Guild Wars 2

Dungeons are difficult but yield a high reward. Most of you are no stranger to the common dungeon strategies: ‘stack’ against enemies you must fight or are relatively easy, and then run past everything else.

This creates a disconnect between what a dungeon is on paper and what they are in practice (in GW2). A dungeon is supposed to be an area where you fight monsters and explore for goodies. I believe there are 3 primary reason why players do this (enemy design, armor cost with tokens, and reward allocation), but I’ll only focus on the last one: how the reward is given to you. (The other things warrant other discussions.)

It’s simple. The bulk of the reward is given at the end of dungeon run. This means you try to get there as soon as possible. So, the reward you get at the end of a given dungeon should be tallied up based on the amount of areas looted and enemies slain. Exploring every nook and cranny and killing all the enemies is actually punished in the current design because your reward is only marginally better while those who run get significantly more due to time.

Now some of you are thinking: Well, it would take a lot longer to get stuff from dungeons, which would be true. What should be done? Things you can buy with dungeon tokens should have lower costs if this was put into effect. This kind of change would require other adjustments as well.

What would it look like? Well for example, each veteran, silver, champ, legendary enemy you say gives you a certain amount of tokens and/or coins upon completing the dungeon (perhaps partial rewards are viable upon defeat/party leaving). It wouldn’t be infinite. Discovering a certain place or opening a guarded treasure would reward additional tokens and/or coin. This way, the longer you spend in a dungeon (typically) and the more enemies you slay, the bigger your reward is.

I think you get the idea. The point is to encourage players to actually play the dungeon instead of run past everything! I believe running and stacking, while efficient, are issues with dungeons. The most recently dungeon has various ‘safety measures’ in place so you can’t run the bulk of it. While an improvement, it’s inching towards a dangerous scenario where Anet annoys players with their dungeons trying to make people participate.

tl;dr – Dungeon rewards should be tallied up at the end of the dungeons based on completion and enemies slain because dungeons are being ran, not played.

Thoughts?

You seriously shouldn’t have mentionned stacking.

Have fun clearing all of Arah then… I don’t think there is any amount of reward that would get me to try that.

TKiller.6829:

You seriously shouldn’t have mentionned stacking.

If it’s an issue I should mention it!

viciouspike.8624:

Have fun clearing all of Arah then… I don’t think there is any amount of reward that would get me to try that.

Actual combat is a separate issue, but yeah.

Bad idea, here is why
1- Anet doesn’t play dungeons, that was obvious when they assigned the gold rewards.
2- Skipping is allowed and some situations are actually meant to be skipped (actual dev said that, same context)
3- Some places will be farmed, when they fight to a certain place, get tons of rewards then exit the dungeon and repeat (happened in hunter and crusher in arah p3 and is happening in the 5 champions of SE p1)
4- The rewards will be messed up and will raise more issues than they will solve since as stated in the first reason, Anet doesn’t play dungeons.

Do you mean Anet doesn’t test their dungeons or the dungeons aren’t designed to be played? Either way, this is a plea for the sake of good design!

Threads with with slight variations of this idea are created at moderate frequence.

I don’t really know why am I typing this, but let’s go through some quick points.

• It’s not critical analysis, it’s subjective analysis, let’s not get too deep into this.
• Stacking is a combat technique which makes it irrelevant to rest of your points.
• Whilst it’s true that the reward is the main reason making people rush through the dungeon, the quests themself are quite pinpoint. You’re not going in to hack and slash every living or undead being inside, you’re going in with a specific reason, be it sabotaging something or investigating, which are solved through getting X from Y to Z. You don’t need to kill every single guard to sabotage the whole objective, you go for the leader, deciding to kill the henchmen is your personal choice and is rewarded in form of usual loot.
• Creating additional rewards for clear percentage is moving us further from our (sometimes ironic, yet somewhat actual) motto of “play how you want”. Currently clearing the dungeon fast and narrow or poking your head in every single room rewards you the same, outside of the loot, which full clearing would net more. Your way would hurt people playing dungeons current “special ops” style by getting a lesser reward. Which at best leads to even more group separation due to different levels of clearing accepted.

There are more but I gotta sleep.

SE p2 gives as much gold as cof p1, I doubt any of the anet staff have a dungeon master title.
Also, another point
5- The rewards aren’t going to be worth it, and if they are worth it they’ll probably be farmed like mentioned in reason #3 in which case they’ll be nerfed again.

I don’t think stacking is an issue. Take 5 characters into melee range against a tiny champion and try not to stack on top of each other.

Anyway, what you’re saying is basically what Robert Hrouda was saying: the best way to not skip is to give incentives to not skip. Originally dungeons were like this, except that players decided it was more profitable to keep repeating the first boss over and over again instead of doing the whole dungeon. The response to this is the back-loaded reward system we have now, and the player response to that is to just skip everything.

Anyway, while the idea of tallying up everything at the end of the dungeon is nice, it does bring two big problems with it:

#1: This will punish players who have connection issues. When you make dungeons longer, you increase the likelyhood of someone’s internet keeling over, and this results in a player running 99% of the now longer dungeons, but getting jack squat for it all due to a drunk driver hitting a telephone poll.

#2: It will make it harder to recruit someone to finish the dungeon after someone else leaves. I’ve been in plenty of groups where someone would have to leave or get kicked right before the last boss. By scaling the reward to activity, there’s no incentive for someone to join up a group that is at the last boss, since they’ll get nothing for it.

Regardless of how hard it is to balance gradual rewards through the dungeon with a slight bonus at the end, this is the best solution because it helps everyone. It will result in skippers and clearers getting the same gold per hour as each other, it will not discriminate against the unfortunate with internet connections since they’ll still be rewarded for their play time, and you can still recruit people mid-run for the same reason.

But Anet chose arbitrary gates, so… this discussion might be moot.

TKiller.6829:

• Stacking is a combat technique which makes it irrelevant to rest of your points.
• Whilst it’s true that the reward is the main reason making people rush through the dungeon, the quests themself are quite pinpoint. You’re not going in to hack and slash every living or undead being inside, you’re going in with a specific reason, be it sabotaging something or investigating, which are solved through getting X from Y to Z. You don’t need to kill every single guard to sabotage the whole objective, you go for the leader, deciding to kill the henchmen is your personal choice and is rewarded in form of usual loot.
• Creating additional rewards for clear percentage is moving us further from our (sometimes ironic, yet somewhat actual) motto of “play how you want”. Currently clearing the dungeon fast and narrow or poking your head in every single room rewards you the same, outside of the loot, which full clearing would net more. Your way would hurt people playing dungeons current “special ops” style by getting a lesser reward. Which at best leads to even more group separation due to different levels of clearing accepted.

-Stacking as I have seen it is not a “combat technique”, it’s an exploit. It’s one thing to fight close together, it’s another thing to position yourself where enemies deal 0 damage.

-If a dungeon’s objective was stealth, yes. I could see there being legitimate reasons to run past stuff, but 95% of this game is straight up fighting. Other areas besides a straight line were made to be explored, but their rewards are not proportional to the end reward, where the bulk of the reward is.

Guild Wars 2 does not have “special ops”, it’s simply that people figured out quickly that if you run past everything you collect the reward much faster. That’s no fault of the players, that’s a fault in dungeon design.

You just crossed Rubicon.

Stacking is not Exploiting.
Stacking is Stacking. Nothing more, nothing less.

If there is a way to exploit a boss to do no damage, then call that exploiting the boss. Don’t make the two words into being the same.

/rant over

What do you call it when every player gets on top of one another against the early spider area in the Catacombs? I’ve heard that to be called stacking, in which case, it is definitely an exploit.

Can you explain how that is an exploit?

The spider still slaps you. The point of stacking is so she doesn’t do AOE attacks. Which she only does if you are out of range of her melee attacks. So rather than coordinate to stay super close to her, instead bring her super close to a stack spot.

You know you aren’t invulnerable there right?
You could stack any where as long as she is in melee range. You sound like you are complaining just to complain.

AOE attacks are like 90% of her damage. You seriously consider crunching your entire party in an obscure corner to avoid the majority of the damage from a boss not an exploit?

You can just run up to her to do the same thing, are you aware of this? Its just more difficult to coordinate puggers to do this in the open.

Dungeon rewards:

-more alt friendly token
-more actually balanced gold reward

/done

Cat Has Ducks.1982:

You can just run up to her to do the same thing, are you aware of this? Its just more difficult to coordinate puggers to do this in the open.

Then obviously the enemy is broken, but that’s not the point…

Not really…. Its an enemy that punishes you if you aren’t willing to go toe-to-toe with her. Like that champ graveling right after her. It only burrows if you range it…. Enemies have mechanics, and you just work with them.

If you’d like to continue on your next example I shall help you out again.

posting in STACKING IS EXPLOIT thread

I would have liked to be apart of that design meeting: “Let’s make a spider boss where you have to step on each other in a corner to beat it. Yeah, that’s intuitive.” It’s an exploit, plain and simple. Going toe to toe would be fighting her in the room she spawns in. Not dragging her to a corner where 90% of the damage is lost. You’re not making sense.

if you fight her in the open and melee she still doesn’t do the attack, but it’s easier to accidentally go into range for her aoe (especially with pugs).

Flopjack.5314:

I would have liked to be apart of that design meeting: “Let’s make a spider boss where you have to step on each other in a corner to beat it. Yeah, that’s intuitive.” It’s an exploit, plain and simple. Going toe to toe would be fighting her in the room she spawns in. Not dragging her to a corner where 90% of the damage is lost. You’re not making sense.

You can kite her around the large statue in the middle to the exact same effect. And it’s not 90% of the damage, since the cone spray and regular melee attack will still hurt if you don’t burn her down quickly.

But hey, keep crusading against using your head in dungeons I guess.

It only doesn’t make sense to you Flop…. This mechanic is everywhere in GW2. Certain mobs do certain attacks if you do certain things. Lupi’s Green TerriDome anyone!?

It’s a mechanic…

Alright, forget it.

You dont even have to stack, its just an attack based on range so if everyone runs up to her in her room and stays in melee she doesn’t do it. But stacking makes this 100x easier and thats why people do it.

Oh look it’s this thread again.jpg

Stacking isn’t an exploit. Moving so that dumb AI monsters follow you into a kill zone is not an exploit. Even moving into an area where some monsters reset, letting you kill the rest easily, is not an exploit. Fighting mobs in your chosen position is a basic tactic going back even to text based MMOs, if anyone remembers them.

Monsters and dungeons can however be designed so that players can’t easily abuse stacking, splitting, and skipping. It’s up to the designers to do that.

“Critical Analysis”
Lol.

To me there is only 2 challenge for dungeon.

1 is to complete the dungeon. The 2nd is to do it as fast as possible.

I don’t understand why people can’t do dungeon as fast as possible. That is the only challenge left after you complete it.

IF YOU DONT ALLOW THE BOSS TO HIT YOU WITH ALL ITS ATTACKS YOURE EXPLOITING

99% of lupicus solos to date confirmed for exploits. Obal has the only 100% legit solo with his scepter guardian!

Flopjack.5314:

What do you call it when every player gets on top of one another against the early spider area in the Catacombs? I’ve heard that to be called stacking, in which case, it is definitely an exploit.

ANET designed the game with clipping character models and limited range 5 person limit aoe boons. GW2 is not a static stats game. It’s an active boons game. You might still have to dodge or reflect even if you stack. Some bosses (mossman, captain, diviner) have mechanics that strongly negate crude melee stacking. So it’s really not like “you stack you win bro”.

If someone goes down, they’re right there to resurrect. The fact that stacking is efficient is a function of game design. For stacking to be eliminated, anet would have to change the game design (not gonna happen). Therefore, stacking is not an exploit. It’s simply leveraging game design.

Jumping an invisible wall so you can jump down with descent of madness and kill lupi in 4s without a single attack? That sounds exploity but watching it happen WAS AWESOME.

So really there’s a fine line. Anet will only ban people for duping / counterfeiting goods so I think you’re ok as far as bans go.

What you should do is fight Laurent on TAF and all stack right on him. Do not spread out at all, make sure you’re in a tight ball. Report back how the exploit worked for you.

Exploit – TA Up, behind the tree before the last boss. It causes both enemies to do no attacks, and stand perfectly still.

Not an exploit – AC, stacking for spider, causing her to do her melee moves rather then ranged moves. As Nike pointed out above, some bosses have more punishing melee attacks (the butcher from hotw also comes to mind), some have lethal ranged attacks. Getting a boss to do their most manageable move set is a strategy, not an exploit.

What i see coming is eventually is:

Ascalonian Catacombs: “Fixed a bug that prevented the spider queen from doing her AoE poison if in melee range”

rfdarko.4639:

Exploit – TA Up, behind the tree before the last boss. It causes both enemies to do no attacks, and stand perfectly still.

They do attack. Its just easier to focus them down before the knight decides to do his aoe knockdown because you LoS them straight to you.

spoj.9672:

rfdarko.4639:

Exploit – TA Up, behind the tree before the last boss. It causes both enemies to do no attacks, and stand perfectly still.

They do attack. Its just easier to focus them down before the knight decides to do his aoe knockdown because you LoS them straight to you.

The champion doesn’t attack if los behind the tree.

I swear it does sometimes. :o

How come these threads don’t get deleted when there are a million of them?

Because they aren’t about TAFU.

spoj.9672:

I swear it does sometimes. :o

we did TA today and while the knight didn’t do anything the champion was hitting us for some reason.

Since it’s bug it a little finicky, and you have to make sure everyone is right up against the tree, but pretty consistently (for me at least) the champion won’t attack. The vet usually dies too quick for me to notice what he’s up to.

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

IF YOU DONT ALLOW THE BOSS TO HIT YOU WITH ALL ITS ATTACKS YOURE EXPLOITING

Even if you use your Shift key, it doesn’t change the fact that all the bosses aren’t using all their attacks in every position. A great example for this is Nente from AC Story or Subject Alpha in path 1.

DaKillaOfHell.5907:

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

IF YOU DONT ALLOW THE BOSS TO HIT YOU WITH ALL ITS ATTACKS YOURE EXPLOITING

Even if you use your Shift key, it doesn’t change the fact that all the bosses aren’t using all their attacks in every position. A great example for this is Nente from AC Story or Subject Alpha in path 1.

USING TERRAIN TO YOUR ADVANTAGE IN DYNAMIC COMBAT IS AN EXPLOIT