Guild Wars 2

It’s apparent that dungeons currently have issues in a variety of ways, and besides quick bandaid fixes for exploits, there has been little communication on the future of dungeons. I think (hope) that both the devs and players realize dungeons in their current state won’t retain players.

This leads to the feedback on the current state of dungeons, note I have 2 level 80s in full exotics, have experienced a variety of dungeons, come from top raid guilds in other games, and am in a WvW guild in TA on HoD; so isn’t coming from someone with no clue or experience in GW2 or MMOs in general.

1. For dungeons to be successful, it needs to cater to both casuals and hardcores, and introduce new players to harder mechanics in stages, rather then all at once.

When I was leveling my first character, it was obvious that dungeons were vastly untuned in story mode. AC30 involved lots of deaths, but was pretty impossible to lose due to close WPs and zerging. All of a sudden, stuff was actually hitting hard. Then CM40 was incredibly easy besides the golem fight and ended up being a walk in the park and a farm spot. Then TA50 brought back alot of good challenge and strategies on bosses, and it was obvious the most thought went into this dungeon out of the 3, but it was something most players never experienced. I also remember that a group of two silver mobs in the first encounter in TA story was one of the hardest encounters in the entire dungeon. Those 3 starter dungeons basically show that early progression and learning is all over the place. Damage and insane health for trash mobs really needs to be looked at, especially for story mode (and especially lower level ones) which is supposed to introduce players to dungeons.

2. Explore paths should be balanced for different difficulties, and rewards should be appropriate for said difficulty.

I think this is the main thing that should be done to attract your entire PvE player base. Of the 3 explore modes, they should be tuned so that the first is easy, the second is medium, and the third is hard. In Arah’s case the 4th path should be very hard to give something for hardcore players to be challenged with. This lets all players experience content that you worked hard on developing, and extends the life of the game. To get the achievement you would still need to do every path, and achievements are usually something that shows you mastered the content, but casuals could still grind for cosmetics at a slower pace. The rewards also need to be retuned, maybe 3 tokens per boss in easy mode, 8 tokens for medium, and 15 per hard and then take a look at chest drop rates for the 3 difficulties. For Arah very hard you could give a unique helm for the reward with a special skin. Something like this goes a long way for longevity.

3. Account bound tokens for variety and longevity

I still don’t get why tokens have remained soulbound. As someone who has two 80s, it’s nice being able to pick and choose which class I want to use. Instead of have 2 stacks of fragmented tokens that are seemingly useless since they can’t be used on alts for lower level dungeon gear and I can’t do anything with them on a main unless I want to run the same thing 10+ times. There is seemingly no reason to make them soulbound, and goes against grinding for alts from both GW1, and other methods in GW2 (gold and honor badges).

4. Difficulty vs Tedium

This is something that plagues both Story quests and dungeons, the seemingly insane amounts of hp of trash mobs that require almost no strategy. The amount of health on enemies really needs to be looked at. It creates tedium with no challenge which eventually makes people stop playing. Random silver mobs shouldn’t take as long to kill as some bosses, it’s just boring.

5. Balancing Rewards

Rewards for hard challenging content should be balanced accordingly. After the most recent CM and CoF nerfs, it is both faster and wayyyy easier to just do DEs and trash farming for rewards. This is obvious by the amount of bots in known DE and farm locations. The only people running hard dungeons are real players who are working together, they should be rewarded accordingly. If you are afraid of inflation, then make the rewards higher in terms of better loot drops and more tokens instead of straight silver. It’s obvious that one of the most unbalanced areas is the amount of runs it requires for skins. I get you want people to grind insane amounts for legendaries, but there are a ton of cool exotic skins in the game from a variety of areas, with probably more to come. Maybe tune it down a bit so it doesn’t take 100 hours of doing very hard content to get a skin set? Nothing from the cash shop benefits dungeons really, keeping us there and making us frustrated and bored isn’t going to get you more gem sales, it’ll just make people quit.

cont.

These are just my opinions, but as someone who has played through all areas of the game for countless hours, it obvious that dungeons are easily the weakest part of the game and if it wasn’t for sPvP and WvW, many hardcore players probably wouldn’t be playing still, which is worry some for people who are only concerned with PvE.

That being said, this is one of the best launch MMOs I’ve ever played and has a ton of potential, which is why I want it to improve, thanks for reading.