Guild Wars 2

Having newly hit 80 on my Mesmer, I took it upon myself to finally earn that armor set from Twilight Arbor. I have almost all of my exotics on this character. I’ve been running this dungeon for some time now with random groups, and I have also done AC story with a random group. I’d like to make some comments on the current state of the dungeons in Guild Wars 2.

Let me make my position clear first. I love this game so far. My Mesmer is a survival build and is focused on tolerable dps with improved utility. I’m not the hardiest character, but I’m very good at avoiding death as well as aiding others with condition removal, etc. Also, the dungeons in this game are not the first I’ve ever played. I played wow for six years. Yes, I know the systems are different. I do not expect the trinity in this game, nor would I want it. That’s not the issue here. While I was in wow, I dungeoned a LOT. I did every normal dungeon, many BC heroics, almost all the BC raids, all the Wrath heroics, and all the Cata heroics. These were done multiple times on multiple class types. It was pretty much all I did. I’ve seen a lot.

Having said this, I’ve noticed some things about the dungeons in Guild Wars 2. I have one major issue: I’m not having fun. By this I do not mean dungeons are too hard. I’ve done hard dungeons in the past and loved it. I also do not mean that it’s too hard to acquire tokens for gear – I’m earning my armor set way, way faster than I earned my armor set in Wrath, and that wasn’t even end game gear! The problem here is not that the dungeons are too hard or not hard enough, but rather that being hard is all they focus on. There are few, if any, interesting mechanics. In fact, it seems to me that “trash mobs” have a much greater diversity of skills than any of the bosses. I have no idea why this is, and it doesn’t make sense to me. As it stands, “trash mobs” are more of a fight than any of the bosses are through pure density, but offer almost no rewards. Heck, the bosses themselves offer hardly any reward. If dungeons didn’t give me tokens, I wouldn’t do them. I can get money elsewhere for much less aggravation, and I’ve found much better loot in general from normal mobs in Orr event runs!

I really want to enjoy dungeons in Guild Wars 2 the way I did for years in other games. I want to do them because they’re fun, not because I need something from them, only to stop doing them once I have what I need. To be honest, the dungeons are very short and lacking in content. “Trash mobs” artificially extend the length of the dungeons, but only if they aren’t skipped – and often they are because there’s little reason not to. Right now I am extremely disappointed in the state of the dungeons in this game. They’re beautiful and are very good concepts, they just need some reworking.

So – what can be done to make dungeons more fun for more people? I may not like wow anymore for other deep-seated reasons, but I can’t deny that when it came to dungeons themselves they had a good thing going (ignoring the trinity, of course.) Here are some suggestions:

• Give bosses known loot tables. It doesn’t have to be anything super amazing, just a guarantee of getting at least one item of worth instead of the random trashy blues and greens we almost always get.

• Give bosses interesting mechanics. Right now, they’re just health pools to burn down and are amazingly boring, yet strangely annoying. The most fun I’ve had fighting a boss was talking to my party members that I had just met while we burned down the Nightmare Tree.

• Make “trash mobs” a bit more “trash”-y. I don’t mean make them so easy that you don’t have to worry about them, I mean make them less of a total pain in the butt that almost everyone will try to skip.

• On that note, give trash mobs better loot chances. Why should I deal with all these mobs with annoying skills and huge health pools (for what they are) if all I get is a grey rarity claw or a tiny thorned bag 99% of the time?

• Make dungeons long because they’re big, not long because everything takes so much time to deal with. Some of my best memories are of running through dungeons in awe of the whole place because it was so huge and varied. There was always something interesting to look at, even if I’d done it twenty times. I never got tired of the Wrath heroics, even when I did them daily for a month.

Finally, thank you for reading this huge post. (I didn’t start out intending to make it so long, oops.) Please feel free to add suggestions of your own. However, I don’t blindly hate or support anything, and I won’t appreciate it if you do. It’s ignorant behavior.

Basically you say you think there isn enough loot? and that Bosses aint intresting enough?

I think the loot part is right, getting only greens and blues is frustrating.

About the bosses i think ur wrong,

as stated in ur topic, you have only done TA and AC. These indeed have the same boss mechanics, but if you do Arah path 1 you get a boss that you have to spawm by standing on tar plates, a boss you have to kill like most other, a boss that spawms gorillas out of corpses around him and a boss you have to reflect damage back to by using crystals. Personally i think this gives a big vairatie (<—probly spelled that wrong) in gameplay. I know a lot of bosses are kinda the same, but its impossible to always think of new mechanics.

I agree for the most part. After spending about a week to get my dungeon master title like 3 months ago and doing everything, I have to say, most bosses are very underwhelming, and trash is consistently harder than fighting the vast majority of bosses.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, Anet needs to strike a balance between interesting and dynamic mechanics and appropriate health pools. As it currently stands, the vast majority of bosses are just gigantic hp pools with very few interesting or engaging mechanics.

There are only three challenging bosses in the game: Simin, Lupus and Alpha.

Simin can bug beyond redemption, Lupus can randomly reset and Alpha’s abilities in p2 and p3 can be devastating.

Thanks for that.

Really, Golgathoth you hit an ignored topic. Most bosses are boring in general. As players we want a challenge; however, a boss with trash mob intelligence will always be a trash mob. This problem can be migrated with mechanics such as Lupus but there is no joy in fighting an unintelligent boss. I actually wish bosses played like player mesmers sometimes. Making a boss with more attack, defense and hitpoints does not make the boss more fun. I guess this is why all Nintendo bosses usually maintain a 3 hit kill. I wish for game creators to make bosses only as strong as the player but more intelligent than the player with a wide variety of skills. This change will be challenging and somewhat torturous. But, it might give a sense of enjoyment because players can employ a variety of play styles instead the one or two. Mining Suit fractual boss, I looking at you.

The biggest problem is that a lot of dungeon sections are just not fun. I think they need to be more fun by being more challenging. Not more challenging as in “this is kittening rediculous” mechanics which make you want to tear your eyes out, but something that tests your own skill instead of simply a gear check. All these bosses which are simply just pools of HP and require nothing in the way of personal skill – like HotW bosses, like The Ghost Eater, like the Golem in CoE, the list goes on. They are not fun to fight because you’re not challenging any kind of skill which you have. You’re just using FGJ or spamming Shatter or stacking bleed or whatever you do that increases DPS for your particular class because it’s not a challenge, you’re just trying to get through it quickly for loot. That’s not to say there are a lot of interesting boss fights in the game – alpha is pretty good (And let me tell you, when I ran this with my friends before we knew what the stacking method was, it was huge amounts of fun. Fights against that guy are just chaotic), kholer is pretty good, ect. And then, most unfortunately, there are the bosses that are just so close to being a good concept but fail because they have no real dynamic to them, they’re just a pattern – Either that, or they have so much health it’s kitten There’s the guy at the end of CoF 3 who revolves around knockbacks but all you do is find a safe spot and follow a pattern while you wail down his entirely too large health pool. There’s the destroyer in CoE P3, which, has an interesting concept but he provides absolutely no threat to you outside of “that kitten is kittening annoying and doesn’t need to be there, it’s slowing us down from the inevitible”. I also don’t like the concept of “skipping” but hey, what are you gonna do if they don’t have rewards. My other main complaint is that pulls and exploits and other such tricks have become such a mainstay part of dungeons when you run with pubs is that dungeons are no longer a test of skill, they’re a test of knowledge of paths. The “kite room” in CoF path 2 is a cool concept for a survival fight, a real test of how many warriors you have, but everyone knows that you do the kite method because that’s just the way everyone does that dungeon.

In short:

-Cut down on the bosses which are just chunks of HP. I honestly don’t understand what the point behind these fights are. Hitting something for 5 minutes isn’t “fun”, it’s just a chore. Is it to beef out the dungeon with extra content, so that you can’t finish it in 5 minutes? Well, add some “stages” in that make it take longer minus the HP-whittling tedium. Or, up the skill required to kill it. Double damage, less health.

-Graveyard zerging is a stupid methodology. Fractals is a good start but it suffers from other problems. A happy medium would be good.

-Too many skips, pulls and exploits make running dungeons a silly routine instead of something actually engaging. Even something that should be fairly dynamic like the burrows in AC are ruined by the fact that the burrows spawn in the same location – pubs have a solution to make life easier on their routine, have one person tank the first burrow while everyone else kills the others. Something as simple as making the burrows spawn in random order would fix this.

People have been making these same complaints since before release, and the only changes made have been adding karma to the end reward and adding MORE trash to certain dungeon paths.

Since we’ve seen two major content patches since we were promised tweaks to dungeons, I’m not holding out much hope that they’re going to be improved in the future.

The good news is fractals is pretty fun, so you can do that if they ever fix the dc bug.