Dear Arenanet,
I love the fact that you’re looking at dungeons and want to improve the experience for everyone and still make it a balanced and challenging for all those involved.
You get an A for effort.
However I feel that the implementation of this (across different phases as you put it) is incorrect.
Firstly, you removed res-rushing. That’s great. It gives boss fights a real thrill. But then you say you’ll be adding new waypoints to compensate, but not in that particular patch (you since have added them). Don’t you think they should have been introduced at the same time?
Secondly, some paths of dungeons are disproportionately harder than other paths. (And some dungeons in general). CoF for instances is a big culprit. Path 1 & 2 are simple with a group who knows what they’re doing. They’re actually still fun regardless. But path 3 is incredibly hard (I’m not even talking about the bosses), even with the same well oiled group. What has that lead to? No one does path 3, closing off 1/3 of that dungeons potential content for all players. This hasn’t been balanced. I’d like to ask you Arenanet what you actually find fun with that particular room in CoF p3 where you have to defend against 5 enemy waves? It’s not.
HOWEVER you have decided to make boss fights in AC MORE challenging, that were already very difficult for the average player. These boss fights didn’t really need to change. Well not just yet anyway. Perhaps later down the road, after all the other paths and bosses have been balanced.
It just feels to me that the order in which you’re doing these updates is incorrect. Don’t change aspects of the game for the sake of change. I would honestly prefer to wait a while and sit on something a little longer and have the end result be as perfect as possible. Don’t just add things so it looks like to us your adding things. We get it, Guild Wars 2 is awesome and ever evolving
I would suggest you balance paths, reduce health on some bosses (HoT p1 boss I’m looking at you), and generally make certain sections more FUN. Remember that hard can be fun, as long as its interesting and not just brutal for the sake of it! Lower health on some bosses but higher damage output can be one way to look at it. But I’m not the professional dungeon maker here, you guys are
Also as a matter of priority it would also be great to fix those pesky profession bugs, so that our skills and traits work properly for when we do face-off against these bosses.
Thank you Arenanet for listening to my rant.