Guild Wars 2

Mungrul.9358:

Could this be ArenaNet repeating the mistakes of old?
In the first game, when you got your armour ascended, they didn’t take into account your pet.
They eventually fixed this.
Unbelievable that they would make the same mistake twice. I guess it really IS a completely different team.

It’s also a completely different game engine.

But Robert, I main a Ranger also and pets dying to agony is unavoidable. There’s many cases in which no amount of micro will keep the pet alive (Dredge Suit boss, Cliffside boss just off the top of my head.) This is the single biggest problem Rangers have in fractals, IMO.

Actually, it’s NOT a completely different game engine. It’s an evolution of the GW1 engine.

So anybody actually managed to interrupt the now supposedly interruptible Rumblus?

My random post-patch 1st timers PUG, mostly 80ies, couldn´t finish as the “shield NPC” kept dying pretty quick and nobody could figure out this mysterious interrupt mechanic.

Random hilarious facepalm: Making that shield look kinda exactly like the Mesmer Time-thingy didn´t make our Mesmer the favorite MVP either, before he had to switch.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

What mechanic do you feel is expressly punishing to a ranger pet?

Expressly punishing? Seriously, is that what you meant (and do you want the response to be that narrow) or do you rather want us to provide you a list of game mechanics that kill our pets or take them out of fights very quickly but are not necessarily limited to those that expressly punish pets?

Pedra, from a place where words mean things.

Wethospu.6437:

On the other hand, some (you?) want them to be like you can just go unprepared without needing to learn mechanics/bosses (this is what I refer with facerolling) and still win. And this is the very reason we are seeing so many complaints.
I realize it’s not nice that everyone can’t do it and I think there should be better learning curve (generally). But truth is, I’m all up for a challenge and that’s design I will support.

First of all, no it was not “me” I was talking about. I have 2 accounts, multiple level 80s with excellent gear and I run dungeons with friends and guild in teamspeak. However, the “who” does not really matter and only shows once again that you look down on people with little skill. Fact is, there are people who are less good at games, and they want to have fun playing too.

A good/successful game does not send “You are not good enough so you are not allowed in this dungeon” as a message to its players. As I said before, it is not the new dungeon design that is bad. What is really bad, is that this revamped starter dungeon will discourage many casual players from trying/playing dungeons. I will just give one example on how the whole “revamp” could have been done much better (besides the obvious introduction of different skill levels for dungeon runs):

Let the game realize when the group is not good enough. Just as an example if a group wipes twice at one encounter, make it slightly easier. Decrease the number of adds, spawn them with less hp, remove some nasty mechanics. Make it so that the group does not quit in disgust, but still manages to complete the objective. At the end of the dungeon, present a summary of which encounters can be handled better. At the same time, introduce a small bonus for each encounter that was handled well. This will let “bad” players still have fun, and at the same time tell them where to improve and give them an incentive. A group manages to finish an encounter exceptionally fast? Great, give them a little bonus. A group struggles and the boss is still only at 90% hp after 5 minutes because people have bad equipment and do not play well together? Make it easier for them so that they may still finish the dungeon, but have them get a slightly smaller reward chest to reflect the toned down difficulty (again, this would be stated in the summary at the end).

Something like that is even already in the game. When a shaman manages to push a prisoner into the lava in the grawl fractal, the chest for this encounter will not spawn upon completion. But if the group manages to keep all prisoners alive, they get the little bonus for handling the encounter “well”. The general idea behind that particular game mechanic could be used much more than it is now.

PS: Please do not pluck apart details of what I wrote. I was giving examples and a general idea. The exact implementation would of course be a little more complicated than a basic “if a group wipes, spawn less adds”.

kKagari.6804:

Robert they should make you lead designer.

/Sarcasm?

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Will we ever release a video of our internal testing process? Highly doubtful. Just as I doubt we will ever post the builds, classes, and gear our testers test with.

May I ask why not? Remember, it’s just a game.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

I personally play Ranger as my main, so I’m fairly aware of how to manage the pet, and do my testing as a ranger primarily. What mechanic do you feel is expressly punishing to a ranger pet?
I’m more than aware of how squishy pets can be in dungeons, but if you could list out all the issues you are speaking of, I can try and address them.

Likely referring to AoE circles and anything that does massive amounts of damage in one shot.

Pets do not have a dodge roll and the return to me feature doesn’t substitute for melee rangers (because the pets won’t go very far while running away.) Even at a range, it has to be used very preemptively.

That’s what I’m guessing, I noticed the red circles in AC have gotten very brutal and that’s the latest major dungeon change I can think of.

Another neat dungeon ranger feature that is currently broken is the skill Search and Rescue. I run a fairly tight guild dungeon group, but I’ve sacrificed the temporary damage boost of QZ (which I was commonly using on rezzes anyway) to equip this skill. Since rezzing is one of the top causes of chain deaths I bring S&R to help alleviate that risk.

However, it has a list of issues and some are more skill balance/fix related but a few may fall into your department.

1. The S&R cooldown is wasted if:
-You are out of range (no range indicator either)
-Your pet is dead (it can be seen as unskillful to activate a pet skill while a pet is dead, but we have seen that the game can be forgiving to warriors who miss with their burst attack [aka no adrenaline is drained and the skill goes on a very short cooldown])

2. Your pet stands over the downed player and does nothing.
- Lick Wounds has this issue as well
- Seems to be an AI, geometry or skill range issue

3. In maps with many dead NPCs (Ascalon Fractal) your pet may waste S&R on one of them rather than a player.

Another issue is certain maps have platforms to jump across (like the uncategorized fractal) which pets can’t jump across to help attack your target.

Pets can not pick up crystal shards so they serve to slow down the Jade Maw fight when they are targeted.

In general, pets require constant attention in dungeons and are often guaranteed to die and trigger the brutal 60 second cooldown between the next swap. Often unavoidable as many dungeon bosses and veterans incorporate 1-shot high damage skills that destroy pets ruthlessly.

I know you play ranger and rangers can do dungeons. I play ranger too because I enjoy the skills more than those of warriors, but I since my guild and I have run dungeons so much, we’ve taken an interest in optimizing the run times down. Often I find that being a warrior speeds things up, making it ultimately a better class to play in dungeons with an experienced group overall.

Rangers aren’t the only class competing with warriors over efficiency, but if dungeons weren’t destroying our pets we wouldn’t be quite as far behind the less micro-managey warriors.

My 2 cents. I play ranger a lot. I’ve tried a few builds but with the lack of a good PvE build testing area (similiar to the heart of the mists) it becomes way expensive to try builds that require different gear. I mainly do berserker/cavalier with 1h/axe (thanks to the buff we just got on axe offhand) and longbow (LB compliments melee better than SB IMO).

I’ve noticed that the first 2 bosses of Arah path 3 have been changed: now the Crusher has the ability to resurrect mobs, even the hunter boss, with 50% health, so he has to be killed first and you can’t go back to the door or he will resurrect all the mobs.
Has anyone noticed other changes that were NOT included in the patch notes?

Shikigami.4013:

Wethospu.6437:

On the other hand, some (you?) want them to be like you can just go unprepared without needing to learn mechanics/bosses (this is what I refer with facerolling) and still win. And this is the very reason we are seeing so many complaints.
I realize it’s not nice that everyone can’t do it and I think there should be better learning curve (generally). But truth is, I’m all up for a challenge and that’s design I will support.

First of all, no it was not “me” I was talking about. I have 2 accounts, multiple level 80s with excellent gear and I run dungeons with friends and guild in teamspeak. However, the “who” does not really matter and only shows once again that you look down on people with little skill. Fact is, there are people who are less good at games, and they want to have fun playing too.

A good/successful game does not send “You are not good enough so you are not allowed in this dungeon” as a message to its players. As I said before, it is not the new dungeon design that is bad. What is really bad, is that this revamped starter dungeon will discourage many casual players from trying/playing dungeons. I will just give one example on how the whole “revamp” could have been done much better (besides the obvious introduction of different skill levels for dungeon runs):

Let the game realize when the group is not good enough. Just as an example if a group wipes twice at one encounter, make it slightly easier. Decrease the number of adds, spawn them with less hp, remove some nasty mechanics. Make it so that the group does not quit in disgust, but still manages to complete the objective. At the end of the dungeon, present a summary of which encounters can be handled better. At the same time, introduce a small bonus for each encounter that was handled well. This will let “bad” players still have fun, and at the same time tell them where to improve and give them an incentive. A group manages to finish an encounter exceptionally fast? Great, give them a little bonus. A group struggles and the boss is still only at 90% hp after 5 minutes because people have bad equipment and do not play well together? Make it easier for them so that they may still finish the dungeon, but have them get a slightly smaller reward chest to reflect the toned down difficulty (again, this would be stated in the summary at the end).

Something like that is even already in the game. When a shaman manages to push a prisoner into the lava in the grawl fractal, the chest for this encounter will not spawn upon completion. But if the group manages to keep all prisoners alive, they get the little bonus for handling the encounter “well”. The general idea behind that particular game mechanic could be used much more than it is now.

PS: Please do not pluck apart details of what I wrote. I was giving examples and a general idea. The exact implementation would of course be a little more complicated than a basic “if a group wipes, spawn less adds”.

Sure, I’m fine with me looking down people with less gaming abilities. That’s something I value in games.
First of all your system would be so horrible to this game skill-wise. They removed wp-zerging because people threw themselves at bosses wiping constantly. This is what your system is encouraging.
It would be also quite big effort balancing all encounters and ensuring wiping is not exploitable. And what’s the gain? People can faceroll. Just seems more trouble than it’s worth.
People don’t really care about improving. They rather afk-ranged with exploits than learn the encounter and melee much faster.

I’m fine with making AC faceroll-dungeon but first remove its “level 80”-rewards. However, I think story-modes should be re-made to reflect explorables more and have improved learning-value. Introduce explorable-mechanics, with reduced difficulty and with npcs guiding you.

PS. Can I get reduced legendary-grind costs because I just can’t do it?

If Ranger pets die to Agony, wouldn’t the simple fix be to just give all pets 100% immunity to Agony damage? I mean, they can’t avoid it at all, so giving them irremovable and massively lethal conditions is a bit unfair (for Necro and other class pets too).

If that’s somehow seen as overpowered, what about a scaled invulnerability? Like give them a multiplied version of the player’s Agony resistance, such that if you have enough resistance for your own character, then the pet would be immune to it. So like level 10-20 you’d need 5 agony resist to make your pet invulnerable, 20-30 you’d need 10, ect., but as long as you kept up, the pet would keep up.

It’d also be nice if, since pet AI is too stupid to make them auto-dodge persistent or “run-or-die” red circle attacks, pets of all types would be at least mostly immune to such attacks. They wouldn’t have to be immune to all AoE, just the types of attacks that are specifically designed to encourage players to get out of their way, like poison clouds, or “highly telegraphed → massive damage” hits. If a player gets caught up in those, they deserve what they get, but a pet/summon don’t know no better, so punishing the pet isn’t really fair.

Wethospu.6437:

First of all your system would be so horrible to this game skill-wise. They removed wp-zerging because people threw themselves at bosses wiping constantly. This is what your system is encouraging.

It is not. Waypoint zerging has nothing at all to do with “my system”. Also, I did not suggest to re-enable waypoint porting for groups in combat.

Wethospu.6437:

It would be also quite big effort balancing all encounters and ensuring wiping is not exploitable. And what’s the gain? People can faceroll. Just seems more trouble than it’s worth.

And the revamp that has been done was no effort? I think the designer would disagree.
Also, an exploit is supposed to gain you something. Wiping on purpose would not gain you something but lower the reward (or not give a bonus for not wiping).
Did you read the post or just skim it?

Wethospu.6437:

People don’t really care about improving. They rather afk-ranged with exploits than learn the encounter and melee much faster.

There sure are such people. But generalizing as much as you do is just cynical.

Wethospu.6437:

I’m fine with making AC faceroll-dungeon but first remove its “level 80”-rewards.

Lowering the rewards for people who play bad is already included in “my system”. Again, did you really read it? What do you suggest, give level 80 players who are bad at the game level 60 rewards? Or no reward at all? Seeing how you look down on them, I guess you do not want them to get anything at all.

Wethospu.6437:

However, I think story-modes should be re-made to reflect explorables more and have improved learning-value. Introduce explorable-mechanics, with reduced difficulty and with npcs guiding you.

Agreed.

Wethospu.6437:

PS. Can I get reduced legendary-grind costs because I just can’t do it?

Sure, just come up with a system of your own and make a post in the suggestion forum. As “my system” includes lowered rewards for the completion of dungeons that were made easier for bad players, you could ask for a legendary for lazy players that has lower stats. Or has no slot for a rune. Or has no fancy graphics effect

Shikigami.4013:

It is not. Waypoint zerging has nothing at all to do with “my system”. Also, I did not suggest to re-enable waypoint porting for groups in combat.

WP-zerging also reduced rewards with repairing-cost but that didn’t stop people. Similarly with your system people throw themselves at the boss until it gets easy enough.

And the revamp that has been done was no effort? I think the designer would disagree.
Also, an exploit is supposed to gain you something. Wiping on purpose would not gain you something but lower the reward (or not give a bonus for not wiping).
Did you read the post or just skim it?

Point of revamp was to make dungeon more exciting and fun for everyone, your system doesn’t improve content.
For example how to exploit: Boss which party can’t beat. They can try it few times and wipe after 5 minutes (~15 minutes). Instead they send one guy to wipe on purpose, takes 2 minutes. They saved 13 minutes. Now, depending how your system works, they may actually gain something from this.

There sure are such people. But generalizing as much as you do is just cynical.

Just wondering, how often you pug?

Lowering the rewards for people who play bad is already included in “my system”. Again, did you really read it? What do you suggest, give level 80 players who are bad at the game level 60 rewards? Or no reward at all? Seeing how you look down on them, I guess you do not want them to get anything at all.

There is a difference between an idea and an implementation. I can have an idea of perfect dungeon which is balanced, fun and challenging for everyone. However, implementing that is not that simple.
For me, implementing your system doesn’t sound simple at all. Every encounter needs a parameter to change based on wipes. How to define wiping (one guy wiping, party resetting fight, all dead)? What if party doesn’t want it to get easier? How do you handle “Dungeon Master”? What would be reduced rewards? How to make sure rewards are meaningful / not too harsh (people will complain otherwise)?

There’s no monk, no tank, no trinity. Yet the game feels like it needs it. Starting to feel like I need to build and buy all new gear just for each dungeon. Not to mention that food and pots seem to requirements. Shouldn’t be that way.

They need to bring back wpzerging or add a monk. Or stop with the massive damage. Dying in one hit isn’t fun. I don’t know who decided one shot moves were a good thing in a MMO without healing. If I want to die in one shot I’ll just go play Dark Souls. The increase in fun as you put only served to suck it out of the game imo.

I don’t know many people that play MMOs for difficulty. Most seem to want to play for fun.

Make FOTM brutally hard. That’s suppose to be for the hardcore.

Wethospu.6437:

How to define wiping (one guy wiping, party resetting fight, all dead)?

“Wipe” means “all party members died”. It comes from “wipeout”. A single person dying is a death, not a wipe. I don’t know why some people chose to start calling dying “wiping”, probably a desire to sound more “cool”.

As for the rest of your post, it becomes too lengthy and too tiring to answer you, so I won’t anymore..

Robert Hrouda.1327:

…One thing we see frequently with at-level people going into dungeons, is that while their character is the right level, their gear is often 10+ levels behind them. When you combine a low average gear level, not having all your skills/tools available, and not being as experienced with the class, it’s going to be significantly more difficult than what an 80 makes it look like.
We build dungeons for at-level players, and then reduce the strength of higher level players to bring them more in line with the players at that level. We do not balance for 80’s sidekicked down to at-level.

Do you have any metrics on if those players are enjoying the “significantly more difficult” experience? Are they finishing the dungeon or rage quitting?

I am not trying to be facetious with my comments. I do have concerns that if the players you describe are subjected to content that players at level 80 are having difficulty with, what does that say for the level of enjoyment those players are experiencing.

M.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

One thing we see frequently with at-level people going into dungeons, is that while their character is the right level, their gear is often 10+ levels behind them.

Why is the gameplay so drastically different from right outside the dungeon to inside the dungeon? What is going on that makes mobs so much tougher? What you say I won’t argue with but why are people mopping the floor outside the dungeon at level, with lower level gear then find the roles completely reversed entering a dungeon? I would also say then raising your gear up 10 levels to at level, doesn’t change much at all. Something that took 150 hits to kill in dungeon, now only takes 145? Where outside the dungeon a kill went from 7 hits to 5 with at level gear.

Am I that far off? 150 vs 5? How many hits at-level does it take to kill a single mob inside a dungeon vs outside? It has to be around a 25 times different. Why? To me that is the whole question about dungeons, why does that world live in an entire different mechanic? Just seems like a totally left-field design choice. I get scaling with more players, that would mean around 25 hits to kill a trash mob, for further difficulty you add more mobs. But hyper-bumping HP, ehh.

Can any group made up of any combination of classes beat dungeons reasonably? Or does it have to be properly planned? From what I saw in many cases it was planned and it was also planned around an exploit with food, that wasn’t ever meant to happen that way.

Horrorscope.7632:

Can any group made up of any combination of classes beat dungeons reasonably? Or does it have to be properly planned? From what I saw in many cases it was planned and it was also planned around an exploit with food, that wasn’t ever meant to happen that way.

Any combination of classes beating dungeons: Yes, as long as the players know what they’re doing.

I’ve done the new AC with multiple different group compositions. Yes, I tailored my utilities/equipment to run a more supportive ele build as needed, or DPS if mass cleanses weren’t needed, or tanking if there wasn’t a good tank for P2. It’s all about learning your class and the dungeon.

Go PUG UW/FoW/DoA/Urgoz/The Deep in GW1 and see how far you get. Explorables are the high-end areas of GW2 and should be treated as such. Don’t make them face-roll easy, make them challenging.

Atrophied.8725:

Horrorscope.7632:

Can any group made up of any combination of classes beat dungeons reasonably? Or does it have to be properly planned? From what I saw in many cases it was planned and it was also planned around an exploit with food, that wasn’t ever meant to happen that way.

Any combination of classes beating dungeons: Yes, as long as the players know what they’re doing.

I’ve done the new AC with multiple different group compositions. Yes, I tailored my utilities/equipment to run a more supportive ele build as needed, or DPS if mass cleanses weren’t needed, or tanking if there wasn’t a good tank for P2. It’s all about learning your class and the dungeon.

Go PUG UW/FoW/DoA/Urgoz/The Deep in GW1 and see how far you get. Explorables are the high-end areas of GW2 and should be treated as such. Don’t make them face-roll easy, make them challenging.

I’m with you in general, at then end the only thing I would differ is that instances have to have difficulty choices. They all have them, but here. To me that is what is needed. I also want harder choices for those that want even more a challenge. The thing is I could be a little better than average, but I’m guilded with Average to Below Average players (called family and close friends) and it doesn’t feel right, the night/day difference between outside the dungeon and inside one.

GW1 was all instances, think if GW1’s instances were as hard as GW2’s lowest level dungeon. Oh vey, game would have flopped! They knew where the sweet spot was for general players and then added a higher difficulty level and had some higher end instances.

Sooo much QQ on here. I love the dungeons in this game.

Thanks Robert for helping with Simin! My well rounded group of 3 defensive wars a ranger and an ele beat her last night for the first time after previous failed attempts last month.

I was wondering though when anet will fix the boat exploit on arah path 2? Every time I’m surprised it hasn’t happen. No pug group will do it any other way and I can’t solo fight my way to the boss and it’s rather hard to run past the trash mobs with deadeye’s and inquest tech’s since the spykits have been edited. Being in a pug group means having to use this exploit, getting lucky and convincing them to fight or being kicked near the end boss for deciding to not run and jump though walls. For this reason I try to only run with people I know on this path now.

Thanks for the updates. I’m excited to try out AC and it’s new challenges. I was brought in to help take out Colossus the other day and now i want to run all the paths again to experience it all.

XD

Tried AC p2 a few days ago. Disclaimer: We didn’t finish, but I think that’s more to do with the fact that 3/5 of the group wouldn’t learn or listen. After the first wipe two of us figured out how to do the traps, and it probably would have been interesting if the rest of the group had gotten on board and stopped aggro-ing him early.

Spider queen was painful. Quite painful.

Contrary.4036:

Tried AC p2 a few days ago. Disclaimer: We didn’t finish, but I think that’s more to do with the fact that 3/5 of the group wouldn’t learn or listen. After the first wipe two of us figured out how to do the traps, and it probably would have been interesting if the rest of the group had gotten on board and stopped aggro-ing him early.

Spider queen was painful. Quite painful.

Doesn’t matter. It should’ve been doable. Their QA testers said so.

“I’m bad and there can’t be anyone better than me”. It’s just impossible to do. Bring back old AC with wp-rezzing or I’ll demand refund.

i guess someone needs to clear up what dungeons and AC explorable are supposed to be. in my mind, dungeons are meant to be completed by at least semi-organised parties. they can be PUGs or statics, but players should at the minimum know their classes and the mechanics specific to that dungeon in order to finish it and claim the reward.

i think AC explorable in its current form should not be adjusted for level 35 players. the tokens at the end are for level 80 exotic loot. because of this, the difficulty should be set for (perhaps new) level 80 parties with greens/rares. tying in with this, explorable mode should be difficult enough to challenge the average level 80 party, full traits and all. newbies with only a handful of traits and incomplete builds should not expect to be able to sail through a dungeon that gives level 80 rewards. they should be encouraged to stick to story mode while leveling and then return to try explorable mode when they are more experienced. sure, give it a go if you want, but don’t qq if you wipe till all your armour is broken after 3 hours of trying.

maybe the level requirements for exp mode should be raised to 60+ (or even higher).

don’t get me wrong, i do loads of dungeons (even fractals) with lowbies, and i take the time to explain the mechanics that i know of, and i fully expect to take longer to finish. it’s just that so many people join dungeon parties expecting an easy time when they’re meant to be relatively more challenging, and when they don’t make it they come on the forums and cry about dungeons being “too hard”, “should be for level 35s”, “should be starter dungeon”, “should be fun”, which just screams of entitlement syndrome, as i call it.

try hero/nightmare/whatever hard mode on some asian MMOs to get some perspective. GW2 dungeons are pretty easy and largely forgiving in comparison, barring the very high level fractals (seriously, the person who thought of mossman should be.. made to suffer. a lot).

having said that, the new graveling CCs are very annoying (but still somewhat doable), even for a guardian with aegis, blocks, vigor, stability and lots of stun-breakers, because when you’re tanking a mob of them, eventually every skill will be in cooldown and you’ll run out of endurance. it might be a good lesson in pacing, but being constantly knocked about isn’t great. i can’t imagine what it’d be like for the classes that lack CC mitigation. they’d either have to stay well back and range or be ressed a lot.

A lot of people I know quit due to not having enough viable builds, the food was one of the only things that made a lot of weaker weapons for many classes and weaker builds more viable, with no compensation for those available builds and the food now gone (which I believe they should of removed it, but greatly improved the builds effected most by this, and no I don’t mean zerker warriors, I mean people who actually used this for tanking and survivability in HARDER content, where some times dodging just isn’t enough.)

It should of been done when they balance the classes to have more sustain, not before… which makes me believe that the entire thing was poorly planned.

TBH one of the issues I see in some dungeons for new/pug groups is some bosses/fights not fully resetting on party wipe. The most noticeable examples of this are

1. Dethra setting up the cannons, if someone rezes Dethra before you deal with the ghost left over from your last wipe you can end up with multiple spawns sitting on top of one of the cannons. So not only has your team failed and got wiped, but you end up having to spend about 20+ mins pulling off 1 or 2 mobs at a time as with multiple Necros/Monks stacked on top of each other it is impossible to kill them any other way.

2. Nightmare vines in TA. If you fail this fight you end up with 2-4 Vines left up. It then becomes a deadly job for the wiped party to deal with them as they are swamped by 100s of red circles. Much harder than the initial fight.

So if you fail these fights the first time the dungeon can end up doubling or tripling in the amount of time it takes. Because the fight actually becomes harder. If you imagine you are taking two or three new people through a dungeon, you explain the fight to them, but one or two of them don’t understand it totally, or one of them runs in and rezes Dethra. The run then becomes slow tedious and boring as you try to deal with their mistake. How many of those players will do the dungeon again.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

OGDeadHead.8326:

Dear Robert Hrouda,

since you’re seemingly the man in charge when it comes to dungeons, would you kindly stop abusing broken mechanics that punishes certain classes, until the class devs have been able to actually fix these broken class mechanics?

Yes, I’m primarily talking about rangers, or rather, their pets.

By designing your dungeon encounters in such manner that one class in particular gets punished for a, in many ways, broken class mechanic, thereby abusing this weakness and making these encounters harder, is imho kinda cheap.

I think you’re fully aware of the issues I’m talking about here, right?

Until a fix for all the issues that involves pets has been pushed out to live servers, I strongly suggest you design your dungeons in such a way that no encounter abuses this broken mechanic.

You do realise that many rangers gets kicked out of groups just because of their class, or more so, because of the core mechanic that comes with this class?

So, in all fairness, if an encounter becomes a lot harder to deal with because of pets, or due to the fact that there’s simply no way to keep a pet alive during some encounters (and please remember, the ranger class is balanced around having their pet alive and working), then please stop designing your encounters in such a manner that they constantly put the ranger class at a major disadvantage!

Having issues with this? Then please go ahead and talk to the guys responsible for designing/balancing the classes about this. Just letting things go on in a broken state month after month is indeed very tiresome.

Thanks for reading.

I personally play Ranger as my main, so I’m fairly aware of how to manage the pet, and do my testing as a ranger primarily. What mechanic do you feel is expressly punishing to a ranger pet?
I’m more than aware of how squishy pets can be in dungeons, but if you could list out all the issues you are speaking of, I can try and address them.

Are you kidding me man? We were told months ago by you or some other dev that you were aware of pets getting aoe’d to death in dungeons and were looking into it. Pets are instagibbed by most bosses because of aoe spam and overall lack of responsiveness of the pet. Alpha and kholer are minor examples of this. Most TA encounters. Basically everything other than trash 1-shots pets. Im not even gonna talk about higher level fractals and agony

It’s not a dungeon problem. Please tell the Jons to fix pets. They need to dodge roll when the ranger dodge rolls. Some sort of skill based evasion is essential or if we’re taking the lazy approach a 30% aoe resistance.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

I’m more than aware of how squishy pets can be in dungeons, but if you could list out all the issues you are speaking of, I can try and address them.

For me with 1100hours on my ranger here are my issues with pets and dungeons

1.) FOTM- as said before agony is a pita. in the svanir instance my pet will always die when the shaman tosses down the red circles(even f3 wont work because the pet generally doesn’t return directly on top of you, instead it seems to go off within a certain radius of you, and stops in a random place)
2.)FOTM- again, grawl aoe damage and agony
3.)FOTM-at higher levels the damage thrown out by bosses without agony becomes insane, and your pet insta dies, leaving you(or us/rangers)with missing dps(i dont know the exact % it makes up of our dps, but to be balanced obviously the pet takes up some dps)
So to me, fotm is kind of tough, below lv20 i have no problems, above 26 i run into issues with the pet, even ranged pets dont work because the bosses will swap targets often, and often target my pet.

4.) COF P1-I ask you Robert to go to gw2lfg.com and go to citadel of flame(explorable) and tell me what most groups are asking for. lf4m zerker warriors is going to be the most common. In COF P1 generally the meta is to have a mesmer drop timewarp and warriors to use 100b, they kill the slave driver before tw ends. To me the issue is that the pet with 5people inside the effect, will not receive quickness. Being that pets are also an extension of us, they should be able to get that effect(even if we need 15 into natures magic i still have yet to see it proc on the pet). Also, considering our pet doesn’t get anything from our runes, perhaps give the pet a buff just for being in a dungeon instance?

I don’t actually play a ranger in FotM and this is largely parroting what others have said, but I have run several instances with a ranger and there are always issues when there’s one (or more) rangers in the party:

- Agony, as others have said, will insta-down the pet.
- Several bosses and strategies rely on effective kiting (e.g. jellyfish, dredge fractal boss), avoiding combat in some situations (e.g. cliffside, volcano boss to avoid triggering the next wave of elementals) and so forth, which means the ranger is often yelled at to pull their pet out of combat.
- Pets significantly slow down progress in the Jade Maw boss by being marked for attacks when they can’t pick up crystals/reflect back the attack. Rangers are the most significantly affected since most other classes (except necros with the compulsory trait that summons Jagged Horrors) can choose not to call in their adds, and rangers can’t stow their pet in combat.
- Lick Wounds and Search & Rescue will often result in the pet standing around doing nothing. S&R is canceled when the pet dies and can’t be used when the pet is down (Lick Wounds, somehow, can). You get hit with full CD if the skill doesn’t work due to the bug or being out of range (no range indicator).

In the end, in a fractal, the pet ends up just being a huge nuisance since it slows down the Jade Maw fight with next to no benefit. At the very least making the Jade Maw stop targeting downed pets should be a thing. Can’t tell you how many times we’ve seen the maw targeting the same downed pet over and over and over while everyone else sits there twiddling their thumbs waiting to be able to continue the fight (and shooting the ranger dirty looks).

I tried the new AC explorable run tonight with a party of level 80 guildies of a mixture of very experience and moderately experienced MMO players playing a mixture of the three profession classes. Some of us have run AC pretty regularly over several months as a fun social event during the week. We didn’t particularly experience much extra difficulty in AC Path 1 and Path 2, other than maybe that we seemed quite spike-heavy damage and this caused us to get a bit swamped in necro adds to the Kholer fight. The changes in Part 1 & 2 mostly seemed like a nice attempt to make the narrative of the dungeon flow better and a not so nice attempt at increasing the time investment of the dungeon through padding fights.

AC Path 3 seemed fine, but the final boss fight seemed entirely broken. After an initial failure because Warmaster Grast decided to run off to fight tunnel gravelings, our subsequent attempts we tried to keep interrupting the ceiling fall skill to prevent it, but not once during our six other attempts did Grast spawn a shield bubble. He spent the entire fight trying to hammer to death Colossus and frequently was killed by the ceiling fall, along with the rest of us. Our best run got him down to around 55% health, but most of our interrupts were on cool down, Grast again did not spawn any bubbles and we were wiped by a ceiling fall. We just gave up in the end as we’d already been playing over 3 hours.

I think the idea of making the dungeons more interesting to play is a good one, but I feel the changes to AC have made it unfun. AC used to be a dungeon we could run in a nice, fun, casual workday evening with a group of mixed ability people of different levels of experience, from a mixture of servers and experiment with different builds, maybe some on voice chat, others not. It was a fun, not too serious way of playing an enjoyable side of GW2 that got people into playing a little regularly and rewarded them with a nice amount of money and maybe a new exotic sword and offhand, if not some new armour.

I think the changes have made it so that this isn’t possible any more, I think more than evidenced by the significant drop in the number of people wanting to group to play through the dungeon and the number of people roaming around that part of the map doing social things.I don’t really understand why every single dungeon has to be aimed at ‘hardcore’ people at the expense of encouraging wider participation and providing something of a gateway into how explorable dungeons work. The changes to mob and boss fights also increase the time commitment, which removes that kind of satisfaction you could get by doing all three runs in an evening, especially for newer people who feel some achievement in going through the whole run.

I don’t think the ideas behind the changes themselves are bad, I just think the implementation and some of the new mechanics are off-putting and not enjoyable.

Ascalonian Catacombs path 3 is impossible now. We should not have to rely on an NPC who cannot deploy the shield. Fix AC EM. It’s supposed to be the beginning dungeon, not a hardcore high level character experience. It’s labeled as a 35. Do you really think a group of even just 50s could do this? Absolutely not.

Horrorscope.7632:

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Will we ever release a video of our internal testing process? Highly doubtful. Just as I doubt we will ever post the builds, classes, and gear our testers test with.

May I ask why not? Remember, it’s just a game.

What does it mean you will propably never post the classes your testers test with? I assumed it would be “all classes”. Oo

Holy kitten new content quality testing is a mess in GW2. No wonder balance is so abyssal.

Oh and to make things clear. I really don’t think this is something the dungeon designers have to improve on. Class balance needs to become a thing. People posting this issue here is kind of a backdoor attempt and just shows how desperate they are not getting any answers in the corresponding class forums. If anyone of Arenanet reads this: The way class balance is handled by minimum ressources makes people very mad right now. I know a whole lot of people that are nothing but frustrated and only play the game in hope for the next balance patch just to get disappointed once again. Stop this fast. Change your mentality towards class balance. There should have been way more progress by now for PvE and PvP. New utility skill should have been released. Mayor flaws like condition caps should have been adressed. Instead nearly nothing happened for certain classes.

Totally agree with that. The way you treat some classes like ranger and major mechanuc flaws just makes lots of ppl think about quitting the game thus reducing your money income. So it must be your main goal to make the game enjoyable to play do that ppl can have fun and encourage their friends to buy this game thus making money for ya. Strange that such obviuos marketing dogmas dont seem to be utilized!

Shikigami.4013:

Wethospu.6437:

How to define wiping (one guy wiping, party resetting fight, all dead)?

“Wipe” means “all party members died”. It comes from “wipeout”. A single person dying is a death, not a wipe. I don’t know why some people chose to start calling dying “wiping”, probably a desire to sound more “cool”.

As for the rest of your post, it becomes too lengthy and too tiring to answer you, so I won’t anymore..

Exactly. Current dungeons which allow resetting encounters just don’t work with your system.
If your implementation is too tiring to explain then it is probably too complicated.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: Our QA teams test the dungeons at the dungeon level, and at 80. They test it with different ranges of gear, and different people. I’ve watched non-QA groups do similar things, under various conditions. We have a review process.
Will 80’s have an easier time? Sure. They have more tools to use and more experience with the class. Our side-kicking system is something we are working on too, to ensure that things remain challenging for those folks and that their gear doesn’t make all the difference.
Will we ever release a video of our internal testing process? Highly doubtful. Just as I doubt we will ever post the builds, classes, and gear our testers test with.

One thing we see frequently with at-level people going into dungeons, is that while their character is the right level, their gear is often 10+ levels behind them. When you combine a low average gear level, not having all your skills/tools available, and not being as experienced with the class, it’s going to be significantly more difficult than what an 80 makes it look like.
We build dungeons for at-level players, and then reduce the strength of higher level players to bring them more in line with the players at that level. We do not balance for 80’s sidekicked down to at-level.

if you see it frequently that lvls 35s with gear that is 10 lvl behind them, then you should design dungeons that would cater for this kind of people, and actually play test the dungeon with such setup and see if it is doable or causes too much frustration.

I think you should also limit your play test PCs to the avg spec and not like the best money can buy because a lot of players use avg specced PCs to play, not top end gaming machines, that way you would be able to pick up potential issues with performance and unintended culling.

ylliv.4029:

if you see it frequently that lvls 35s with gear that is 10 lvl behind them, then you should design dungeons that would cater for this kind of people, and actually play test the dungeon with such setup and see if it is doable or causes too much frustration.

Nah.

Dungeons are intended as the challenging culmination of PvE play. Asking for it to be easily completable while significantly under geared would push it into trivial category once someone was properly geared. And by properly I mean “Wearing greens with a level requirement less than 4 away from their current level.”

Robert Hrouda.1327:

I personally play Ranger as my main, so I’m fairly aware of how to manage the pet, and do my testing as a ranger primarily. What mechanic do you feel is expressly punishing to a ranger pet?
I’m more than aware of how squishy pets can be in dungeons, but if you could list out all the issues you are speaking of, I can try and address them.

I personally find the biggest problem is pretty much pets often don’t balance out in dungeons.

What I mean by this is:
In the open world you’re running along with any pet, and they all work (barring group events with one-hit-knockout attacks and the like) very well. The squishy ones are squishy, but hit hard and kill the enemy quickly. The tough ones do less damage but can take the hits so they can keep doing their damage.

Fastforward to the dungeons and this breaks down; many of the bosses hit very hard with some/all of their attacks and far more importantly they all seem to have chugged industrial amounts of the health potions.
So you use squishy pets for a bit more damage… but because there’s so much more health on enemies in dungeons the extra damage is undermine. They get taken out so much easier/faster that unless you watch them like a hawk they can often get taken out before you can do anything about it. Tougher pets (Drakes, pigs, ect) give you a bit more leeway.
Ergo, tougher pets are more useful and seen far more often.

For what it’s worth, Ascalon’s Dungeon is proving to be overall far more accommodating of the more fragile pets in it’s new incarnation. There’s some problems (a ‘good’ one is the Spider Queen’s AoE poison attack; if it targeted you, you often can’t roll out and then swap pets in time to save your pet if it’s also in a poisoned area.)
But as I said, it’s proving to be largely more forgiving for pets, while still interesting and fun. I’m especially enjoying how Toll-kun works and the new end bosses fight.

I tried new AC with friend. We were just 2. We both are lvl 80.
He went on his Thief (Full berserker, armor exotic, jewels green).
I went on my Guardian(Exotic berserker armor, Eye of Janthir, Ancient Karka Shell, and the of jewelery is Knight exotic).
I used the newly fixed trait pure of voice to test it (conditon → boon when I use shout.)
We played quite badly and did not cooperate at all. We did not use any voice communication. It was late and we made a lot of errors.

Feedback:
1) new breeder is soloable. Even if you don’t interrupt. He is no longer doing any meaningfull damage, and his minions go away when he dies. You can run in circles around him and the minions will never hit you. Of course when you interrupt, you can stand in 1 place and auto attack. We were already able to solo the old breeders, but these were much harder. Why such change?
2) same goes for burrow. If you circle run the burrow the gravelings will never hit you. Soloable again.
3) little spiders → I like the change. Now they actually mean something. We did the mistake of summoning all of them with a spider queen so we wiped several times. Wall of Reflection saved the day. Little spiders still kill themselves on the wall. You should improve their AI so that they are aware of the wall and go into melee range instead of killing themselves. Right now solo guardian can clear the room from hatchlings.
4) spider queen. We wiped once. Pure of Voice worked very well on her, breaking immobilize and allowing us get rid of poison. Combined with some regen, aegis, protection and swiftness it made the encounter not so hard. Anyway, the encounter now seems more polished and the difficulty increased, so I like the change.
5) gravelings in the corridor → we just destroyed them. I did not have any chance of see what were they doing but it seemed like nothing important. I soloed breeder while my friend got aggro from the rest of gravelings. When I finished witht he breeder I helped him finish off the graveling that he targeted. From then we just killed the rest. The champion was not doing anything. Very poor encounter.
6) Stone heads shooting with fire → I did a test, and stood still, and auto attacked one of them with scepter. Both heads were hitting me. I had burn. I destroyed both without moving. I had to use my heal once. I think these should force me to move and dodge roll since I’m not a tank. Very poor.
7) New Kohler → we were able to kill his adds, and bring him down to 75%. Then another group of adds spawned and we made several mistakes and were low on hp so we wiped. I like that new adds are spawning. Our record was to bring him down to 50% but then, necro showed up and destroyed me. One thing I noticed is that the aegis no longer works on his pull which is lame. I hope it is a bug. There is no reason why aegis should not block his projectile… I think he is now a nice challenge for 1-2 ppl. You should maybe consider adjusting him to be a challenge for a full group?

As I said it was late and we were not in a condition to beat the Kohler. I think we would also struggle with the burrows without an ele. Anyway my overall impressions with a change are:

Encounters are more polished, but IMO more forgiving and overally easier. (At least the ones we did.). However, I’m overally not happy with the change. First of all, I imagined that it would be required to kill Kohler. As well as more exploits closed. I also imagined that you will take a different approach with the dungeon. I hoped for less linearity, more replayability, making use of dynamic events and adding the exploration feel.

Examples of what I mean:
You enter the dungeon and meet the Durmand Priory encampment which is the only safe zone. You have several options and several location you can go. Each of these contains some encounters and some random dynamic events, and you secure that location. NPC are moving in and researching eventually opening new possibilities of progressing. Depending on your success or failure with various events and activities and maybe on some random things the differnt things can happen. Finally you unlock a boss. I imagined NPCs with gear for tears will be inside the dungeon, hidden. I imagined more hidden optional stuff. Etc. I’d like the dungeons to go more into the direction of GW1 Underworld or fissure of woe. I feel that you have great engine and you failed to put it to good use. GW2 dungeons are not much different from any other MMO dungeon. Except for combat system of course, but you know what I mean.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

I personally play Ranger as my main, so I’m fairly aware of how to manage the pet, and do my testing as a ranger primarily. What mechanic do you feel is expressly punishing to a ranger pet?
I’m more than aware of how squishy pets can be in dungeons, but if you could list out all the issues you are speaking of, I can try and address them.

Robert,

My ranger is my main too, and I feel like I’ve had quite a bit of experience with Fractals (prior to this year’s patches)…

1. First off, ranger pets lack agony resistance. This makes them essentially worthless in boss fights. We can’t easily get them to avoid agony when the boss performs an attack.
   Since we have to invest such time and effort (and sometimes gold/ecto) into getting Ascended gear and infusions… I feel like pets should definitely inherit our infusion bonus.
2. Pets in GW1 didn’t need infusion. They (like heroes) were, by default, “infused.”
3. Jade Maw’s OHKO attack. This was a biggie when I played the Fractals. Most people groaned about how rangers can’t dismiss pets.
   Although I tend to get around this by switching my pet if I notice that it’s been targeted, it would be nice if the Jade Maw wouldn’t target pets as much (if at all.)
4. Pets are considered half of the Ranger class. You’re always expected to have one, and thus it’s essentially considered half of our DPS.
5. Not being able to keep our pets alive during dungeons makes us less valuable. It’d be nice if we had some better skills, traits, or other options for helping to keep our pets alive.
   This isn’t really an issue in open-world PvE.

Those are my points about the Ranger in Fractals, and I’m sure many others feel the same way. And it seems to be the “public opinion” of our class, when it comes to Fractals.

RakaNishoo.6071:

Encounters are more polished, but IMO more forgiving and overally easier. (At least the ones we did.). However, I’m overally not happy with the change. First of all, I imagined that it would be required to kill Kohler. As well as more exploits closed. I also imagined that you will take a different approach with the dungeon. I hoped for less linearity, more replayability, making use of dynamic events and adding the exploration feel.
…
I’d like the dungeons to go more into the direction of GW1 Underworld or fissure of woe. I feel that you have great engine and you failed to put it to good use. GW2 dungeons are not much different from any other MMO dungeon. Except for combat system of course, but you know what I mean.

I think that GW2 should have difficult content, but I feel that the Fractals currently fulfill that need.

I don’t really know of all that many people that did GW1’s Underworld or FoW (aside from people farming Ecto which wasn’t really all that useful in GW1 outside of obscenely expensive prestige armor art.)

There are a variety of reasons GW2 needs to make dungeons “easier” and “more forgiving.”

First of all, most players aren’t going to be elitists. They’re not going to be willing to try difficult content with a PUG (or even their guild) multiple times if they’re not really getting anything out of it. (i.e. if they end up getting wiped multiple times in the dungeon, so that repair costs skyrocket and outweigh any potential benefit.)

The reason you should care about this: You need other people to keep playing the game to keep it alive. I’m not sure how much (if any) real money you’re putting into the Gem Store, but a company needs cash to keep servers running and to pay developers to come up with new content.

Ascalonian Catacombs are the FIRST dungeon. The main purpose should be introducing players to dungeoning.

It’s a level 30/35 dungeon. At those recommended levels, players are just unlocking their first Elite skill. They also are limited in what traits they have available to them.

If players at level 30/35 decide to try their first dungeon and played what existed before the recent patches, they may very well decide that GW2 isn’t for them.

Dungeons were TOO DIFFICULT for your average player. You need people playing to keep the game alive. Those are the facts.

That’s probably why other MMOs succeed with their “easier” dungeons. Because it’s fun and enjoyable content for the majority of players.

Hardcore elitists are always going to be difficult to please. I mean, that’s arguably why the Fractals (and Ascended gear) were introduced.

Minos.5168:

rt,

1. Pets in GW1 didn’t need infusion. They (like heroes) were, by default, "infused.

Bit of trivia; they weren’t at first, and for a fair while after release were not either. Wasn’t fun, but it got sorted. IIRC originally getting infusion when you did, and then just always being resistant.

Loki.4871:

Minos.5168:

rt,

1. Pets in GW1 didn’t need infusion. They (like heroes) were, by default, "infused.

Bit of trivia; they weren’t at first, and for a fair while after release were not either. Wasn’t fun, but it got sorted. IIRC originally getting infusion when you did, and then just always being resistant.

Well, point being, they had infusion (after ANet acknowledged that it was silly for them not to be).

I don’t care if pets are immune to Agony.

I just think they should, at the very least, inherit my Agony Resistance.

Wethospu.6437:

Shikigami.4013:

Wethospu.6437:

How to define wiping (one guy wiping, party resetting fight, all dead)?

“Wipe” means “all party members died”. It comes from “wipeout”. A single person dying is a death, not a wipe. I don’t know why some people chose to start calling dying “wiping”, probably a desire to sound more “cool”.

As for the rest of your post, it becomes too lengthy and too tiring to answer you, so I won’t anymore..

Exactly. Current dungeons which allow resetting encounters just don’t work with your system.
If your implementation is too tiring to explain then it is probably too complicated.

I think by tiring, he meant that trying to convince you that you aren’t 100% right is tiring.

He’s probably right.

I’m not saying that improvement shouldn’t be encourage. There was a time when I was “omg Lupicus is too hard nerf him now please thanks lol.” Then I learned how to play my warrior, and realized that I was kind of being a kitten.

On the flip side, not everyone plays the enormous amount that I do, and not everyone wants to work that hard when the play.

Perhaps those people should be denied dungeon rewards by your standards, but I believe that there should be an option.

As a side note, I PUG quite often, and I find that many people actually want to do the dungeon correctly, don’t know how, and are used to elitist jerks that just brush them off. There are problems that stem from elitists as much as from laziness…perhaps you should consider how you are contributing to the problem/solution.

Regarding AC, I think the knockdown is excessive. Otherwise, I enjoyed path 1.

LunaticSerenade.7615:

Wethospu.6437:

Shikigami.4013:

Wethospu.6437:

How to define wiping (one guy wiping, party resetting fight, all dead)?

“Wipe” means “all party members died”. It comes from “wipeout”. A single person dying is a death, not a wipe. I don’t know why some people chose to start calling dying “wiping”, probably a desire to sound more “cool”.

As for the rest of your post, it becomes too lengthy and too tiring to answer you, so I won’t anymore..

Exactly. Current dungeons which allow resetting encounters just don’t work with your system.
If your implementation is too tiring to explain then it is probably too complicated.

I think by tiring, he meant that trying to convince you that you aren’t 100% right is tiring.

He’s probably right.

I’m not saying that improvement shouldn’t be encourage. There was a time when I was “omg Lupicus is too hard nerf him now please thanks lol.” Then I learned how to play my warrior, and realized that I was kind of being a kitten.

On the flip side, not everyone plays the enormous amount that I do, and not everyone wants to work that hard when the play.

Perhaps those people should be denied dungeon rewards by your standards, but I believe that there should be an option.

As a side note, I PUG quite often, and I find that many people actually want to do the dungeon correctly, don’t know how, and are used to elitist jerks that just brush them off. There are problems that stem from elitists as much as from laziness…perhaps you should consider how you are contributing to the problem/solution.

Regarding AC, I think the knockdown is excessive. Otherwise, I enjoyed path 1.

Just wondering are you saying that it is a non-issue that there are two ways to “lose” an encounter while his system deals with just one. Partial wipes are quite common.
My point is that you can have a great idea but its implementation has to be simple enough so that it’s doable. And he has barely scratched the surface, at least I can understand why I don’t fully understand his idea.

In my opinion key is better learning curve. Story-modes are quite useless and they should be reworked to give better learning experience. Make story-modes simpler and clean, just basic mechanics and no fancy stuff. For example you see a room with big spider and NPC advices you to take condition removal and watch out for “glow”.
To make explorable modes better they should reduce “ambushes” because proper preparation is a huge asset (story-wise there can be ambushes but player shouldn’t find himself middle of enemies unprepared and with no idea what to do).

And fix exploits (arah p3 lanterns, GRRRR!).

If developers need feedback from Rangers on pets in a dungeon, despite playing a Ranger in a dungeon like they said.

We’re screwed as a class….

If you can’t play a ranger in a dungeon, and not see something seriously wrong after 15 mins…..Then you clearly haven’t played any other class in this game.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: Our QA teams test the dungeons at the dungeon level, and at 80. They test it with different ranges of gear, and different people. I’ve watched non-QA groups do similar things, under various conditions. We have a review process.Will 80’s have an easier time? Sure. They have more tools to use and more experience with the class. Our side-kicking system is something we are working on too, to ensure that things remain challenging for those folks and that their gear doesn’t make all the difference. Will we ever release a video of our internal testing process? Highly doubtful. Just as I doubt we will ever post the builds, classes, and gear our testers test with. One thing we see frequently with at-level people going into dungeons, is that while their character is the right level, their gear is often 10+ levels behind them. When you combine a low average gear level, not having all your skills/tools available, and not being as experienced with the class, it’s going to be significantly more difficult than what an 80 makes it look like. We build dungeons for at-level players, and then reduce the strength of higher level players to bring them more in line with the players at that level. We do not balance for 80’s sidekicked down to at-level.

QA teams are great, except that I’m 100% certain that they are made up of VERY experienced players, and you probably have more-or-less the same QA team that you did in early development. The unfortunate thing is that most of the people playing your game are NOT as experienced as your QA team. And how is a QA team running all 80s going to tell you that a dungeon is suitable for lvl 35 toons? Regardless of your methods, the changes you made to AC are exasperating to say the least.

To me, these changes are unwelcome and annoying. It makes no sense to make a lvl 40 dungeon off limits to level 40 players

Join a team of REAL players on 35s in lvl35 gear with lvl 35 traits/skills instead of your QA geniuses and tell me that your mechanics are working properly. I think you will find that 2-3hrs for 1 dungeon path is ABSURD.

Set up a PTR, throw all your changes to dungeons on it at once, and try listening. There are literally thousands of people who are all making the exact same suggestions to your team and giving you the same criticisms – your design philosophy seems to be “more hp, more damage, more adds, more CC” and while I don’t know if most people are unhappy with that I do know that a lot are.

Getting hit with 1 knockdown in AC means 3-5 knockdown. Spamming Mantra of Concentration PLUS Mirror Images PLUS Blink PLUS stealth PLUS swiftness isn’t enough to escape the knockdown/knockback. Whn you’re playing an MMO, your toon in supposed to be a hero, but AC makes you a pinball instead. Is that fun? Not for me. I’ve tried AC p1 twice since the patch. P1 was my favourite thing to do IN THE ENTIRE GAME. What WAS a 10-20 minute jaunt through what is, in my opinion, the best-looking dungeon in the game. The last two nights, its taken me 2+ hours just to get to the boss, and I’ve had to log out WITHOUT the rewards for finishing because I have to go to bed for work in the morning. This patch has taken the ONE thing that I really loved about GW2.
1/2

Robert Hrouda.1327:

@KuishenThanks for the feedback. I noticed however you mention that your necro minions were causing ectoplasms. I built it specifically so that only players can draw ectoplasms off – that way rangers, mesmers, and necros wouldn’t enrage their party just by playing. I think someone in your party may have been attacking when they shouldn’t have been.

Three GREAT posts on AC and all you can respond to is a simple aggro issue…? Let’s have you sit down, read through this thread, and actually come up with a real solution here. Despite your intentions with this dungeon, you have ruined it. I really hope that you listen TO THE PLAYERS instead of just your QA team. THE PLAYERS are the ones who should be enjoying the game.

All new stuff in dungeons is going to be hard for the first few days. We see it all the time with new content – people fail and get knocked down when they aren’t used to that sort of thing, and they claim it is too difficult.Give it a week or so for everyone to develop strategies, learn encounters, and build fundamentals, and they will claim it is too easy. Trust me when I say this, the numbers are punishing (but less than they were before), but knowing the mechanics will greatly mitigate the danger.

Right. Well I guess I will just have to learn how to not get perma-knockdown from knockdown-spamming hordes. Or just quit running AC. Since I can’e stand ppl’s attitudes in WvW and AC has been ruined, I guess I’ll be playing less GW2 now, since all that’s left for me is farming in Orr… Whoo. Might even go back to GW1. At least you’re not bungling that anymore…
2/2

Minos.5168:

RakaNishoo.6071:

Encounters are more polished, but IMO more forgiving and overally easier. (At least the ones we did.). However, I’m overally not happy with the change. First of all, I imagined that it would be required to kill Kohler. As well as more exploits closed. I also imagined that you will take a different approach with the dungeon. I hoped for less linearity, more replayability, making use of dynamic events and adding the exploration feel.
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I’d like the dungeons to go more into the direction of GW1 Underworld or fissure of woe. I feel that you have great engine and you failed to put it to good use. GW2 dungeons are not much different from any other MMO dungeon. Except for combat system of course, but you know what I mean.

I think that GW2 should have difficult content, but I feel that the Fractals currently fulfill that need.

I don’t really know of all that many people that did GW1’s Underworld or FoW (aside from people farming Ecto which wasn’t really all that useful in GW1 outside of obscenely expensive prestige armor art.)

There are a variety of reasons GW2 needs to make dungeons “easier” and “more forgiving.”

First of all, most players aren’t going to be elitists. They’re not going to be willing to try difficult content with a PUG (or even their guild) multiple times if they’re not really getting anything out of it. (i.e. if they end up getting wiped multiple times in the dungeon, so that repair costs skyrocket and outweigh any potential benefit.)

The reason you should care about this: You need other people to keep playing the game to keep it alive. I’m not sure how much (if any) real money you’re putting into the Gem Store, but a company needs cash to keep servers running and to pay developers to come up with new content.

Ascalonian Catacombs are the FIRST dungeon. The main purpose should be introducing players to dungeoning.

It’s a level 30/35 dungeon. At those recommended levels, players are just unlocking their first Elite skill. They also are limited in what traits they have available to them.

If players at level 30/35 decide to try their first dungeon and played what existed before the recent patches, they may very well decide that GW2 isn’t for them.

Dungeons were TOO DIFFICULT for your average player. You need people playing to keep the game alive. Those are the facts.

That’s probably why other MMOs succeed with their “easier” dungeons. Because it’s fun and enjoyable content for the majority of players.

Hardcore elitists are always going to be difficult to please. I mean, that’s arguably why the Fractals (and Ascended gear) were introduced.

In my post I was not saying I expected harder content. I expected something different. It is not related to hard content. Please read it.

AC was not in line with other dungeons becaus it was as hard or harder than many others. I can live with first dungeon in the game being easier if it was more fun to do. (Read my post).

I completely agree with AC story difficulty (Although it could be a little bit tougher so that it is not soloable with a lvl 30 character. )

As for your arguments that dungeons should be easy I’ll say this:
1) As you said, you want more ppl playing the game, which is exactly the reason why you need to introduce hard content. Most of my friends left the game because there is nothing challenging. They are watching. And waiting. I’d even risk to say that there are more such ppl than currently players that like easy content. Demon’s Souls just in NA sold 500 000 copies until 2010. There is huge demand for hard games.
2) You have a lot of skills in this game, yet there is no content that encourages you using them. Just spam 100b and you’re good. If that was the intention of developers they would not waste so many hours developing this combat system. We would have press 1 button to rule them all combat system, like in many other easy MMO’s.
3) Dungeons explorable mode are great for being hard. This is due to them having easy story version. So players that don’t like gw2 combat system and don’t like to learn it can still enjoy the dungeon.
4) Guild Wars had already a huge fan base that was used to hard content. GW2 should pick this up but at the same time make the game more accessible to new players no matter what their gaming experience is. This is not done by eliminating hard content but having good learning process and nice increase in difficulty from easier areas to much harder ones. Right now the game encounters are teaching to play badly, for example standing still and auto attacking works very well. Then you go to the dungeon and die.

It would definitely be nice if a player’s AR translated onto their summons / pets. That would help a lot.