quite a lot of dungeons and a lot of them seem similar formula wise. Currently it feels like entire dungeons are composed of nothing but HP bars, you go through the HP bars of the trash mobs, the HP bars of the environment (gates for example), and the HP bars of the mini-bosses and bosses. Currently the harder dungeons don’t feel like they need more involvement, but rather more time. Explorable mode doesn’t even feel explorable, each dungeon has 3 different paths but they don’t feel different from one another. Yes there is some strategy involved but after the first and second run it all becomes second nature. Some dungeons don’t even require that, since you can figure it out by just following your other members.

I want dungeons that lets party members to split up up into different paths, and dungeons that can’t be done by just following your party. I want more dungeons like the dredge map with out all the dredge, I want switches that activate things, that move objects or terrain that may not be obvious in the first few few seconds after activating them. I want things to happen in the environment that if we miss we miss, and that if we catch it we may end up with a different ending dungeon. I want dungeons that require more effort instead of just time, and I want more explorations instead of chasing map objectives. Right now you path off from a dungeon you hit a wall or a dead end.

The other thing that bugs me is that you got rid of the ‘trinity’, but you haven’t replaced it. The bad thing about trinity was that it forced people into roles they may not have wanted, but the good thing about it is that it was forced involvement and punished people for not being involved (dungeon wipe etc). Now I can mindlessly play any dungeon and still complete a dungeon and be rewarded, maybe I die few more times but overall that is nothing. If we die we get a do over, even if you fail a dynamic event in PVE you don’t get a do over you get something else, but in dungeons we get as many do overs as we want. With the trinity if you lost any role, the dungeon would get a lot harder. Here you can 3 man most dungeons minus a lot of the new ones added in the fractals, the difficulty doesn’t really go up but amount of time spent does. The only dungeons that really get harder from being a man downed in this game, are ones that become impossible because they require a minimum number of players.

TL;DR I want dungeons that are more than just HP bars, dungeons that are actually explorable, dungeons that require a team but not to eat away at an HP bar faster. I want dungeons that if you fail a certain portion you fail it, and have to find another way around or if you find a certain portion you can ignore another part.

As someone that is somewhere in between casual and hardcore (as is my wife, and several friends we play with), I have to say that the philosophy behind dungeons confuses me.

The dungeon story is integrated into the main story – yet the story modes of the dungeons are way too hard for the levels people are at when allowed to complete them. So, if we’re meant to do each dungeon as they become available, why does it feel like you need to be 80 to complete them?

Also, if dungeons are meant to be endgame content, then why do they not all require level 80? And again, why are they tied into the personal story?

And why do I need to complete the last one to finish my personal story? I can solo through the whole story (and plan on doing so from now on, due to a still persisting story-track skipping bug I have recently encountered), but then I need to assemble 4 other people to complete my personal story? And if I am not the party lead, then technically, three other people and I are helping someone else complete THEIR personal story.

Story modes should be somewhat easier, they should scale, and should be completable no matter the party size, even if I want to do them on my own, or with 1-3 of my friends. This solves the problem of not being able to find 1-4 other people, and allows me to see the story at my own pace and actually interact with NPCs within the missions, rather than being rushed and ’gogogo’ed and ‘skip cutsean plz’ed by random strangers.

Due to the above problems, I have not even attempted any explorable modes yet, and neither have any of my real-life friends that play with me. Most of them have only done 1-2 story modes, and can hardly be bothered with dungeons at all. You can increase rewards all you want, but until some of the tedium is removed from the dungeon-ing process, we will probably continue to avoid them.

My main problem with all Explorables right now – to keep it short and simply – is that except Ascalon Catacombs, they all come down to huge-HP-pool-simplistic-attacks fights.

There’s no tactics, no strategy, and the fight stretches on 15 more minutes from the point it starts getting boring.

I’d either add 5-6 moves and 1-2 phases to nearly all bosses and reduce their HP by 20%-30%, or boost their damage by 25%-50% but nerf HP by 75%-90%.

There are probably enough responses around for devs to get their feel reading them. Here’s one more from a guy that played Guild Wars for five years, maxed all professions and titles there…

1. Currently, there isn’t a good dungeon or story set, or quest set for casual players. The dungeons are mostly too hard at first, the learning curve is too great. They’re all very easy after maybe 3-5 runs for an average player with above average observation skills, or a good listener. If you are below average in your skills & just average in your ability to listen or observe situations, you drag your team into oblivion.

I had a small guild with maybe a dozen players in it during Guild Wars. Everyone was pumped to be here, but after three months I am the only one still playing. Most made it to 80, but some didn’t. Of the ones that did a dungeon at any level: all of them left after their first dungeon. Say what you want about them, I don’t care. That’s simply what happened.

2. Sorrow’s Furnace. This dungeon in Guild Wars was simply a blast to run. Many of us ran this dungeon over and over for a year – it never got old. Why? Very simply, we controlled the difficulty level ourselves.

In Sorrow’s Furnace we adjusted to the ease of it by taking in smaller teams, which automatically meant upping our loot chances, and adding challege to it ON OUR OWN. Getting that dungeon down to a 1-man or 2-man team was a challenge. It was fun and if you played around enough, you could do a path of it pretty quick that way and still not get your wife ticked off at you for being late to the dinner table.

These Guild Wars 2 dungeons don’t play that way. Not even in story mode. The scale down of lvl 80 players is so severe that one wonders why we bothered to get to level 80 to begin with. We work just as hard in AC or CM as anyone else, and technically we get less by way of rewards. The difficulty is totally out of our control. And if we ever did want to 2-man a dungeon, it wouldn’t be worth it in any way whatsoever.

Casual players work for a living and typically aren’t looking for a part-time job in a video game. They need something to do in Guild Wars 2. Currently, dungeons are not that thing. You reach a point with diminishing returns in the game where your time begins to feel meaningless…. and expensive.

Many of the guys who left the game after their first dungeon did so after spending 2 silver to warp to the port and 10 silver in repairs all for a 25 silver reward – and that was only if they managed to finish. Some didn’t finish, others took over an hour to finish, have small children that need attending to, and just couldn’t give the game their full attention. That’s fine.

Personally, I enjoy most of the dungeons. My family is in bed at 9:30PM and I can get a bunch of paths done in 2-3 hours provided the points aren’t contested. But the first couple of new guys that run with us add precious minutes to every path, slowing the process to a near crawl. These experiences frustrate new and old players alike.

The game needs something for the casual or under-skilled population to do — a way they can feel like time spent was meaningful. With all these dungeons there ought to be a good way to balance the difficulty, giving everyone a place they feel is their own.

That’s what Sorrow’s Furnance was in Guild Wars and that’s what this game lacks.

Oh man, first post.
Anyways,

I run a glass cannon engineer, so staying alive is of importance to me.
So from this:
-Boss AoEs: If someone gets downed, how to revive someone without taking more hits. Either the downed player keeps getting hit by AoEs, OR the AoEs target the person trying to revive and the downed player gets hit anyways and defeated. This only leads to people who want to revive teammates, but cannot.
-Boss attacks: For most AoEs, a red circle has been okay. For boss autoattacks, I have been able to see large boss signs, such as a boss jumping, or the fractal grawl shaman drawing back his bow before firing an arrow. Well, my complaint is one of the CoE’s alphas, that just makes giant rocks from the ground. Have not been able to figure out when to dodge that one. Other bosses that come to mind are dredge fractal bosses (all of them) and CM’s bosses/champions.
-Rate of attacks: Maybe I should spec more into endurance regen, but I don’t like getting hit when I’ve used up my dodges and immobilizes or the boss is defiant.
-Make an option that closes a dungeon path if it is bugged, like the recent CoE path 1 Bjarl.
-Some sort of magic find redo for dungeons. One person running magic find at the cost of lower efficiency for the rest of the party doesn’t feel right. (person with magic find dies more easily, deals less damage, missing utility runes/sigils, etc.-> people without magic find has to carry that weight, with no incentives),
-Give dungeons more bonus events. Like, make it to various checkpoints without any defeats/downs. Or, defeat this boss in less than X time, teaching players to learn how to increase damage while surviving with dodges and blocks or whatnot, instead of playing safe and slow. Or maybe just buffs that go away on down for defeating subbosses.
-I feel that at some point, fractals dungeons will be as unattractive as other dungeons. LIke, at some difficulty level, fractal dungeons will face the same problems of veterans dealing more damage than bosses and having tedious hitpoints. Maybe at the level where fractals drop 20 tokens per fractal, assuming 60 per run like the regular dungeons.
-Why are daily rewards account bound if the rewards are character based.

Edit: read some of the posts that were made while i was typing this up,
Wanted to add that it turns out dungeons are very team orientated.
My unfavorable dungeon runs were usually with people that haven’t done it before, or just seem to refuse to acknowledge that a dodge key exists.
There is no way to know who these people are. First judge, look at armor. Second judge, look at magic find (food/sigil). Third judge, look at achievement points. There has been a lot of depressing things, like the rest of the team just autoattacking while i’m downed and theyre right next to me. Fractals incurring needless repairs fees because some teammate jumped off the edge.

Another idea, no relation to the previous note.
Make dungeons that can be done by 3 people, but allow 5 people for reduced rewards.

One more thing – in Guild Wars I could take my seven year old kid with me on dungeon runs. They were straight forward enough and usually I was skilled enough to cover what he lacked. He wasn’t going to wipe me or my team.

He’s eleven now. I can’t take him into Guild Wars 2 dungeons, at least not yet. There’s just too much to remember, too much dodging that has to happen, and I spend too much time resurrecting him. The risk / reward system is built around getting in and getting out without dragging it out. That keeps my kid sitting on the bench.

I think that speaks to the above post I made, but maybe in more personal terms.

Definitely agree about boss HP. http://memegenerator.net/instance/31481452

This thread is ridiculous and I don’t have time to read through all the suggestions, but here’s something I’d like to see…

Every major boss should have at least three or four “phases” where they have different movement and attack patterns. BUT HERE’S THE KEY. These phases/tactics/strategies should change at random.

So the boss might have both ranged and melee attacks that he switches up. He might single out a target and attack it or use AoE. But there should be clear tactic switches that change in some way other than “Once he hits this HP, he’ll switch to this other tactic.”

Also: covering the entire playable area with red circles might constitute a challenge, but it is by no means the fun type of challenging. Smaller AoEs with some smart targeting would be better… e.g. focus fire on the player doing the most damage, when the player hits downed, drop a bunch of AoE on the player.

I love dungeons how they are. I’ve done every path of every dungeon many times, and love most all of them. However, there are some improvements that can be made.

1. Don’t make anything easier. I’d like to see more challenge in the dungeons. In most cases, people say something is too hard because it actually has a little challenge to it. They want things handed to them easy-mode style like in AC and CoF path 1-2. One of the most annoying things I see regularly are glass cannon players complaining things hit too hard. What do you guys expect when you value damage over living? You don’t do much damage downed/defeated!

2. We NEED more bosses like Giganticus Lupicus with fun mechanics, multiple phases and some actual teamwork requirements.

2. More random events. One thing Arenanet bragged about before the game came out was how there would be randomly occurring events and mini bosses in dungeons. This only happens for 1 mini boss in 1 dungeon (AC). Fractals are going in the right direction on this one!

3. Ascended gear needs to be obtainable through all dungeons, along with WvW and open world PVE.

4. Dungeon currencies shouldn’t be an item you have to carry around. I have 1 3/4 FULL bank tabs of dungeon tokens I’m not going to use any time soon.

5. Fix the dungeon achievement that you seem to get randomly for doing dungeons after receiving the Dungeon Master title. Every now and then I get the dungeon hobbyist achievement that simply says “0 /Dungeons”. wut?

6. When the ascended armor and weapons are added, consider making dungeon armor upgradable into it. If this is not done, every dungeon set currently available will be “just for the skin”. It would also bring a lot of attention to different dungeons.

Why does every boss in every single dungeon have so much HP? It’s not fun. It’s boring. The mentality will always be lets just get this over with… I want it to be done… as opposed to heck I want to do that dungeon again!

Stop with the high Vitality/HP mobs. It’s boring and tedious.

Fractals did a good job of getting rid of what feels like pointless trash, having small events instead of trash makes the progress to bosses seem more meaningful, as it is always a bit disheartening to run through half the mobs in a dungeon (Also make sure you can’t just run past the mobs like many instances now- even in the some fractals). Boss fights all around are rather mediocre, there’s just not enough variety in most fights when they don’t have different phases at health percentages, this also makes bosses feel rather easy, as you’re just doing the same thing over and over.

Another issue I feel is the lack of teamwork required, it often feels like I have 4 other people just to make the boss die faster, instead of actually needing them. I think it’s mostly due to the lack of trinity, but I miss that feeling of actually needing your team and cooperating with them. This can still be created through environmental weapons and interacting with the environment, a good example of this is the last boss in the dredge fractal, where you need a party member to pour the lava. Phases would also allow for shifting roles in these types of fights. I also really do not enjoy way points, as they promote zerging, a good fix would be to not allow them when anyone in your party is in combat.

Conclusion: Add phases to boss fights to keep variety and make trash little mini-events.

A lot of other people have pretty quickly come up with good lists of what the problem with dungeons is. Here’s mine:
1) Poor rewards for time investment, especially the story mode dungeons. I get that you don’t want the old days of people running CM Story for infinite XP, but at least give tokens for first-time completion (or even better, if someone in the party hasn’t done the dungeon before, everyone gets tokens for helping them through it). I’ve spent, at a conservative estimate, 30 hours in fractals thus far (probably much more, but I’m guessing here). I’m still barely even halfway to getting the backpack. What do you define as “minimal grind”? Why do so many things require 250 stacks of ultra-rare materials? (That’s not really dungeon-related, I guess).

2) HP bars everywhere (As an experiment, cut the HP of every mob and every boss by 50%. Play the dungeon. Is it meaningfully less challenging? Or just shorter? There is a difference.)

3) Unbalanced difficulty. Some paths and dungeons are far, far faster and easier than others. Some bosses are insanely difficult and basically require exploits to be defeated, while others (most) are just tedious time sinks without any challenge or interesting mechanics. (Even in the generally excellent fractal dungeons, the jellyfish boss is a great example of a boss that just takes forever to kill without anything interesting about it)

4) Over reliance on RNG. If it drops from the dungeon, we should be able to buy it with tokens. Rolling the dice on opening a chest is fun enough, but I don’t want to be locked out from Ascended rings because I’m not lucky enough (I actually do have a ring, but many of my friends don’t and it’s extremely frustrating for them). Cosmetic items can be a drop, sure, but gameplay-relevant items shouldn’t be locked away like that.

5) Trash mobs. What role do they play in dungeons? Are they there to provide smaller challenges to introduce mechanics and prepare players for the more challenging boss? Or are they filler? I’d argue that they’re filler in the vast majority of the dungeons. They just waste the player’s time and end up being skipped by most players. Even in the fractals, players just run past trash mobs wherever possible (after the ice elemental in Snowblind, the stairs up to the first seal in Colossus). If an enemy can be avoided, players will find a way to avoid them. Rather than just accepting that that’s the way it’s going to be, either make it worthwhile to kill the enemies, or make them unavoidable (and if you’re going to do that, give them interesting mechanics or players will hate you for making them fight past yet more waste-of-time trash).

Part 2, since this got mad long, yo.
If you really, really want to experience the problem with dungeons, go make a level-appropriate alt and gear him with blues and greens from the preceding 10 levels. Then run Sorrow’s Embrace story mode with a PUG. Only then will you experience the pain of endless champions without worthwhile mechanics, multi-stage bosses that take so long you can easily run back from the WP and only see their health bar go down 5%, silver trash mobs that add nothing, and a story so uninteresting and formulaic that the players in my group were actively mocking it after every cutscene. (Seriously, the story in story mode dungeons is basically terrible- “Which member of Destiny’s Edge is going to act like a petty spoiled child this time?”)

On the other hand, the fractal dungeons are a great first step towards dungeons that are actually fun to play. They make use of the cooperative nature of the party for more than just “let’s all add our damage together”. The much-maligned swamp fractal is enjoyable to work on as a team (if you get a group that aren’t going to be dicks about it when someone doesn’t run it fast enough) and the dredge powersuit boss (despite having probably too much HP considering how hard it is) is really exciting because it has the team split up and accomplish different goals, beyond just “nuke this guy”. I’d love to see more of this in future dungeon (re?)designs- bosses with unique mechanics and objectives that are more complex and interesting than just killing a billion trash mobs in a straight line. More jumping puzzles, more regular puzzles, and more fun co-op gameplay (look at other co-op games that have varied team objectives or put players into different roles/places on the map). Again, I still think there’s room for a lot of improvement, but the fact that the fractals use Veterans and not silver mobs is a great sign that you understand how boring it is to fight walking health pools.

Everyone wants a group finder. Add a group finder. gw2lfg.com is actually a pretty good workaround, but I don’t want to have to leave the game to find a group. I understand concerns about splitting the community or losing the conversational aspect that comes from LFGing, but I’ve had chatty groups by using the site and I’ve had silent groups from LFGing. Please make it easier and faster to run dungeons, since I want to be spending my limited free time playing the game and not putting up classified ads.

A final, pie-in-the-sky idea that I’d love to see added to the game: split up the current dungeons into their most interesting encounters. Make those parts fractals, and then let players choose different playlists of fractals from the portal in LA. (So I can run the AC fractal playlist and get AC tokens, or the “mixed bag” playlist and get a potpourri of different fractals and tokens). And then add a “currency” page that stores all my different currencies. Seriously.

what bothers me about dungeons is NOT the grinding itself. its more that there is nearly no real teamplay involved. everyone is mostly just dpsing and maybe buffing on CD.
i would really kill for a massive combofield and healspecs buff.

ever wondered why nearly noone is using +heal gear? – yes its because its just plain useless. heals targetting others (by combofields) should be waaaaaaaaaaay more powerfull.

and yes i also agree on the fact that some content is just plain timesink without any other purpose. (the lost shore event was full of timesink stuff like spawning 23947823 times the same waves of mobs -.-’)

<3 let this game evolve!

Like timmy i don’t have time to read all the post. So let mine either be new suggestions, or a + 1 /agreement of others that posted in front of me.

For me the biggest change I would like to see are Dungeons that are Similar to FOWSC and UWSC. Now before you go off the deep end in disagreement, the aspect that I like is that it took a lot of player skill to get these down right.

This is what is lacking in the current dungeon experience. Right now it’s a yawn fest, grind fest. Dodge, Dodge skill, skill, Dodge skill, Ress a downed player, boss fight with lots of HP, skip this content don’t need it, next boss please.

I, as a player after finding a good build, and getting my gear I am NO LONGER challenged in the dungeon. It’s more of an endurance act then an experience were my playing skills get better.

What I liked about FOWSC, and UWSC is we raced each other, we raced for times, we raced for perfection. How fast as a T4 could you pop your reaper. Or the fact that I can pop my reaper, can I duo T3 and T4 quest, or could I true duo them., or wait I’m a LT, T4 went down I’l jump in and finish 4 horse, and improve my playing skill.

For the sake of length, there were many ways that I could progress and improve my playing skills in those speed clears.

The other thing that I love was the fact that ectos / shards could drop from normal mobs, and you were guaranteed one in the end chest. You could do this with loadstones, or something along those lines.

I would still get away from the RNG on the good skins, and keep it with tokens. I ran UWSC 50 times and got 2 voltic spears, and someone else in the guild ran over 500 and never got one, now that is frustrating for them. What I did like was that specific skins came from dungeons. I knew what to farm for BDS, or for froggy scepter, or for the Voltic.

My only concern really, and this comes I suppose out of selfishness, but I for one would like to be able to actually properly run Fractals now. The current level system is kind of punishing to those late to the party. (Since most announcements in LA are for at least level 10+) And for quite a while I’ve had little to no luck finding people interested in running lower levels.

At the moment, I’m able to do up to level 4, And about a week a go me and a Friend sat in an overflow of LA for half an hour posting in the chat, for just a few more people to run level 4 with us… it was either people looking for higher levels or anything BUT level 4.

My thought on this was they should of had it in level brackets, similar to how PvP’s ranking system is set. From what I’ve noticed and what I’ve also been told, levels 1-9 are all about the same difficulty. So all someone would need to do is just run the bracket 9 times and then after their 9th run they’d be in the next bracket, where Agony comes into play.

That’s my thoughts anyway, otherwise I just want to see what else you guys have in store and some of the ideas I’ve read here sound promising too.

I enjoy gameplay and most of the dungeon and boss design on its own. I’d play it even if they did not have unique rewards.

The biggest hurdle for dungeon gamers today is that there are no tools to assemble groups. I know developers are strongly against adding automated group assembling tools like some other games have, and I think that is fine. But the lack of a cross realm, cross map way to find players interested in doing things with you often means you just cannot do them, or spend more time trying to find people than actually doing them.

Oh, and Fractals… the “same server” requirement here is absolutely unacceptable. It is a requirement to play only during peak hours and then to pray that your servers are popular, even as concurrency dwindles between content patches.

So, we need an LFG channel, or opt-in overflow map (think “Enter the Mists”), or bulletin board listing tool that let’s us communicate what we want to do and find others. And once we’ve found those others, we need to be allowed to play with them. The increasingly prohibitive search for players is itself the biggest problem with the reward structure of dungeons, as the reward does not scale with this absurd and constantly increasing difficulty.

It has probably already been said but:

Add different mechanics ala phases to major bosses in the dungeons and make them somewhat random in that you may know of 3 different phases for a boss, but you don’t know in which order the boss decides a particular phase and it may be triggered at different % health of the boss. This will make the fights a bit more dynamic.

Also: 100% agree with everyone saying some of the bosses just have way too much HP. HotW bosses just take way too long to kill and its not like the mechanics of the fight change so it isn’t giving players an extra challenge, just an extra chore.

Real LFG tool (which is supposedly in the works)

A SELL BACK feature from spending dungeon tokens. Give us 1 hour to sell the item back for our tokens if we accidentally buy the wrong thing.

Agreed also with the different lodestones as another reward to purchase with dungeon tokens.

Other than that, I have a good time playing them.

I would like to see all gear types offered, I hate that i have to grind out a set of gear for looks, then another or craft another for the stats. I dont like HotW or ascalon gear, but P,V,T. gear is only in those dungeons.

I think it would be better if they sold either all types, or a menu that let you select the stats.

I always prefered it if there were no stats on gear, and you had to equip a gem into them “berserker gem” makes it berserker gear.

Make it incapable of skipping Kholer in AC.

Slightly better drops I try to urge people to do dungeons but not many are interested in something they don’t really need to 2. or little more rewards in the middle of the dungeon instead of rush to the end boss kinda of deal I do like the new bags of wonder that drop off of bosses but some people just see it to better to just skip them aka Kholer in ac.

also do not make dungeons easier make them possible if they are glitched or bugged or near impossible but don’t nerf them.

Looking for Dungeon.

Dungeons that needs more then 5 people would be nice. The chaos of controlling 10-20 people is always really fun and it would make a PvE guild of 40+ people have a real meaning outside of socializing.

Oh and Looking for Dungeons.

My 2 pennies worth:

Myself and the friends I play with in game have avoided Dungeons almost without exception due to a perceived high barrier to entry plus a general dislike of PUGs. We also have the issue that we can’t all be around to run Dungeons together due to schedule conflicts etc. Now, of course, the barrier to entry thing isn’t such an issue if we had managed to get going at the start of the game, but now, not only is there an issue finding groups for Story modes, but also, there is the idea that at this point everyone should know all the tactics for all the instances by now, and we really are not interested in encountering the elitism that comes with first time run-throughs at this stage in the games life.

With all that being said, I guess what I’d like to see are Dungeons that scale not only to level but also to number of people that want to run them. This means that smaller guilds/groups and people that just prefer it that way can still see this content and never have the issues that I have outlined above.

As for loot – I think a simpler Daily random system would work fine with a single currency for all Dungeons that lets you go after the gear you desire without the needless grinding of a single Instance.

Tokens exchange. I like some dungeons, but I HATE ARAH. Worst. Dungeon. Ever.
Give tokens for doing story-mode if there’s a person who didn’t done it before in the group. Finding people for story taking hours.
Less RNG in fractals, 2 weeks and still only one ring. 2 more daily and I’m done, it’s just not worth all this time.
Daily for dungeons, where you getting bonus for doing specific dungeon story/exp mode.
LFG system in the game.
Loot based on actual player’s level.
Custom groups for contacts. I’m sick with all those rage quits, random people and whatever. Guilds are useless in Guild Wars 2, so I’d like just make a “people running dungeons is fun with” group and “avoid those kittens” group. With pretty icons next to those people’s names.

Currently there doesn’t seem to be much point in running story mode, with its silver mobs and lack of rewards.

Problem:
I really liked playing my thief, but now he’s got all the gear he needs. I’d like to run other dungeons, but I don’t see much point to it beyond selling loot for extra gold.

Proposed solution:
Give players an incentive to collect the gear from more than one dungeon on single character. Perhaps allow us to save different “wardrobes” (similar to Rift’s wardrobe system) and choose between different saved outfits. Monetize the system or create a gold sink by charging a fee for additional wardrobe slots and swapping between outfits.

Well like I stated on my openings post:

Quests inside dungeons. Maybe in par with the Precursor or Legendary.

Or that you can get mats trough some long questchain inside a dungeon. With a nice story and such.

Quests for Unique Loot. Not just a named loot but actually something you can wear. Give some sort of loot that is unique from any other thing.

Mechanics

Some bosses really need overhauls. Give them sort of tactic. Make their HP pool smaller. For example the Dredge Mining Suit from Fractals, has a fun mechanic (it’s just kiting but someone is kiting upstairs). But his health pool makes it sometimes to long for it to be killed. Which can end up into a frustating fight in the end.

Disciplines

Our crafting disciplines are atm only something we can use for making gear or use for making a gift for your Z or Y Weapon. Maybe make it so that like for example, in SWTOR you could use your crafting skills to get you some sort of buff in some area or make a short cut. Or bring up an ally or weaken a boss. Or let out a new one.

If you had the crafting skill at a certain point you could make a dungeon path more fun.

Jumping puzzles

Make them inside dungeons. Or make them like mini dungeons who actually are fun also. Vexxa’s Lab in Fire Hearth (that’s the one or I am wrong). Was such a fun experience. The mini boss was fun. And not to hard. And it had some sort of mechanics.

Hmm maybe make it more explorable, give us secret bosses. Something to REALLY explore the place. Let us get chance of precursors or tier 6 crafting materials so you actually wanna explore the place. And maybe if you already at it. Make it so dungeons random generate. So paths change so now and then and open up new things.

The regular dungeons themselves just need a good tuning. Some work well such as Subject Alpha in CoE. You really see the difficulty ramp up as you progress as long as it’s not being out healed. Others such as TA seem to have the difficulty getting easier and easier as you progress.

In general the FoTM seems like a good idea in the right direction with a few key flaws.
The positives:
1. There are mechanics (such as the hammer) feel more integrated than a lot of the ones that exist in the launch dungeons.
2. The leveling system gives different players a “difficulty slider” so that everyone a chance to see the dungeon while giving others a chance to push themselves.
3. The random fractals and changing difficulty keep recycled content fresh.
4. Overall each fractal seems to ramp up in difficulty climaxing at the end boss.
5. The lack of waypoints encourages people taking a bit more time to learn the encounters rather than just rez to win.

The negatives:
1. The leveling implementation makes this instance punishing to play with friends. Even ones who are at the same skill level. The dungeon is too long to want to backtrack to catch players up especially when the whole theme of the dungeon is progressing.
2. The rewards system on it causes fragmentation. A random drop system can be very frustrating if the goal is progress and the content is gated based on that. Choices in offensive vs defensive and group composition would be better here than if someone in the group has had good luck.
3. The way the party system work should be rethought. Currently disconnects and the lack of ability to player swap are serious issues.
4. There are still issues where players can skip or beat the content in unintended ways (running over the lava) leading to not playing the dungeon “as designed”. If left alone players will use these paths more often than not and they lead to dungeons being very unsatisfying.

Well, for starters, I would appreciate it if getting in to dungeons were ACTUALLY POSSIBLE… It takes hours trying to find a group in Lions Arch or in front of the dungeon gate shouting LFG, especially when after 2 tries you get muted for spamming. The ingame LFG tool is crap, because you can’t say what you are LFGing for, so people just ignore it. They need a new LFG UI that can be used to find groups for certain dungeons, and/or an automatch tool like the one for PVP. I would be happy with either, because then i could actually find a group and actually do a dungeon for once…

Most dungeons are way too long (time) and the rewards are the worst in the industry.

16 years ive played mmorpgs, dating back to Neverwinter Nights on Aol. Never have I seen dungeon loot as bad as what GW2 offers.

The token items are a great reward, however the actual run (inside the dungeon) is embarrassing when it comes to loot.

Finally, magic find in dungeons. It needs to be disabled. Until you add soloable dungeons, people in magic find gear are not pulling their share of the team weight, either through their lack of defense or lack of offense.

But seriously, there needs to be an easier way to find dungeon groups than standing in Lions Arch spamming LFG in chat.

Not only that In Lions arch you ALWAYS get suppressed. Another thing that annoys A LOT of players is that when someone disconnects we have to restart from the beginning. Also the price of shards and the drop rate of Relics. 5 Per dungeon? Wow. Thats low. Its like 3750 or so to get 250 shards. Make it easier or put back the events back in Cursed shore. People are getting bored of this game already because there’s 3 things to do which are sPvP, WvW, and FoTM mainly.

• Please use less CCs (like knockbacks, immobilze) mechanics in encounter design. Its not a good experience when i lose control of my character.
• Please have boss aggro evenly split between the party.
• Would be nice if boss loses aggro on a player when they enter downed state.
• Please keep the token system, I really hate RNG gear drops.
• Please add phases to boss fights, Giganticus Lupicus is freaking hard , but i rather fight him than the jelly fish boss.
• Please use Boss abilities( that one shot you ), sparingly.

WoW has a lot of thing I hate, however I think their encounter design is superb. Their dungeons are pretty straight forward , trash to boss to trash to boss, however every boss fight feels fresh.

EDIT: Overall im happy with the reward i get from doing explorable duengons , they seem fair. Its the RNG for the ascendant ring that annoys me.

I’ve really enjoyed the dungeons so far. What I’d love to see are different group size options. (random number examples) With a 3-man group, your experience in the dungeon is a covert operation. With a 12-man group, you fight a two-prong attack. With 24, a full-scale battle. Doubt it’d happen, but it’d be nice to not have to rely on 5 (considering it isn’t tank+healer+3dps anymore).

I’ll keep it short:

1. Boss fights are simply not up to par with the current generation MMOs. There is very little scripting and a serious lack of variety in terms of interesting mechanics. Boss HP is too high for how little they actually do; huge HP bars only work with different phases to keep things interesting.

2. Dungeons are messy. Groups dynamics function more like a bunch of piranhas than an actual cohesive unit, there is little meaningful interaction between group members, even with mechanics such as combo fields in the mix.

In every other way Arenanet took the genre forward but here I’m don’t think they’ve even managed to prove that intricate, meaningful dungeons can even be done without the trinity.

Boss with less HP, a fight shouldn’t last longer than 8 minutes, but should instead be executed properly. More bosses mechanics. Rift should be an example of good boss mechanics.

More challenge though mechanics, less death 10 minutes into the fight because …. because you’re not sure why but everybody is dead and you have to go through this huge amount of HP again and you just want to quit the game.

Fractals is a step in the right direction, but fights like imbued shaman are just … long and boring.

I love the dungeons! I love the way they are designed, and I love the difficulty of them. However even though you had “buffed” the boss drops with a bag that contains a drop of karma (100ish Karma) and about 2 silver; it’s still not even close to a proper reward considering the time and effort we have to go through to finish the place. By the end of the run, you may have to repair 2 times if you’re with a pug that doesn’t communicate…that gets really expensive!

Another thing that really still needs to be improved on is the random gear drops. Blues and the occasional green are meh, but I have never seen anyone get a yellow piece of gear. I have seen people get potions to turn into other things (which by the way is kind of lame seeing as it only works once and it doesn’t drop more than 1 at a time.) When I killed Zhaitan (or whoever dropped the last chest) I was very disappointed that I got 3 blues and that was all.

I could go on a while longer whining about my lack of drops, but I think you get my point so I’ll shut up now.

Stop giving NPCs way way too much health.

Remove junk from loot tables. Garlic Bread and Overgrown Tonics come to mind. Hell, any tonics in general. They’re useless to me and I always end up grimacing when I receive them. The fact that I can get something that sells for less than even a white drop is insulting. Especially for a difficult or frustrating encounter, like Nightmare Vines in TA.

My biggest gripe with dungeons is the lack of incentives to do story, the huge RNG on the recipe drops, and the absolutely abysmal loot from most chests. While I receive an exotic every now and then from a chest, I’m still generally receiving garlic bread, trash tonics, and blues. Hell, even in 15+ fractal difficulties I receive blue reward chests. This is frustrating and by no means inspires me to run higher difficulties or longer, harder dungeons.

Positive: Theming done well.

Negative: Most boss encounters are dull. It’s either avoid red circles or kill ads. Very rarely you get something interesting, and in most cases, people figured a way to exploit it to make it easy. Need dungeon specific drops. Need better drops. Tired of getting blues and greens.

Antinous.9341:

I’ll keep it short:

1. Boss fights are simply not up to par with the current generation MMOs. There is very little scripting and a serious lack of variety in terms of interesting mechanics. Boss HP is too high for how little they actually do; huge HP bars only work with different phases to keep things interesting.

2. Dungeons are messy. Groups dynamics function more like a bunch of piranhas than an actual cohesive unit, there is little meaningful interaction between group members, even with mechanics such as combo fields in the mix.

In every other way Arenanet took the genre forward but here I’m don’t think they’ve even managed to prove that intricate, meaningful dungeons can even be done without the trinity.

I’m never going back to trinity.

GW2 needs more mechanics like combo field effects, timewap etc to encourage teamwork and coordination.

I won’t say all GW2 dungeons are awful. I think cliffside, CoF, mad king dunegon are pretty cool. I really like the fractal difficulty scaling. Lets people pick their own difficulty like in single players. I’m finding 14+ fractals hard, so i’ll just stop and play 10-14 fractals, im not punished for not progressing.

I’m confident a year from now GW2 will have the best encounters.

Just no RNG, just add more stuff we can get with tokens, more people will do them.

Not from chest
Not from Bosses
No random chances (rng)
Just tokens

That is the best Solution.

Yes that too, make exiting loot. We can’t get better gear so make some cool stuff to loot, whatever it is (pets ? food ? something). getting white items and token I’m not even sure I need is not a big incentive.

Not terribly original contributions, but my own input would be…

Solo-duo scaling or mode
GW1 was my favorite game ever (certainly outnumbered the rest combined in hours played!), and I do greatly miss being able to play independently – I love the open ‘living world’ of GW2, but there’s essentially zero solo PvE end-game currently and that is a real shame.
Money and rare materials are the only solo pursuits after earning the exploration/jumping achievements, which just doesn’t have the staying-power that GW1 offered.

The 5 player gating of end-game is also compounded by the absence of rare cosmetic skin drops and the restriction to 1 end-game (L80 exotic) crafted skin set, 1 karma skin set and 1 loot skin set; between the 8 dungeon sets (73% of end-game gear!) and the mystic forge grindathons, there’s a huge gulf between easily obtained and never-going-to-obtain.

To people not interested in party gaming, GW2 PvE does lack the piñata factor at the moment – open world foes aren’t desirable for anything but money and craft items that are essentially just money-made or money-saved (depending on if you want to amass them); opening dungeoneering for those who won’t/can’t form parties would greatly expand solo content without requiring any new assets.

Party finder
I’m not on the edge of my seat for this personally – though I certainly would use it (for my remaining story modes & AC explorable) – but I don’t see how dungeon content has a long-term future without it; the barriers to group forming are already formidable, and will only become more so with further new content and the inevitable introduction of other hubs.

Super-mob swarms
There’s nothing fun about some of the lethal mob swarms currently in the game, thinking especially of Caudecus’s Manor (I haven’t seen many explorable modes!) – they don’t even allow for careful pulling or tanking, only avoidance tactics or waypoint-zerging.
Also; surely can something be done about the aesthetic design – player race enemies especially – because opening a door and having 20 cloned bandit ladies pour out isn’t atmospheric and does give the impression the game is glitched…

The Fractals are much better than the regular dungeons in this regard, in my opinion.

Health measured in millions
Just to echo many other contributors: I don’t find this fun.
Granted none of the dungeon bosses has ever given me 7 days of burnout like the Karka event (presumably graduates of the more exclusive Billions O’Health School of Monsters), but ultimate bosses can still drift over the tolerance threshold even on the first encounter,

This is what I would like to see:

LESS hp on mobs!

MORE mechanics on enemies!

PHASES on bosses! (If they are gonna have an enormous HP pool, at least change up the way it fights while we are taking forever to kill it.) I’d love to have a boss that has the difficulty ratcheted up as we bring it closer to death, makes finally killing it feel that much more epic

If all else fails, make all dungeons like the fractals! I LOVE THEM! <3

This started as a couple of paragraphs and kinda snowballed from there. I should state up front that when I say “dungeons”, I’m referring to dungeons other than the Fractals of the Mists (which I think are a pretty good step in the right direction).

So here goes…

I’ve been running an awful lot of the dungeons lately. For the most part they’re pretty good and quite a bit of fun — even when playing a pick-up game full of randoms. They are by no means perfect, however. There are quite a few balancing issues that make certain paths of certain dungeons an absolute chore to play through.

These “balancing issues” are, to my mind, largely caused by two factors: how long the path takes to run and how difficult it is to successfully complete the path — the latter of those two factors strongly impacting the former.

Players being players will almost always go for the biggest reward for the least effort. In explorable dungeons, this means that they’re going to do the shortest, quickest, easiest path. It makes very little sense to subject yourself to a grueling hour of play for 69 tokens when you can do another path twice in half the time and with less effort and end up with more tokens overall.

There are two ways you can approach this really. You can either balance out the duration and difficulty so that each path is roughly the same or you can adjust the token reward to reflect the added difficulty and time. Whichever way it’s done, it’s not going to be an easy task. Though I think the latter method might be easier.

Speaking of difficulty… This is a bit of thorny subject since certain groups will find the same situations significantly easier or more difficult depending on the exact composition of the group — which professions and builds are in play, what level everyone is, how everyone is geared, and so on.

All issues with group composition aside, I think the biggest issues I personally see with the dungeons are threefold: trash encounters are often harder than boss fights, boss fights are typically highly repetitive, and the dungeons are highly static.

As far as the difficulty of standard encounters go (what most players would call the “trash mobs”, the issues I most notice are:

- Though many enemies have “charge up” effects for their special attacks, not all of them do. Some enemies (often ranged “trash”) have no readily perceivable warning before they launch an attack that can one-shot a player (even one with 3200+ defence and 25000+ health). In certain dungeons, this leads to a lot of “WTF just killed me” moments — a source of constant frustration in any game. An alternative to more “charge up” effects might be to use an icon floating above the player whenever he’s targeted by an attack that is a potential kill-shot (similar to how the Jade Maw beam works).

- Often, there is no easily discernible difference between different types of enemies. Some might be slightly larger or have different weapons or whatever, but often they all look the same — especially when the effects are flying. Having to mouse-over enemies one at a time to determine which is the greatest threat while you’re fighting for your life can get pretty old pretty fast. It would be nice to see some more obvious differences between enemies. Team Fortress 2 did a great job with making its classes readily identifiable at a distance using colouration, size, and silhouette. Some changes along those lines would help immensely.

- Certain enemies (often ones that attack in groups) have access to spammable control effects that can lock down players for long periods of time. It can become quite frustrating to be unable to do anything to save yourself or a teammate, because your team only has a limited number of skills that break stuns or grant stability.

- Many such encounters take place in areas where there is very little room to move. Confined corridors, hallways, and similar areas greatly increase the effectiveness of area of effect attacks (for both sides) and can change up the pace of the dungeon somewhat, but they also greatly disadvantage professions that rely on movement as their primary defence. Either way, these encounters only exacerbate the issues mentioned above with spammable control effects.

The last two issues — those of encounter design and balance — are ones that pen and paper roleplaying games have been dealing with for decades. Consequently, there’s quite a lot of great guidelines and good advice available on the subject.

As presumptuous (and nerdy) as it sounds, it might be an idea to make the Building Encounters chapter of the Dungeon Master’s Guide for 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons required reading for the dungeon development team members. Or not… There are plenty of other systems that have similar chapters.

Hmmm… Had to split the post.

So…

Boss fights in the dungeons are highly repetitive and consequently fairly boring. Most are just big bags of health that occasionally perform a special attack that must be avoided — usually just by pressing the dodge key at the appropriate time. This does not lend itself to gameplay that is in anyway exciting or dynamic. Players just circle the enemy spamming attacks and boons when they become available and dodge occasionally.

This could be alleviated to some degree by adding specific mechanics to each boss fight that require one or more players to do something different for a limited period of time. Multiple phases could also be used to break up the monotony of the fight.

As many people have mentioned in other posts, there’s also very little reliance on teamwork, communication, or coordination for the boss fights. Aside from reviving teammates or triggering/attacking an object/enemy occasionally, there’s really nothing to the bulk of them.

Finally…

Dungeons are highly static and consequently repetitive. The environments and encounters for any given path are almost always played in exactly the same order in exactly the same way. There are occasional “dynamic” elements in play (additional burrows or the troll in catacombs, for example), but for the most part… Not so much.

What I’d like to see is a bit more variety in the dynamic events in the dungeons (bringing them in line with how they were pitched to us prior to launch). Perhaps have a couple of different bosses that could be in a particular area, only one of which spawns — so that you never quite know what you’re going to face, even if the mechanics are essentially identical (eg. Ice Elemental/Dredge in the Fractals).

Maybe add additional enemies to an area or remove the “normal” enemies and replace them with a mini-boss or event. You might expect to fight a bunch of gravelings in an area, but instead run into a troll champion or the like. Or alternatively, have a cave-in cover up a doorway forcing the group to find another way around.

Whatever the case and whatever the balance issues, I’m really looking forward to see what magic is worked with the dungeons in future. They’re fun now. Hopefully they’ll be more fun later.

Mobs:

I am not too fond of the design choices that the dungeons “trash” mobs have. For one their HP is much to high and their damage is much too high as well. No I am not a bad player, I’ve only ever had one or two deaths out of 10 successful runs and its normally because I was distracted. But they are all simply very punishing and somewhat stressful to handle with an inexperienced or fragile team.

Bosses:

I did love them. Currently I like them. The issue with them is that the lack of variety. A good number of them are simply very powerful “trash” mobs that sometimes have a single unique mechanic that you have to deal with. Boss fights are also much too long for what they involve. This is fine for a mini boss because its a mini boss and will be over in about 2-3 minutes of fighting.

Environments:

I love them but there are a lot of corridors of mobs or traps. Traps are fun, but they do damage you armor and I end up having to just ninja my way through Resident Evil Laser Hallway naked.

What I would like to see:

Mobs and environments: I would like there to be unique conditions that the party as to work with to survive in the dungeons rather than “strong mobs and lasers”.

Ascalonian Catacombs. Normal mobs like spiders and graveling or oozes are actually in scattered small and weak groups or individuals. Ghosts phase onto your group at random times and attack you.
Crucible of Eternity: No mobs only security traps everywhere. The bosses hunt you and can appear at any time, bosses are affected by security.
Twilight Arbor: Overgrowth at your location forms while in battle. Staying in the same general area (like melee radius) will cause you to bleed, then cripple then rooted (like the ranger elite) unless you move out of the way. Overgrowth degenerates over a long period of time making previously “overgrown” areas dangerous to traverse immediately.
Citadel of Flame: Heat Exhaustion causes all of your CDs to extend up to 1-50% depending on how many stacks you have on you. Enemy fire attacks and molten areas give stacks of heat exhaustion. Staying in maxed stacks of Heat Exhaustion causes you to down. Darkened and dry areas remove stacks over time.
Etc.

Bosses:

I want phases. Especially on longer bosses. Doing a boss that takes like 10 minutes to kill with one or two unique things that I may have to worry about gets boring. Phases breaks it up, give you a chance to add new mechanics to the fight and makes it less repetitive.

I would also like to point out that not every dungeon needs to be a home for powerful things to kill. It would be a shifting maze or a race to the finish because something is filling the place that will kill you or a haunted house or a giant puzzle, etc.

My main concerns:
1- We need a LFG tool. I dont like sitting in Lion’s Arch asking in map chat only to be blocked by the spam detection. Wasting time when I could be doing something more fun.
2- Bosses have too much health… and when all strategy comes down to dodging away from red circles, it gets old very quickly.
3- At this time, the only dungeon I have done is TA (for my set), and I hated it running it over and over to get my armor. There is no incentive for me to do the other dungeons, I am sort of a completitionist so I WANT to explore them, but they feel too chaotic and unfun and in the end it is just not worth all the frustration just too see the content.

YES to shorter timeframes! No more over an hour long runs would be great.
YES to dropping the health of bosses!!
YES to scaling the dungeons to any size groups! Including 1 man versions.

We need bosses like lupi. Maybe rewards harder/longer paths with more tokens. Nothing really else. Oh, and the most important thing:

DO NOT MAKE THEM LIKE FRACTALS. Leave fractals for fractals fans and dungeons for dungeons fans. Simple as that. No need to duplicate systems.

• If you do nothing else, please replace waypoints with checkpoints in explorable paths (or disable waypoints while a boss is in combat). Graveyard zerging isn’t something that should be allowed.

• There are better ways to challenge players than bosses with a million HP and trash mobs with autoattacks that hit for half of a player’s health. In general, fights would be more fun if they were more mechanically complex and a bit less chaotic. Test us on coordination (“kill these two mobs at the same time”), positioning (“these adds make a painful red circle on the ground when they die — kill them in places that won’t fill up the room”), execution (“the better you do in phase 1, the smoother phase 2 will go”) and teamwork rather than just on who can hit the dodge button at the right time through a swarm of particle effects.

• More multi-phase fights. A 10 minute boss fight with 4 phases is a lot more interesting than a 10 minute boss fight with 1 phase (though a pair of 5 minute fights with 2 phases each is even better).

• Make sure there’s at least some reason for veteran players to go back to Story mode, so that new players have someone to go with.

• Add a large variety of achievements each dungeon, with a reward (a title, mini-pet, or unique gear skin) for completing all the achievements of a given dungeon. Give players some way to demonstrate their skill beyond merely completing the dungeon.