Guild Wars 2

To be quite blunt, the dungeons are inconsistent and poorly designed. Buffing them to the point of being a head-smashing silver milking waste of time is not only doing nothing to fix the base problem, but also making sure that people stop playing said dungeons at all.

Don’t get me wrong, CoF magg option was by far the easiest, too easy. It needed a buff and I’m all for this. What we got is ridiculous. The community will accept nothing short of the dev team doing a full and perfect run before they stop making their voices heard. You can’t expect other people to be able to pull off something of your own genius design without being able to do it yourself.

The only way to avoid repair costs for the bomb part is to run in naked one by one. And guess what? That’s what everyone will end up doing. You know why? Some dungeon designer says the enemies were intended to be fought. There’s absolutely no way that you can keep up with the enemies, even kill one before you get overrun. The bomb part is not possible to survive consistently.

I’m playing a guardian with a bit of toughness and toughness gear and I get locked down by knockdowns from the devourers. Is it cheap and absolutely not fun? Yes. But you can survive it (sometimes). I still take massive damage from all sources, but every single mob in the bomb part in particular hits like a truck, about as much as a boss.

Another thing, there’s no fun to be had running dungeons over and over for weeks at a time. I believe someone on this forum calculated that it would take 75 hours of fast runs for a set of armor from a particular dungeon. Is that not enough? 75 hours of my life for an almost purely cosmetic upgrade? Some will undoubtedly argue that you “don’t have to do it”, but that’s just it; there’s nothing else to do.

In my opinion, the PvE endgame is already weak. In fact, I’m a little sour that PvP had to suffer with 2 playable maps and 1 game mode so that we could get this sub-par PvE experience. I don’t doubt that more resources would have been put towards PvP for a better experience. PvP is the best part of this game. It doesn’t feel like a grind, even though you play the same 3 maps over and over.

What I’m trying to say is that GW2 still has a lot of potential, by why can’t we grow up and accept that PvE this time around wasn’t what it could have been and move forward? The only thing I fear is that we’re not going to get any new PvP maps and modes until an expansion. I love this game but not enough to play for a year or more on the same maps and the one game mode.

Yeah I agree with you 100% – thanks for writing this. This is funny because I calculated 75 hours to get the full Arah Exotic set (not including weapons) because of how the Dungeon is poorly designed and there is no incentive to complete the Dungeon or try different routes because there is a stand-out method to farming tokens the fastest.

The sad thing is, even though I really find it boring – there is actually nothing else to do!

The “grind” element is for people who want special or unique appearances. Statistically, they are no better than the exotic gear that you can craft (or buy) with little to no “grind”.

So, yeah… they HAVE removed the grind element if you don’t want to do it yet remain (at least stat wise) on the same level as anyone else your level. For those that want to put in the time and effort for a unique look, this is for them.

Grind is good. Just make it so that when I DO grind, I’m also having fun along the way. I can’t do that inside dungeons which are as terrible as they are atm.

Dungeons are fine as they are.

Dungeons need a complete rework. They need BIG changes which I am going to suggest and dungeons would need to be re-balanced around my following suggestions if they were to be implemented.

1. If you die in a dungeon (not downed) then you cannot respawn.
2. If you die in a dungeon (not downed) you have a 60 second respawn timer.

For option 2: If a complete party is killed (aka wiped) then you fail that dungeon and must re-attempt it from the very start.

A problem with option 2 would be that if a player is downed during a fight, other players can just flee until the player is revived so they can reattempt the next part of the dungeon. That would be okay as long as the monsters aggro duration is increased (often you can just run away 10 metres and they stop chasing).

Why these suggestions will work? Because right now the dungeons are SUPPOSED to be challenging instances that require TEAMWORK, SKILL and GEAR. Right now players are just spamming auto attacks at trash mobs with super high hit-points or trash mobs with 1-shot kill mechanics which just AREN’T fun (I often alt-tab during prolonged fights where there is no real threat). Players are allowed infinite chances to continue dungeons even after multiple wipes (the only challenge is not to die so much). This allows players to attempt dungeons way beyond their skill, equipment and teamwork.

Or the opposite where players are getting 1-shotted, avoiding whole content altogether (running past mobs, sometimes even naked so gear doesn’t get damaged), farming the first 2 bosses of a dungeons for tokens rather than completing it, or complaining because the dungeon is way too hard or long (imbalance).

Of course if either of these suggestions are implemented then Dungeons will have to be reworked:

• by removing 1-shot kill mechanics,
• tweaking the number of trash mob packs,
• balancing hit-points and DPS of bosses/mobs.

But personally I believe to make Dungeons more challenging is giving those elite/boss packs unique skills such as AOE crowd-control (fears, slows, chills, stuns), AOE damage-over-time (bleeds, burns) and other unique abilities such as knockdowns, frenzy, move-speed buffs, debuffs, knockbacks, invulnerability (super short duration, aka Wraithlord Hunter in Arah).

In regards to the paragraph above, my favorite boss would have to be the Asura golem at the start of Caudecus Manor. Even though his rockets are 1 shot kill (and have super fast projectile speed), the first time I faced him was awesome! Why? Because he has a number of different skills which players actually have to be skilled to fight him (not sure if players can still sit on ledge to avoid rockets still), such as the rockets, whirling flames and the blitz-pull (league of legends reference).

TL;DR Give proper death penalty in dungeons (at least Explore mode), and kitten off the packs of trash mobs and give small packs of mob and elite/bosses more Unique Abilities and skills/passives rather than give us a Veteran or Champion trash mob.

Token System Suggestion in Spoiler

For people complaining about Dungeon GRINDING
Grinding for Dungeon tokens is completely 100% optional because the stats on the Dungeon Exotic gear are not the best you can acquire. In fact if you want the best stats you should be looking at crafting your own gear, or buy it off the Trading Post (I understand that gold is harder to get now but these are your options). But here is the deal, if you want to look like every single level 80, then don't run dungeons... On the other hand, if you want to look like intimidating and awesome, then get the Dungeon Exotic Gear of your choice. And for the more casual players who don't have hours on end to spend farming tokens, there is the Rare set of dungeon gear you can also acquire however all Rare dungeon armor sets will have the same appearance, but they still look nice and the stats aren't that bad either.

3 words. Tactics, variety, challenge.

theres nothing to do in PVE
its too expensive.