Guild Wars 2

Can’t quote….

But @Balthor.

If no one is doing story modes anymore…… then by logic you would think they are attempting Explorables. If not, then maybe they aren’t doing anything at all. Point is though, you either find like minded people for story mode, or you rise to the challenge of Explorable mode. If you can’t rise to the challenge…. why delude yourself into believing you should be able to complete it.

I do wonder how guys like you cope in full competetive games. Like Starcraft 2, Dota 2, any fps. etc. Do you ask for an easier game? xD Makes no sense.

So pulling bosses and find “exploitable” areas is not strategy? I would think this would be… Because you didn’t figure it out and read about it or watched the “exploit” on youtube to make a boss easier, well, the real damage here is you researching a boss and using the so-called exploit instead of figuring it out yourself or with your team… When you do that, a strategy could be an exploit cause it just made it too easy for your team.

Exploits to me is more or less locking a boss in a corner of a polygon where he can’t hit anyone.. Or hacking code or changing out textures models in the game to get an advantage over a boss. That’s exploiting to me… Dragging a boss to another room to use stairs to avoid aoe and range him down is NOT an exploit (just one example).

Rainfall.4017:

Can’t quote….

But @Balthor.

If no one is doing story modes anymore…… then by logic you would think they are attempting Explorables. If not, then maybe they aren’t doing anything at all. Point is though, you either find like minded people for story mode, or you rise to the challenge of Explorable mode. If you can’t rise to the challenge…. why delude yourself into believing you should be able to complete it.

I do wonder how guys like you cope in full competetive games. Like Starcraft 2, Dota 2, any fps. etc. Do you ask for an easier game? xD Makes no sense.

I don’t enjoy fps games :P I’m not asking for an easier game, read my post again. and as I said, explorable dungeons aren’t meant for me.

Some bosses have flaws by design, i.e. characteristics which prompt a certain player behavior that was intended by a developer and is considered to be the desired “fun gameplay”. Regardless of whether the players consider it to be fun or not. Example: dodgeroll to exit red circle of death.

Some bosses have designflaws, i.e. they show behavior which prompt a certain player behavior. However, it was not intended by the developer and the amount of fun is debatable. Example: killing the enhanced destroyer (Infinity Coil 3) by using only longbow attacks.

Loving the inflated egos who probably felt like deities when winning at childrens card games in the past. Don’t bother using logic with neckbeards, game breaking bugs are simply more content to them and when they find exploits to get past certain bugs they will say its too easy. Just like how most people got past the gw1 ones.
They will argue with you for centuries against having any alternative to get the prestige gear because it makes them feel special. They won’t want repair costs fixed.. not because of any logical reason but because it makes them feel special. They will keep ways to overcome certain broken instances secret in their guild because it makes them feel special to know exploits. Thats the ulterior motive. Its very -special- to get a group of lvl 80’s on skype with dungeon gear together and spend hours and hours on end doing the same mission over and over and over and over while using predetermined stats traits and gear that everyone else will use because the beaten path is special to them.. “Complexity” is doing the same thing over and over because its proven effective to them.

If we get a great group going, get a fair bit into a dungeon, then encounter a bug.. our only option is to just zone out. Thats broken content. Its not a feature. Its not Dark Souls. It doesn’t make you look less pathetic if you are able to surpass it out of sheer luck or exploits.

In the meanwhile, we who understand the difference between actual complexity and inflated stats + bugged gameplay mechanics will hope the bugs such as falling through the floor, traps activating far away, and bosses with spammable attacks which are clearly not meant to be which have no warning animation… are fixed. Also the random death walls(walls which kill upon contact and are not traps but simply geometry bugs), broken instances where the mission gets stuck.. etc. Thats a feature to the “elite”!

Those who say l2p and that people who experience these bugs and cannot get past the content should realize this: I whipe entire teams in tribes sometimes. Entire teams. Go try it. I know about difficulty and I enjoy it. People who still complain once the bugs are fixed might need to learn to play but currently its perfectly reasonable to want certain things fixed.

Just because people aren’t capable of compensating for the huge amount of bugs in the game which undermine progress in various ways, doesn’t mean they should learn to play. Just because you hit level 80 doesn’t mean you are special. Theres level 80’s everywhere in lions arch and we are all over the map.

ColinJohanson.2394:

“What I would call ‘hard’ was trying to run Domain of Anguish and Mallyx with a balanced setup in the first weeks it was released. Many people called it impossible, but it was a heck lot of fun to do! Why? Because it offered veriety and fluid gameplay, quick and deadly like it should be. Not kiting a mob for 2 minutes and then walking into the next mob rinse and repeat.”

I’ll point out ironically, when we first turned on DoA back in Gw1 the posts you’re seeing in this forum from a few folks about difficulty were the exact same comments everyone had about DoA. It was “impossible, mobs were just tuned to do insane damage and have huge HP, there was no tactics to defeat DoA”, etc. I went back and read through the original DoA launch feedback and it was literally identical to the comments folks on the forums are leaving now.

We made the choice back then to stick with the difficulty, and give people time to learn how to play the dungeon better and overcome it. A few months later, people viewed it as the most fun thing in the game and totally reasonable without us changing anything.

We’ll be doing the same with the Gw2 explorable dungeons, our own internal testing teams and alpha test groups learned to beat them using a combination of player skill, synchronous builds, strong use of cross-profession combos, use of cooking/consumable buffs (these make a huge difference!) and well formed player tactics. By comparison, after having months to play the game and the time our alpha was complete, some of our better dungeon groups felt the explorable dungeons were too easy for launch, we decided not to make them any harder given the expected player skill on launch.

We’re actively monitoring every dungeon and working on balancing issues we encounter appropriately. We’ll be keeping an eye on bosses we think don’t have enough varied mechanics to warrant their large health pools and updating them over time to make them more varied/interesting fights. We’ll be monitoring, and continually tweaking/adding to dungeon rewards over time and of course balancing where we see the need. And of course, we’ll be looking at adding more dungeons as well!

All of that being said, the game is VERY new for most of our players, and I can absolutely promise with more knowledge of the game and advanced player skill, the explorable dungeons can all be overcome by being skilled groups. We’ve seen many groups do it just fine in our internal alpha test once they had time to learn how to play the game well. Just like Domain of Anguish in Gw1, it takes time and practice to learn how to overcome stuff as hard as our explorable mode dungeons, and that’s exactly the kind of players they are designed for.

If DoA was any indication, a couple months from now, many of you will likely be posting saying most of the dungeons are too easy and you need better challenges

I really appreciate your reply.

However, I think there is a clear difference between DoA and Dungeons in GW2. First of all people are already completing all dungeons without too much of a problem. It’s not the sheer level of difficulty that was put in place, but the problem is how that difficulty takes form.

The problem is that dungeons are not as fun to do as they could be, simply because everything has too much health. In DoA everything had a ton of damage and there were a ton of enemies. In GW2 instead there’s three enemies who take a couple of minutes to take down. It’s simply becoming an obstacle: it feels it’s only that way to lengthen the dungeon rather than make it a fun experience for the player.

It very much gives a feeling of ‘I swung a sword’, something I did not get with any of the dynamic events which were perfectly balanced. What I hoped was to find the average mob to be between the level of a regular lv80 mob and a veteran lv80 mob. I also hoped that the player would actually have a risk involved, that you fail a mission if you all die. But instead there is the option to corpse run. These factors really decrease the fun factor of dungeons, which should be risky, deadly and fluid.

If mob and boss health decreased, mob count increased, mob skill diversity increased, boss skill diversity increased, waypoints removed and tokens made account-based, I believe dungeons would be WAY more fun than they are now. They would also fall more in line with how the rest of the game was designed.

I dont agree with Lup not having a res and run strategy. He is not forgiving at all, very easy to make a single small mistake and end up being smashed by his greenblob. Normall phase 3 he chases me around the room, I have no problem staying up. Phase 2 I stay up too, but I can see others struggle dodging multiple things, and for my sake I very much dont mind them being able to run for a few minutes and get back in to the fight. The distance they have to run is a fair pay off for the death.

A little question for warriors and guardians. Has anyone else got the feeling mobs seem to prefer smacking heavy armor? I honestly feel that even when I do nothing but stand near the encounter, mobs focus me. For example the Deadeyes in arrah, There are 4 other guys with me, I havent used a skill, not contacted them, yet they both target me. The engineers, always chain stun me, no one else.

Thank god Colin. Those graveyard zergs need to go, it’s one of my biggest gripes with the game right now.

You can even make dungeons (and a few storyline missions as well) a little easier, but please, for gamers’ sake, delete this graveyard ressing stuff, because it makes no sense at all.

I agree with GY rezzing…. I think it takes a little too much away from a dungeon… I was hoping that it was just in the early dungeons and later get taken away, but apparently from previous posts, this is an epidemic in the latter… I mean it’s easy to rez people, you have skills like banners also.. if 4 people wipe and the 5th kites till rest everyone else shows back up to continue boss where left off, there is an issue.. See it happen too often already… Or I see people kiting bosses back to the WayPoints so they can easily just keep getting back in the fight after death… No negative effects… If you wanna keep this feature.. least lower the reward if a waypoint was taken.. Then there will be a small sense to let boss reset and try again from start.. To get the loot they deserve for taking it down correctly…

Fox.1054:

It very much gives a feeling of ‘I swung a sword’

you mean “I shot a rifle/bow”? because using melee usually downs you instantly.

neoplasmax.4286:

I mean it’s easy to rez people, you have skills like banners also..

put a vid on youtube how you ress people in coe, especially on subject alpha. just curious…

Collin I read your posts and it’s such a huge relief. I absoultely do not want you guys to nerf dungeons. Actually some need a buff. Atm I’m farming HotW EM and some bosses are way too easy like the Khodan and Troll champions.

Also JESUS CHRIST BUFF CoF Magg path. It takes 10-15 minutes to do it and it’s RUINING dungeons runs because everyone goes for that and barely anyone wants to do anything else.

Balthor.9482:

So the more casual players can’t have dungeons?

“So the less casual players can’t have content?”

…is what would happen if you reduce the entire game to the lowest common denominator. We’re talking about—what?—5-10% of the PvE content here?

“…but you can’t fool/please all of the people all of the time.”

My only criticism is flow: AC for a first dungeon (ow—WTB wide-angle camera) and then CM (cakewalk).

arcaneclarity.5283:

ColinJohanson, I think you should read this thread.

I think that’s what he meant when he said more mechanics.

The dungeons are badly designed – sorry, they just are. Remove about 75% of the trash, they serve no other purpose than to prolong the pain. Reduce the HP on bosses, again, you aren’t fooling anyone, its a lame attempt at making the dungeon longer.

The dungeons aren’t hard per se – they are just annoying and artificially long – most people are already farming the shortest paths in the shortest dungeons, so take a hint Arenanet – you put a lot of work into these dungeons, so don’t turn them into grave yards because you are too stuck up to admit you made a mistake in their design.

The rest of the game is brilliant, absolutely brilliant….tweaking these dungeons (not making them easier, just streamlining the experience) would be the icing on the cake.

I think once again people are misunderstanding the meaning of “casual” (at least as I understand it).

A casual to me is a person that doesn’t dedicate as much time into gaming meaning generally , not always, that person has less skill and normally doesn’t even bother to research tactics or synergized builds.

My opinion on some dungeons even on Story mode is I’m sorry but casuals won’t be able to finish them other than abusing the GY spawning which I don’t feel its fun.

I used to be a hardcore but now I don’t have the same amount of time to dedicate to gaming and sure I can do content and yes some it’s a bit hard. Now hard doesn’t mean fun sometimes.

Example: I like that you have several mechanics in bosses throughout a fight that are hard, that makes a game fun. The prob I feel with GW2 is the damage trash does. I mean it’s seriously not fun as you’re not working out anything and basically playing a thief I can sometimes be one shot just by being in melee without having any idea to what killed me since aggro almost dwindles in a random fashion.

CoE is just ridiculous in Story mode. Main entrance trash is like 5 elite mobs and all one shot most of us (I mean we’re geared a bit above entry level gear). Plus I’m not sure if we were doing something wrong but they were respawning every time. Most other dungeons were manageable.

Then (and I’m aware this is the last story content) why the hell would you have an ending to the story like that in Arah??

I mean it’s seriously not fun , it’s grindy once again and it’s a trash fight once again.

I’m going to say this constructively (although I know I’m going to get hammered but whatever) but I’m doing this to give my input on dungeons cause I really like this game.

Work out on boss encounters cause I feel most of the challenging stuff (asides from a couple of bosses) is from trash and not in a learn or synergize way. Bosses should have more interesting mechanics and I feel no game has still got to the standard of Wow at least till cataclysm.

Epic fights are welcome not bashing at trash and dying tons of times so you can go past them then the boss is a pushover. Yes and you will get hammered a lot by trash until you overgear a dungeon and that’s proven by the accounts provided lately.

I also agree that dungeons shouldn’t be nerfed. I feel however they should be better tuned. Harder bosses and less menacing trash would be welcome.

PS and pleas fix the horrible camera specially in Arah. Its painful when fighting hordes of mobs when the camera goes under the ceiling…

One thing I have to ask Anet. Because I am genuinely curious about their philosophy here.

Is it your honest intention to make dungeons content (including rewards) accessible to only a small part (i.e, the more hardcode players) of your playerbase?

Thank you.

PS: also, I want to suggest you bump the AC and CM exotic armor to lvl 80. I think it;s the fair thing to do considering the time required to obtain them.

Vanisher.9216:

EnderNerdcore.5308:

I’m stuck at 98% completion because even one of the skill point events is broken. .

Just go to another server to get that skill point…

…and you’ll be telling that to people once the server transfers cost gems/money?

My two cents.

Our guild did AC & CM story + explorable a couple of times so far. We’re a small guild ready to tackle and complete any content. Still, most of us only have at best 2-3 hours per day available to play (over week days) — and not every day.

Story modes are fine. However, explorable modes give too few of a reward. If you want the whole exotic set from one dungeon at 30 tokens per run it will take 40 runs of one dungeon. Times 8 dungeons, that’s 320 successful runs to get all armor types. Or to be more realistic, one armor per character slot is 200 runs total. Each run ranging between 30-120 min. depending on group setup etc.
Sincerely, none of us (in our guild) want to grind one specific dungeon that much. It’s a pain. And there are no other alternative to get those specific armor skins. The time it takes to get one armor isn’t the problem here. It’s fine that some things take a lot of time. The problem is doing the same dungeon over and over.

I’d suggest, like some others did, that all dungeons give the same tokens.
Let’s say that to get the AC armor it takes 80 hours (random number) of farming AC .
Wouldn’t it be better that it takes 80 hours of farming any dungeon? It would be surely less painful to do and more fun, which is totally what matters the most here.

Some will say “but people will do the fastest run and will farm that.”
Just make it so that harder/longer routes yield more tokens than easier ones.
Per example, 20 tokens for CM explorable. 40 tokens for AC explorable.
Think of a token/hour ratio plan instead of a set # equal for each dungeon. Think like karma vendors but for dungeons. (karma vendors are great btw)

Our guild would be really grateful for that. Otherwise, we’ll end up with a bunch of stacks of dozens of useless tokens of different dungeons clogging our banks since we’ll never want to gather enough of them to get an armor set.

Yesterday I did my first dungeon in Ascalon Catacombs with a pickup group and I had a lot of fun.

I can honestly say the different opponents I fought felt quite varied, sometimes simply because of the enviroment. Fighting Ascalon Mesmers & Elemenalists in an open space feels very different to fighting them on a bridge or in a corridor.
The boss fights also felt varied. I apologize of being unable to remember their names, but the Full-on AOE assault from the Necromancer felt very different from fighting the Ranger, who’s switching between ranged and melee combat had our group switching tactics just as we were getting comfortable. Then were The Lovers, which had our party attempting to split pure damage on one whilst maintaining crowd control on the other, in an attempt to destroy one quickly whilst keeping the other at a distance.

I do have a minor complaint: I do think the dungeon would have been practically impossible for an entire party attempting at the advertised level of 30, I was the only level 30 in the party with my allies levels ranging between 39 to 80 and although they do get down-leveled I felt that their extra traits and Armour made a huge difference whereas an entire party at level 30 could simply not do it.
That said, I have not attempted it with an entire party at level 30 so I may be wrong on that.

I do still completely completely agree with the author of this Thread, DO NOT NERF DUNGEONS

Before commenting please make sure you are not full power, precision, crit damage. If you are you will mostly get one shot every time unless you have many vigor skills to dodge-roll constantly.

Maxing out dps skills and spaming dps skills is not for this game. Dungeons are to endure not to burn down.

The difficulty of the dungeons is fine. The penalties for death are far too severe however. After finding Ascalon Catacombs and Cadaceus Manor enjoyable I tried Twilight Arbor. It was an utterly horrible experience. We wiped many times, which is fine. However each death required us to to spend a significant amount of time running back to where we died and the repair fees cost a hell of a lot.

As a result I’ve decided not to run dungeons simply because its not fun. Its not fun seeing your gold disappearing, or spending minutes running back after death.

ColinJohanson.2394:

“What I would call ‘hard’ was trying to run Domain of Anguish and Mallyx with a balanced setup in the first weeks it was released. Many people called it impossible, but it was a heck lot of fun to do! Why? Because it offered veriety and fluid gameplay, quick and deadly like it should be. Not kiting a mob for 2 minutes and then walking into the next mob rinse and repeat.”

I’ll point out ironically, when we first turned on DoA back in Gw1 the posts you’re seeing in this forum from a few folks about difficulty were the exact same comments everyone had about DoA. It was “impossible, mobs were just tuned to do insane damage and have huge HP, there was no tactics to defeat DoA”, etc. I went back and read through the original DoA launch feedback and it was literally identical to the comments folks on the forums are leaving now.

We made the choice back then to stick with the difficulty, and give people time to learn how to play the dungeon better and overcome it. A few months later, people viewed it as the most fun thing in the game and totally reasonable without us changing anything.

We’ll be doing the same with the Gw2 explorable dungeons, our own internal testing teams and alpha test groups learned to beat them using a combination of player skill, synchronous builds, strong use of cross-profession combos, use of cooking/consumable buffs (these make a huge difference!) and well formed player tactics. By comparison, after having months to play the game and the time our alpha was complete, some of our better dungeon groups felt the explorable dungeons were too easy for launch, we decided not to make them any harder given the expected player skill on launch.

We’re actively monitoring every dungeon and working on balancing issues we encounter appropriately. We’ll be keeping an eye on bosses we think don’t have enough varied mechanics to warrant their large health pools and updating them over time to make them more varied/interesting fights. We’ll be monitoring, and continually tweaking/adding to dungeon rewards over time and of course balancing where we see the need. And of course, we’ll be looking at adding more dungeons as well!

All of that being said, the game is VERY new for most of our players, and I can absolutely promise with more knowledge of the game and advanced player skill, the explorable dungeons can all be overcome by being skilled groups. We’ve seen many groups do it just fine in our internal alpha test once they had time to learn how to play the game well. Just like Domain of Anguish in Gw1, it takes time and practice to learn how to overcome stuff as hard as our explorable mode dungeons, and that’s exactly the kind of players they are designed for.

If DoA was any indication, a couple months from now, many of you will likely be posting saying most of the dungeons are too easy and you need better challenges

another “l2p” response from the devs lol. Seriously, why is it so hard to see that the core problem is not dungeons being “too hard”, it’s about the steep learning cliff, convoluted design (why the trash mobs often cause more wipes than bosses? why a high level dungeon feels much difficult than a lower level dungeon? why certain routes in HotW and CoF ex mode are considerably easier than even most story mode dungeons?), and finally, the reward that doesn’t scale with the effort and time spent doing these dungeons.

And someone should do a reality check on how popular is DoA in gw1. The place, along with many other “elite” areas, are basically off limits to new players, since the learning curve requires the veterans to teach and the newbies to practice before becoming good. So, remind me why is it a good design and why we want that kind of mentality in gw2 please?

Ty Colin for the straight forward replies. Indeed, the major problem with some dungeon mobs is that a few of these bosses have large HP pool with poor mechanics. While it’s true that most difficult dungeons are absolutely beatable a rare few of these dungeons were also a bit towards the degree of super extreme difficulty (ie. AC breeders was just brutal). I’ve observed that (a couple of things here):

1) Most explorable dungeons are designed to fit with the balance scale of a “lvl 80 player” – meaning if a player runs an explorable dungeon at the max lvl & with party members also at max level he/she should find the difficulty lvl just about right.

2) Generally the proper difficulty comes down to the mob having proper mechanics; glitched mechanics such as – letting the mob stand there and do nothing is often the key tip-scale of a dungeon’s level of difficulty.

Dungeons are not the end game content of GW2, because there is no end game content to GW2.

There is just Game Content for GW2.

Mr Johanson, I love you :P

Seriously though, thanks for the reassuring post and keep up the great work! Glad to hear the graveyard zerging is being looked at as well.

GW1 was mostly based on difficult trash (like DoA), so it’s not really surprising that they’ve been designed somewhat similar in GW2. But just think about this – maybe trash isn’t too hard, but bosses are just too easy. Certain paths are much easier than others, and I would like a better difficulty curve in general (AC should be the easiest, and Arah the hardest). As Mr. Johanson noted, I think the biggest thing the dungeons need right now is for the boss fights to be more engaging, and actually have the ability to completely wipe your group. I think a lot of the complaining that “bosses take forever” are due to the bosses killing a few people but then the rest of the party is running in circles while the boss can’t really kill them, then the party can res and run back in time. The only boss I personally think takes a long time is the Gorilla boss in the Jotun path of Arah. Everything else seems to take appropriate amounts of time based on it’s location (Arah bosses generally take longer as it’s the big instance of GW2, equivalent to DoA in some regards).

As for the dungeons in general, they really aren’t that difficult if everyone is playing with group oriented specs. I’ve completed every dungeon and every path with 5 players in full damage gear with minimal wipes. You just need good specs/utility skills.

Also, getting downed isn’t really a big deal in this game. You certainly don’t want to get downed, as it adds a lot of lost dps time and pressure to your group to get you back up, but it’s not the end of the world. Because of this, I don’t think “random oneshots” (which don’t exist) are something you should be getting worried about.

Somewhat related, I don’t think the dungeon grind would be as bad if the rewards were a little better. In GW1 we had chances to get green boss drops, but there doesn’t appear to be any specific drops anywhere in the dungeons. We consistently got crafting mats/yellow items from the chests. In GW2, the end loot isn’t really consistent other than the money reward and tokens, but I think item rewards are better for the economy.

Actually, AC EM Breeders are cake compared to the Scavengers / Stalkers. Now THOSE are brutal! In fact, my group makes them a priority over the Breeders. AoE based skills kill the breeder’s minions quickly, and as well, you can always interrupt them (They make a very noticable barfing animation when they are spawning minions)

In any case, my group has updated our AC EM Explore . We just finished getting our achievement for all paths done. (IMHO: Asura path is the hardest, but my guild group thinks Human path is hardest)

And also: note that I just hit 80, but I was running AC explore as I was leveling with levels being 40 thru 75. My gear was the normal Greens + Blues, occasional yellow, with associated Minor / Major runes. Also, I run mostly melee, and can now do AC EM with all melee and no deaths. Once you figure out the mechanics, its a cakewalk

I blame most of the mmos in the industry having catered to lazy (not saying casual) players over the last couple of years. Many people have this idea in their head that all the content on an mmo should be accessible to them.

Not everything in an mmo should be accessible to everyone, work for it.

Amlin.6041:

I blame most of the mmos in the industry having catered to lazy (not saying casual) players over the last couple of years. Many people have this idea in their head that all the content on an mmo should be accessible to them.

Not everything in an mmo should be accessible to everyone, work for it.

I agree wholeheartingly with this.

When I started playing MMOs, back in EQ1, I remember the toughness of those bosses / raid bosses. I never got to play 90% of the raid content back then, but I didnt begrudge the developers for making a hard game, and bosses that required only the top players could down.

Now being 31 years old, and seeing, over the years, how the genre has dumbed down, we are left with players like ‘whats-his-name that was 33 years old’ wanting to have the current dumbed down content. Im sorry, but you make me feel embarrassed for my age group. (In fact, im here at the airport doing another business trip, waiting for my flight. I work 55+ hours a week, 2 kids, and a fiance who hates games. I manage to make what time I have.. work)

I am fine with a small portion of the game only available to the elite. Its a challenge and a goal to work towards, and is alot of fun to get the chance to actually do it.

Its the same reason why I made one of my long term goals to obtain a Legendary weapon. It may take months, but I like having goals to work towards.

Please don’t nerf dungeons. I love difficult content and while I haven’t started exploratory yet I have been working on putting together a static to farm the dungeons with.

I farmed every heroic in Rift until they were easy for me. I plan on doing the same here. So far all of the story mode dungeons have been doable if we take are time and think about the fight.

It saddens me that so many players refuse to think through problems.

TLDR, please use a long term approach to dungeon balance. TY

Before ppl start yelling and saying others to go back to WOW… It has nothing to do with roles – and it has nothing to do with difficulty. It has to do with fairness.

Somehow PPL think WOW can’t do anything wrong. Well… they could – and they did it multiple times in Cataclysm when it came to dungeons. Just for example there were few fights that chanced difficulty depending on how detailed your graphics were. You could not see some ground effects on lowest settings and ppl did therefor not get visual warnings to move away.

THATS the issue I see with GW2. The core system of the encounters is so bad cause ppl can not see what is going on – what the boss is doing and when they should move and when they should stay. And many of the current dungeons are set in very small areas that makes it even harder to manage. 5 ppl bomarding the screen with effects and you miss the only effect that matters.

Thats bad game design. Just like the WOW graphic settings controlling the difficulty was a bad game design. Alot of ppl love PVE dungeons and they will do it in GW2. But the dungeons need to be FAIR and they need to be structured in a way so ppl know how to work on them. There is no such things atm.

I’m fine with the fact that Explorable Dungeons are meant to be played by la crème de la crème. Better reward for highly skilled players is logical too (i’m not a highly skilled player).

My only concern is the durability of trash mobs even in story mode. They’re tougher than the lost son of John Mc Lane and Ripley. Furthermore, i’d like to see some more specific loot in dungeons.
There’s no need to give marvellous things in story mode, but at least some good looking items would be nice.

Without difficult content I really see no reason to play this game. The difficulty is all that really keeps me interested.

90% of all video games are easy now. I have to play almost all single player games on hard the first play through now just to get my money’s worth.

When I hear people talk about playing through games on easy now days it blows my mind. Games have literally become so easy you won’t ever die. So many games now can be played through on normal difficulty with 1-3 deaths for a 12 hour game.

Lower the difficulty this early would be very short sighted.

Please don’t turn GW2 into Darksiders, Uncharted, Gears of War, Batman on easy. If you want a easy game to play then I just listed 4 games taht you can play through on normal difficulty and die once or twice.

As if the market doesn’t offer enough choices for easy gamers anyways. There is a plethora of games to play for casual gamers.

Rolo.9248:

Balthor.9482:

So the more casual players can’t have dungeons?

“So the less casual players can’t have content?”

…is what would happen if you reduce the entire game to the lowest common denominator. We’re talking about—what?—5-10% of the PvE content here?

“…but you can’t fool/please all of the people all of the time.”

My only criticism is flow: AC for a first dungeon (ow—WTB wide-angle camera) and then CM (cakewalk).

You are pulling my post out of context. That was a reply to someone who said that story modes weren’t meant to be repeated, but only to be done once to unlock explorable mode. But also says that explorable mode is for the more hardcore people as it requires more coordination and communication (and believe me, I’m fine with that).

So in his point of view people who want to pug get a dungeon wich isn’t meant to be repeated a.k.a. no dungeons at all as you would run out of dungeons to do.

Please at least nerf story mode, the mobs hit way too hard and have too much health. For melee it is especially bad as much of the time it’s impossible to see telegraphed attacks. Spell effects and screen clutter can cause a squishy player to die instantly and without warning.

Difficulty is fine. However, as already mentioned by ANet, bosses need more special abilities as their health drops. They also have way too vast reserves of HP.
And lastly, the cost for dungeon items is ridiculous. Running all 3 paths in full on a character should at least give a minor armor piece (hands/helm/boots), items which are currently requiring 2 seperate days of running all 3 paths.

Dungeons are fine(except for my vanishing tokens?). However I have a problem with the downed state in every aspect of the game outside of WvW.

Specifically to dungeons, I think its horrible that killing gets you up. In TA you just have to kill one of those poison plants and you are back up and fighting.

Was the dungeon designed with that in mind? If so its really bad if you ask me, because it makes the whole thing trivial.

The things that actually make these dungeons fun for me are the mechanic driven boss fights. That’s pretty much the bread and butter. Favorite parts in the game so far:

SE story, last boss, very fun, t2 reference.
CoF story, last boss, really fun mechanics, Logan stopped whining.
Dragon in Frostgorge, cool mechanics, fun all around.

When the mechanics are fun I don’t stop to remember how much HP they had. When it’s boring that’s all I can think about. The golem boss in SE is the best example, they have more HP then the boss does and 3 mechanics at most each, yet you wail on them for 4-5 minutes. The biggest let down yet was the Zhitan dungeon, so many cool parts I didn’t mind the 3 random bosses with seemingly no mechanics that started the dungeon. The dragons, the giants, so cool. Then you fight Zhitan, who spawns some mobs, then clings to a tower while you shoot him in the face and he literally does nothing about it. I have a hard time believing this was intended, unless the idea was, O.K. Zhitan fight, let’s see, kill a ton of trash, and then press 2 for 3 minutes. (Also where was Trahearne? He was just not there because he was busy or something?)

I like challenges. I play a warrior and I prioritized Power, Toughness, and Vitality. I still get smacked around like I’m made of paper.
- Making mobs have huge health pools isn’t challenging.
- Making mobs one shot you, isn’t challenging.
- Mechanics that are only challenging to figure out, are only challenging to figure out, and have 0 replay challenge so that’s kind of awful in its own way.

And to agree with some others, 40 times through a dungeon is a little much. You done good by making three separate paths, that’s nice, but you can choose the path, so you get locked into the easiest one because no one wants to do the harder versions (mostly because there is no reward). Have it randomly pick for you, and give more for completion. Or just give out a piece when you complete all 3, so that’s 3 runs per piece of armor, plus weapons is around 25 runs to get a set, and at least it’s not 25 of the easiest one you just ground out.

Lastly I want to say I am not at all upset in this game so far, there are things you should tweak, I know most will be fixed, maybe not to my specifications but in a way we all feel is fair. I really enjoy this game, and i will not be returning to that other MMO because it has show me there is a much better format to play, where the combat can be exciting and engaged, and the fights CAN be interesting and change every time.

Keep up the good work.

I do not know if this has been fixed or not, but there is this one boss in CM exp mode that is just… annoying is the best words to describe him. I believe he is an engineer because of the rifle and the knockback skill he is using, but I could be wrong.

You choose the butler path, you go into the next area, he is there with 3 lesser versions of himself.

Before first death: we rushed him, we wiped. that’s to be expected lol
Before second death: I found out his non-cooldown existence on his knock back. 4 knock backs and you have to waypoint. He kept me, someone who wasn’t even attacking him or close to him when it started, perma-knocked down until I died.

It probably took 6-8 deaths on that guy just to get past him. Then the hallway afterwards with the flame turrets/riflemen.. and the riflemen at the end of the hallway.. it was so hard to get past that, but we did.. it was the rocket turrets at the next part that we all just rage quit at. why? that’s because we lost a guy, had to go out of the instance(only I did) and then when we got a new guy, couldn’t get BACK INTO the instance..

That was my first exp mode experience. sucked.. but I’ll probably do it again.

Man, people always want things to be easier. Jeebus forbid you have to put a little planning into what skills you want to use in a dungeon. I’m very glad that the dungeons are as “hard” as they are now. I hit level 80 recently, and the dungeons are a great way to constantly work on becoming a better player.

I honestly DON’T think a pug group should be able to burn through it unless they are all highly skilled players. If you’re serious about running these dungeons a lot, find a group of players/friends you can use voice chat with and learn to work together as a team. I don’t want care bear dungeon runs that are in most MMOs.

Infact, I’d like it if the boss fights were harder, or like the Anet rep said, more varied. The boss fights seem much easier in comparison to the mobs you fight to get there.

Also, would you guys really want to see 70% of the people running around in dungeon gear? I think it’s great that getting that gear actually shows that you toughed it out.

So guys, don’t complain, just get better at the game.

P.S. One thing I would suggest is making CM the first dungeon, as CM is in my personal opinion 10 times easier/shorter than AC. It would be much better intro into how this game does dungeon crawling.

My only gripe is how much HP’s bosses have.

Once you figure out a bosses mechanics, it’s just 5-10 minutes of repeating the same thing over and over.

Thats why many people dont do them and wont be bother by them. Dark Souls hard… well from what I could gather, many say it is hard and too much of a chore.

Me, same here. Dungeons only appeal to a small crowd of players, which are the ones having a hard time to finding groups.

When the dungeons are way off balance it stops becoming fun.

I’m answering to the first post.

People need to man up and ask for the ridiculous artificial difficulty be changed to something that is actually withing the nature of your skills and “pick up party”. The game was advertised as there is no defining role for the classes but even then when a randomly assorted party from the dungeon entrances enters or a party with players who have defining roles (healer, tank, dps, support, etc) and/or strategies gets destroyed by insta gib “skills” that don’t play by the game’s rules and are really cheap, it says a lot about how the developers could not come up with a way for the dungeon to be difficult/challenging within the games rules.

My view on the whole “you died go back all the way to the waypoint and avoid all the traps again” thing is: this is 2012….just like I wrote above why does this still exists? There are other ways to do these dungeons. The player showed he can avoid the traps why does he have to do it 5 times again. Every time I repeat the dungeon I’ll have to do it again so that’s enough times, I do not need to go through the traps every time I die please.

EDIT:
I just read the response from the director, hey director here is what happens:

I form a party fromoutside the dungeon, we only have 1 person who knows what to do, we wipe every time on Ascalonian Catacombs, the part with the boss with insta gib spinning move which has a nice AoE radius outside of its character model.

I tried dodging, dodging so I could land behind a wall he stills pulls me (also pulls the entire party) and kills me (and the party) in one hit, I ask the guy:
Me: “I am dodging and blinding the guy nothing works”
Him/Her:“You can’t blind him”

After the third party wipe he quits the group disbands. Worst experiences ever I’ve had playing a dungeon in an MMO, no amount of buffs or well coordinated simultaneous skill usage protects against that nonsense.

It was better off to have random events happening at the dungeons that could influence skill usage by the bosses, monster spawning/placement and geometry than “pulls entire party even through walls game over”.

@Geiger Luck your complaint shows iam right with my post. The miniboss you mention from AC is easy doable, you mentioned the strategy of staying closer to a pillar and use the LOS to your advantage which works, at first thats what i used, but i have done that dungeon so much u get used pretty easy on how to dodge his pull. When you him shining/charging just wait like 1sec (maybe less) then you dodge. If you are complaining about this haha you are goin to have such a bad time later.

As said before explorable IS for a small intended hardcore base. If you plan on doing it get better, and by this iam not being arrogant, you will actually get better by the fifth time. If not this content is not designed for you and its only what? The 10% of all the game.

God, so many people wanting this game to be beaten in 2 weeks like a single player game. Seriously guys, having content to work toward and work on beats the hell out of sitting in cities. I know, I know, you are 48 with 8 kids, 12 dogs, a pet spider and a few kittens and have been divorced 18 times.

Yet somehow….you ended up playing the game long enough to 100% the entire world which takes around 120 hours or so and its only been out for 2 weeks? If you haven’t then theres your content, go grab it. If you have already played 120+ hours in 2 weeks then you obviously aren’t casual, you are just bad. So the response by the devs is spot on. Learn to play.

annnnnnnnd they nerfed it :P

ColinJohanson.2394:

Yeah graveyard zerg and some bosses having a few balance issues (or needing more varied skills at various health percentages so they are fun to fight for their large health pools) are absolutely things on our radar. Make sure to note specific locations/bosses when leaving feedback on the forums!

This is wonderful news. I don’t really enjoy dungeons as they are right now, with a few exceptions. The Iron Forgeman for example, is a really enjoyable fight. Me and my group loved the use of different and unique mechanics, which made the boss so much more fun to fight compared to many other bosses, for example the Asura-golem boss before him (I’ve forgotten his name, sorry). That boss was really tedious to fight. It wasn’t hard per se, since you could just graveyard zerg him to death. It was just a boring fight, with way too few mechanics. I barely can’t remember anything unique he did. Basically a “tank n’ spank”, but without the tank.

I realize that The Iron Forgeman is the last boss of the dungeon, and he needs that special kind of epic, which I agree with. BUT! Don’t let that limit the use of fun mechanics on the other bosses. This is something that WoW did right in the TBC-expansion, in which almost every bossfight seemed right; they (almost) always had different mechanics, and there was a special kind of accomplishment that you got after defeating them. So far, I kinda miss that in GW2.

I agree that the bosses should have a fair amount of HP, and they shouldn’t be nerfed as much as a lot of people say, but more importantly, THEY NEED TO BE FUN TO FIGHT, (which I can’t stress enough) or else a lot of people, including me, are going to lose motivation to play the dungeons in the game (or maybe even the whole game itself, for the record). So, don’t

Now, before some people go and bash my opinions, hear me out. I love this game, and I’ve been following it in development forever. It feels like it’s part of my duty as a player to give constructive criticism to the developers, so that the game turns out even better.

I’m really looking forward to the changes that you’re addressing, and I think that it’s really effin’ great to see developers reading and responding in the forums this much. Kudos, ArenaNet.

WARNING: End-game spoilers ahead!

Oh, and the third phase of the fight against Zhaitan was horrible. Seriously, clicking “2” for 4-5 minutes isn’t enjoyable, especially when it’s the main boss of the game. The two phases (fighting the risen minions) was a good buildup, and me and my group were expecting some epic finale. I think alot of people are disappointed with this fight, and I really hope that it’s something that you’ll be looking into.

/rant

I have no problem with the difficulty of the dungeons. But I do have a problem with the fact that the APPARENT difficulty of the dungeons is artificially inflated by giving everything huge amounts of hitpoints. No matter how challenging a fight is it’ll just become boring if it drags on too long.

Biscuithammer.8615:

I have no problem with the difficulty of the dungeons. But I do have a problem with the fact that the APPARENT difficulty of the dungeons is artificially inflated by giving everything huge amounts of hitpoints. No matter how challenging a fight is it’ll just become boring if it drags on too long.

This is exactly the issue I have with the dungeons at this time. Hard content is fine, in fact, I LIKE hard content, but there’s a difference between something being hard because it has interesting mechanics that you need to learn how to deal with, and the current state where the difficulty is artificially inflated by bad design. Say what you like but oneshot mechanics and needlessly large health pools are not “good design”.

I know people love to hate on WoW but when I recall the original versions of the heroic dungeons in the Burning Crusade expansion, THAT brings to mind “good design”. The fights were hard because there were interesting mechanics that you had to learn, not because you needed to pigeon-hole yourself into a certain spec with certain gear in order to even have a shot at completing the dungeon. I too regret that the difficulty was nerfed back then but I am simply baffled when I compare the design of the rest of the content in GW2 to the dungeons…when I look at how well things like Dynamic Events are done, with good scaling (on most events at least) I just do not understand how the dungeons ever made it into the game in the current state.

Please don’t misunderstand me, I am NOT asking for content to be nerfed, I’m asking for interesting mechanics that I actually CAN learn instead of having to play my character in a ranged style just to be able to see what’s going on during a boss fight…(CoE I’m looking at you here…) give me something that I can learn to do well and that will reward me appropriately for my efforts and I’ll gladly spend weeks improving my skill like I did for the heroics in WoW TBC pre-nerf …

Now, I will admit that I did not play GW1, but when I hear about having to use certain combinations of professions just to have a shot at even being able to complete the dungeon, this just SCREAMS bad design to me. Please anet, let your design philosophy for the rest of the game flow over into the dungeons, make the story mode easy enough for the casual players to complete if they get their proverbial heads out from where the sun doesn’t shine and make the explorable modes difficult by giving the bosses and trash mobs interesting mechanics that can be learned…the current mechanics are often badly telegraphed if at all and from what I’ve seen so far the same mechanics are re-used over and over again. There’s just no inspiration in it which really baffles me when I see how inspired the rest of the game is.

Colin

We’ll be monitoring, and continually tweaking/adding to dungeon rewards over time and of course balancing where we see the need. And of course, we’ll be looking at adding more dungeons as well!

Nice “Tweaking” of dungeon rewards. (x_x) Till the rewards are UN-NERFED or the difficulty made so a level 1 could do it (appropriate difficulty-reward scale) I won’t be running a dungeon and probably not even logging in.

If you’re adding more dungeons with the same reward/difficulty, keep em to yourself.