Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone! Just tossing ideas at the wall here. See what sticks.
I’d like to turn this into a collection of ideas. With feedback from the community. And hopefully, Arena Net will notice and consider things!

There was talk of a lack of a dungeon team on Arena Net’s development side. As such, no dungeons are currently being developed (that we know of), and the dungeon content has become remarkably stale over time.

Here are a number of things I think could be implemented to easily make dungeons more interesting.

• A lack of unique loot per dungeon.
  In many other online games, and RPG’s in general, replay value of certain dungeons and raids comes out of the will to collect certain rare and enjoyable goodies. No final boss encounters in dungeons on Guild Wars 2 currently result in valuable, unique drops. Going back to beat that one boss in that one place? “What boss?” Exactly! No boss is remotely memorable, since they have no value to players.
  Suggested solution(s): Add a collectible weapon or unique item to the final boss of each dungeon path. Make them named items (like greens on GW1). These unique weapons can be part of a Collection, with a unique, fun or silly reward for collecting them all.
  Drop rates for the weapons should not be set at 100%, but nothing under 5% either. This should give players an incentive to repeat certain dungeon paths over time, without it being an impossible task.

• What dungeon shall we do?
  Lot of people have gotten Dungeon Master by now. They still want to do dungeons, but have difficulty choosing from the LFG tool. (At least, I do sometimes.)
  Suggested solution(s): Add an extra button that asigns your full party of friends to a random dungeon (possibly for a bonus reward) they must complete. A queue could be implemented alternatively, to randomly hop into groups with strangers. Keeps the experience fresh.

• Fractals are a waste of time.
  When put next to other dungeons, Fractals generally take much longer. And the worst isn’t that they are long, but they reward the players with less items and gold on average. Especially higher levels are arguably not worth their time.
  Suggested solution(s): Further increase the gold reward at the end, based on the difficulty bracket. From bracket 20 onward, the end reward should be guaranteed. Getting nothing should not be an option, past this point. Add more rewards for Pristine Relics (such as the Fractal skins).

Auruan.2837:

• A lack of unique loot per dungeon.
  In many other online games, and RPG’s in general, replay value of certain dungeons and raids comes out of the will to collect certain rare and enjoyable goodies. No final boss encounters in dungeons on Guild Wars 2 currently result in valuable, unique drops. Going back to beat that one boss in that one place? “What boss?” Exactly! No boss is remotely memorable, since they have no value to players.
  Suggested solution(s): Add a collectible weapon or unique item to the final boss of each dungeon path. Make them named items (like greens on GW1). These unique weapons can be part of a Collection, with a unique, fun or silly reward for collecting them all.
  Drop rates for the weapons should not be set at 100%, but nothing under 5% either. This should give players an incentive to repeat certain dungeon paths over time, without it being an impossible task.

This is already the case. In CM P1 for example you can get the back item “Spineguard of the North” and in P2 the recipe for the ring “Plague” as a possible drop from the end boss.

Yes, but those items are not quite memorable and have close to no impact. I cannot name anyone who advertised for his AC run because he wanted a Ghostly Spineguard so badly, or wanted to punch Subject Alpha for the Fibre Splice.

What I was thinking of was a system along the lines of more interesting collectibles, with actual valuable or good-looking items. Thanks for the heads up though!

I love these ideas! I agree that dungeons could use a facelift in rewards if they aren’t going to release any more in the near future or are afraid of releasing too many.

I’ve got an idea of my own to add regarding the random dungeons.

• Random Daily Dungeon Paths Rotation – Each day, there’s a set of daily dungeons. They could be 4 or 5 random paths across all dungeons, that sounds reasonable. These dungeons will now offers an additional reward chest at the end with a bit of extra coin, tokens and a small chance for a very unique item, such as mini, dungeon weapon or armor box, or even an ascended.

This would offer more replayability to the dungeons and reward those people who can take on the random challenge. I think this one would suit GW2 better than a random button to play, as it would require more features to be added and tweaked, make sure you can’t exploit it somehow and among other things.

Not to rain on your parade, but most of this stuff has been mentioned before with no response. I think it’s long past the point to safely say anet doesn’t care about dungeons and will most likely never fix anything substantial with the current dungeons or add any new ones unless it’s part of the LS.

tl;dr Forget dungeons getting better, ever

Auruan.2837:

• A lack of unique loot per dungeon.
  In many other online games, and RPG’s in general, replay value of certain dungeons and raids comes out of the will to collect certain rare and enjoyable goodies. No final boss encounters in dungeons on Guild Wars 2 currently result in valuable, unique drops. Going back to beat that one boss in that one place? “What boss?” Exactly! No boss is remotely memorable, since they have no value to players.
  Suggested solution(s): Add a collectible weapon or unique item to the final boss of each dungeon path. Make them named items (like greens on GW1). These unique weapons can be part of a Collection, with a unique, fun or silly reward for collecting them all.
  Drop rates for the weapons should not be set at 100%, but nothing under 5% either. This should give players an incentive to repeat certain dungeon paths over time, without it being an impossible task.

Quite a few dungeon paths already have that unique item in the form of a recipe. However I do support more lootz as long as they aren’t account bound.

Auruan.2837:

• What dungeon shall we do?
  Lot of people have gotten Dungeon Master by now. They still want to do dungeons, but have difficulty choosing from the LFG tool. (At least, I do sometimes.)
  Suggested solution(s): Add an extra button that asigns your full party of friends to a random dungeon (possibly for a bonus reward) they must complete. A queue could be implemented alternatively, to randomly hop into groups with strangers. Keeps the experience fresh.

Many paths are avoided due to bugs (AC P2 and SE P2 >.>), in addition I have done most paths in the game that randomizing is not going to keep it fresh. So I’m not for this being added. Also if I want things to be fresh I’ll join an arah pug.

Auruan.2837:

• Fractals are a waste of time.
  When put next to other dungeons, Fractals generally take much longer. And the worst isn’t that they are long, but they reward the players with less items and gold on average. Especially higher levels are arguably not worth their time.
  Suggested solution(s): Further increase the gold reward at the end, based on the difficulty bracket. From bracket 20 onward, the end reward should be guaranteed. Getting nothing should not be an option, past this point. Add more rewards for Pristine Relics (such as the Fractal skins).

Skins should not be touched. They are fine as is. I do agree that the reward should be guaranteed but not past 20. I would rather it be 40 and onward and none of this extra relics shenanigans. Gold increase would be nice but I feel the karma more than makes up for the lower gold.

Skins are fine? Are you mad? Skins are terrible. You can run a thousand fractals and not get the skin you want. You can be the best or among the worst of the fractal runners and it doesn’t really make much of a difference. The better player will merely be able to do more runs in the same time thereby getting more dice rolls. Having a token system that allows you to make constant progress would be the sensible thing to do. It would be very easy to adjust the cost of skins so they’re not dirt cheap nor impossible to get. If there’s one thing games don’t need in excess it’s RNG. It’s just a lazy way to design rewards.

Veydar.5017:

Skins are fine? Are you mad? Skins are terrible. You can run a thousand fractals and not get the skin you want. You can be the best or among the worst of the fractal runners and it doesn’t really make much of a difference. The better player will merely be able to do more runs in the same time thereby getting more dice rolls. Having a token system that allows you to make constant progress would be the sensible thing to do. It would be very easy to adjust the cost of skins so they’re not dirt cheap nor impossible to get. If there’s one thing games don’t need in excess it’s RNG. It’s just a lazy way to design rewards.

I don’t mind RnG it keeps things rare. I also enjoy playing fractals for the challenge. In addition I average WELL below the average for getting skins at 40/50s I’m under 1/100 per skin, so please don’t Q.Q to me about rng (I have 5 skins for 700+ runs btw).

I agree with OP, a rewards revamp needs to be put in place.