Guild Wars 2

One of the best things about the Ascalonian Catacombs, in my opinion, is that it feels physically rewarding to play with my friends not just insofar as receiving tokens, but in that certain champions and all end bosses drop respectable amounts of silver.

For reference:
- Three Champions in this dungeon each drop 5s
- Every Patriarch (End Boss) drops 15s

This gives players a sense of accomplishment and really encourages them to clear the harder groups. It also rewards players significantly for playing the dungeon all the way to the end. This is great! I think this is probably the best feature of any dungeon in existence right now: a reward for playing and beating mobs that would otherwise be a waste of time and total trash.

My biggest suggestion to improve the dungeon experience for players is to do this for every other dungeon. Basically, my suggestion is thus:

- Make at least 1 champion you fight per path in every dungeon worth 5s to kill
- Make every elite (purple-ring) in every dungeon worth 7-10s to kill
- Make every end-boss in every dungeon worth 15s to kill

Maybe you won’t do it for every champion or elite you face, but doing it for most of them or even some of them would go a long way to balance out a lot of issues with PvE rewards in dungeons. It would reward playing endgame content as opposed to running around in circles in assorted zones, it would reward talented teams able to beat paths efficiently, it would discourage botting to some minor degree because players could make decent money doing dungeons, and it would, most importantly, give a sense of accomplishment for beating certain tougher enemies that are currently a frustrating waste of time (ie. Troll in AC / Kohler / the CM hound boss / etc).

Cheers and thanks for the great dungeons so far. I look forward to discussion on this matter.

Yep, I mostly run AC with my daily group because of those rewards (omnom bars increase their coin drops). It’s a decent incentive for killing those bosses. I hope these kind of rewards will eventually make it to other bosses in other dungeons.

Which bosses exactly drop the coins? I know the end boss gives the 15, and the graveling gold enemy on path 2 gives 5. Which other ones? (I ask only because I dont pay attention enough to look)

The three spawn locations are:

- Directly north of Kohler’s WP in the passage up the staircase
- Directly east of Kohler’s WP, then North a bit in that area with the traps that connects to the Lover’s Crypt and the path 2 area
- In the area of the Graveling tunnels to the south where there are multiple fire traps in a criss-cross setup

I’d much prefer better item drops from dungeons instead of coin. Increased chances for rares/exotics/lodestones would be great.

Currently with the anti-speed run philosophy, dungeon running can’t compete with cursed shore farming in terms of making gold. Therefor there is no incentive to run them beyond personal interest or the tokens.

It would be nice if they changed the dungeon events to DEs, rewarding a bit of karma as well.

Or say a small increased drop chance for exotics (including precursors) would also give people incentive to run them more.

I was glad to see this aswell but as has been said the wealth acquired doesn’t beat orr where there are addition resource nodes and karma to be had too.

I am also a big fan of running AC for the same reason, AC is much better for money than most dungeons I have run due to these coin drops. I can also say that these coin drops have been enough incentive for me and my friends to work these trash packs into our clear path (the gold mob outside the lovers crypt for example is easily skipped, but we always pull for the 5s drop). However the game is still a bit inconsistent.

Still looking at AC, I tend to do all my runs sitting at at least 100% MF, maybe closer to 150%. On spider queen, from the boss herself most times I will maybe get ~30c, sometimes a low level item, and if I’m super lucky maybe a level 80 white. Whereas the above mentioned gold mob by the lovers crypt drops ~7.5s with omnnomberry bars and takes a fraction of the time and coordination. The troll is the biggest waste of time in the instance – it takes ages to kill and has pretty much consistent loot with the spider queen. If possible my group never kills the troll, we don’t even pull it to Kholer as that takes even longer than a regular kill and also involves dealing with the troll. It goes completely against the idea of a bonus event as having it spawn is more of a curse than anything.

One of the big problems with the games loot system in my experience, which seems to be the same for several others in this thread, is the risk/reward with loot – namely speaking with cursed shore in mind. Running the Melandru event in CS with the same gear, I tend to get a full 125 slot inventory, and 1-2 rare drops. This takes at most probably 45 mins. A run on each AC path back to back takes us ~90 mins, and comes out with about 80 slots filled, and maybe a single rare if I’m lucky. Not to mention the loss on karma and much higher rates of exp in CS. I also as a general rule tend to find mass looting mobs (from farming events and such) is far faster and more profitable than running 30 min AC explorable runs. The first honestly not being very difficult, and the latter requiring 5 relatively switched on and well built players.

Overall these are the changes I think would be very good for the loot system:

- Consistency in mob coin drops, i.e all gold mobs dropping ~5s base, purple bosses dropping ~10s and final dungeon bosses dropping ~15s.
- Make chests worth looting, chests in dungeons require quite a bit of work to get, make sure the return on rare items is consistent with other methods of obtaining them such as CS farming.
- Gradual token drops, while I recognise boss farming is a problem with this, having all the tokens at the end of a run can mean incomplete runs feel worthless. One suggestion on how this could be done is possibly to make it so that bosses drop 15 tokens per kill on their first death in one path, with a reward of 15 at the end. Then having subsequent runs give 20 tokens only upon completion, but none from bosses. This would mean people attempting something new can still see rewards even without finishing, and those farming will need to do full runs to continue getting tokens. This is obviously a more complex system as some dungeons have shared bosses across paths and currently I would assume the game tracks completion rather than individual kills, however its an idea that may be useful.

I understand Dungeon rewards must be extremely hard to balance, especially with the diversity in ability of the playerbase, and tipping the scales too far in one direction is hard to avoid, but it is definitely not in a great way right now. I look forward to seeing changes to the system to improve it, and thanks for reading this slight wall of text

Try using Omnom Berry bars or any equivalent on those coin drops;) 40% increased gold from mobs:)

Drool over the extra coins!