Guild Wars 2

So in an interview that I’m too lazy to find, a developer said that he wanted to make more dungeons like Domain of Anguish (DoA) for Guild Wars 2.

I personally didn’t even like that place seeing as there was way too many enemies, the enemies themselves usually killed me in horrible ways, and if you died, well you’re kinda screwed.

The only time I went was with heroes that had the right builds or with people that had the right builds to do speedruns and such.

So basically, since GW2’s dungeons looked to DoA as a rolemodel, did anyone actually like this place?

I only did DoA to grind armbraces and sell them to buy things I actually wanted. I don’t know of anyone who actually did it for fun. I certainly didn’t. The Underworld, more specifically UWsc, was for fun. It wasn’t very challenging or difficult but it was FUN and had tons of replayability. Dungeons in GW2 however feel super grindy and have no replayability in the sense that they aren’t fun so I don’t want to play them… Ever. They seem to do this in the name of “challenging content” even though a challenge is only fun the first or second time you do it.

Here’s something for Anet to think about;

Bashing your head through a wall is a challenge but it sure as hell isn’t fun.

The Domain of Anguish was fun when they removed the environmental effects from normal difficulty. The artificial difficulty created by nonsense like “50% chance to miss” had to go. I greatly enjoyed playing the normal mode for the challenge it offered pre-Eye of the North.

And then consumables, Ursan, Shadowform and what have you just threw everything out the window.

DoA was farmed by a lot of people, it was just harder than UW or FoW so it didn’t appeal to as many people. I loved DoA, as did my guild and many of my friends/people I know from GW1.

Granted, we only loved it due to speed clear team builds. If the dev wants to make it like doing DoA with a “balanced” team build, no thanks.

As for the “if you wipe, it’s game over” concept that GW1 used for instances, I ’d like to see that return for GW2 dungeons.

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

DoA was farmed by a lot of people, it was just harder than UW or FoW so it didn’t appeal to as many people. I loved DoA, as did my guild and many of my friends/people I know from GW1.

Granted, we only loved it due to speed clear team builds. If the dev wants to make it like doing DoA with a “balanced” team build, no thanks.

As for the “if you wipe, it’s game over” concept that GW1 used for instances, I ’d like to see that return for GW2 dungeons.

That would be kind of annoying with the 1 shot mechanics and the Z axis being in the game though, a fall could make it so that a player is dead for good :X

I use to hero way doa all day. I found doa fun because i would always try and beat my time, think it was somewheres around 1 hour 26 minutes for a full hero run. If you knew doa and where to stand, where to pull it was quite fun. You can pull in this game the exact same way as gw1 with LOS but most people have lost sight of that.

But I think the most fun i had was creating the builds and using them, something this game has kind of lost, theres not much skill selection, got really boring really fast. I use to love putting together 7 hero teams and making the builds for specific things like doa which with the right hero team you could plow threw it. This game is “111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 dodge 11111111111111111111111111111 dodge 111111111111111111”

arrownin.3128:

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

DoA was farmed by a lot of people, it was just harder than UW or FoW so it didn’t appeal to as many people. I loved DoA, as did my guild and many of my friends/people I know from GW1.

Granted, we only loved it due to speed clear team builds. If the dev wants to make it like doing DoA with a “balanced” team build, no thanks.

As for the “if you wipe, it’s game over” concept that GW1 used for instances, I ’d like to see that return for GW2 dungeons.

That would be kind of annoying with the 1 shot mechanics and the Z axis being in the game though, a fall could make it so that a player is dead for good :X

GW1 had a Z axis as well, just not how you’re picturing it. This is a good point, but how many places are there that you can fall and be in an unresable position? (Genuine question). I guess ANet could make it that if you fell somewhere that you’re unreachable, your corpse is portaled up onto some nearby land. The one shot mechanics thing isn’t really a big deal, considering that foes such as Dhuum could wipe an entire party with his judgement attack if people weren’t sufficiently built. Even Aatxe, a basic mob in UW could almost one hit people without prots.

Just food for thought really, being nostalgic for GW1

i grinded doa for the full doa hom weapons , i really miss that area it just brings back memories.
let’s just hope these news areas can’t be speed cleared.

You know, when my guild first entered the Svanir fractal, and we had to pick up torches to run through the woods, the very first thing I said was: “Is anyone else flashing back to Ravenheart Gloom in DoA?”

I loved DoA, it took work, and team work, and good build design…. I was happy to do DoA for armbraces, and I’ll tell you something that I miss from DoA that I would like to see in GW2: Not having to do all the paths in a row to get to Mallyx. Sure, you got more gems if you did zone after zone after zone… but as long as you did all 4, you could go to Mallyx (of course, it reset after you beat him, and you had to do all 4 again.) That was good design. Hardcore types could full clear, more casual groups did one zone at a time, but everyone could get to Mallyx eventually. I dislike having to do 3 fractals back to back to do Jade Maw… or to progress difficulty. DoA had it right! (Slaver’s Exile…. same thing, just sayin’.)

More than DoA though, I miss Urgoz. Not so much The Deep, but then our guild was deeply Kurz. But I miss the fun of the 12 man dungeon.

I like DoA, but tbh i looooved UW and FoW. Good times! Would love to see some 10/12 man dungeons for guild runs. That would be fun and would bring more ppl into play. I know a lot of people just AFK in LA doing nothing, it could bring new lvl of fun to them

Wouldn’t want DoA actually, the gimmicky abilities and random mechanics made for an extremely hard instance if you came unprepared, but a snooze fest if you had any kind of SC build.

I’d prefer UW and FoW any day tbh, they were both challenging as hell BUT doable regardless of what builds you were running.

I only did DoA a handful of times. Didn’t have a ton of fun, but that was mainly because I didn’t know what I was doing as much as I did in UW or FoW. I can remember my first 55/SS run in UW I hated it, then the better I got at SS the more I loved it, until they killed it, then I did 600/Smite FoW ( EASY MODE ) until they nerfed that. Continue down the years until now where I just solo smite run on my Derv and do VoS for FoW.

I loved DoA because it was so difficult when it first came out and later on HM that most people couldn’t complete it, which meant that the rewards you got out of a HM run (or the runs when it was first released) were very valuable. I was a very, very good player of GW1, and I made my entire fortune running DoA. It wasn’t even a small amount of money, either; I made hundreds of thousands of plat and essentially could afford anything in the game that I wanted. I loved being able to make money from playing the game. That is sorely missing from GW2, which now rewards you more money for playing the market than playing the game.

What I’d like to see ANet take away from this is that they should introduce either a new dungeon or a new difficulty so challenging that less than 1% of the population can complete it, with rewards that can then be sold to other players. I want to be able to translate my skill in GW2 into gold to then actually get the items I want. FotM, unfortunately, doesn’t allow this due to the nature of the RNG rewards and the fact that everything unique you can get out of FotM is account bound, which is a major disappointment.

I remember DoA. I liked it and hate at the same time. I liked it in that it was challenging and allowed me to complete any of the four paths in any order before fighting Mallyx. That same concept also applied with Duncan the Black in Slaver’s Exile, which I also found moderately challenging.

I hated DoA in that I played a Ritualist, and had to depend on my guildmates to vouch for my skills if we had to pug someone. If you played a profession that fit the usual meta-group at the time, then no one would ask questions except when something went wrong. Otherwise, people would look at me funny. This was when there was no “Hard Mode” and the four different paths had zone-wide conditions regardless of difficulty. If I remember right, you needed a tank of some sorts (Warrior, Dervish, or a properly-specced Elementalist), three nukers (usually Elementalists), a BiP Necro, and a Bond-Monk, and two other types of healers (usually Monks). I actually had to build my Ritualist to fit one of those roles— I went with being a Channeling-based “nuker” and it worked surprisingly well. Though I suppose having a high Lightbringer rank (around 6) also helped.

A thought crossed my mind in that what if all the eight original dungeons had a “Secret” path that would only open up if the three previous paths (or 4 in the case of Arah) were completed before the reset? This secret path would be tuned for Level 80 characters and would actually require a considerable amount of coordination to complete it. However, if you complete it, then you might end up with more dungeon tokens than usual. The encounters in this secret path should also be varied somewhat to keep it interesting, perhaps by placing different branching paths or different boss encounters.

The Domain of Anguish had some things going for it… but what it brought with it above all else was an attitude of elitism that was difficult to match within GW.

Not the fault of the place, I know.

I liked DoA. It was inhumanely hard at first, then I stopped doing it, and when I came back a few months later it was all figured out and the runs were smooth. Just get all enemies balled up and destroy them. Was fun.

funny cuz after 5y of gw1 its the only dungeon i never even tried even tho every other dungeon i spent months/years on. All i want is uw/fow kind of dungeon in gw2

Maybe when they said Domain of Anguish what they really meant was Foundry of Failed Creations. Plenty of GW2 dungeons have the ‘tiny room, full of AoE’ thing or simply ‘cover everything with AoE regardless of size’. Not exactly the same but very similar to the beginning of Foundry of Failed creations.

Can’t really say I’ve ever enjoyed any of UW/FoW/DoA. Protecting brain dead NPCs made of tissue paper which results in complete failure if they die is not my idea of fun. Too bad they’ve both improved on that and made things worse. You don’t fail and get kicked out of the dungeons anymore but instead they can just break the whole dungeon instance.

I do like DoA a lot and am going back to GW1 sometimes just to play it, so i would be totally happy to revisit something like DoA anytime

I have to say I really loved DoA. I became a well practised with the Ritulist ST build. Which means, I basically looked after a bunch of skills that lowered the damage my team took whilst increasing the damage the enemies took.
Generally got lots of good drops, lots of gems and as it was a role I was good at I fell into it easily and didn’t get any random aggro for it. Unlike alot of the paragon players, especially new ones who wanted to learn the role, many people just didn’t have patience for it and completely lost their temper with people trying to learn.

For me though, DoA was good. I liked the variety of bosses, the lore, the back stories and the fact that you could do as much or as little of it as you wished. What I disliked about it was that it would be nearly impossible to do a full run due to time limits, people disconnecting, people getting angry and leaving…etc… so by the time a good group had been found 2 hours would have passed.

I havn’t played much PvE in GW1, i mostly PvPed.
I played DoA around 20 times, it was challenging. If your group wasn’t good, you wouldn’t get past the first group of mobs. No Waypoint / Checkpoint-zerging.

The community for the end-game-dungeons was really bad, mostly made up of elitist jerks. If you just got a single different skill on your skillbar, then what they thought was the only viable build, they would kick you from the party, no questions asked.

I really like the Arah-dungeon in GW2. When it was new, it was challenging and fun to find out the Boss-mechanics. Now that almost everybody got geared up, have min/maxed there builds and know all the exploits and Boss-mechnaics, it’s mostly just a farmfest. The Artist and Developer’s did a really good job, the atmosphere inside Arah is just great. I would like to see more big Dungeons like Arah.

In my own guild, to my memory, no one actually liked DoA. Some of us did it, but it was only either once or twice for the 100% completion feeling or for the rewards. And, within the circle of players I moved in, nobody claimed to actually like it for what it was.

Nuka Cola.8520:

funny cuz after 5y of gw1 its the only dungeon i never even tried even tho every other dungeon i spent months/years on. All i want is uw/fow kind of dungeon in gw2

A friend of mine and I were talking about the GW1 and GW2 similarities the other day. I can’t remember which of us made this comment, but one of us said that they had missed FoW until they realized that every single zone is FoW; a series of events that you complete until you complete them all and get your reward chest. There was no reason to make a dungeon like that because the entire world already followed that design.

Similarly, Urgoz / Deep are akin to fractals, but with randomly chosen paths. Instead of 12 fixed gimmick rooms, you get 3-4 gimmicks chosen from a pool, and 3 sets are chained together, giving you roughly the same content, but with the random twist that prevents you from preparing for everything up front.

I could easily see the DoA design being applied to dungeons with a final path, which requires you to complete the prerequisite paths first, following the DoA model. I never actually finished DoA, but I did enjoy it (running heroes or heroes + wife limited my options, and we both absolutely reject consumable abuse). The challenge was largely in the preparation, but that was always the case in GW1. The key design, as I see it, was the resetting progression that culminated in a boss battle and ewarded groups that could handle the varied challenges in each section in sequence. The environmental effects were relatively cheap, but given the lack of environmental interaction, they were a reasonable substitute; I want to say that the frostbite, darkness, etc. effects in fractals are a modern-day replacement.

Like others have said I liked DoA after they split the environment effects off in to hard mode. My main complaint is that some parts had too much trash (City was ALL trash, Forge and tons and tons of it).

I wouldn’t like to see the return of the wipe and you get kicked out mechanic, I like the way that Fractals and the EoTN dungeons handle wipes much better.

Rising Dusk.2408:

I loved DoA because it was so difficult when it first came out and later on HM that most people couldn’t complete it, which meant that the rewards you got out of a HM run (or the runs when it was first released) were very valuable. I was a very, very good player of GW1, and I made my entire fortune running DoA. It wasn’t even a small amount of money, either; I made hundreds of thousands of plat and essentially could afford anything in the game that I wanted. I loved being able to make money from playing the game. That is sorely missing from GW2, which now rewards you more money for playing the market than playing the game.

What I’d like to see ANet take away from this is that they should introduce either a new dungeon or a new difficulty so challenging that less than 1% of the population can complete it, with rewards that can then be sold to other players. I want to be able to translate my skill in GW2 into gold to then actually get the items I want. FotM, unfortunately, doesn’t allow this due to the nature of the RNG rewards and the fact that everything unique you can get out of FotM is account bound, which is a major disappointment.

As I have stated many times before, it is pretty much impossible for developers to create difficulty in this game because of how the combat system is set up.

The Mexican Cookie.3690:

DoA was farmed by a lot of people, it was just harder than UW or FoW so it didn’t appeal to as many people.

Lies lies lies, it was just boring!

Hi Cookie <3

Back to topic: I would pretty much appreciate a remake of elite-area’s in GW2, would especially if uw, fow and doa will be implemented.

I think difficulty can indeed exist. Positioning matters a lot in this combat, so area of effect indicators can follow specific, predictable (or unpredictable) patterns to create threatening and yet dodgeable situations. You can put pressure on a team that inhibits their ability to dodge everything; you have to choose your dodges, or perfectly position yourself, etc. There are already a couple very good examples of this in-game.

As an example: I never wipe against GL with my guild. That said, GL is still a ‘difficult’ boss. He requires situational awareness, class knowledge, team planning, tanking, utility planning, trait planning, and the whole nine yards. This makes him fun. I don’t think GL is nearly as hard as things could be. I can personally think up about a dozen boss mechanics that could easily trump GL. Here’s another example: Grawl Shaman Boss in L50+ FotM. Ridiculously challenging considering the number of things that you have to be aware of, and yet one of the most enjoyable boss experiences in the game because of it.

tl;dr: I think difficulty can be done, just not with more HP and more auto-attack boss damage. I think ANet knows this, and is moving in the right direction. (Also better rewards for good players!)

Rising Dusk.2408:

I think difficulty can indeed exist. Positioning matters a lot in this combat, so area of effect indicators can follow specific, predictable (or unpredictable) patterns to create threatening and yet dodgeable situations. You can put pressure on a team that inhibits their ability to dodge everything; you have to choose your dodges, or perfectly position yourself, etc. There are already a couple very good examples of this in-game.

As an example: I never wipe against GL with my guild. That said, GL is still a ‘difficult’ boss. He requires situational awareness, class knowledge, team planning, tanking, utility planning, trait planning, and the whole nine yards. This makes him fun. I don’t think GL is nearly as hard as things could be. I can personally think up about a dozen boss mechanics that could easily trump GL. Here’s another example: Grawl Shaman Boss in L50+ FotM. Ridiculously challenging considering the number of things that you have to be aware of, and yet one of the most enjoyable boss experiences in the game because of it.

tl;dr: I think difficulty can be done, just not with more HP and more auto-attack boss damage. I think ANet knows this, and is moving in the right direction. (Also better rewards for good players!)

You shed very good light on the problem. GL, Subject Alpha and Kholer are often considered “good” bosses, and they all require timed dodges and / or enviromental awareness.

The problem however, is that if this is the only way Arena Net can create difficulty, there is a certain roof they will eventually reach before they have reached the amount of difficulty they can create without introducing more gear tiers. It goes without saying of course, that if we are still required to dodge X attack at Y point in time after 2 years, GW2 will be extremely stale. Take FotM for example. The entire dungeon is designed around one thing: Dodging agony at the right moment. It’s just extremely boring after the N’th run.

Having a Paragon as a primary, DoA was about the only dungeon that I could ever really get into a pug to to run. It was fun enough, even if it got to be a bit grind-y after the first few times completing it.

I can see how GW2’s Fractal dungeon takes off from (and improves upon) DoA, though. Separate areas, different scenarios and enemies, all linked together…yet the concept of these areas being ‘shards’ of Tyrian history allows the developers to add new content, introduce lore that doesn’t fit into the core game, and try out new mechanics.

imagine if they remake UW! and no one has SF lol will be epic 1-2 hit deaths from aatxe. I still want UW sooooooo bad.

@Coast are you a member of DS?

Personally I got pretty bored of DoA, and I thought Rosaway was really bad. I don’t think Coast is in DS

my bad, the DS guy has Keks and not cookis in his name
good old DS times xD

Since Tyria is 1000? years in future… i wonder what happened to FoW and UW now, do they exist or something happened to them? And yes, i would LOVE to see elite zones / dungeons UW, FoW, DoA way. Would be nice to see a dungeon that u actualy cant finish from first try

After reading this thread, I’d love if they’d put in UW and FoW again. Only rule is that theyre not allowed to make obsidian cost 500g and make it ascended