Guild Wars 2

I really like the GW2 dungeons because of their uniqueness in versatility. Not every boss is just another tank-and-spank, and each dungeon has its own special tricks and tactics. I run dungeons even if I’m not after the tokens or the lodestones, simply because they’re fun — the only time I really have a bad time in a dungeon is if my teammates don’t listen, are uncommunicative, or just plain rude. To be honest, there isn’t much I want to change about them, but here’s some of the things I don’t like:

1. Dungeons take too long because of boss health.

If your group is bad, or if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s completely understandable if you take more than an hour to finish a single dungeon. But if your group is good and knows what they’re doing, then why does it still take so long?
The dungeon I’m thinking of in particular is Crucible of Eternity. Subject Alpha has enormous health; he’s one of my favorite bosses in terms of strategy, because I find the ice path-dodging to be a great challenge, but even if all your team members know what to do and don’t wipe, it takes incredibly long to finish the dungeon simply because the boss’s life is so big. And if you do die, the walk back is really, really long (thankfully this was addressed in path 2, with the addition of a new waypoint, but I have yet to see this improvement in path 3). A lot of people simply don’t run CoE because a) you have a big chance of getting at least one member who can’t dodge and b) even if you do have a great team, it’s a minimum of one hour, most of which is taken up by (almost) mindlessly attacking Alpha. I would love if this dungeon had more challenges like the laser, or even a more difficult Alpha, so long as it takes less time for a practiced group. I feel like the game is catering to glass cannon specced players — the better skilled you are, the less you need to spec on toughness/vitality — but it’s a pain for those of us who like being tough and tanky and supportive.

2. Looking for group system and the guesting feature.

The LFG system is a common complaint, and while I don’t really have trouble finding groups myself, I find it strange that players have to rely on external sources like gw2lfg.com to find members. As for the guesting feature, again I’m thinking of CoE — when you have five members from five different servers, and it’s contested on every server, then you have five people who want to do a dungeon together but can’t because there’s no one on Mount Maelstrom willing to kill the annoying Champ guarding the door.

3. Dungeons that cater to certain playstyles.

I don’t know if this is an oversight or it was really meant to be this way, but like I said in number 1, I find that some dungeons cater to certain builds and playstyles more than others. The TA dungeon, for example, I’ve found to be heavily ranged-biased. The strategy for the nightmare tree is almost always “ranged him to death”, and that isn’t fun for players who use only melee weapons. Or sometimes, a dungeon can be dps-biased, like SE path 1. I’ve taken to bringing a scepter and staff on my guardian, and I levelled a dps mesmer to 80 so I have more options when I want to run dungeons. Again, I don’t know if this is good or bad, because in some ways I like it (you need to know strategy to run it) but in some ways I don’t (I feel restricted whenever I want to do a dungeon and I’m on the wrong character). Perhaps if the bosses had two strategies, one involving more than one type of playstyle?

I admit I didn’t read whole topic so has been probably mentioned.

1) Steep learning process
Story-modes should be more easier and more tutorial-like (like NPCs giving advice, they are Destinys Edge after all). Even better if featuring exp-mode mechanics.

2) Brute-force/faceroll should be less effective
Beating a boss without even knowing and using its mechanics feels bad and dull. For example that self-healing champion in SE2 should heal way faster and way more obviously forcing you to do something about it. And of course reduce maximum health to compensate.

3) Interrupts not very rewarding because of Defiant
Honestly, I never seen clever use of interrupts in pugs (or even in most non-pug) because it is simply not worth of it. Burning through five or more stacks to get a chance for interrupt require huge coordination which most of teams don’t have.
I’m suggesting Anger-stacks instead. Whenever boss gets interrupted it gets Anger-stacks based on what was interrupted (like 0-1 for interrupting nothing, 3-5 for a skill, 5-10 for something major). One stack gets removed in 3-5 seconds. After 10-15 stack boss gets CC immunity. I think this would make clever use of interrupts more rewarding and team-mates less likely screwing up you while still preventing CC-lock. Downside is you can’t burn through stacks but possible add with bit more complex system.

4) Thrash/Repeating fights
Every fight should be unique. Thrash monsters are fine but there needs to be something special about them (very different group composition for example).

There’s one thing that really needs attention. Tokens should not take up slots in our inventory. We should have a token / trophy storage. This annoys me to no end.

Relevant: Allow Rangers to permanently stow their pet. When running advanced tactics in dungeons, I do not want to mess up agro if I’m hit.

My supposedly baddass Charr… Farts Chocobos when hit… Moas…

My current frustration about dungeon is that it is the only place where exotic jeweler recipe drops. this is particularly frustrating because it’s starting to be that ‘grindy game’ that it’s not suppose to be. i have tons of tokens sitting in my bank. but no recipe.

Even more frustrating is that I’m trying to get my hands on the recipe for nightmare coil from TA. and as a necro with no reliable stability. it gets frustrating when you plead and beg to your team to clear mobs and yet they still run past and leave you behind. I’m spec’d tanky (vit/tough) but no way in hell am i getting past chain knockdown mobs. don’t get me wrong, I’ve run past many of them too myself. but if you’re the lucky all the knights or husks decide to chain knockdown, no way are you getting up from that. most of the time too, your group won’t go back to run with you.
(and no, i will not respec 30 pts into DS 3 sec stability just so I might survive, maybe, running past mobs. I created my necro to play it as a minion master, full of bugs as it is, that’s how I want to play it. I’ve got other characters if I wanted to play a different style)

I’ve ragequit many groups this way. Even stopped using gw2lfg.com because I don’t want my name tainted anymore than it already is as a rage quitter. But people don’t realize that not all classes can skip mobs this way. I should know. I have 4 80s. And I’m stuck with using my necro for dungeons because she’s the jeweler (another frustration since reports say that the recipe drop is soulbound on acquire).

1. why are jewelry recipes only dungeon drops on RNG?!
2. not all classes can skip mobs. not everyone understands this.

Here are my points:

1. I’d like to see 1 guaranteed rare drop at the end of the dungeon. Considering they take about 30-60 minutes to clear I don’t think that’s unreasonable. This ensures they’re worth running even when you don’t need the Tokens.

2. Please add a separate Token tab to the game as Dungeon Tokens take up a lot of unnecessary bag space.

3. A lot of bosses simply have too much HP and too few mechanics to make for an interesting fight. The Jellyfish in the FotM is a classic example of this. He has one…maybe two mechanics…both completely lackluster. The rest of the fight is about grinding his HP down without falling asleep.

General rule should be, don’t have a fight last longer than 4 minutes without changing up the mechanics. Lupius is ok for example because his fight dynamics change. Many others are not, however.

4. Combat mechanics, especially aggro/threat have to be more transparent. The fact that you can’t effectively control certain mobs like the aforementioned Jellyfish make the fight so much more tedious than they have to be.

5. TONE DOWN THE MELEE HATE. So many bosses have abilities or simply auto-attacks that can near-instantly kill any melee in range. This is something ranged players simply don’t have to care about and it is hugely unfair. Melee being higher risk/reward is ok but the current boss designs make the choice moot in many cases. You see, melee is already inherently more difficult because you have less oversight and a harder time avoiding red circles. No need to exasperate this.

6. Reduce NPC interaction to a bare minimum. Babysitting NPCs, be it protecting them or accompanying them is so tedious and causes so many bugs and flukes. It’s very frustrating when you can’t progress simply because NPCs aren’t doing what they’re supposed to do or they’re holding the group back because they aggro’d a mob. Their nothing but a hindrance and annoyance in most cases.

7. Event Chains unlocking Dungeons. This is a cool concept….on paper….but anyone with even an ounce of MMO experience could have told you how bad this idea is. Let’s ignore the fact that bugged event chains have often resulted in certain instances being inaccessible for weeks (or even months). When I find a group for a dungeon I want to do it now. Not in 15 minutes…not when the game feels like letting me. No, now! Everything else is just completely arbitrary. People do dungeons because they are reliable and semi-predictable. These event-chains are not.

8. Poorly balanced events/encounters. Some events, like the “Protect Magg by kiting mobs” event in CoF path 2 are just very imbalanced. I doubt you intended for the current system where people would take turns sacrificing themselves. There are many other similar imbalances that could use some looking into.

Here are a few things I think will improve the dungeons:
- Give bosses clear tactics, (like don’t stand in the fire, or move away during this stage) instead of just giving bosses abilities that are able to 1shot people and make the player figure out how to do it.
- Make the bossfights more rewarding, the chests need to have a higher chance of dropping exotic gear.
- Maybe make an gear set in the dungeon different from the gear set you get with those coins, an exotic gear set with low drop rates.
- Give bosses a few items whereas always one drops, make those items known to the players. This way people might want to do a dungeon for a particular item.

I’m sure the people behind the dungeon design played a lot of GW1. Remember The Deep? Fissure? UW? Domain of Anguish? I miss that experience. You know, that feeling of exploring an insanely hostile territory, to cautiosly journey from quest to quest, and where every player death was meaningful.
In many ways the current dungeons remind me of old dungeon crawlers, and not in a positive way. The way to go is too often: Enter that room, kill everything in it, (seldom) solve puzzle, progress to the next one, repeat. There’s just something off about it to me.
Basically, one of the issues I have with dungeons is that they are way to linear. I’m not asking for future dungeons to be all an open area with several quests that can be done in random order leading up to a final confrontation, like the GW1 elite reas, but I’d certainly like to see some of them.
Related to that, the current dungeons with the possible exception Arah are too short. Way too short. I don’t know of a path anywhere that can’t be done in half an hour if you know the strategy. I did CoE for the second time just yesterday with a quasi-PUG party that was mostly second- or first-timers as well and we barely clocked 35-40 minutes each for the first two paths. We didn’t have a clue!
Once again, half-hour dungeons have a place, but to an experienced player they’re a snack instead of a full menu.

More specific points:
*As often requested, bosses desperatly need phases. 99% of bosses in the game are one-trick ponies that become tedious after the first few minutes. Only a tiny circle of them keep you on your toes, like Subject Alpha. For some particular encounters a gating mechanism would be neat, so that spawn rushing is discouraged and players have to coordinate a hardrez of a defeated player.
*The silver “trash” is absolutely fine. I love it. Finally a enemy in a MMO, that isn’t a boss, where it’s actually worth to use single target CC or DoTs against, because they present a danger instead of a nuissance that dies in the blink of an eye due to focus fire and AoE. Their current sturdiness is perfect.
*I think we need much more content that requires communication. Fractals was a good start for that.
*I’d like a return of persistent environmental effects like in the elite areas mentioned at the beginning.
*More “Cave Troll” events.
*I don’t think a hard mode would be a good idea. Segregates the player base too much.
*A random idea I had is a dungeon that features two (or more) unrelated parties, either with coorporation (in a select few spots; the rest of the way they’d be seperate) or rivalry (i.e. not PvP but for example a race to the final boss).
*If there’s a well-known AI/engine exploit, like porting Magg through the lava room, I think it needs to be actively fixed. It just leads to a cheesy experience and shouting at players that aren’t familiar with or don’t want to partake in it.
*As for rewards, I think token drops are fine, but most armors are ugly. Seriously. While this is subjective, it’s pretty evident that there’s a tendency when you visit the picture threads that people comparatively seldom brag or express their happiness about finally getting their dungeon set, compared to cultural gear or even crafting sets.

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.

I just wanted to single that sentence out as a (no offense) degenerate mentality, and I hope Anet knows how to deal with it. Dungeons really shouldn’t be looked at as pure loot/token piñatas.
Personally, I find it fun to engage those mobs, but I see how players running them over and over (I’m doing it myself with CoF and AC) makes you lose that fun quickly. But that doesn’t mean the content should become a non-issue, that would lead to it become even more of a mindless grind, like a Skinner box.

After coming from just one such terrible a run; Stop people having the ability of running through freely like the police are at the door at they have to hide the miniature pony dressed in leather in the back room.

Sick of it!

I’m one of those who still thinks that the dungeons are too hard, take too long, have too many bugs, the bosses have way too much HP, and for the time that it all takes, first to get a group together, possibly have to clear the way to gate, then do the run…

The loot is pathetic for all of what you have to put up with.

I stopped doing the dungeons here and unless they are toned down quite a bit I probably will never do another dungeon run in this game. I’m a casual player and I want to enjoy my gaming time with some laid back fun.

For those of you who want to tell me to quit being bad at the game? I have things I would like to tell you that aren’t allowed here. So just save it.

Please add a unique cosmetic reward (like the fractal weapon skins) that let other players know you have defeated a difficult boss / dungeon route (e.g. Lupicus).

If this reward visually upgradeable, so that you can tell who’s beaten him once and who has consistently beaten him several times, it would add prestige to players who are able to do paths of a dungeon that are considered difficult.

Edit: Also, boss rush mode would be nice.

Also like somebody said, the fact that you have to choose between your magic find set and your stats optimized set. You do your dungeon and then at the end you’re like “If only I had my set on maybe my loot would be better” then again I don’t want boss fight to go any longer and always wear my stats optimized set. Magic find should be in a specific slot or something.

Feeling a bit disgusted when I finish a dungeon shouldn’t be what I feel.

I would like to see dynamic difficulty adjustment where the dungeon difficulty adjusts lower as it detects you or your team mates are sucking badly.

By defaulting to high difficulty and then adjusting lower – you keep the challenge for the skilled players but you stop less skilled groups getting frustrated.

-More token rewards, atm there ain’t too many items i can buy with tokens, for example most people only are buying armor sets and once that is done its nothing left to do with tokens. For example my friend atm has bought his CoF armor set and now hes sitting with almost 4k tokens. Lodestone idea was very good. Like 1 lodestones for 100-150 tokens.

- Unique dungeon drops. Guild wars 2 had underworld where at end chest you had chance for items such as Dhuum’s Soul Reaper, unique scythe which was only possible to drop from that dungeon and Miniature Dhuum (collected 2 of those from underworld out of about 500 times i have completed it ). Like if arah would have chance to drop Miniature Lupicus, i would definently do the dungeon much more often.

-This isn’t really just for dungeons idea but i want the /age back showing how much time i have spent in that area. Makes it much more enjoyable when we are trying to get fastest time possible on a dungeon completion. Thats actually the one thing that kept me playing guild wars 1 for so long (and many of my friend).

-Bosses are quite nice but atm most of them are just too easy and take too long to finish. Rather make them do more damage or just more difficult in general instead of running in circle with ranged weapons and killing the enemy. Lupicus is good example for me of what all bosses should be. It’s not too difficult with team that knows what to do but i like the phase idea. In that boss i don’t even care if it has alot of HP because its fun.

-Bigger party restrictions in future dungeons? Groups of 8 players for some dungeons would be very fun.

Scaling dungeons with the number of people in your party – if i want to try something solo or duo with a friend – why not?

1 – We need an ingame LFG tool, doesn’t have to be an auto group maker, just something that lists the dungeons people are looking for, groups lfm etc. Anything would be better than hoping you land in overflow when you travel to LA and spamming 3-4 times before getting suppressed.
2 – With more people doing FotM and less people doing the old dungeons, the price of lodestones required to make named exotics/ legendaries (i’m looking at you charged & onyx) is getting ridiculous. Lodestones should be added to the respective dungeon token merchants, even if they were 200 tokens each or more it would still be preferable to paying up to 2g 50s for one lodestone, especially when you need 100 of them and even more so when the drop rate from dungeon chests is stupidly low.
3 – Dungeons that take 2-3 times longer to complete than others should get 2-3 times the reward.

Avigrus.2871:

Scaling dungeons with the number of people in your party – if i want to try something solo or duo with a friend – why not?

I loved this concept in Tabula Rasa, It would be great to see this implemented in GW2

It would be nice if the unique equipment/rings dropped from Fractals of the Mists were account bound on equip instead of soulbound, or at least purchasable by that dungeons tokens.

Currently have two ascended rings with stats I can’t really justify soul-binding to my thief that I primarily use for Fractals. A bit of a nitpick, but it honestly dissuades me from progressing onto the more difficult levels until I get a ring that suits the build I’m using for that character. It wouldn’t be so bad if there were other ways of obtaining them, but as it stands, I feel like I’m at the mercy of an RNG-pool I must repeatedly throw dice at until I get lucky.

I wouldn’t mind dungeons to be much harder but you get over 5 Rares, multiple lodestones and chance of precursors from chests per run.

That feeling of wanderlust.. could it be bought into dungeons? Something new and interesting to find everytime you redo it? Or maybe a minigame?

Honestly, my biggest problem with dungeons right now is that the bosses take too long to kill, and are not interesting to fight. Take a boss with a semi-interesting teaching mechanic: the sword-wielding Lieutenant in the middle of Ascalon Catacombs. If you can dodge his pull five times, you can do it ten times. There is no need for him to have so much HP that he can do his pull a dozen times. Once you get the dodges down, that fight is just an incredibly boring tank-and-spank. It’s interesting while you’re learning it, but once you’ve learned it (which is easy in your first fight) the fight is just long, with rare spikes of interest when you have to dodge the pull. And then it’s back to your boring DPS rotation.

Let’s look at another example: Ginva the Butcher, the Path 1 boss in Honor of the Waves. This fight would be amazing with just one change — take away the Protection totem, and add an offensive buff in its place. The Protection totem is basically redundant to the Regeneration one, and is a very boring buff to fight. Regeneration feels like a race – you want to keep the DPS on him, but also take down the totem quickly enough that you don’t lose ground on his HP. The Retaliation totem is so small (~200 damage per hit) that we just ignore it on our runs, preferring to just DPS him rather than waste time on the totem — but that does leave us more fragile, so it’s an interesting choice in how to approach it. The Protection totem doesn’t work like that. If we take DPS away from the boss every, what, 15-20s? to kill the totem, then odds are we’re putting enough DPS into the totem to make up for the 33% difference. So we just ignore it, and the fight is probably the same length as it would be if we killed it. It’s the most boring possible buff. Replace it with Fury, and suddenly he’s a huge threat every time it’s up, and the fight becomes a hectic race against his spikes of damage. A Might totem, that pulses every 3-5s and can stack up to 10 stacks on him, would open a lot of interesting possibilities, though. Do you bring a Mesmer to steal stacks? Or just try your best to take it down when it comes up? Or deal with the extra DPS he does, finding some way to mitigate it? Oh, and remember those stacks would add to the Retribution totem’s power, too, so maybe you take out the Retribution totem instead of the Might? Or alternate? Interesting choices. Protection’s “he takes longer to kill” is just… boring. It’s a good boon for players and PvP, but in PvE fights, you might as well just give the guy extra HP — and he’s got more than enough HP to begin with.

Compare this to my favorite boss fight in that instance – Path 3’s Legendary Fimbul. His iceblock heal is a frantic moment, forcing us to balance DPS against Fimbul and holding back our biggest hits to stop him from healing. An interesting mechanic, and it doesn’t pop up so often that it becomes repetitive, and he’s still a threat otherwise, especially when you’re balancing him and his adds early in the fight. That fight is fun. A bit over-long (all the bosses in this game far outlast what is needed to show mastery of the mechanics of the fight — which is all a boss fight should require), but more fun than most bosses.

Now, for an example of what I mean by “showing mastery of the mechanics.” Every time I kill the [Dredge suit/ice elemental] boss in the Dredge fractal, it takes some 10 to 15 hits from the molten stuff to kill it. Miss a superheat? Have fun watching him heal back all the damage you did on the last one. Why are both of these mechanics together? Not only does it take next to no damage normally and require an effect to hurt, AND have a way of killing you effectively (grenades/summons), but it can undo whatever damage you manage to do with a single heal.

Larger party size! This may sound like a traditional raiding request, but I love the epic feeling of a large party facing hard encounters. The great part about this is you can actually have tactical coordinated combat, versus the normal rule of “don’t stand in the red rings.” This doesn’t degrade into roles like “this is wear the healer stands…” but into something more constantly like the Dredge Fractal final boss with the molten pots. I’d like to see more mechanics like that enter dungeons, but I know that reasonably you’re limited by the amount of players allowed in the party.

I believe a big founding thought in GW2 is that everyone should get to play how they want to, so horizontal progression is amazing (and I love the options everywhere) however there’s no reason not to have vertical progression as well (and it doesn’t have to be gear-based.) Vertical progression outside of fractals is pretty non-existent, and while some of your player base don’t want it, some of your player base does! And since you can start designing really complex tactical scenarios as far as boss fights the challenge isn’t a gear-check, it’s a can-you-coordinate-effectively check.

The other thing I really liked about fractals is that you incorporated jumping puzzle-like components to it, which is fairly unique to GW2, and everyone really enjoys them. It really gives some depth to the “challenge” of a dungeon as the challenge is not just knowing the mechanics of a boss, but also knowing that certain mobs knock back so you have to be more situationally aware, etc…

I’d also like to see more story while you’re fighting (like different phases an NPC will say something to progress the topic…) rather than cut scenes. I love cut scenes, but I think there are other ways to weave story into the game during actual gameplay.

I think incorporating these aspects into the game will make it a more complete game as far as horizontal content is concerned because there is just a hole right now for big-group boss-like battles. You can argue that the world bosses provide this, however the tactics to these bosses are non existent because you want the entry fee to participate low since they are actually happening in the world (unavoidable in the zone, etc..) What I’m really asking for is encounters on an equivalent scale or higher to the tactics required for competent WvWvW play and system that supports a larger group.

It’s been said a few times, but I’d like to see loot tables improved on “trash mobs,” with perhaps a reduction in their HP to make the fights go faster. I’ve only been able to do explorable mode with PUGs, and these groups are just interested in flying through the content as fast as possible, resulting in a lot of skipped enemies.

Tokens need more uses and are way to easy to aquire. I already trade in most of the tokens for weapons to throw into the mystic forge.

Something like the Underworld and Fissure of Woe. To this day, those remain two of my favorite MMO experiences of all time.

They felt like awesomely warped/twisted versions of the real world with their own distinct character and history, and the fact that they were only reachable through certain portals/events made them seem like truly separate places.

Also, the fact that the whole zone was a dungeon of sorts without any necessary linear progression made them very cool. We’d run around them for hours just to explore and kill the elite mobs.

Explore dungeons

1. Remove contested dungeons. They prevent players from….playing, which should never be the case. It is good on paper, but with lackluster bug fixes <Arah was broken for over a month which should never happen to you endgame dungeon> and players not wanting to secure them 24/7 it becomes tedious for smaller groups <See freeing CoE with 5 people for an example>.

2. Balance out dungeon run timers. I am against long dungeon runs – They are tedious, tiring, and most of all filled with unnecessary/unrewarding dungeon padding. Each path should take 20 – 30 mins. If you want the full experience it will be roughly 1hr – 1hr 1/2, which is the perfect time as that is roughly where casuals playtime lies. Arah would sit at 1hr 1/2 – 2hr for full completion still nice, but slightly more hardcore <as it should be>.

3. Remove unrewarding dungeon events. If you want a “boss” event – make it a boss event. If not just make trash instead. We shouldn’t have to go through high HP “mini” bosses that offer NO chest reward for compensation. A great example of this is the robot “mini” boss in CoE. High HP and a boring fight followed directly by the hacking event which is a real event. It is awkward dungeon design to slap two boss encounters in a row, but only one has any real reward. The other is simply dungeon padding. – padding – isn’t – fun.

4. “Bonus” encounters should be a triggered system to make them truly a bonus. It should allow players to choose to lengthen their dungeon by fighting “Mini-bosses” similar to the troll. You must find a randomly placed trigger, but it spawns an extra chest or always drops some sort of lodestone/core, just something worthwhile to make you hunt for these triggers.

5. Redo the reward system. I know shocker since you already did it right? The problem with a no RNG system is that as the devs found it people get bored and feel it is WAY too grindy. Tokens aren’t impressive and you can’t link to friends. However a pure RNG system is way too random such as the loot system we have now. It offers nothing in return other than pure RNG, sometimes you get nothing for a run and that can kill new players initiative to run dungeons as they will most likely rack up a repair bill, and leave with nothing but blues.

A mix of both should work:
T1: 30-39: 100% at 1 blue your class can use / 2 random blues All +2 your current level

T2: 40-69: 100% at 1 green that your class can use / 2 random blues/greens / All +2 your current level

T3: 70-79: 100% at 1 yellow that your class can use / 2 random blues/greens / All +2 your current level

T4: 80: 100% at 1 exotic of the dungeon set you can use at the Final chest only. Random which piece. Set on daily timer. All other chests follow: 100% 1 yellow / low chance at exotic / 2 random greens/yellows. Trash will be sole source of blue 80 drops.

The reason I went with this system is because it allows players to get loot at all dungeon tiers and slow increases the rewards. This allows players leveling up to have a “dungeon” progression. When they hit 80 players can have RNG hit in (W/o the horrid Ascended RNG system), and it might help them, and it might not. They still get a chance though. The tokens would remain the same to prevent grind for random exotics. Players would want to explore dungeons rather than skip them for the “Bonus” encounters which will always reward a lodestone/core (whichever) as a prize for finding it and completing it. Multiple random types of Bonus encounters is encouraged. Make the spider/troll two variations that you might run into, but only one pop per run. Sometime you might get a troll, sometimes you might spawn the spider queen.

6. LFG system, we NEED one. A third party site should make the devs realize that this has gone too far.

7. Reduce HP on bosses. What is it with Sons of Svanir and huge HP pools? It even invaded the ice fractal with the shaman boss.

8. Tougher bosses with better abilities. HoTW butcher totems should be slightly different, but not respawn as fast. Maybe have them pop at certain percentages (every 25%), and players must rush to clear them. Swap retail totem for Might+fury.

9. Please remove “no touch” abilities such as the butchers Spin to win. If you don’t have AoE it isn’t fun to just randomly have to stop attacking both range and melee. Maybe mix it in with the totems so you can disable it.

10. Fix various exploits.

SM:
1. Make story mode duo instances. That will allow players to do them as they are deserted and no amount of “tokens” will make me do them. Tokens are worthless to me at this point, and players feel that you get enough just by explore.

2. Reduce the rewards to compensate for duo mode. Make them 1/2 blue(s) with a rare chance of greens. One random green you can use at the final chest.

(Continued) – Hit max character limit on last post.

Fracals:

1. Fix bugs – This is a HIGH priority since it is random and we can’t “choose” to ignore a fractal.

2. Fix DC issue

3. Fix ascended RNG. Make it so you get 100% chance at a random ring. So were chasing “perfect” stats rather than complete RNG.

5. Make it so that players can join based on player choice. Such as:
Player 1 – level 5
Player 2 – Level 10
Player 3 – level 20
Player 4 – level 1
Player 5 – level 2

Players can choose level 1/2/5/10/20 as their difficulty. You will ONLY progress on levels that are higher than your original number (So a 10 can progress on a 20, but not the other way around). This would allow level 1’s to join in daily runs if they are good enough. You would only gain usually progression numbers – 10/20 on level 20 difficulty the level 10 would go to 11 while the 20 would go to 21.

5. Fix exploits (shocker I know, but that shouldn’t be #1)

6. Add xp “bonus” similar to Dungeons in fractals. Maybe not silver reward, but at least something.

7. Loot should progressively get better:
T1 – Blues
T2 – Greens
T3 – yellows
T4 – Yellow with a low chance at an exotic

8. Make it cross server! I am unsure why you decided to code fractals to only use the specific server you are on (home/overflow), but that was unwise. The greatest thing about SM/Exp is that you can do it cross server. This just makes it a pain as you all have to be in some sort of overflow and makes grouping even MORE complicated in a complex and rather archaic grouping system.

9. Leaderboards – I want to see where I stand. It promotes competition in PvE as well as more reason to log in rather than daily runs, which can’t last forever.

Sunny.6354:

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 already suggested the Zelda-style stuff and no one listens or bothers to acknowledge it as a great idea.

Yumiko Ishida.3769:

I already suggested the Zelda-style stuff and no one listens or bothers to acknowledge it as a great idea.

I think its a great idea!

Robert Hrouda.1327:

I’d love to hear from you folks about this thread

I’d also love to post in the thread about what some of our plans are, but there is a time and place for everything.

I am pretty sure this ll get buried but it would be an awesome idea to incorporated tokens in the story mode after the 1st time you’ve done them. Maybe half the tokens or something.

I really enjoy the times when i revisited the story after doing the exp mode 5 billion times.But most of the time I don’t because I don’t get rewarded and getting rewarded would be 1 step closer to the legendary…

just my thoughts

-Make MF shared for the whole party when someone uses MF gear or remove it from dungeons. A dungeon is composed of 5 players not just one, you can’t add a “greedy” stat that only boosts one player while at the same time it kittens the whole team.

-T6 mats dropping from chests along with higher drop for lodestones (at least the final chest), they will still be rare, but not insanely expensive.

-Ability to exchange an ascended ring + tokens for an ascended ring with the stats you want.

-Fractals need to run on a token system. RNG for best in slot gear is a terrible decision that carried over to cater to WoW babies and is quickly destroying this community. I mean, nobody wants to grind fractals for hours on end only to get a crappy ascended ring that doesn’t give any of the stats they were looking for. The token system was perfect because I knew for a fact I was making progress and that I would get the reward I wanted at the end.

-The fact that I see more and more threads promoting ostracizing entire classes and anything that doesn’t run cookie cutter builds shows that there are some major flaws in class balance. People shouldn’t be forced to run an extremely specific build they may not enjoy just to be able to get the gear they want. This is a game not a job.

-Old dungeons may still have the skin factor to them, but they will quickly fade away unless something is done to give them more incentive. I’d like to see each dungeon be required to do in order to get a full set of ascended gear, or at the very least make it so old dungeons give something to help you get ascended gear. Maybe a dynamic event in each of them, like a portal from the mists that opens up and releases a boss you can defeat for fractal tokens..

Most suggestions in this topic are very bad. I’m sure Robert know it, but I would like to state why.

1) Many suggestions come from people using the same mentality as seen in other games. See the very concept of “trash mobs” – enemies that might as well not be there since they are so easy to kill that they do not require any kind of effort and do not provide any kind of challenge. Instead of asking for common mobs in dungeons to become “trash mobs”, something ArenaNet mentioned in one of the dungeon blog entries that they were actively trying to avoid, people should ask for those mobs to become more interesting so it’s fun to kill them.

2) Many suggestions don’t consider the whole impact those ideas would have in the game. For example, suggesting better rewards for partially completing a dungeon: then we would have the same issue Arah has just had. If doing the beginning of a dungeon is rewarding enough and fast enough, people will just do it over and over instead of playing through the full dungeon.

3) Many suggestions are based on bad game design. Grind is the main example here. Asking for merely increased rewards is not going to change anything. If the dungeon rewards were increased as a whole, or if the dungeon rewards were increased only for specific dungeons, people would just find the dungeon and path with the best “time invested/reward acquire” ratio and keep farming it over and over. Which is more or less the issue with Fractals right now. Bigger rewards are not going to make people play more varied dungeons; they would at most move grinders from the current grinding spots to a single new one.

4) Many ideas are so bad they are a mix of all of the above. Adding a “Hard Mode” to dungeons is a perfect example of this. Not only it would fracture the community even more (each dungeon would have 6 possible paths instead of 3; good luck finding a group for the path you want), it would also make PUGs impossible to join (PUGs would rather try the Hard Mode and fail than try the normal mode and actually suceed but get a smaller reward) and it’s basically based on bad design.

My main suggestion is about Ascalon Catacombs: currently, the ways to do damage to structures are very limited, since they are imune to conditions and both melee and ranged attacks often give the “obstructed” messages. This makes destroying burrows to be somewhat annoying; it’s easy, yes, but it’s imbalanced since necromancers have it harder than other professions, and for some weapon combinations it’s simply bugged (a shortbow/longbow ranger is going to get “obstructed” messages more often than not). I would be happy to see this changed, so structures take normal damage.

@Erasculio, adding money drops inflates the economy, adding item drops does not, it just lowers the prices for these items. So if people just farmed over and over a place that pretty much gives you mainly…let’s say…a charged lodestone, the only impact on the game will be that charged lodestones will be worthless…people won’t get rich.
The issue with arah was that the rewards were mainly money and on top of it you could get more from drops and tokens (ectos).

At the Moment my sole request is to balance the explorable ways. Right now there is always one rush way, that can be done fast, while others are hard or at least time consuming.
If there are dungeons with harder enemies or scripts and you wont increase the tokens for these runs, then balance them. For example citadel of flame way 1 and 3. You can actually get more tokens, even with diminishing returns, if you just run way 1 in the time of way 3. The extra money on top of that.

I also would like to see some epic big dungeons like the sorts of Eye of the North.
Dungeons in which you have to prepare a group. Not just 5 individuals, but changing traits and skills for bosses as needed and actually synergizing them with team members.

At last, reduce the hp of some bosses. One feels stupid to bash on some mob for 10 minutes that is not dangerous. Less hp and more dangerous is ok. But one hitting aes all the time isn’t good also.

Dungeon Finder,

Enough said.

Difficulty and rewards seem about right. Fractal dungeons are some of the best content in the game but their level system has terribly fragmented the community.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

I’d love to hear from you folks about this thread

I’d also love to post in the thread about what some of our plans are, but there is a time and place for everything.

Time – adjust the time of the various paths to be roughly equal. When I hear that a given dungeon/path takes anywhere near an hour, I simply don’t do that path. I don’t want to raid – if I did, I’d be playing a game with raiding.

Fun – much of the combat in dungeons (especially the non-Fractals) simply isn’t very fun. Simple boss fights with tons of health that take forever to kill but aren’t really a challenge aren’t fun. Overhealthed trash mobs that pose no danger aren’t fun. If you want players to enter your dungeons for fun, they should be fun to do.

Rewards – much of the trash give nothing worthwhile, but only serve to steal your time. And once someone has what they want from a dungeon, why is there a reason to go back if they don’t consider it fun? Something useful to do with any extra token would be nice – be it some sort of consumable, or some way to exchange them, or anything, really.

RNG – Just…no. The RNG design of the Ascended rings drop is just…very lazy design.

Bugs – the AI of your NPCs, throughout the game, is bad. I don’t know if their AI breaking is the cause of all the various dungeon bugs – but one of your other posts hints that it is. Design your NPC AI around things that people WILL DO, not around the one way that you guys expect people to do things. If skipping mobs breaks NPC AI (and therefore the dungeons), either make mobs unskippable or adjust the AI so it can handle it. People WILL skip what they can, especially if that something either rewards nothing (trash) or isn’t worth the trouble for the rewards (some bosses).

Dungeon finder/better LFG tool – it doesn’t have to auto-group me, it doesn’t have to auto-port me to a dungeon, but it has to make it EASY for me to find the other people playing the game that want to do the same thing I do. Overflow hopping in LA shows that there are dozens of people (at least) that want to do any given dungeon at any given time, but your game provides no way for them to know about each other. At minimum this tool should match the functionality of the lfg website – at minimum. If it doesn’t, or if it does, but is harder to use, people simply won’t use it, and you will be wasting dev time.

Pre-events – please disable these.

-Story Mode dungeons are just as hard if not harder than explorables. Either give them the same rewards as explorables or make them orders of magnitude easier to match their rewards.

-Dungeon/Group finder. Let me scan a list of people flagged as interested for particular dungeons and whisper/invite them. Do NOT autogroup me and/or port me to the dungeon when 5 people happen to be ready.

-Remove the events contesting the entrances to dungeons. Do not fix them. They serve no purpose other than needlessly keeping me from fun content.

-Nerf every Silver grade mobs damage and HP. Three Ascalonian Rangers are more dangerous than anything else in AC. More than a single Knight in TA are as well. I dont care what the rewards are. They’re cheap, overpowered, and are avoided/skipped/exploited past for good reason. The ones that aren’t dangerous just take forever to kill.

Less hassle, seriously running through half a dungeon to get back to a boss so it doesn’t reset is just frustrating, the main reason i gave up CoE..

All classes equal in dungeons and have an actual use to be there.

These insane insta kill mechanics that are just plain annoying (cof fire rocks, CoE laser fence) that mesmers can totally circumvent just sucks…

Trash mobs harder than boss mobs, seriously…

Lack of Rewards to suit the risk, 2-5 hours in a dungeon for blue and green junk out of a chest (why bother) no wonder so many exploit and dodge half the content in them, even 60 tokens aren’t worth that hassle in the end.

Zero rewards in Story dungeons = waste of time bothering.

The bosses either need to be more interesting in their mechanics or less health padded, especially when they near one shot every player, spending 5 minutes dodgeing a simple auto attack and 1 aoe ability while you auto attack down some 100k health pull isn’t nearly as much fun as I’d be able to convince you it isn’t…

Also just in general, More mobs, less health, players enjoy killing things, lots of things, especially in coordinated groups, that’s why GW1 was so fun, you’d often fight 10+ mobs but now you come accross 2-3 supper mobs that can be more challenging than some of the bosses and you never get to have fun large fights cause more than 3 of any of the mobs and you’re party is liable to wipe. Loot can still be balanced with this but I enjoyed GW1 where the time to kill on any single mob was pretty quick.

I do dungeons only occasionally, and my only two points of feed back would be now with the Fractals, It’s hard to find other players to do dungeons that are not FOTM, so maybe a matchmaking tool that’ll match players to do dungeons. Also I find that the bosses take quite a while to kill, and the rewards aren’t the greatest from the chests.

1. You could have challenge modes that’ll offer bonus rewards upon completion. Furthermore, these modes can cater to those who have the time to spare and actually want to combat mobs instead of “skipping trash”. So in essence, you’re giving players who don’t skip a chance at something good for their efforts.

To make it more interesting, these modes can be time-based, so your group focuses on coordinating the best tactics to drop the mobs the fastest way. So you’d be promoting speed-clears, but without the “skip trash” mindset.

There could even be titles implemented into this system.

The biggest problem with dungeons comes from the entire way that a lot of players are thinking. It’s this mindset of “gold gold gold, gimme gold”. The question is not about how to make dungeons more attractive, but instead it’s how do you create a game that doesn’t encourage these narrow mindsets without actually dismantling anyone?

I think some suggestions in this thread miss the point.

Larger gold drops: That would just lead to more inflation? The only thing that’s expensive and unaffected by that is cultural armor. Grinding your way to a legendary or gearing up your alt won’t become a single purchasing power adjusted copper coin cheaper. Better chest drops, particularly unique dungeon skins, are perfectly reasonable however.

Able to play the dungeons single or duo, or with henchmen: This is exactly what ANet tried to avoid this time around. That content is supposed to be strictly multiplayer. They need to include a better LFG tool to facilitate that though.

Shorter timers: The reason behind the timers is to incentivize people to run the other paths. Shorter timers would lead to the longer/harder paths becoming even less desirable, particularly to Pugs. I might add that by design longer paths should offer better rewards.

Easier story mode: You probably remember them harder than they were because you were likely less experienced and less geared. More importantly, the story mode is meant to ease players in the “harsh reality” of the endgame. It’s not bad if they struggle for the first few times and have to adapt, have to leave their comfort zone. Tearing and healing is how muscles are formed, if you allow an analogy.

Dante.1508:

Zero rewards in Story dungeons = waste of time bothering.

What about fun? Unlike explorables you aren’t supposed to farm them. I remember ANet having stated somewhere that story mode isn’t even meant to be repeated more than once per char.

Jamais vu.5284:

Dante.1508:

Zero rewards in Story dungeons = waste of time bothering.

What about fun? Unlike explorables you aren’t supposed to farm them. I remember ANet having stated somewhere that story mode isn’t even meant to be repeated more than once per char.

The problem is finding groups for story mode when everyone only does it once. The most polished and interesting dungeons in the game go unplayed because they offer no replay-ability (either in gameplay or rewards).

Hello all,

I have to admit that the new “Bag of Wonderous goods” has helped, but unfortunately, many of us find ourselves getting “Dark Vine”/“FoeFire Amulet” which is kinda frustrating especially for us level 80s.

I’ve only read page 1 and 5 of this topic, but I would certainly second these ideas:

1) Acquiring Lodestones through the use of tokens. The price on TP is ridiculous, and it makes infinite light looks like a legendary. On top of that, the chance of it dropping is just like whether will it rain today? >___<

2) LFG. Enough said, hope there’s a easier way to find Dungeon Run groups. I ought to thank FOTM for buffing up the amount of people in LA and thus the Overflows, making LA more active for finding people. However, I suppose what Dungeon we do depends on what the Map chat has, or whether our guildies are in the mood to do it or not.

3) Token Gallery. I admit, they do take up space, loads more space for those who do them daily, many times.

4) A Bug system. I’ve to admit, Twilight Arbour is challenging and a few times, it bugged after killing the stupid tree on Path 1. There goes all the token rewards and effort spent. Maybe there should be some kind of error systems that Admins can look at, such that when we report it, you can look into them, then probably re imburse the tokens later? I guess Dungeon will be a crucial part to look at, since it takes much effort and time to complete, no1 would wanna complete it and walk off empty handed.

5) New paths for the old dungeons for Fractuals or Ascended Gears?

6) Lastly, I totally agree for New dungeons (like a Crystal minions; Shatterer those or Quaggons based) , or increasing the amount of people to do dungeons. Maybe this will help to “kill time” as bosses take so long to die.

I did CoE3 yesterday. It was horrible.

Destroyer is still a tedious kitten and Alpha is the most annoying of all Alphas in this path.

Fix it.

Dungeons like Arah is far too long, reward vs time doesn’t pay off, is not to be pugged. Farm CoF p1-2, AC instead.

Very difficult trash like nightmare knights(knockdown combo? -.- better skip them!) without reward.

Boring bosses like Nightmare Tree(auto attack! go afk! ZzZzZz)

Please add epic music to all dungeons and bosses(again like Nightmare Tree)

RobinotX.1604:

How can you make Dungeons more attractive?

We know there is coming an overhaul. But how can we make it so that people will feel that dungeons are less a grind? Make a chance to let gear drop at bosses? Or special gear drop at bosses and ask the RNG to do it for us?

Or maybe quests inside dungeons to get certain things to craft pieces of armor or weapons who have an unique look?

I think Arenanet alienated people from some dungeons by:

1) Making them hard, especially supposedly trash mobs – many are brutal. This can be fun but is sometimes horrid – depends on the team, their gear, their level and experience playing their character.

2) Offering ugly gear sets for hard dungeons and pretty sets for the easy dungeons. Why are the weapon rewards for AC so cool? Why does CoF armour look so good? Arah weapons look plain. Surely, it would be best to offer ugly but functional stuff for the easy dungeons and beautiful AND functional stuff for the hard ones?
I think this might even itself out over time as people start wearing the now “novel” CoE gear to look a bit more unique, etc.

I’ve done all paths except for the bugged arah ones.

Anyways only problem I have is with :

Some paths you’ll only want to play once (the looong ones) since they have poor rewards for the time your party invests in them .

Higher level dungeons still gives out mostly blues and other junk from chests. Compare to Fractuals where it’s fairly common to get an exotic from the chest.

Over use of trash padding to inflate the time. Worst offender here is Arah, maybe TA.

Hoping Arah is rebalanced so people aren’t so inclined to just baggie farm.