Guild Wars 2

Dungeon tokens being added to story mode OR making access to story mode account-wide instead of character specific would solve the annoyance of ‘has anyone done story mode?!’. Preferably the former.

Also, I think it’d be nice if explorables were a bit more time consistent; example being that HOTW path 1 is extremely short compared to paths 2 and 3, mostly due to the fact that path 2/3 have way more bosses with extremely huge health pools.

Lastly, some paths simply need to be made possible. I still haven’t completed Dungeon Master since I can’t get anyone to run some of the SE and Arah paths due to just absurdly overtuned mobs and respawns and time commitment and such.

Lupi and kohler are the only 2 interesting bosses in the entire game. They have interesting mechanics that can easily cause a party to wipe, and they have a lot of different varied mechanics (more lupi here than kohler). Every single boss should be interesting like these 2.

Even outside of dungeons, the world dragon bosses are unbelievably boring, no interesting mechanics at all. Every single boss needs to be looked at, reworked, and made harder and more interesting.

Note that harder is not equal to more hp, which is what you designers seem to think. Just because it takes a long time to kill a boss doesn’t mean it is a hard fight. Interesting mechanics like lupi’s grub eating can result in a longer and harder fight, but simply increasing base hp does not make a boss harder.

If you want to see multiple examples of how bosses SHOULD be made, go to dragon’s nest, and look at the nest bosses in that game. Every single one, from the lowest levels to the highest levels have a minimum of 5-8 unique attacks/abilities, with several having even more. Only lupi has this many different attacks, and most bosses only have 2. This is not enough to remain interesting and challenging, and needs to be fixed.

I think the biggest problem is the way the reward system is structured. Having all the worthwhile gear simply be available for a large number of tokens makes running dungeons feel boring and grindy. Furthermore, having full sets with the same stat configurations encourages simply farming a single dungeon once a day.

Honestly, WoW really figured out how to make doing dungeons and getting rewards work well – it’s part of the reason the game is still so popular. I think GW2 should take a few notes from the WoW book, and bosses (possibly just final bosses to prevent farming) should have known loot tables (of which one item is guaranteed to drop for each player) with bind-on-acquire exotics with set stat configurations. In the event that this would make acquiring exotics too easy, it could be pairs of rares and exotics with the same stat configurations, with drop rates determing the rare:exotic ratio. Perhaps exotics could be guaranteed from the final boss, or exotics ONLY drop from the final boss, with other bosses having masterwork/rare loot.

As long as the different stat configurations are smartly distributed across all the different explorable mode paths of all the dungeons, this would give players incentive to run all the different paths in the game.

Tokens would then serve the purpose of letting you buy gear you need eventually, in the event you get really unlucky. (Or a way to gear up alts)

This system would work even better with the existance of ascended gear, because these exotics are no longer the max-stat items in the game.

Also, this is a bit unrelated, but GW2 really needs a good dungeon finder system, especially with the introduction of FotM. If it teleported players into the dungeon (like WoW does) it would further encourage people to run dungeons – why make the whole group pay several silver and sit through an extra loading screen before they get to start a dungeon? (Perhaps it could only allow players to teleport in if they’ve completed the story mode version).

PLEASE Remove the magic find stat from dungeons all together, it rewards you for being selfish and hurts you for gearing correctly

1. Either fix jumping so that max size characters can negotiate and view jumping sections just as easily as small characters, or take JP out of dungeons. I don’t consider it fun to have my view obliterated while trying to navigate a tricky section when it is a breeze for small characters. I like large as possible Norn toons, but I have no desire to stumble them through the key jumping puzzles of the FOTM. I have noticed that many times there will be single steps up on ledges rocks etc. that small characters breeze right up, but large characters have to try repeatedly untill they find the micro spot where their model can negotiate that step. I have a smallest possible female Asura and a max size male Norn, and they are NOT equal when jumping sections are involved.

2. Gating dungeon access by the lowest party member is bad and divides the player base. Change it to be choose-able based off the highest level reached by any team member.

3. Get rid of sections that rely heavily on randomization. I am thinking of the swamp.
which also has jumping bits that puts large characters at a disadvantage
Most people I play with, casual scrubs, hate the swamp FOTM. It is just too gimicky and depends too much on whether you get a good path, and if the swamp guy shows up and how the traps are placed randomly. Just dump this level entirely. Some people claim it is easy for them, but they must be in the minority.

4. Put melee back into dungeons. Just about every dungeon and boss has to be done ranged as much as possible. It is as though your devs have admitted they cannot within the restrictions of the ‘no tanks, no healers, no damage dealers’ produce anything except things the require ranged in order to survive. If that is the case you should change the name of the game to Ranged Wars.

5. Drastically lower the requirements for the dungeon gear sets. One run should net enough tokens to buy one piece of a set. We casuals have been there and done that (the grind) and moved on. The reward is just not compelling enough to make me want to run the same instance more than a handful of times. It is really easy to tell that no one does this given the rarity of seeing people running around LA in full dungeon sets. Also the designs are simply not attractive. Out of all the sets, I see only two pieces that appeal to me. The rewards need to be sweetened in terms of drops.

6. Make all dungeons open all the time. Talking about the dungeons that now get closed due to being in contested areas. As it now stands several planets have to align just right if you want to enter a few of these dungeons. Way too much aggravation, when there are so many good new games out there that don’t throw frustration after frustration at you.

7. Put a decent LFG module into the game. Sure your hard core 1% can always get groups or know how to use external tools, but don’t forsake the the great majority of scrubs that make up most of your player base. Begging in map chat, is not something that would look good as a bullet point on your retail box.

Some bosses have WAY too much hp. We are easily better as a team than these bosses and the only threat they impose is a time threat, this is incredibly boring and discourages people from doing dungeons.

The most important thing with dungeons is adding new rare weapon/armor skins. A friend and I repeatedly cleared Frostmaw’s Burrows in Guild Wars just to see the drops we could get out of the end chest, the grind didn’t bother us. If dungeons in Guild Wars 2 had a similar very rare chance that bosses and chests dropped exclusive loot, that would go a long way as far as replay-ability goes.

Lastly, loot in dungeons is entirely horrific. I’ve never seen anything remarkable drop EVER. At least make the chests and bosses drop more or better loot.

Whenever I consider doing a dungeon, I relearn that standing around spamming “LFG” is not fun. I end up leaving and having fun elsewhere. I believe that dungeons simply are not very accessible to anyone less than hardcore. To that end, I’d love to see a better group finding system or scaling with the number of players.

Also, the decision to end the personal story in a 5 man dungeon is very confusing to me. After completing the rest of the story solo, it was like, “Good job, you’re so close to the end! And now for something completely different.”

One thing I’ve always enjoyed from dungeons in any MMO were random, rare, bosses that had a “chance” to drop something special, possibly named after him/her.

Examples:

-Path 3 in Arah, one of the Giants pathing around the final platform has a chance to be called “BIG NOSE NICK”, and he can drop mob-specific items. Rare skins and what not.

-CoF path 1, when you do the event that spawns Acolytes that you have to kill, one of the other mobs that spawn has a chance to be a named Champion, with a high chance to drop one of X number of weapon skins.

Stuff like this would make people want to kill stuff, and also make encounters much more dynamic and/or give players the chance to make some parts of the dungeon more challenging in order to gain some cool stuff.

Drew.1865:

Oh you must mean even more rewards than the 3 gold I made running cof and AC this morning.

I have yet to see 3 gold in two dungeon runs. I usually see little more than 75 silver.

So either you are extremely lucky and you wear full MF gear or know some secrets the rest of us don’t.

Some of my thoughts…

#1: Something close to the actual new dg system with several levels of difficulty of the same content but all of them rewarding in a scale basis. Low difficulty with less rewards and high difficulty with more. To prevent gating, dont introduce progression (you can go to the last difficulty on the first attempt if you want).

#2: Something with a group rank based on time spent to complete the dg. You could have a fixed maximum reward that can only be achieved by breaking the best time. You can have a reward scale towards the best time too.

There are more ideas but the thing here is reward better those groups that are really good without letting farm pug groups be the “right choice”. You can’t remove 100% grind or farm or force people to not to farm/grind but you can reward better those that don’t.
Of course this will only work with a good design of dgs.
What happened with CoF and several other dungeons after launch can’t happen again.

Sorry my bad english….

I admit I haven’t read the thread, so I apologise if any of this is blatant reiteration:

- The swamp fractal is kitten. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE a challenge! But the swamp fractal isn’t challenging, it’s just frustrating. I like puzzles that are overcome by skill or innovation, not by sheer luck. Pros: it deeply encourages communication and teamwork. Cons: it just has TOO MUCH schtick. Timed carrying challenge with extremely small window of completion? Check. Traps that slow or stop your progress during that window? Check. Aggressive enemies that respawn incredibly quickly and are in some cases impossible to avoid? Check. Dynamic terrain that actually seems programmed to block your progress AS you arrive there? Check. Putting all of those things together in the same instance is just, frankly, overkill. And more to the point, it’s not fun. Aside from the very first time doing the fractal, I’ve never had fun doing it. I’ve never met anyone else who finds it fun, either. Every other fractal is, on the other hand, SO RIDICULOUSLY FUN and rewarding, that it’s all people do nowadays! I just wish I didn’t dread getting that kitten swamp.

- Rewards for story mode are pretty pathetic. 10s and some experience? Woo. I feel like story mode should appeal to everyone, so that people who haven’t done story yet have an easier time finding a party to go with. I suggest adding dungeon tokens to the end reward, or upping the monetary reward to 1g (awarded once a day, maybe). Otherwise it just feels barely worth doing the story mode (even though I personally love the narratives).

- Drops are, as your team has acknowledged, bunked up. There have been days when I’ve done multiple dungeon runs, and gotten nothing above a Masterwork item. Even with full magic find gear, and a Sigil of Luck (which I realise many people think is a waste of upgrade space, possibly because of this exact problem), it’s incredibly seldom that I get even a rare, much less an exotic. Due to the fact that dungeons are one of the most challenging activities in the game, this seems like a poor way to reward the effort and skill that go into completing them. However, I feel that drops throughout all of the game feel a tad lackluster, so I won’t go into further detail.

Ruien.9506:

-snip-
4)Put in Armor Trophies that people can see that you have done a truly challenging dungeon. These have absolutely 0 stats. They are there for others to see. They arent titles they are instantly recognized by all when you have done something not many other people can but has 0 power. The tokens for armor system of now would have worked better if they had had 0 and I mean 0 stats on them.

These are just some ideas.

I would love to see some town clothes rewards from dungeons. Devs always said cash shop items would be attainable through in-game activities. And no I don’t consider converting gold —> gems a viable method (especially with the exchange rate….)

Replace waypoints with checkpoints, like in fractals, and tone down difficulty accordingly. Graveyard rushing is frustrating and demoralizing.

But the biggest thing I think is to reduce the health of a good number of the enemies. A few of the random mobs running around have little strategy to them. Killing them is a chore. It has no challenge or difficulty. You sit there and whack them for 5-8minutes.

Basically, if the enemy is just filller between the next challenge, it shouldn’t be a huge waste of time.

How about A DUNGEON FINDER. The dungeons are fine. I hate spending an hour just looking for a kitten group and 95% of the groups are for AC because no one wants to walk anywhere else or do anything else. Dungeon finder that teleports you to dungeon and back to your original location.

I’d say drop the health of one or two bosses, perhaps, but the majority are fine, I believe. Bosses like Alpha, the Destroyer, ones people often bring up.

Others are over the top, including the first Dredge Foreman on SE Path 2, and the CM bosses. Often it’s bosses that don’t mix up the gameplay mechanics, and offer nothing new. But again, I say, most are fine, including the Fractals ones (possible exception being the Archdiviner).

Extra paths has been mentioned elsewhere— let me just say, I love the approach that’s been taken with multiple dungeon paths in this game. Problems aside, it’s great design, and people DO play more than one path, whatever the complaints are. The title saw to that.

The Bags of Wondrous Goods were a great addition, but I share the feeling that the tokens are a little stingy. As it is, the dungeon sets take a number of runs divisible by 60 to obtain— which makes sense, since tokens initially came only in 60s (DR notwithstanding). However, this means that someone would have to obtain 20 bags of wondrous goods just to stop them from having to run the dungeon once.

That’s a bit silly.

I think somewhere between 5 and 10 is reasonable… maybe even make it a bit random, within parameters. Other people have been suggesting more than 10, but I think that’s going too far, and would end up with people farming early bosses and leaving end-rewards for good. Jeez, you just can’t give MMO players any room to cut corners :/

I think peoples complaints over Arah Path 4 are well-founded (Simin acts as a brick wall, it’d be alright if she didn’t come in a path that already takes 3-4 hours routinely). I think peoples complaints over Alpha in CoE are less well founded— he requires alertness, awareness and skill, he shouldn’t be toned down. This is a boss fight all about movement. Boss fights I thought incredibly fun and innovative were ones like Baelfire in CoF— makes you change gameplay style unexpectedly, impressive visuals etc.

In fact, all dungeons deserve props for incredible visuals— even CM, which is my least favourite gameplay-wise. Visually stunning.

OOOOOONE final personal point, mister Hrouda— I’ve been collecting for my SE exotic (medium) since I had access to SE, very early in the game. I played it whenever grouping for it is possible, incl path 1 and 2. Now that it’s finished, I notice that the texture on the helmet… it looks like it’s been done in MS paint. Even the non-exotic version of the helmet is properly formed (but without the glow, ofc).

It’s a a real disappointment to me, after putting in a lot of effort in a dungeon very few people play. I don’t know whether this is the kind of thing you’re interested in, but maybe it’s only a quick fix, I don’t know, especially since the non-exotic is fine. Take a look, it’s a serious downgrade in quality from most armours, and it’s exotic-grade.

I started to write something small, but it turned out to be huge, so I decided to create a thread to detail the idea itself better. Find it here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Idea-Bonus-Mode-On-all-routes-completion.

Short summary:

#1: Make story mode attractive for replayability
#2: Encourage completing all routes on explorable mode
#3: Add special content for those who complete story and explorable modes, like a mini-dungeon or a boss (helps fix both #1 and #2)

You need to encourage completing all paths. Giving some extra tokens (like the daily fractals chest) could work. You could give some dungeon-unique item, too (in line with the unique boss drops). A more drastic solution could be unlocking special content (#3).

Story mode is much more better and epic in pretty much all the dungeons, and it’s a pity it’s “do once and forget” content. Giving tokens on SM, too, could be a good idea (but not as many as in the explorable mode).

Dungeon finder -or- use all of your magical scaling abilities so I can run dungeons with my 2 real life friends who play and disregard strangers. Scale the dungeon, scale the loot, scale scale scale I know you can do it.

This is hypothetical but…

Dungeon with 2 = +2 stats
Dungeon with 3 = +3 stats
Dungeon with 4 = well, you get the idea

Make the stats marginal but running it with a full party gives the “best”

Just throwin the idea out there.

More boss mechanics, phasing, and make mechanics random.

Instead of it being the same thing over again, the boss battle can be split up at three different parts.

There would be a minimum of 7 different mechanic for 3 phases. Making every boss battle fresh and new. The lack of randomness makes the battle very stale and boring. This is what helped made Fractals fresh and new even after I did all the paths.

Casual player here these days, but also as someone who signed up for Everquest on Day 1 and played through it for years, then most recently playing LOTRO for awhile, I have to say I haven’t had that “epic” feel across the GW2 dungeons I’ve seen so far.

Now, I’ve only done CoF, AC, TA, and Fractals up to level 5, and there are some tough bosses. But still it’s only one group and it seems like everyone already has the strategy figured out long before the encounter starts. I’m not sure about Arah as it seems it’s so hard that folks don’t want to play it (chickens!)

Maybe it’s not possible due to game mechanics (instanced dungeons) or maybe that’s not where you want to go with the game, but I miss the feeling of a huge raid of several groups joining together to do something epic. There was nothing quite like requiring an entire server of guilds cooperate to get the bodies/classes needed (50-60 toons) to take down the likes of Nagafen, Vox, Kerafyrm, or Innoruuk. WvW comes close, but still that’s against other players and not lore of any sort. The Ancient Karka was really cool, but not that epic. So maybe it’s a combination of WvW mechanics and a Karka, dynamic type of PvE situation?

Thanks for listening and looking forward to many more great dungeon crawls!

Hi guys, one of the biggest miss from the dungeons in Guild Wars 2 is the Dungeon Finder for the game. It is not fun to stay in major city’s/zones and spamm the chat to find a group/or member. Please consider as a high priority the Dungeon Finder . Any game of GW2 caliber should have in 2012 the DF in it’s release. Hope you guys appreciate the idea and hope you implement it asap.

OMG… so many peaple asking for Dungeon Finder ?! HOW lazy can You be not to be able find a group by urselves !? This is madness is this still an MMO ?

#&$% You Blizzard for destroying the good old fashion MMO idea of dungeons by adding something so stupid like dungeon finders, such a wanderfull world and peaple sit on their kitten in towns and LFD…

[img]http://i1098.photobucket.com/albums/g363/blong217/1_I_Dont_Want_to_Live_on_This_Planet_Anymore-s500x282-295658-580.jpg[/img]

but indeed chat bans for looking for party = spamming can be annoying

Only thing that I really dislike about dungeons is the boss A.I.’s. Have more flavour between each and every boss fight.

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.

i really like this idea im in dire need of some molten/destroyer lodestones and this would really help me out with getting those, plus i rarely ever get them to drop in the dungeons.
if you don’t like that idea maybe just up the drop rate a little

Before anyone worries about fixing dungeons, the process of getting into dungeons needs to be fixed

I have just under 250 hours played, but I haven’t run a single dungeon.

Not one.
I want to.
I love running dungeons

However, I flat out, 100% absolutely refuse to sit around spamming /m lfg

I personally think anet should be utterly ashamed to have not only launched without a group finder but to be months into release and putting out new dungeons which actually manage to make the situation massively worse.

Halo.8976:

Tokens exchange. I like some dungeons, but I HATE ARAH. Worst. Dungeon. Ever.

This. Oh god this. I don’t care if you up the price for armor. But Arah is easily the worst experience i’ve ever had in any mmo ever. Which is a shame because the armor looks amazing. Whereas, I love AC and TA but their armor looks kitten #8230;.

One thing I would like is some better rewards for story mode, since the story mode dungeons were really well done and there is not much reason to go back.

All final bosses should spawn a chest. For example, CM Seraph final boss doesn’t spawn a chest while Butler final boss does spawn a chest. There’s a bunch of others but I can’t remember them all off the top of my head, but I think CoE has the same issue.

Just for a bit of background, I’m one path away from my dungeon master title and I play mostly a support guardian.

1. Boss HP is usually too high.

2. Mechanics need to matter. This relates to point 1, because when there are mechanics in a boss fight that are trivial and can be ignored, it just degrades into a tedious situation where we mindlessly attack the boss without moving. I understand that this is mostly a numbers balancing issue, so I’m confident you guys will fix it over time.

3. A “lockout” would be extremely helpful for dungeons like Arah, where it is sometimes not possible to complete a path in one sitting. Having dungeons save progress until the reset would be ideal for me, although this may cause issues for those who aren’t concerned with diminishing returns and want to farm the same path repeatedly. I don’t have a better solution right now, though.

4. You should incentivize killing trash mobs. As it is right now, most pug groups will simply run past trash pulls whenever it is possible. Adding rare drops for skins would probably fix this, since horizontal progression is the main focus of most players.

5. I’ll be succinct since this topic is already over-discussed. Your implementation of Ascended gear is key to its success in game. I think it’s safe to say that most people would prefer horizontal progression through aesthetics and customization rather than stat increases, since the vertical progression model is already available in all traditional MMO’s.

Please, be careful that you don’t create a situation where the ascended tier of armour is so significantly better for all content that it becomes mandatory to obtain it.

6. I’d like to see more multi-phase bosses like Giganticus Lupicus. That was a very fun and engaging fight, my dungeon group enjoys the difficulty of it.

EDIT: I forgot to add that I absolutely hate graveyard zerging. Once a fight starts, you should not be able to just take the waypoint and come back in. It really takes away from the challenge since you have so many extra attempts, especially if the waypoint is close.

TheWalkingDead.7298:

PLEASE Remove the magic find stat from dungeons all together, it rewards you for being selfish and hurts you for gearing correctly

Mostly, all MF sets and weapons should never even existed at all from beginning. MF with food, fine, leaving the player to wear a proper armor, not a leeching one.

Akuma The Wicked.9528:

Halo.8976:

Tokens exchange. I like some dungeons, but I HATE ARAH. Worst. Dungeon. Ever.

This. Oh god this. I don’t care if you up the price for armor. But Arah is easily the worst experience i’ve ever had in any mmo ever. Which is a shame because the armor looks amazing. Whereas, I love AC and TA but their armor looks kitten …

I strongly disagree. If you see someone wearing arah armour, you know they’ve worked hard for it, and as a result it is rare and valuable.
Most people can clear CoF or AC, so this would give an extremely easy way to obtain it. That devalues the arah armour set and the accomplishments of the players that completed it.

Quam.7218:

OMG… so many peaple asking for Dungeon Finder ?! HOW lazy can You be not to be able find a group by urselves !? This is madness is this still an MMO ?

#&$% You Blizzard for destroying the good old fashion MMO idea of dungeons by adding something so stupid like dungeon finders, such a wanderfull world and peaple sit on their kitten in towns and LFD…

[img]http://i1098.photobucket.com/albums/g363/blong217/1_I_Dont_Want_to_Live_on_This_Planet_Anymore-s500x282-295658-580.jpg[/img]

but indeed chat bans for looking for party = spamming can be annoying

Yeah I would agree kids these days they don’t know how to spam LFG like honestly it’s so eas- YOUR MESSAGE HAS BEEN SUPPRESSED DUE TO EXTENSIVE MESSAGING

I’m not an expert of dungeons (this game and others) but I really do love running them but there’s a few suggestions that I would love to have happen in them (I think they may have already been suggested but here’s I go anyway)

I think it would be awesome to have more “interactive puzzles” to progress in the dungeons – fractals have done a great job of this so far and AC is my favourite in terms of dungeons because of this (Detra’s traps of the gravelings). It’s not just all fighting but use of wit too. Kind of like the Zelda series dungeons.

Also… more “do a certain thing” to damage bosses is really fun. Like in Sorrow Embrace, you need to kill both golems at the sameish time (though really hate that dungeon and that boss fight but that’s the type of mechanic I would like to see more of) for not just the main boss but mini bosses too – that way it’s not just all fighting and people won’t rely on others for just “deeps” or just “tank”.

I also love how AC has random events if you trigger them; the ghost behind the staircase, the troll randomly poping out. More dungeons should have these

LASTLY, adds or trash mobs. They need to be more “worth to kill”. I’m sick of joining parties where we skip through like half the dungeon avoiding things and then when one of us die, we can’t get back as easily because of all the things we skipped. In AC, mobs drop a lot of money for how long it takes to kill them. I would like to see this happen in other dungeons.

Also~ More karma rewards should be implemented. Some people just run dungeons for whatever their reason is – token gear or cores/lodestones and they do not really get a lot of karma. I wish this would be more.

I know quite a few people who haven’t run dungeons enough to give any [useful] feedback. I’m in that same boat.

For this reason, imo, ANet should roll out a quality “LFG” product, give that some time to stew, and then ask for this sort of feedback.

Right now, imo, dungeons are just not accessible enough to get feedback from a very broad spectrum of players.

It will be disappointing to see time devoted to changing dungeons based on this feedback instead of being allocated to creating the LFG.

I’ve pretty much stopped playing GW2, most people I know have quit. The way Dungeons and Fractals have been handled is a large part of this.

1) Bugs don’t get fixed fast enough. There aren’t that many dungeons and there are even fewer good dungeons. Every time a path gets bugged that is one less dungeon we can do to add variety to our runs. Things being left in such a sorry state for over a month while we wait on a big dungeon patch is unacceptable. Especially when that patch fails to address all the issues and the next patch could be over a month down the road.

2) Dungeon rewards are horrifically imbalanced. Arah takes considerably more time and effort to do, but you still get a mere 60 tokens. The more challenging dungeons need to offer bigger rewards.

3) The failure of fractals is another huge problem. Taken individually the fractal dungeons are interesting. However, fractals as a whole are terrible due to the lack of reconnects, the character bound progress system, and being limited to the least progressed player. You have had 3 weeks now to fix things with fractals, we’ve seen nothing. Why should we have any faith that we will see fixed in a reasonable time frame? Reconnects should have seriously been at the top of the list and got an emergency patch. It is that big of a problem.

Ultimately, the way GW2’s end game has been handled has permanently damaged A.net’s reputation for many players. GW2 sold based on the reputation of GW1. Much of that reputation is now burned and must be reearned.

Spankert.7514:

Some bosses have WAY too much hp. We are easily better as a team than these bosses and the only threat they impose is a time threat, this is incredibly boring and discourages people from doing dungeons.

This is incredibly important.

We are at geargrind stage yet, there is nothing to be earned back for a gw1 player who believed their statements when we bough the game to justify a log back except bored if you didn’t lost somewhere you password, for big events, when back+rings are done. Not willing to be a betatester for that much more than until i find the last ring i need. Even the fotm only guild i joined is poor of players, and with nor representing people. I had to join them leaving FOUR guilds, totally empty all the day and night from days and days.
If someone is gonna plan to answer " well no subs, you can log later", there are other f2p mmos online yet, one is new too and way more fun.

I haven’t read any of the posts in this thread yet, so I may be repeating what others have been saying. But either way, here it goes.

1. First and foremost, I think the dungeons need more unique boss encounters. Bosses like Giganticus Lupicus. Maybe not every dungeon needs an equivalent of him, but it would be great if the higher level dungeons had something like this. This guy is simply the funnest boss in the game and having other bosses with the same difficulty would be awesome.

2. Lose the random champion mini-boss with a TON of health but no new mechanics introduced over time. One example that comes to mind is the dog in CM Explorable. Seriously, that dog takes years to kill and is the same over the entire fight, he’s boring.

3. It would be nice to add some waypoints in some of the dungeons. For example, in Arah path 1, was it intended that there is no WP after the tar elemental fight? It takes a good 5 mins to get back to lupicus if someone dies.

4. Exploits and bug fixes. Would be amazing to have all these sorted out.

5. Remove Magic find from dungeons, entirely. Please. I would ask to remove it from the game but that may be going too far.

Can’t think of anything else right now. I would also like to say that the extra dungeon rewards that were added are great.

I think there are three major things I would change in current (and future) dungeons to make them more enjoyable.

1st – Eliminating the grind — Fractals of the Mist really helps with this, because it’s more of a “what dungeons are we going to get this time” rather than "time to farm this path because it’s easiest.

In normal dungeons the easiest path is generally what people farm to get tokens. This path is the easiest path to find a group for, and people are generally unwilling to do other paths.

This easiest path might not necessarily be the most fun to you though.

Fractals did a really good job of eliminating that, and the feel of grinding. If newer dungeons acted in difficulty like a normal dungeon – but behaved like a fractal (multiple, random, miniature, dungeons.)

2nd – “Quest chains” that lead into dungeons and offer unique objectives for a few players. Unique skin rewards would be pretty cool (cooler if you could choose what type of weapon you are rewarded with).

3rd – Story displayed while playing, rather than in cut-scenes. Story is better delivered by watching characters interact and speak about the world around them presently, rather than something all groups will skip because they take them out of the game. Think Half-life 2 presented story in an MMO setting.

Thank you for reading and taking to heart our opinion, ArenaNet is great.

1 And what part of “i still need to drop an ascended ring/ ring with my stats” grind you lost ,thinking it is eliminated?
2 Forget it, we asked it from day 1, just ignored.
3 again, forget it, asked from day 1, ignored.

Noone is taking to heart our opinion at all, don’t illude yourself.

I think the most important upgrade for instances its to give phases to bosses, its very important this aspect. A boss with phase breaks the monotony and give a sense of achievement when we for example reach the phase 2 of the boss.

A lot of the bosses imo are not very well design especially those who have a lot and i mean a lot hp like in HoW instance and the mechanic its always the same.

One of the things that i miss from other games its like we wipe on phase 3 and we would analyse whats going wrong and what we need to do diferent, unfortunely here doenst happen except in a few rare cases, like Lupicus in Arah.

On the loot side of things – you need to break the degeneracy on the market. As far as rewards go, the only thing that is different between the dungeons is the tokens, which cannot be traded, and the occasional lodestone drop. For the most part your rewards are raw gold and vendor trash (into raw gold), which encourages running the easiest dungeons.

If dungeons had distinct rewards that could be traded, then the price mechanism would do all the work in making the harder dungeons more rewarding – since those rewards would be much more scarce, and thus more valuable.

I don’t think rewards are in a bad place on the whole at the moment, they’re just undifferentiated.

I second the motion to have a way to “Ascend” the exotic dungeon armor sets we use tokens to buy, so there will be more incentive to bring people back to running dungeons.

I would also like the story mode to award some sort of reward (like tokens, a buff, or whatever) to players who repeat them to accompany those who haven’t unlocked them, so that those wanting to do story mode can find people to do them with.

I would also like to point out that some of the encounters boil down to hitting HP sponges. That kinda sucks.

Also maybe tweak the spawn-time of Volatile Blossoms in TA?

But first and foremost, a way to “Ascend” our exotic armor sets!

How about not making one scale you up to its level and taking everyone away from the rest of the world?
I’m a newer player, and only just now found out about this. Feels pretty bad.
Its no wonder I meet no one whilst I’m out exploring these days.

most of the encounters aren’t complex enough, although i can’t talk about most of the fractals. except for those, though, every dungeon should have at least one boss like giganticus lupicus in every explorable path. that is the kind of complexity and business you expect from dungeon content that was said to be challenging.

apropos business: i can only echo a lot of the other players and say that most bosses have far too much health for how busy their fights are. most of the time, you need to pay attention to about 3 relatively simple things and that’s it. a fight like that doesn’t have to take 10min on average just through the dps requirements.

i would like to see more phased encounters, because i feel they make longer fights more fun. different phases give you a sense of progress inside the encounter, some nice variety and make it feel less outdrawn, because you have to change up what you do during the fight (you’re not doing the same stuff all the time).

last, but not least, some stuff is/was bugged in a way that i don’t think is okay for a release version of the game. like arah being closed and unopenable for the majority of the time on most servers.

I’d like it if there weren’t so many ways to get one-shotted in dungeons. I’d like it if dungeons weren’t super long. I’d really like it if the rewards for completing a path was split along the bosses of that path (instead getting it all at the end give fractions of it for each boss, that way it feels like less of a waste of time if you can’t finish the run). I’d also really like a dungeon finder.

Aside: are there guides for dungeons outside of the wiki and the videos stickied here?

Robert, I would happily run dungeons except that everyone and their kitten uncle under level 60 is trying to run Fractals, and trying to run fractals is pathetic as everyone is on different skill tiers.

Earlier in the week I tried to assist some newb guildmates going through CoF explorable the first time and we couldn’t even summon help Fireheart Rise to take the gates of flame such that we failed the first time. After 20-30 minutes of frustration and doing the lead-up events, I even offered to pay 1g to people in the zone and I still got no one beyond those in my party. Everybody runs Fractals because they perceive it as more profitable and don’t want to get left behind by the levelled gating system being user so no one bothers to try running dungeons, I can’t imagine how frustrating this is for people just hitting 80 or people trying to complete their set of exotics

Many of these had been stated, just restating some to show my support:

Boss fights, they should not last more than 1 minute per mechanic in the fight. Meaning if all the boss does is walk around and breath on ya, he should only have enough HP to survive 1 minute of sustained damge

Magic find was a novel idea to create a hardmode. Problem is that it is not a decision a party gets to make. A player gets to chose to put the burden on the rest of the party which is many times a PUG. Get rid of the MF stat on gear. My recommendation is have MF be a multiplier of your world completion %. Your character has traveled thus he knows where to find the better items at.

I am tired of the “skip” dungeons where players exploit terrain or slow AI in order to rush to the only thing worth getting in the dungeon and that is the final 60 tokens and 27s. Make the money a percentage of the mobs cleared, or at least a percentage of so many mini-bosses or mini-events.

Create a token exchange NPC market. You already know how often each dungeon it getting run. Have an NPC that will exchange tokens of one dungeon for another based off of the previous week’s average runs. Meaning, if TA was run the least last week, its tokens are worth more to exchange for other dungeons up to a max of 1:1. Gives flexibility and encourages more runs on different dungeons.

Use the dungeons as part of the legendary process. Exchange X number of tokens for a gift needed for certain legendaries. Farming world mobs endlessly to simply buy your legendary components really devalues legendaries as anything but farming achievements.

Introduce daily/weekly dungeon runs for bonuses. NPC wants X bosses killed and is will to give you a reward (tokens, chest, BL keys/kits, whatever)

Fractals – standardize the levels into tiers so people are not so segregated in forming PUGs. Also make it so that running 6 different fractals levels you the same as 3 in a row. Since you would need to track which fractals were run by a player, have the RNG that picks your fractals use logic of the least run in the group. And definitely, figure out a way for players that DC to get back into the fractal. Lock in the character so people cannot play switching games for credit if need be.

Many of these had been stated, just restating some to show my support:

Boss fights, they should not last more than 1 minute per mechanic in the fight. Meaning if all the boss does is walk around and breath on ya, he should only have enough HP to survive 1 minute of sustained damge

Magic find was a novel idea to create a hardmode. Problem is that it is not a decision a party gets to make. A player gets to chose to put the burden on the rest of the party which is many times a PUG. Get rid of the MF stat on gear. My recommendation is have MF be a multiplier of your world completion %. Your character has traveled thus he knows where to find the better items at.

I am tired of the “skip” dungeons where players exploit terrain or slow AI in order to rush to the only thing worth getting in the dungeon and that is the final 60 tokens and 27s. Make the money a percentage of the mobs cleared, or at least a percentage of so many mini-bosses or mini-events.

Create a token exchange NPC market. You already know how often each dungeon it getting run. Have an NPC that will exchange tokens of one dungeon for another based off of the previous week’s average runs. Meaning, if TA was run the least last week, its tokens are worth more to exchange for other dungeons up to a max of 1:1. Gives flexibility and encourages more runs on different dungeons.

Use the dungeons as part of the legendary process. Exchange X number of tokens for a gift needed for certain legendaries. Farming world mobs endlessly to simply buy your legendary components really devalues legendaries as anything but farming achievements.

Introduce daily/weekly dungeon runs for bonuses. NPC wants X bosses killed and is will to give you a reward (tokens, chest, BL keys/kits, whatever)

Fractals – standardize the levels into tiers so people are not so segregated in forming PUGs. Also make it so that running 6 different fractals levels you the same as 3 in a row. Since you would need to track which fractals were run by a player, have the RNG that picks your fractals use logic of the least run in the group. And definitely, figure out a way for players that DC to get back into the fractal. Lock in the character so people cannot play switching games for credit if need be.

Standing around for 3 days shouting for FOTM Lvl 3 doesnt help…since everyone is like 30+

How to make dungeons more attractive? A few suggestions:

a) If you are willing to do an overhaul, make them open instances (at least the explorable modes) that everyone goes into, like any other map zone. You can do all those path events with your already set Dynamic Event system.

b) Make them scale to number in your party so people can go in solo and come out victorious with solid gaming.

c) Make story mode more rewarding than explorable, but only let each player “lead” story mode for a dungeon ONCE. This will encourage people to run Story mode more, as the pool of people that can lead teams in will dry up. As for rewards I’m talking maybe Precursors can drop from Arah story.

d) Consistency with trash. A regular outside I can kill with ease. Same dude inside (not silver or champ) takes an insane increased amount of damage. Why? If their loot table is the same as the dudes outside, then make them the same strength – just boost their numbers. You want to keep them strong? Fine, each should drop GOLD coins on death. Otherwise they really are just something to skip over, like feces littering the dungeon.

e) A side query – can an arenanet team (5 players) actually keep all the good guy NPCs you escort through a dungeon alive all the times without them needing ressurection? If the answer is no then you should rethink their AI too. Having to revive them is… lets just say immersion breaking, so either make them die permanently or don’t let them come along at all.

f) Fractal level segregation is stupid. Sorry. Let the teams choose whatever level they want to run right off the bat. Agony should be modified to control this. It shouldn’t come from AoE attacks or boss special abilities. It should be if you are standing there even not in combat you are DYING THE ENTIRE TIME. Slowly at first, and at the higher levels your life drains down pretty kitten fast unless you have the ascended gear to counter it. At the highest levels, there should only be enough protection (in total) to slow down your death but not stop it entirely meaning everything is on a timer.

g) How many times do you have to GRIND a dungeon to get a full set of armor and a weapon? If you do story and each path once you SHOULD have enough for everything. Unless you want to, you know, intentionally drain the fun out of dungeons and make people have a grindy experience (which is what is happening now).