Guild Wars 2

Giganticus Lupicus and Simins need to be toned down! Zhaitan needs to be as difficult as a final boss should be

Ohoni.6057:

Talking about dungeons, those should be so kitten hard that you can really be proud of yourself if you finished one of them, every single time.

No, that’s silly. Dungeons are such an integral part of endgame that no players should be excluded from them because they are not “hardcore”. If the developers want to have ONE path out of the three that is their vanity project, and just punishes players relentlessly for not divining the exact tactics the developers intended to be able to survive the dungeon, then that’s fine, but at bare minimum one of the dungeon paths should be relatively straightforward so that players that have no interest in a “hardcore” challenge and just want to get dungeon tokens for fancy gear can do so without the frustration of wiping several times in the same encounter.

Well, sorry, I was just kind of dreaming when I wrote that down and wanted to explain what I really would find kind of cool. I was just giving my opinion overall…
Apart from that, you are right, there certainly should be dungeons/paths that aren’t that hard like I’m asking for. Actually they could realize that quite well with their Dungeons & Paths system, bringing very different challenges/difficulty levels to each path within one dungeon (setting).
The more difficulty paths could give some more tokens in the end (and probably a title to show), so players who want a specific gear/weapon, could choose if they take the hard way and probably reach their goal faster (with a neat title) or just end dying on the floor several times… :-)

I just want to add my opinion as well even though something similar has been posted already.

This was a rushed patch for dungeons. The same thing as with ascended gear happened. You release a feature without releasing the full range of changes that need to be done for it to be a usefull/good/understandable one. First of all why I cannot wp travel in the dungeon when my team is in combat and I am alive? I am alive I dont need a ress! Why I have to be punished for that? Its such a simple thing. If this new change in dungeons was tested before releasing it to the public how can nobody noticed it ?? I noticed it on my second dungeon run after the patch. It only hints that this was not tested.
Secondly, why I am punished when some1 else is in combat anywhere? Why cant this feature be active only during boss battles ? example: I died going to AC p2 ghost dome and couldnt respawn back to WP because some1 else who died before me started runing and agroed the spiders. Ok I understand why would some1 consider wp rushing a bad thing. But if it is a bad thing why are the dungeons as they are (full of wp) and not the same as fractals? Why have the WP there if I am not allowed to use it when I need it. Why took you 5 months to realize that WP rushing is wrong and shouldnt happen? Why not remove them when you introduced fractals?
Furthermore, why is this released now and not when you actually change the dungeon encounters to accommodate this new feature? Dungeon encounters were designed with the WP rushing in mind! You cant tell me that you actually made CoE p3 last wp randomly there or Cof p2 wp before the exploding door. You must have known through testing that WP rushing will happen and will be necessary for the ordinary/not so hardcore PVEr to go through that content. And after 5 months letting people use wp rushing you come and just disable it without doing anything else. The rest of the changes will be in phase 2… in a month or 2?
People were WP rushing because actually sitting and waiting for a ress means more party members deaths and waste of time. If ressing would take less that going to the WP and running back or getting ressed by a party members people would not do it. Why you didnt make the ressing times shorter in t his patch at least? Why you didnt make the downed people withstand longer so they can be ressed and not 1hit-ed from bosses? Why you didnt make the ressing skills of classes to work even on dead people instead of only downed ones.

Who thought that it is a good idea to release it now to the public without the changes of phase 2? Really…? After the rushed decision of ascended gear through fractals only and the backfire it caused??

On a positive side though the cof p2 door event is much more enjoyable now.

So last night was my first time to run Arah explorable (or any dungeon) since the update.

I have to admit, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. I ran with a pug, as always, and we killed Lupi on our second try. I didn’t die during the second attempt but I did rez a couple of people and it wasn’t that hard to pull off as long as I didn’t have aggro.

I’m still not keen on being forced to do nothing while waiting to either be rezed or for the rest of the party to wipe. IMO, the player should always be allowed to do something.

have just wasted 2 hours trying to complete first dungeon in story mode with 4 others only the warrior lasted the rest were dead or down most of the time. we were completly stopped by the twins and after dozens of trys gave up in dispare. i have copleted this run a few times before never easy but do able. not now. will have to change kit to have a hope.
all vit and tough.
will not be doing monthly as with out " balanced , experienced and well kitted group will not be fun just cost loads to repair.
i spent a huge proportion of my time rez ing other characters well that was fun.
welcome back the tank and the healer.

Loving the new CoF p2 event, altough it may be a bit overtuned for the general difficulty of the dungeon path ( quite easy ). Since there’s a ton of enemies I couldn’t quite see what mobs (or how many of them) do x or y skill, but you might look into reducing their CC and possibly lowering the damage of archers. Equipping for AoE stability and using Wall of Reflection helped us quite a lot and since these two things are almost Guardian-only prerogatives you might want to design future changes with that in mind.

Ok perhaps as dungeons are turning toward pain in the kitten it might be an idea to put up a timer for ressing like 45-50 seconds before a player can res and make ress time about 15 seconds?

Currently I find myself often in fractals dying on boss, and today 2 players didnt make it to the boss in aquatic fractal. They ressed but where ported before the dolphin part, having to do that with 2 players, both died and boss was killed with 3 players. 1 of the players managed to ress after death when out of combat, and get the chest, the other player couldnt.

Its a SERIOUS pain in the kitten to not be able to ress due to kittenty combat bugs and its lame to not get ur chest.

Besides that I dont feel the personal reward lvl has 2 much influince? Does it work on the chests or the mobs? Because my loot is mostly trash these days. Not to weird as im playing under my usual level which gave me some proper loot as far as most GW2 dungeons go…..

Add legendary armor to the dungeon chests, perhaps ppl actually get the feeling they are being rewarded for doing the hard, long and boring dungeons!

Also when you dont have healer/tank, make it better workable without them, and we certainly need better scales, that goes for dungeons (especially fractals, they make 0 sense when it comes to difficulties, specially noticeable on higher lvl) and for classes. Some classes have some must have skills for dungeons, and will get the “healer/tank” type invites as those are the needed ones in other games. They will most likely find a group, other are being cut out because of the lack in those skills.

If something works well, dont change it, if it doesnt work, fix it!

It looks like GW2 will never be game for people that want to “grind” for something.There is no challenge in the game ex.FOTM lvl 25+ that can fit lvl 80 population.Spvp is a absolute failure but thx god for WvW.So the facts are:It is a PVE game,It is really noob friendly and it doesnt have even a bit interesting endgame.For how long it will be like that we dont know.But i do agree that they are focusing on things that really do not require a fix.I know they listen to what people have to say,but is that really a good choice?If u listen to 1 person u ignored the other.Best thing they can do is to stick with their own plan and ignore all the /cry on the forums.Also the should release the new content pretty soon.Lots of people hate the current state of GRINDING daily for ascended items…Not fun,not fun at all.
Best bet to keep things fun is to fill up all character slots and wait till they think of something to do

All I can say is I used to enjoy dungeons with my friends. Lots of my friends and family play gw2 and it was fun to get together and run a dungeon, even though we all died a lot and sometimes couldn’t make it through. Almost had my 3rd char to 80 and was anticipating running dungeons with my new 80 guardian and earning points for the armor sets, etc. After trying a few dungeons with the new system I’m totally discouraged. In fact, haven’t been back on to play after the last fiasco…it’s just not fun any more. I doubt I’ll play again until it’s fixed. If this is a scheme to raise revenues by making us buy more revive canisters well it’s backfiring…they are just going to lose players imho. I know a lot of my friends feel the same…it’s just not fun any more.

this new Dungeon patch sucks so bad. I mean realy why take away the respawn wile team is fighting the monsters. Do you even think a player will be able to resurrect a team member in a boss fight? you know how much time it takes to resurrect someone wen there dead wile youre in combat a lot. And no one is gona do that wile they have a boss trashing them up. The dungeons mechanics befor were great now they are trash you want to make dungeons harder? Simple give diferent dungeon levels to each dungeon normal, hard and nightmare. Add greater rewards reward and penalties depending on the level not so hard to do. Seriosly this is a a bad idea that will make many people stop playing dungeons or even the game.

Let me preface by saying that I would likely fall heavily into the category of Casual player. I (and my partner, we tend to duo everything) took our time getting to 80. We putzed around and eventually got there and didn’t bother with doing the dungeons as we leveled up; we wanted to see the story first. We don’t put a huge amount of time into the game, maybe a couple hours a night (certainly not enough to be considered hardcore).

We’re now working our way through the dungeons to experience the story modes there, and haven’t done any of the Explorables yet so everything I’m about to post relates to Story Mode only.

We did our first Story Mode attempt at Ascalon Catacombs before the patch changed the res-rushing and locked down waypoints while a member was in combat. We were a PUG group, and I think only one person in the group knew what they were doing from past experience. It was new to all of us. We did pretty well most of the way through the dungeon, and there wasn’t much res-rushing to be had until we got to the Aderlbern fight. The ranged players stayed up the whole while but me and the other couple of melee’rs were running back from the side waypoint as trying to res anyone that Addie knocked down with his spam-casted AEs of doom was suicide. We actually managed to do the Lovers fight successfully without res-rushing. It took a couple tries to get a strategy that worked for us but we did it.

Then we did Caudecous’ Manor. There was a bit more res-rushing in this one but on the whole we did pretty good. Again a PUG group, though sadly I don’t really remember much in the way of specifics of where we had trouble or not.

Then the patch came in and… I felt no burden because of it.

My next dungeon run was actually without my partner and I was using a Ranger alt (I main a Warrior) and I was roughly level 35 when I decided to try AC more ‘level appropriate.’ I didn’t die once and we never wiped. There wasn’t an encounter we didn’t survive, and I wasn’t the only one near level range for the dungeon. The Lovers fight was ridiculously easy; they didn’t even teleport back to each other at 50%. We just burned them to the floor and went on our way. Same with Adelbern. His AE hit a lot less frequently and was much softer. So no deaths there either.

Recently we did both Twilight Arbour and Sorrow’s Embrace together, and as always in a PUG.

TA was admittedly tough, especially for me when we got to the necro boss with his evil spiders of doom. This fight gave us the most troubles, but it only took three attempts to get it down (and the realization that being in melee or not constantly moving was a bad idea).

Sorrow’s Embrace was actually a bit easier though we did run into some spots were we fell on our faces but each time that happened it was entirely because of our own silliness (like rushing into the Dredge gathering after clearing the cannons and trying to take all of the groups on at once… But it was incredibly fun trying!).

All in all though, what I’ve seen from the Story Mode runs of these dungeons before and after the patch is that after the patch players are playing smarter (with the exception of our Leeroy Jenkins moment in Moleville, but that was totally worth it). They heal each other more often, ressing as soon as someone drops if able.

The waypoint change, and the Daily update encouraging people to Dodge seemed to have done a net value to the skill of people in the game.

So I think this is an excellent change, coming from the viewpoint of a casual player going through Story Modes (the only parts of the dungeons one could really consider necessary).

I’ll reserve judgement on the Explore modes when I get to doing them, but then again I kinda feel that those modes are more supposed to be hard trials of skill and co-ordination and that they’re not at all necessary to advance. They’re there to say “Lookit what I can do, and the nifty costume I’m wearing to provide I did it.”

What in the hell was Arena Net thinking when they increased the difficulty of these dungeons? This is absolutely stupid. I’m trying to do Honor of the Waves with a GOOD group of people and we physically can’t kill the Zealot boss. DO YOU EVEN TEST THIS STUFF?

He does 4000 damage with his auto attack, which is AOE. Please, hire new testers. Whoever tests it now sucks at their job.

After experiencing issues with gameplay in multiple dungeons today that were caused solely by the 1/28 patch, I also am not happy with how the patch affected dungeons.

On the whole I like where this is going however there are three things I’d want to see changed. Everything else in my opinion is awesome!

1) Rez skills to revive dead allies. So far I’ve practically never bothered bringing a rez skill, they have ridiculous cast times and ridiculous cooldowns. If I were to bring one it would be in anticipation of a particularly troublesome fight, yet I’ve stopped doing even this because in most of the particularly troublesome fights, by the time my rez skill has finished casting, my downed ally is already dead, leaving the skill in its ridiculous cooldown and having done absolutely nothing to help anyone. If they had shorter cast times I wouldn’t mind that they don’t rez dead allies, if they had shorter cooldowns.. I wouldn’t mind so much that they don’t rez dead allies. However since we now have this mechanic where you can’t hit a waypoint if someone’s in combat, I don’t think it would be unfair that these just rez dead allies.

2) If I’m rezzing someone and I hit my dodge hotkey it should let me dodge. I don’t have double tap enabled because it sometimes goes off when I don’t want it to, leaving me with less endurance than I’d intended, so I shouldn’t really need to start moving away from someone I’m rezzing before I dodge. That’s only an extra split second action before my dodge but it feels like the game penalises me for rezzing, that split second could be and has been the difference between life and death. This is why I tend to avoid rezzing people who are all the way dead during some of the harder boss fights, it’s not worth the risk of losing that reaction time.

3) Preventing the ability to skip everything. It just doesn’t feel right to enter into a dungeon and then skip past everything than can be skipped past. In the last MMO I played, once you’d aggro’d something within a dungon, it’d chase you all the way to the ends of the dungeon if you didn’t have it killed. I know this would just enrage those trying to speed clear everything but… I guess I’m just selfish, I like to do dungeons because I enjoy playing the game. Once I’m out of a dungeon I go looking for the next dungeon to do because after having done plenty of dungeons, general PvE content outside of dungeons just isn’t quite as exciting. Thus the reason I just can’t understand why people even play if they’re not even going to… play. Skipping isn’t playing it’s avoiding playing, I don’t understand it really. Ok I’m done.

Just to give my 2 cents on the matter of res rushing:

I understand it was not a planned mechanic at first, but there are a lot of bosses that 1 shot people a lot, and ressing takes so much time and leaves the ressers vulnerable that it is not that feasible. Might not have been planned, but it seems many bosses were balanced towards it. As such, I do not agree to such a mechanic without first having most bosses balanced. And another thing, it is VERY annoying when someone dies and can’t be ressed so he just has to wait there while everyone else battles (like when someone falls into lava during a boss), not to mention boring.

Also, this fix is a problem for other areas of the dungeon that are not bosses. For instance, while trying to do CoF path 3, at the long bomb line, people die a lot. After someone gets to the top of that, he starts getting attacked by the turrets, which engages him in combat, and makes it so no one else can res to try to run the bomb line until the turrets are gone. It is impossible to res people in the bombs way, so there is no way around that.

If you really insist in locking people out of boss fights after dead, I would suggest placing them behind a closed door. When the boss battle starts, the door closes and even if people res, they would not be able to rejoin the battle. Or better yet, make this cant res mechanic only work when in boss battles. As it is right now, I personally just find it annoying and frustrating, definitely less fun to do dungeons with.

I thought I might be a little proactive and offer a solution of kinds to the problem of res-rushing and no ressing. I’ll give it in the form of an algorithm which you may use without first gaining my permission. Thanks in advance.

IF vitality<1
THEN wait 120 //seconds
ALLOW way-point activation.

Yllnath.2573:

Account.9832:

They designed these dungeons with the WP respawns in mind. Now they’re changing the respawns but not actually changing the dungeons at the same time.

Pretty awesome that you know what they had in mind when the designed dungeons.

Wait, so you think they designed the dungeons without knowing that people could respawn…? If anything, that would seem even more disorganised. And surely they would have noticed that people were respawning, no…?

Not sure if this issue has been psoted yet. havent read most of the replys.

Although i really like the revamp to the rez system, wp rez rush was ridiculous in my opinion, there are some issues with it.

I think its great to “force” players to actually rez their fallen team mates and disabling waypoint rez if the party is in combat, however, i’ve come across some situations where the system desperatly needs tweaking:

Cof path 3, final boss fight. The boss will try to push you into the lava, while its easy to avoid with proper dodging and stun breaker use, sometimes you will get hit. last night a party group passed the whole fight dead on the lava, with no way to rez him and no way to return to the wp. In this case i think players should be able to get to the wp.

Same thing in other maps with lava (coe destroyer fight for instance).

Also players killed by traps should be able to wp back even if the party is engaged in fights, but this is a minor concern.

Thats about all the problems i have with the new system.

Blades.9417:

a party group passed the whole fight dead on the lava, with no way to rez him and no way to return to the wp. In this case i think players should be able to get to the wp.

If, instead of this blanket “no rez” policy, they had taken a look at other MMOs out there (or read the suggestions GW2 players have been making since release…), they could have implemented a much better system:

1. Allow players to respawn at WPs whenever they want.
2. Optionally add more WPs to dungeons.
3. On a case-by-case basis, decide if the “boss room” should become locked or stay accessible during the fight (i.e., if there’s a possibility that players will get downed in inaccessible places, leave the doors open, so they can respawn and run back in; if not, close the doors).
4. Improve the revive system so that players reviving teammates can simply press their dodge key to interrupt reviving and dodge attacks, instead of being frozen in place.

This would have the added benefit of letting them update each boss encounter separately (i.e., leave all doors open for now, duplicating the original design, and add doors to each boss encounter after updating that boss encounter to make sure it works correctly with the new system).

Instead, they applied a blanket change to the resurrection system without updating most of the actual boss fights (that had been designed for the old system), which is just going to drive some players away (while doing nothing to attract new players, because there’s no actual new or improved content).

People who preferred to not resurrect at WPs already had that option. This update doesn’t add anything to the game, it just removes that tactical decision and forces everyone to play the same way. What the game needed (and still needs) is a change in encounter design to make reviving more viable.

The reason why some people preferred to release and run back from the WP was that, in many encounters, trying to revive a teammate is pretty much a death sentence for the reviver, because your character is frozen in place while reviving, and can’t even dodge. It can take almost 4 seconds to interrupt reviving and regain control of your character. That is the real design problem, and it still hasn’t been fixed.

I have to say I really love the dungeon mechanics thus far over gw1.
:)
I enjoy a nice Lupi fight. I’m concerned about Simin being bugged though. Not sure if my guild group just had trouble and which complaints are accurate… bugged or over powered healing and stealth?

Blades.9417:

Cof path 3, final boss fight. The boss will try to push you into the lava, while its easy to avoid with proper dodging and stun breaker use, sometimes you will get hit. last night a party group passed the whole fight dead on the lava, with no way to rez him and no way to return to the wp. In this case i think players should be able to get to the wp.

I couldn’t agree more. My guild has gotten much better with this guy since the update and can get him in one or two trys now but i still think there should be a way to revive dead players who end up in lava and dead from other similar effects. Maybe put the dead body in some accessible area or even I don’t care, under the bosses feet. You just cant rez when someone who takes 7000 dps because there toe is in the lava. I no longer care much about the rez rush change but I hate to see players outed with out exception or possibility of rescue after missing one dodge.

We run all the CoF paths every night (and other things). I wish CoF path 1 was longer, harder and unfarmable. We do it properly, usually no mesmer, mixed group in around 12 mins . . way to fast. I enjoy paths 2 and 3 a lot more because of this. We tried the speed clear way just to see what the hype was about. . .. . 5 mins . .. . That is just way to insane. I do hope that gets corrected. I like 30-60mins a run, more enjoyable, more rewarding an experience.

Keep up the great work!

I still stand by my last post I said in this thread, reviving needs work. My group was fighting lupi in Arah last night prior to the maintenance. We hit lupi just as the warning popped that the servers were going down in 60 minutes. We never finished the dungeon, mostly because of issues with reviving. Either it was kitten near impossible to get to someone before they died, or you got to them and suddenly lupi aggroed to you and you both died, or lupi’s weird leash would take effect despite him being in combat and he reset. His leash needs to be fixed or something, there’s just a lot of annoyance in the encounter.

But back to reviving, it needs a ton of work. As people keep mentioning, you can’t dodge when in a revive. It’s slow to do and most people are too afraid to do it knowing they’ll take a risk of dying too leaving one or two people to watch as the rest of the party fights the boss. I try to res downed people all the time but there’s points where it’s very difficult or almost impossible. I personally feel that you should res someone at ALMOST the same speed regardless of whether they’re downed or dead. If someone is downed people will get them back in the fight quickly. If they’re dead it takes a longer time but for seemingly no reason. To punish the person who died? To show how much the person reviving them cares for them with their slow caresses?

And to go kind of off yet on topic here, it’s clear that some of the new dailies are trying to enforce the playstyle Anet wants in a dungeon with the dodger and healer. As far as I’ve seen though, I don’t get healer credit for reviving a downed person which is of course why we see people killing npcs or afk players to get their dailies done outside of dungeons. It’s kind of a strange choice of things to make a daily incentive when saving someone while their downed is the best (and only in some cases) way to do it when in a dungeon.

tl;dr version: reviving needs to be faster when someone is dead

Edit: I’d like to also add that I don’t see any benefit in making the dungeons any harder. As it currently stands dungeons are primarily run by people trying to get tokens for exotics or legendary gifts and whatever else. They should be able to be run at the suggested level for the dungeons (possibly in a set of “bad” armor) and by any selection of classes. Fractals are for those who want a challenge and ascended gear. As dungeons stand right now they can be pretty tough, especially for someone new to them. When you talk about cranking up the difficulty to make them more challenging you’re asking to exclude more players than are already excluded. Look at AC explore for example. It’s a level 35 dungeon which can be run by a level 35 with a bit of difficulty. Now look at the people recruiting for the dungeon who are demanding an all 80 party. Or you join and you’re 35 and you’re instantly kicked. People are already alienated enough in dungeons. People are afraid to say they’re new to a dungeon for fear of getting kicked. There’s already no margin of error due to the waypoint change so to increase the difficulty just doesn’t make any sense.

my 2 cents about dungeons so far:

almost all bosses, across the board, just have too much hp, it’s not that they are to hard bcoz of that, it’s rather getting boring having to fight them so long – no matter the mechanics

boss focusing a single player even when downed – is that a bug or intended, if its intended… oh boy, and you wonder why noone would rez ppl in boss fights? generally the rez takes way too long and like cripples you when you want to dodge any attacks in the meantime

rez-rushing “nerf” – like others said, put a cooldown to it like 2-5min. increasing everytime or something but no rez at all – plz think things through before implementing them, …just once oO

…that and many more things already mentioned here, but these annoy me the most

I agree that the reviving system needs a revamp. Keep the “revive manually” for downed players as it is, but change the skills that give instant ressurection to downed players so that they revive defeated players, like a real ressurection system.

I totally disagree with the doors locking bosses idea, i dont think players should be kept out of the battle for that leave them dead where they fell, the waypoint rez mechanic in dungeons was flawed, now is better, just need some tweaks in my opinion.

And please nerf the mesmer portals that allow people to skip a lot of content, last night i ran with my guild in coe p2, i used to run it back on FA server with some friends from gw1, we did the dungeon as it should be done, no mesmers, killing the bosses and disabling the alarms, took a while but felt good to finish. so alst night i run with this guys and they skipped everything using mesmer portal to bypass doors, i gotta say i was disapointed to see that as possible.

Kelly.5293:

I wish CoF path 1 was longer, harder and unfarmable. We do it properly, usually no mesmer, mixed group in around 12 mins . . way to fast. […] I do hope that gets corrected. I like 30-60mins a run, more enjoyable, more rewarding an experience.

I see no benefit to having all dungeon paths take the same amount of time, or basing that on what you find more enjoyable. Different people have different tastes and might have different amounts of free time on different days.

IMO, the key to a successful game is having content that appeals to all those people, and that means having at least a couple of really short dungeons and a couple of really long ones.

If you don’t find the <15 min dungeons enjoyable, simply pick one of the others.

And no one forces you to do speed runs. If you don’t like them, don’t do them. Asking for something to be “corrected” (i.e., removed from the game) just because you don’t like it seems a bit egotistical, especially considering no one forces you to do them (“I don’t like [short dungeons / long dungeons / jumping puzzles / skippable bosses / unskippable bosses / whatever] so it should be removed from the game, because everyone should play the way I want them to.”).

You Ruined your game…get your act together A net or be prepared to dish out some refunds I wouldn’t sell you a car you love then have you wake up to find I took the tires off and replaced the dash with a big dude that punched you in the face when you put in the key. think things through post what you are thinking about changing then get some feed back then implement don’t take liberties you don’t have.

I like the patch so far, I think the problem is people really got attached to dying and getting up right away so they didn’t feel any shame for it. Now they’re down till they get picked up slowly and can feel like the burden they usually are. There are lots of ways to rez people safely on bosses but maybe the range, speed, traits for rezing, or utility of rez abilities should be improved so they aren’t so awful people won’t go near them. (at least for pve)

Sorry I wanted to repost this. I see a lot of complaints but not much constuctive ideals about improving things. Also whats with all the talk about kittens? :P

“I know you guys were against the whole “trinity” class system, but it would definately help the dungeon experience. It’s hard to strategize boss fights when theres no set tank or healer. A couple of big hits and your down. My suggestion would be to implement a sort pick-up and go role system using the in game environmental weapons. You already have plenty of DPS, so you only really need two. A sword/shield set and a healers staff set. These of course coming with thier own set of skills designed for thier role. The tank set (sword/shield) would have skills that increase agro and reduce incoming damage. While the healer set, well would heal party members and perhaps provide bonuses to rezzing. Ideally the sets could be picked up and drop as needed, so if your tank takes a dive another member can pick it up and continue the fight!”

Viore.7542:

I know you guys were against the whole “trinity” class system, but it would definately help the dungeon experience.

No, it wouldn’t. The WoW-style “trinity” system is based on deliberately stupid AI, that will attack the player posing the least threat simply because that player has certain skills that manipulate the AI variables (increased threat, taunts, etc.). It’s completely unrealistic and artificial, and only benefits bad players who expect to be carried through encounters by the tank, while they stare at their skill bar instead of paying attention to the actual fight.

There’s a reason why no one adopts the standard “trinity” party set-up in PvP arenas and battlegrounds: because it doesn’t work against intelligent enemies. The enemies will simply focus on the healer, kill him quickly, and then kill the DPS one by one, while leaving the tin can (tank) who does the least damage for last.

Having a combat system that doesn’t rely on deliberately crippled AI allows the game programmers to code more interesting mob / boss behaviours, and adds value to players with good awareness.

This isn’t to say that GW2 dungeons don’t need improvements (they do, a lot), but a WoW-style combat model is bad enough in games designed for it from scratch; tacking it onto GW2 at this point would be a disaster.

If you like “holy trinity” games, you have plenty out there to choose from. The last thing we need is to make GW2 into yet another bad WoW clone.

We’ll get used to it. the no wp rushing….

and when the wp was still in place sometimes u had terrible PuGs, sometimes awesome PuGs….. which is still the case, its not that some players are bad and others are good, but the synergy of the working as a group.

Your right, I prefer the AI to randomly wipe out party members one at a time without a good means to mitigate damage.

Viore.7542:

Your right, I prefer the AI to randomly wipe out party members one at a time without a good means to mitigate damage.

hit the dodge button

I like the new rule of no rez rushing. If player want to play a game without thinking, go WoW. Players need to learn how to use their utility slots. And as Robert said somewhere (if not mistaken on the person). Dongeons are aimed to organized groups. Which means you have to actually TALK / WRITE with other people you group with.

I have never had a dongeon unfinished with pugs as long as we set our mind to it. And I am far from being a good player. I know some a lot better.

Pretty much all classes have a way to rez a downed player, or even a dead player for some. Some are just plain useless (guardian one, takes just too long to cast and you need to be near the player)

Also players should really start thinking on packs they find TOO hard. At least 2 professions in game can unlink packs and pull annoying mobs one by one. Yes, one by one If you can’t do the pack like you want to.

Though, in regards to some story dongeons, I believe some are just hell if you are not in a full 80 party. (CM is one of them) While others are just…………… seriously Arah Story ? Why the heck did you nerf that one ??????? It is no fun to run now…. boring as hell, you keep on waiting for the ship to move around

Don’t change the system all path in every dongeons are doable even Arah/Simin. As for rezzing a player, you don’t have all to go

And for those wanting the trinity, LOTS of boss can actually be tanked (Alpha, Victoria, Lupicus (not cac tanked but still tanked), …) you just need to equipped the correct utilities.

Regards

Regards,

The locked way points are fine, not having any problems except in cadaceusmmanor path 2 the way point is to close to enemies and hence if you botch a mob it becomes impossible for an entire party to way point and try again. Aside from that, Coe feels fairer now, sorrow’s embrace is still fairly challenging, but not overtly so, and over all things are better. It’s nice to see players Rez completely dead characters and has made kiting a much more important strategy.

Removing rez-rushing was a good thing to do. A better way to do it might have been to make it unnecessary instead of just banning it, causing severe collateral annoyance. But whatever.

important suggestion:
The biggest problem I have with dungeons is: skipping groups of mobs. It just sucks. It is boring, and when it goes wrong, it is extremely annoying.
Where GW2 really shines is it’s very adaptable, spontaneous combat system. And this shines most versus multiple enemies on which crowd control actually has any effect. In AC and TA the most difficult encounters actually are those where you face groups of small mobs (AC: defend Detha’s cannons, TA: groups of Nightmare Court Knights). It’s a shame that players skip groups of silver/bronze veterans wherever they can.
The reasons are:
1) Its not rewarding.
2) Skipping is very much possible.
3) And players think the optimum time to complete a dungeon run is about 30min and don’t want it to take any longer, if possible. Dungeons would take ages if you killed every mob in your way. Arah already takes far longer than 30min, even with skipping wherever possible (which is fine with me, but the skipping sucks).
ways to fix this:
1) wrong: make skipping impossible/very unreliable by adding more knockdowns, roots etc. to trash. This would mean dungeons taking ages and being less rewarding per time.
2) right: just remove trash mobs. make some of the veterans normal mobs. Killing them would be fast, maybe not challenging, but still better than the status quo of trying to run past everything.
3) right: make trash mobs rewarding. The best way would be to add a chance of dropping dungeon tokens. Now that bosses have a chance to drop 3 of them, why not loot a total of 5-10 tokens from trash mobs per run?

I realize that this is probably a bit late in the development process.

praise:
I really like GW2 dungeons
The difficulty in the explorable dungeons in general scales well with dungeon lvl (AC < CM = TA < .. < Arah) with few exceptions (like CoF being easy and now the farmgrounds of packs of mindless warriors).
The story modes can be a bit frustrating though. They should be an entry point for all the story/exploring players, but quite often they are more difficult than the easier explorable paths (like AC back in the old days. I think Sorrow’s Embrace story is still fairly OP (I’m talking about the fire golem summoned by the evil guy) for people not usually into dungeons).
Nobody wants to ever fail to complete a dungeon. Please keep this in mind when making changes. Nobody wants to get frustrated. Good groups already get big rewards for playing well (like only taking 20min for a TA run, instead of 1h), so thats fine. There is one challenging dungeon in the game (Arah), and uber-pros can do high lvl fractals when they are looking for failure.
I only join random groups and have so far only failed in: AC story back in the old days when Ralena and Vassar felt mostly immune to knockbacks, SE story (have completed it in the meantime), Arah exp p1 (haven’t done any arah since then, playing for almost an hour and then failing at lupicus sucks. I don’t have time to play computer games for an hour and feel bad afterwards). The total times any dungeon got bugged and had to be restarted were maybe 2-3.
Overall this is a very good balance. I love your dungeons (as Necro, Guardian, Mesmer).

oh, and:
more waypoints please! now that we can’t abuse them anymore, please make us able to regroup quicker. running is boring

Anet’s idea of testing is to outfit a group in the best gear possible for each class, throw them into a dungeon, and tune each encounter around that top end gear. Not once do they ever think “Maybe players won’t have xyz/ascended/etc gear)”, IF they even test their “adjustments” at ALL. Case in point: CoF P2. Same number of adds spawn, they do relatively the same amount of ridiculous damage (In full lv 80 exotic leather gear I got 2-shot by a Shaman after dodging his 1st 2 fireball attacks and ran out of energy), but NOW we have to worry about the assassins that basically 1-shot Magg (we thought we missed an assassin that might have already hit Magg a couple times, but the next attempt we decided to test this by letting the 1st one that spawned go hit Magg to see what his damage was, and yea – The assassin 1-shot Magg).

Add to this the removed ability to respawn mid-combat, and ALSO add in the fact that whenever you attempt to rez someone, you become 1st priority on every mob’s decision on which person to attack.

Instead of lowering the difficulty of the event, Anet actually made it more difficult by failing to address the primary issue (# of mobs and their damage), and instead simply added an unneeded element (the ridiculous assassins).

IMO I honestly think that Anet’s attempting to sabotage their own game. Assuming this isn’t the case, poor/inappropriate adjustments to the game’s mechanics, overtuning and unneeded nerfing of certain mechanics to the game, such as eliminating emergent gaming as it happens in an attempt to bottle-neck players into accomplishing tasks ONLY ONE WAY versus inspiring them with different solutions/paths to take, etc. in the very least indicates total incompetence.

May be off topic but dungeons are too hard, and it costs ridiculously amount of gold just to repair the gear( just another one trick of arena net to rip off the gamers wallets),,,and yeah teleporting via waypoints at high levels is another rip,,,this game is tooo much flawed, Im going back to GW1! Arenanet please fix the PVE!

Essence Snow.3194:

What the WP change accomplishes

1) Less friendly PuGs and/or less pugs in general (why all the hate towards pugs?)
2) Groups finishing boss encounters while dead player remains dead being denied boss loot
3) Players less likely to help less experienced players in dungeons
4) Player mandated gear checking/title checking/ etc…

What good does this change accomplish?

1)Players with superiority complexes can feel better about themselves
2)I can’t really think of anything else…I simply don’t see the good in this

All in all this doesn’t really change things for groups that already had no issues with the dungeons. It doesn’t make it anymore challenging for them. What it does do is raises the barriers to entry for those who are new/less experienced/ and, or just well not as capable. How is that a good thing?

I have to agree with you, I’ve seen every aspect you’ve been talking about. I find it sad that anet that promised no grinding and the game being friendly to casual players is doing the exact opposite. They also tend to use the terms “Making it more fun and challenging”.

To answer your question (How is that a good thing?): No matter how you look at it, it’s not. I love the game, but i don’t like their approach at “fixing unpredicted player behaviour”.

Why stop “res-rushing”. Parties that do that:
1) Already waste time. Since they are not all 5 on the boss it takes longer to kill than an experienced party.
2) It did enable parties to learn the dungeons on a more positive note and allowed them to learn strategies on fighting the boss because trying something out didn’t have the outcome of having to start over if your idea didn’t work. (it encourages learning)
3) Overall less frustration and player discrimination.

A much nicer way to have handled the “res-rushing” issue could’ve been by scaling the reward the boss gives (ex: give more pouches containing coins/tokens/karma or extra tokens or rarer items in reward chest, etc. for beating it without using the WP)

Robert Hrouda.1327:

A comment above mentioned how our QA runs things in the best gear, and has some other false statements in it. Our QA run dungeons and test bosses with multiple characters using different gear combinations/levels, and characters who are both level 80 and the dungeon’s base level. As well, we have people throughout the company of varying player skill testing these things before they get pushed out/patched in. After all that, it has to be signed off by design leads who also play it… so there is plenty of balancing and work done on a boss prior to its release into the wild.

So why is everything so bugged/poorly thought out on release? There must be a disconnect in this process.

It’s unlikely they’ll experience disconnects with a beta system near them. They also didn’t notice some problems caused by network delays, so I guess their testing platform is located inhouse.

Brutal Arts.6307:

So why is everything so bugged/poorly thought out on release? There must be a disconnect in this process.

Because thousands of players (=dozen thousands of runs) are much more likely to find a problem than a few dozen runs with devs. To truly test something the system must be automated; e.g. use bots to run dungeons.

green plum.7514:

Brutal Arts.6307:

So why is everything so bugged/poorly thought out on release? There must be a disconnect in this process.

Bots cannot make the decisions and move like we can..move like McJagger!

Seriously, bots cant test things.

Robert laid out what goes on, and while thats good, it unfortunately isnt enough sometimes and thats not arenanets fault. I do not get upset with a developer, in this case Anet, when a boss bugs out and resets because I moved too far in one direction or whatever the case may be. I do get upset with the developer when they are, seemingly, narrowminded with a development direction. Im sure they have their reasons and from time to time enlighten us. But lately I’ve been getting the feeling their reasons for doing things/design direction/vision is greater than or supercedes what thousands, hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of players feel is in the games best interest.

I was thinking about that last point this morning, to be honest, while putting on my pretty shoes and trecked onto work. We might not always be right, but kitten the customer is always right! Isnt that the saying? Take ascended gear: Apparently it was always meant to be in game. Game released without it. One day, 3 months in, we get walloped with ascended gear in Nov 15 patch with a reason that does not even make sense to me, still. The reason chris whiteside gave to us is contradictory of itself: Meant to bridge the TIME gap between acquiring exotic and legendary(assuming everyone is going after a legendary, when probably less than 1% of people will) because they realized that people got exotics and legendaries way too quickly. Yet, ascended was always meant to be in game. Doesnt make sense to me, but OK. Anyways, I digress. There was a thread with something around 40,000 posts, mostly against ascended gear. Now the forum community is but a fraction of the overall community, but most of your enthusiastic and passionate player base did not want ascended gear in the game, or implimented the way it was. Yet, we were heard and ignored. They could have simply created new gear(not a new tier) with an infusion slot to progress through fractals. No stat increase. Yet, we were ignored. There were a ton of great ideas, but ignored.

Thats where my frustration comes with developers.

Wow I went off on a tangent. I hope it still is relevant to the topic!

Because thousands of players (=dozen thousands of runs) are much more likely to find a problem than a few dozen runs with devs. To truly test something the system must be automated; e.g. use bots to run dungeons.

I just want to throw my two copper in here and say…

When I heard that you guys were going to be getting rid of rez rushing I was pleased. Not all PUGs advertised the fact that their objective was to just throw themselves at content until the dungeon was finished, and when it became apparent halfway through a dungeon my only options were to leave with all that wasted time and nothing to show for it, or stick it out.

Since then I’ve found a group of friends with whom we work really well together and often run dungeons together because of it. It’s when I found this group that the anti-rez rushing started to become a pain.

Despite how well we work together, inevitably every once in a while something doesn’t go as planned and someone goes into the defeated state. The loss of two+ people DPS on top of the defeated persons against a boss isn’t worth the extra time it takes to res the defeated person, so whoever was downed would sit there patiently until the battle was over. That was until we realized that: on any mobs, even if you properly tagged it before being defeated, if you spend more than a few seconds completely dead, you loose out on loot.

Because of this, and because we care that everyone in our party has a fair chance at loot, if someone gets defeated during a champion or higher level mob we spend extra time either loosing aggro and resetting the mob (which can be a pain in itself if the mob was almost dead) or kiting the mob around while the rest of the party tries to get the defeated person up as fast as possible. Perhaps this was your goal, but we all find it annoying and wish the defeated person could just res and re-join the battle.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

That doesn’t solve the problem though. It’s an interesting reward mechanic, but the problem persists that players wouldn’t have to learn the content or how to play it – they could just ruin their armor res rushing and having a miserable time of it in order to complete it. By forcing players to learn how to do things and cooperate as a group, we’re encouraging them to get better and as a result die less. If players are getting better and dying less, there will be less prejudice towards PuGs, since the general skill level of the dungeon running population has increased.

That logic makes sense if the dungeons, and dungeon progression, were actually designed well. However, they are not.

There’s little rhyme or reason that I can find in the dungeon design.

There should be a progression of the dungeon difficulty and the mechanics introduced. The fist dungeon players encounter should be the easiest, and provide the means by which players become familiar with PVE dungeon mechanics. Subsequent dungeons should progressively increase in difficulty and/or introduce new mechanics. One of the hardest dungeons is the first, Ascalonian Catacombs. This makes no sense.

Trash mobs should be used as a means to help the players learn how to work as a team and prepare them for dungeon bosses. In many occasions, the ‘trash’ mobs are far more difficult than the ‘boss’ mobs.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

As well, we have people throughout the company of varying player skill testing these things before they get pushed out/patched in. After all that, it has to be signed off by design leads who also play it… so there is plenty of balancing and work done on a boss prior to its release into the wild.

I assume that they also playtested the dungeons that were available at release, as well as the dynamic events. Those were also grossly imbalanced and often simply broken. So, I won’t put much stock in the sign-off process as a means of ensuring things are working well.

I don’t want sound like I’m ‘beating up’ on the Anet development team. I think they’ve done something really neat and innovating by breaking up the ‘holy trinity’ configuration of dungeons. However, I think that removing ‘rez zerging’ is a mistake. ‘Rez zerging’ right now isn’t a problem – it’s a symptom.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

… By forcing players to learn how to do things and cooperate as a group, we’re encouraging them to get better and as a result die less. If players are getting better and dying less, there will be less prejudice towards PuGs, since the general skill level of the dungeon running population has increased. …

I laughed when I read this. I will be deeply surprised if this is how it turns out. Pleasantly surprised, but deeply surprised nonetheless. This is not what I would bet. My bet would be that what will happen, instead, is that outside of a few exceptional guilds, new people simply won’t be welcome on dungeon teams at all. What your theory leaves out, what this design leaves out, is any in-band, in-game way for players who start out with average skill or below to learn what the alternative to rez-rushing is.

Guilds that (a) have figured it out and (b) have exceptionally patient teachers, people who are willing to have it take a lot longer to get to the reward chest because they have to stop to type, including answering questions, before each fight, will work out the way that you think it will. My experience with MMOs tells me that such teachers are so rare that there will never been enough of them to go around, that not 1 player in 20 will ever get to play alongside one.

I for one think it was the single best move Arena Net has made in order to improve the PVE in this game. It really does encourage players to learn the encounters and to work together.

I love this change. I missed the wiping mechanics of GW1 so deeply in GW2; before this change it felt like you could never lose. Now you can lose, which is great. It’d be nice if eventually we get such difficult instanced content that if you wipe once, you’re ejected from the dungeon entirely. This was very much a step in the right direction.

That doesn’t solve the problem though. It’s an interesting reward mechanic, but the problem persists that players wouldn’t have to learn the content or how to play it – they could just ruin their armor res rushing and having a miserable time of it in order to complete it. By forcing players to learn how to do things and cooperate as a group, we’re encouraging them to get better and as a result die less. If players are getting better and dying less, there will be less prejudice towards PuGs, since the general skill level of the dungeon running population has increased.

I don’t know, maybe in theory. I have noticed that I die less often in dungeons than I used to, but at the same time I didn’t mind dying as much in the old dungeons because it only cost me a few silver to fix per run, which is a drop in the bucket compared to what I was making back so it didn’t really bother me. What does bother me is lying on the ground, unable to contribute, or being unable to use a WP to catch up to the group because one of them has agroed something.

When it comes to "player aggravation, I’m much more aggravated by a dungeon event that stops the party dead for 2-3 wipe cycles, perhaps even preventing forward progress entirely, than I am by a situation that the party can get through in a single try, even if it means that I have to rez and run 2-3 times for a total of -3 silver or so, out of a dungeon run in which I accumulate 50+ silver in total rewards. Under those circumstances, dying a few times is just the cost of doing business, less than the cost of consumables in some cases.

The new Magg event, for example, is pretty cool, but more frustrating than the old method if players start dying because there’s absolutely no time to waste rezzing anyone. That’s the real problem with the “no rez rush” philosophy, it only works if nobody dies. Ever. I know you seem to believe that players should be capable of rezzing dead team mates, but that’s just silly, it takes waaaaaaaay too long to be practical in any situation that is deadly enough that it would have killed someone in the first place. Most dungeon events tend to have either a time factor or an “infinite spawning until complete” factor, either of which makes it impossible for even one character to waste time trying to rez another, especially given that the group is already a man down.

You will be deeply surprised. I’m currently trying to get permission to expose some of our internal data regarding our anti res rushing patch – you know, some before and after data where people can look at the numbers. Posting numbers is the tricky bit, but from what we have seen and can correlate from the data, more people are playing dungeons, and less people are dying. There’s more really interesting information that I won’t go into at the moment, but our data suggests that there is an overall positive affect from the patch that is measurable.

You might also want to keep in mind that the February monthly reward required every player to play five dungeons to complete it, so make sure to take your February statistics and subtract out five runs per character before comparing them to previous months.