Guild Wars 2

What I think can solve the problem is a dungeon reward option called “gold share.” Basically you get 5man reward split amongst the number of people in your party. This way when you decide to solo,2man,3man a dungeon to make it more difficult for yourselves you can get more gold reward,and you can enjoy all the boss mechanics in all its glory. And because this is an option you probably won’t want to join a LFG group with that option selected so it will not introduce party kicking situations.

Whoever thinks GW2 dungeons are toxic and have a steep learning curve should give Wildstar a try. The first boss of the first dungeon (before the latest patch that introduced Prototype) wipes so many people that most groups who don’t make it to the end of the dungeon actually disband right at the beginning (Stormtalon’s Lair).

Thaddeus.4891:

Zenith.7301:

Yeah, his group sucked, it’s a PuG.

But you don’t think that linking that video shows just how poorly designed PvE is where someone can cheese conjures on large hit boxes and the power of might stacking to down a boss in a few seconds?

If you think its cheesy try to do the same. Stacking 25 might on yourself on an elementalist is hard in one shot and need practice. You can do it more easily in two shot, but either you don’t have enough time to kill the boss with all your might or you need Rune of strength. He had to change trait quickly, then had a good rotation. He also dodge Icebow to concentrate the damage on a line. Something that isn’t easy in a combat situation.

FGS back in the days. That was cheesy. You simply had to pull the boss in a corner and press 3 skills, no practice, no preparation, no skills.

Zenith.7301:

You don’t lay waste to mythic level bosses in less than 2 minutes, and you certainly don’t get to skip Imperator Margok or Blackhand’s mechanics however much you are geared out.

And you don’t lay waste to Fractal 50 Bosses or most of the higher level World bosses. AC is a low level dungeon with scaling issues. Every mobs is super easy to kill in there. You can’t say that its a broken PvE because 1 low level boss is super easy to kill and then compare that to the hardest boss to kill in WoW. That’s just a stupid comparison.

Don’t expect much of a response from me. I already replied bringing up Arah and fractal boss kill times by optimized group but some people don’t like being replied to so they resort to reporting people to get mods to purge posts they don’t like off threads.

I’ll just agree to disagree as in every thread it’s the same particular individuals coming in to trash talk and nitpick and quite frankly I’m not interested in more infractions.

Veydar.5017:

Whoever thinks GW2 dungeons are toxic and have a steep learning curve should give Wildstar a try. The first boss of the first dungeon (before the latest patch that introduced Prototype) wipes so many people that most groups who don’t make it to the end of the dungeon actually disband right at the beginning (Stormtalon’s Lair).

STL is actually the easiest dungeon to gold. Sanctuary of The Swordmaiden and Skullcano are worse offenders, and Slavedriver in Ruins of Kel Voreth is the absolute brickwall for most inexperienced groups as it has hefty healing checks and need to coordinate CC alongside breaking people out of tethers.

The really toxic times were when adventures only dropped epics on gold so people would disband immediately if an objective necessary for a gold medal was not achieved.

And despite all that Wildstar has never had a history of dungeon communities looking down on certain classes, granted in raids nobody minds a surplus of warriors and they prefer to keep the amount of spellslingers and espers low (much like GW2, buffs are melee based so light armor classes have to sit in melee and soak up more healing since they take ~20% more damage than heavy armor classes while having no damage advantage, and in wildstar there are raid damage auras and other unavoidable damage so it’s not like you can do anything about that gap in efficiency).

Wildstar’s combat is actually very similar to GW2 if you look past the presence of a trinity system (which exists in GW2 in its own way, somebody soaks the damage or redirects it away from the group, and water field blasting and proactive mitigation take the place of healing’s reactive mitigation).

The steep learning curve is also due to Wildstar’s interrupt system. It’s virtually the same as Defiance, where you need to remove stacks, but interrupts actually work because there are dangerous casts to interrupt that when properly interrupted give a moment of opportunity for extra damage. Interrupting key skills in GW2 is unreliable anyways since the defiance stacks on some bosses are very high and the tells are too short anyways so you’re better off dodging/using aegis/reflects.

Wildstar’s interrupt system is much more similar to GW1’s system and the playstyle of interrupt mesmers.

Zenith.7301:

Interrupting key skills in GW2 is unreliable anyways since the defiance stacks on some bosses are very high

Openworld isn’t really “dungeon speed runs” is it now?

Zenith.7301:

I’ll just agree to disagree as in every thread it’s the same particular individuals coming in to trash talk and nitpick and quite frankly I’m not interested in more infractions.

Weird. I was in pretty heated argument over the last two years in this forums, but never got any infractions. Even if we can get pretty passionate about the game, I try to keep it respectful. I’m not saying you weren’t in this instance, but if you already had a couple of infractions you really have yourself to blame for that. (unless there is some conspiracy theory here on the forum lol).

RemiRome.8495:

Zenith.7301:

Interrupting key skills in GW2 is unreliable anyways since the defiance stacks on some bosses are very high

Openworld isn’t really “dungeon speed runs” is it now?

Even in fractal 50 there are enough defiance stacks on a boss where you need a very specific niche set of skills to consistently get off a CC right when you need it. Mesmer’s mantra of distraction being one of them, but poor necromancers should have something like that too.

I still think nerfing necromancer fear as a reliable interrupt against bosses was one of the worse ideas they came up with.

Though more importantly you miss far less by botching an interrupt in GW than one in Wildstar. In Wildstar an interrupt that is not done significantly introduces difficulty to the fight if not an outright wipe.

I really liked the dynamic in GW1 and with interrupt mesmers. The interrupt and counter system there was done far better than in GW2.

I hope they revise the power of boons vs conditions because quite frankly in pve boons are just superior forms of condition. Protection and aegis tend to work better than their condition counterparts (example being, dredge fractal where mobs are immune to blind, but there’s not a single encounter where boons are targeted).

Conditions have caps, boons do not. Conditions like blind and weakness don’t even affect bosses to the same effectiveness boons protect you from them.

I rather liked all those conditional builds (not just conditions, but interactions between skills and conditions on mobs, and interactions with mob behavior) in GW1 and hopefully in HoT they start edging more toward that.

Though more importantly you miss far less by botching an interrupt in GW than one in Wildstar. In Wildstar an interrupt that is not done significantly introduces difficulty to the fight if not an outright wipe.

Wildstar was not a game marketed at casuals. GW2 seems to be the opposite end of the spectrum. Do you really think ANet wants to create wipes for casual groups just because the party comp had no good interrupt, or because the interrupter missed?

We speed runners will happily take bottlenecking content like that, because it’d increase the difficulty of content, remove all the casual bads from the dungeon runs (or make them extremely easy to filter), and give us pretty a much bigger relative share on dungeon gold income. It would end up looking like, say, any of the less casual-catering MMOs.

Other games punish you for not doing things well by wiping your party or adding significant difficulty. GW2 lets you yolo through content with anything for the most part, but doing things well makes it faceroll easy.

It’s for the sake of keeping the casuals and bads viable that content isn’t made harder, not because the dungeon community lobbies to keep things faceroll.

@Dave

shhhhhh last I heard wildstar was exceeding expectations everywhere!

Purple Miku.7032:

Morte.5916:

How do I get that in slow motion?

Click on the gear symbol (Settings) and change the speed from “Normal” to either 0.25 or 0.5.

Youtube offers the ability to watch it in 25%, 50%, 150% and 200% speeds.

Thanks, I just get to choose resolution and autoplay from the gear symbol in youtube, but I found another way.

That is astonishing, he goes through 3 weapon sets in 3 seconds. I think he does 8 blasts without Arcane Wave, and a sigil of battle triggers as he goes into water. How on earth do people do that?

Dave.2536:

Though more importantly you miss far less by botching an interrupt in GW than one in Wildstar. In Wildstar an interrupt that is not done significantly introduces difficulty to the fight if not an outright wipe.

Wildstar was not a game marketed at casuals. GW2 seems to be the opposite end of the spectrum. Do you really think ANet wants to create wipes for casual groups just because the party comp had no good interrupt, or because the interrupter missed?

We speed runners will happily take bottlenecking content like that, because it’d increase the difficulty of content, remove all the casual bads from the dungeon runs (or make them extremely easy to filter), and give us pretty a much bigger relative share on dungeon gold income. It would end up looking like, say, any of the less casual-catering MMOs.

---

Other games punish you for not doing things well by wiping your party or adding significant difficulty. GW2 lets you yolo through content with anything for the most part, but doing things well makes it faceroll easy.

It’s for the sake of keeping the casuals and bads viable that content isn’t made harder, not because the dungeon community lobbies to keep things faceroll.

Luckily for casuals Wildstar now has adventures, veteran shiphands, open world content and dynamic events, and a solo instance with several paths to boot.

GW2 can already cater to casual players via open world content, which there is plenty of, and WvW.

Hell, they can make story dungeons not be terrible rewards wise and be the casual equivalent. Then they can actually make explorables what they advertised them to be and raise the rewards accordingly to the time and effort spent.

Problem is explorables are only really profitable if you speed clear them relative to open world content. That needs to be fixed. You can even introduce achievements into dungeons like boss mechanics execution and death counters/ time limit achievements while fixing all of the cheesiness of some speed clears that is most egregiously present in Arah (and they can in turn go and revise the dungeon and remove some of the trash packs).

Another thing Wildstar did well with its revamp of dungeons was Veteran Sanctuary of the Swordmaiden. People did not initially like it because it could easily be a 40-50 minute run for organized groups (speed can push it to 30-40 mins), and it was just basically a version of Arah full of trash packs that you had to dance around/skip and abuse to make the timers.

They went and cleaned in the packs, and also did a complete rewards overhaul. Trash mobs received sizable drop rates for customization items like mount flairs (basically accessories for your mounts). The gear quality was upped to be the best pre-raid entry gear (in the case of GW2, they could just make mobs drop ascended and t6 craft materials and the chests for all dungeons should have a decent to good chance of dropping ascended chests).

So, Vet SSM was still a longish dungeon, but you didn’t mind a 40-1 hour run (pugs can take from 50-75 minutes for the silver timer) because the rewards were rather good. And completing the dungeon could net you like 2-3 plat (the equivalent of let’s say 10 gold in GW2).

But I have my doubts about them ever making the game rewarding, since their pet economist seems intent in keeping this game a casino for microtransactions so rewards can’t be good or people won’t farm and grind for months and be more likely to buy gems at the store.

Anet’s dungeon design philosophy was such that there would never be encounters with a single point of failure (interrupt this skill or wipe) which lead to conclusion that failure is basically impossible. We’ll see if they are willing to let people fail in the expansion content.

Morte.5916:

Purple Miku.7032:

Morte.5916:

How do I get that in slow motion?

Click on the gear symbol (Settings) and change the speed from “Normal” to either 0.25 or 0.5.

Youtube offers the ability to watch it in 25%, 50%, 150% and 200% speeds.

Thanks, I just get to choose resolution and autoplay from the gear symbol in youtube, but I found another way.

That is astonishing, he goes through 3 weapon sets in 3 seconds. I think he does 8 blasts without Arcane Wave, and a sigil of battle triggers as he goes into water. How on earth do people do that?

It takes practice to get consistent but it helps to keep watching.