Guild Wars 2

The first time I did Ascalon Catacombs, it was with friends and we were level 30-40 group. We had skype up for communication. We wiped multiple times against each mob and died numerous times on various traps in story mode. We tried and failed explorable areas a couple times. None of us were really deterred as this is the general pattern for trial and error games (and playing Dark Souls and Ys the week before). Queue a month later, we have our characters at level 80, much more optimized and organized, and have a route for the dungeon. Now killing enemies is trivial, we don’t have to worry about getting autoattacked to death, there are few deaths, the lovers are easy to tackle, and adelbern no longer one-shots my ele.

And I enjoy it. Of course, we dislike the massive amounts of hp, the cheap downs, and things going wrong, but it’s fun working as a team. Nothing is better than a seemingly impossible task becoming trivial.

Unfortunately, I finally got around to doing Arah story mode with a pug after getting 100% world completion. It was the worst experience I had so far in the game. It was a similar feel to playing WvW by yourself. The team mates were mute for most of the dungeon, they didn’t attack enemies, they were either dead or nowhere near enemies we needed to kill. It’s a wonder that players that had probably explored most of the map and worked through their story line still played the same as they did at level 30. Up to that point, they weren’t forced to do dungeons to progress, so the final quest turns into the standard body count drawn out to 3 hours.

Personally, I love that dungeons require skill to play through the content, too often there is an “Easy” difficulty for people who simply want to experience the story without doing the work. Roleplaying can be as much synonymous to your skills translating to your player as much as the story your character is involved in; it’s one of gw2’s strengths. I had more than my fill of joining inept pugs in gw1, the dungeons were my breath of fresh air.

So which players are enjoying this change of pace from usual content they see in MMOs or games in general? Are dungeons in gw2 a breath of fresh air for you? Do dungeons only cater to that certain group of people that want to tackle a challenge in a group or do they have enough appeal for pug groups to eventually be able to enjoy them without complaining about difficulty or lack of skill?

Dungeons remind me a lot of Ninja Gaiden; the game is easy when you know where to jump and when. It is easy when you know what is going to leap from the edge of the screen. It is easy when you know the boss patterns and safe spots. It is close to impossible until you do.

I still love that game, even… wow, its already 23 years old.

In some ways, the gw2 dungeons are a breath of fresh air:
-5 person limit; quick grouping with friends/guildies
-does not take 1 hour or more once you learn the dungeon; I can do multiple runs a night and feel accomplished
-does not require a specific profession; freedom to play our favorite profession(s)
-decent completion rewards; will likely improve over time since it has dev attention

When it comes to grouping with my friends/guildies on our nightly runs, I love observing how we improve our dungeon clearing skills over time. Sometimes we learn new strategies, sometimes we pick up a new profession to get a new perspective, and sometimes we switch our group composition.

However, when it comes to PuGs, I feel it is really hard to play dungeons sometimes. I’ve had some successful PuG runs during the beta, but I chose not to PuG after launch because sitting around for hours spamming LFG is not fun and very time consuming when I could just whisper some guildies/friends and we would have a full team in seconds. When you pick up a PuG group where everyone is dedicated and willing to learn from mistakes and help each other out, I’m sure the run will go well. However, when you get those people that don’t cooperate, leave your party in frustration, or don’t even bother to communicate, it’s a hassle and you’ve wasted a lot of your time making the group and attempting the dungeon. Sometimes, you get the occasional condescension when things go wrong and it causes a lot of drama. After a bit of experience in online gaming, I’ve just accepted scenarios like this with pessimism. It’s the internet… you can’t expect much.

The dungeons in GW2 are not a breath of fresh air for me, nor for a single guildmate in my small (20-ish people) guild. All of whom enjoy good dungeon crawls together. For example, we all enjoyed the well-designed challenge and progression of dungeons in The Secret World.

To all of us, the dungeons here are a cloying reek of stale tobacco, body odor, and garlic from a recently eaten shwarma wrap in the back of a New York taxi on a bitterly cold winter night.

Seriously. We tried a few different runs together and threw in the towel. None of us want to try again unless/until we hear they’ve been significantly changed.

Again, these are people who ground out full sets of elite gear in TSW dungeons, which are seriously hard to learn. It’s not like this group of people are unable to L2P. Nightmare mode in TSW dungeons are a hell of twitch requirements, precise movement, and serious communication/coordination. The Elite tier there is incredibly hard too.

The dungeons here are just chaotic nonsensical mush with cheap one shots and no telegraphing or time to respond to a red circle under your feet, and chain-stunning trash mobs who are practically minibosses in themselves. Playing ping-pong aggro kiting and reviving players downed by unavoidable cheap shots is NOT challenging, nor fun. It’s just tedious, frustrating, and boring.

Evidently not, because the mechanics are sound and you’re unwilling to adapt. They’re not something you pick up in ‘a few different runs’.

The communication in the game is a problem.
It is not right to have a multiplayer game where the characters cannot communicate and play the game at the same time. It literally cannot be played while typing in chat. chat sucks up the keyboard focus.

some games make it so that only alpha numeric keys got to chat which is a step in the right direction. but here even function keys which have no output in chat get sucked into chat.

Its a big problem that games just dont seem to get right.
how much more deep would this game be if meaningful quick in character communication could take place. at the very least pugs would get to a much more equal footing.