Guild Wars 2

Dungeons need to be fun and challenging at the same time. This means they need to not be too easy, and not too tedious. The overall dungeon length itself cannot be too long. (Nothing absurd like WOW’s 2 hour clears).

There are a LOT of dungeon encounters in GW2 that are terrible : pointless hit point bag bosses that never endanger your party that you must hack away through for 10-15 minutes at a time. Bullkitten bosses like the godforged greatsword that just run around insta gibbing players that you slowly wear down by graveyard rushing (terrible mechanic that I wish would be removed. if players fail, they fail).

But I thought I’d highlight some encounters that I think are done right. They all share common elements:

1) Fairly shot
2) Requires communication and planning ahead of time
3) Not just a single tank and spank monster.
4) Everyone has to be alert and pull their own weight – no one can afford to be dead weight and just die pointlessly/early

These are all from everyone’s favorite dungone, CoF #2! I wish we would see more events like these.

1) The bomb running event for Magg. This is a good event because it is fairly short: in fact, the short timer is the primary limiter for this event. It also requires coordination: you must specify who is going to go where and get each orb first, the next orb targets, who will start the encounter, where speed/healing boosts will be needed, how to handle the godforged, etc. If someone dies, you probably don’t have enough bodies running around collecting bombs to make it. Everyone needs to stay alive and stay on point. If you screw up and fail, the room explodes. Good event.

2) The final fight in CoF. Again, communication and timing are key. You must specify who is to fight each of the acolytes, when to start burning them down, and so on. I think this event may be a tad too easy, as you can more or less take as many tries at the acolytes as you need to take, but the basic idea is sound. If the ghost boss kills or fears someone trying to take out down acolytes at the wrong time, you are going to miss out on most of a cycle. Everyone needs to be alert and pull their own weight.

3) The kiting event where magg blows up the door to the final chamber. First of all, I can’t imagine this event is supposed to be a kiting event, but I imagine the devs think you will kill all those monsters. Given the absurd spawn numbers and times this is of course impossible for undergeared level 75 players, so a kiting event it is. I like that this is different and requires individual skill at staying alive, as well as making judgement calls on if it is safe to rezz a downed ally or if you need to keep running. It is also fairly short.

We need more events like this, frankly. These are the fights where the communication happens. The rest of the run passes in grim and bored silence for all the typical straight forward fights.

So based on this you only did CoF story and exp.
And yeah godforged gs boss in Cof rly is crazy they should reduce the dmg they do cuz right now 1 spin = half hp from adds and almost insta death by boss.
I loved the TA story mode last boss fight for instance.

I’ve done a lot more than CoF. I just used this one as it is the one most people are familiar with. Plus some dungeons ( AC, CM or HoW) have literally no fights I would describe as fun or good.

Some bosses I like:

Arah Explore Path 3: Giganticus Lupicus. Very dangerous fight (even after apparent nerf) and requires reaction to grubs in phase 1, solid dodging in phase 2 and use of defensive cds in phase 3. Overall solid fight, though phase 3 seems to last a bit long, maybe a very slight reduction in hp to stop the last part feeling like a grind.

Arah Explore Path 3: Final Wraithlord Event. Control point holding while distracting adds works very well and is pretty engaging. Remaining boss fight is a bit easy, but the mechanics are awesome if the damage the boss does was tuned up a bit.

Some others that are similar im too lazy to list.

Bad fights:

SE Explore path 1: Final boss. Not dangerous except one move, large health pool, boring.

So you get the general idea :P. There are several great fights. A TON that have potential but need a slight up tick in damage coupled with slight decrease in boss HP. Than a couple that just suck and take a long time to kill but don’t require you to do anything at all difficult and are very very boring.

For some reason the “quote” button is missing from the forum.

some dungeons ( AC, CM or HoW) have literally no fights I would describe as fun or good.

Ralena and Vassar are a pretty good fight, or would be if it wasn’t for a couple of annoying bugs, such as pushbacks often resulting in them just being knocked down in place instead of actually being pushed away (the bug affects other creatures too, but here it’s a fundamental mechanic of the encounter, and seeing it “wasted” by the bug can make the fight frustrating).

Other than that, I agree, nearly every fight goes on for far too long and is either extremely easy and boring (basically stand there burning down a massive HP pool) or is based on “unfair” (or buggy) one-shot-kill mechanics (Kholer’s harpoons that sometimes go through walls and shields, the golem’s rockets in CM that fly out of the screen and then hit players that can’t even see them, etc.).

Most of the Arah SM is good, except zhaitan, the mouth has too much HP though.

The mouth on Arah SM was fine, when he starts to inhale, your supposed to throw the fire ball towards it Andross style which deals about 12k and then you start slashing it and nuking it when he gets more damaged during the stun.

I found the rest of the game more doable when i could come to cm and in a few runs make some silver back from what i was bleeding elsewhere in the game. I see a lot of players with similar perspectives. Here’s a suggestion for an economy project make a script or something that will tally the rise and fall of all players gold and break it into percentiles. Sometimes I think the decisions are ignoring actual player results and desires, this is supposed to be a service to people who bought the game. If the players could see some more objective information about what is really going on in the game, we will have a more realistic dialog about what changes will help GW2 become a better game that is not just grinding.