Guild Wars 2

I’m a huge fan of organized, tough PvE content. I was a “hardcore” raider back in my high school days when * *cough * * there was a popular MMO out there..

It’s not even so much the vertical progression that entertains me or gets me excited, it’s the conquering of challenges with a team, testing out builds, min/maxing, etc..

There’s just nothing in this game when it comes to PvE or group progression. We group up, skip trash pulls, and zerk down bosses. Again, I’m not talking stat/gear progression. I’d be happy just earning new prestigious titles, skins, new visual backpieces. But we’ve been stuck grinding away the same old dungeons. For what? .0001% chance at a precursor?

I just don’t see it happening in GW2. It’s been a year and all we’ve seen is a Tequatl (and rumors about “upcoming” open world boss) improvements. But that’s open-world zerg content, another topic altogether

With the emergence of some new titles (see: Wildstar) and even existing with a similar F2P model (see: Rift) I’m starting to feel drawn away from the bland content we get on the “hardcore PvE” side in GW2.

Er, “hardcore PvE” small scale is Fractals, and maybe Arah/Aetherblade path.

Fractals was updated in December. Tons of people complains about Fractals but I honestly think it’s a challenging aspect of PvE. I’ve seen my share of bad players that’s just inept at the highest fractal levels though I agree that dungeons are mostly an ignored aspect of the game from the devs.

Tachii.3506:

Er, “hardcore PvE” small scale is Fractals, and maybe Arah/Aetherblade path.

Fractals was updated in December. Tons of people complains about Fractals but I honestly think it’s a challenging aspect of PvE. I’ve seen my share of bad players that’s just inept at the highest fractal levels though I agree that dungeons are mostly an ignored aspect of the game from the devs.

Very true, and I was even including FotM when speaking about the lack of challenges. I’m currently at personal level 46, and am guildless – have literally PUG’d all content thus far. Higher level stuff does get a bit more challenging, but for the most part are the same fights with the same strategies. I like this facet of it.. but let’s be honest – the scaling and repetition of FotM is just a very “convenient” way of a developer to add a form of content scale without redesigning or adding – they just slightly tweak some numbers (health/damage) per FotM level and voila, as my peon would say work complete.

George Steel.1804:

I’m a huge fan of organized, tough PvE content. I was a “hardcore” raider back in my high school days when * *cough * * there was a popular MMO out there..

It’s not even so much the vertical progression that entertains me or gets me excited, it’s the conquering of challenges with a team, testing out builds, min/maxing, etc..

There’s just nothing in this game when it comes to PvE or group progression. We group up, skip trash pulls, and zerk down bosses. Again, I’m not talking stat/gear progression. I’d be happy just earning new prestigious titles, skins, new visual backpieces. But we’ve been stuck grinding away the same old dungeons. For what? .0001% chance at a precursor?

I just don’t see it happening in GW2. It’s been a year and all we’ve seen is a Tequatl (and rumors about “upcoming” open world boss) improvements. But that’s open-world zerg content, another topic altogether

With the emergence of some new titles (see: Wildstar) and even existing with a similar F2P model (see: Rift) I’m starting to feel drawn away from the bland content we get on the “hardcore PvE” side in GW2.

I would like to point out that much of your rose colored glasses concerning “challenging” raids in that other game cover up the fact that 97 percent of it was gear checks and the remaining was split between players being able to be herded like cats by the raid leader, their ability to use macros or at least know their rotation, and being smart enough to not stand in the fire.

In that other game sure, there was tons of things to do, but really it was just the same old same old grinding out dungeons/raids hoping for a drop that you can use and hoping somebody else doesn’t “need” the only thing out of the random loot distribution that you actually can use.

Wildstar is made by the same company as gw2, draw your own conclusions. Rifts while fun for a bit, is quickly tiring. IDK if the population has recovered since they changed models, but last I checked it was nearly dead everywhere.

Wildstar and GW have the same publisher NCSoft, not the same developer but yeah I’m gonna pass on Wildstar because it’s published by NCSoft.

MastaNeenja.1537:

Wildstar and GW have the same publisher NCSoft, not the same developer but yeah I’m gonna pass on Wildstar because it’s published by NCSoft.

Good choice.

You could try joining a dungeon guild TC. Sure, we do make our own challenges and that is different from Anet producing challenging content, but I find it quite fun to be honest. I don’t necessarily need a title or official achievement that says I conquered some hard content, although those things would be welcome.

Last night we did a dungeon tour with warriors only, many will say that’s easy, but with no reflects, little condition removal etc, it takes a little different playstyle than we’re used to. The other night we took on lupi and the champion undead risen knight at the same time, and consequently a few elites a couple times…Not to mention solo’s or getting a good team together and trying for record times. Even teaching content to new people can be a challenging yet rewarding occupation. I personally find all these things fun.

This type of play is common in many games, even single player rpg’s. It may not be your cup of tea, but it’s just a thought

on the plus side we are seeing more tweaks in dungeons as of late than we have in quite a few months, so I suspect something’s going on over there. They may have made a new team or just assigned a few tasks as a side project to an existing team. either way it seem that dungeons are being looked at. Cof P1 had a wall added and players are reporting changes to Arah as well that i haven’t had a chance to see them yet.

MastaNeenja.1537:

on the plus side we are seeing more tweaks in dungeons as of late than we have in quite a few months, so I suspect something’s going on over there. They may have made a new team or just assigned a few tasks as a side project to an existing team. either way it seem that dungeons are being looked at. Cof P1 had a wall added and players are reporting changes to Arah as well that i haven’t had a chance to see them yet.

Agreed, the new changes are promising. Sure they missed tons of stuff that probably should have been done first. Arah p2 is in far better shape than it used to be. So at least there is some attention going on. Hopefully this is only the beginning of this trend.

laharl.8435:

MastaNeenja.1537:

on the plus side we are seeing more tweaks in dungeons as of late than we have in quite a few months, so I suspect something’s going on over there. They may have made a new team or just assigned a few tasks as a side project to an existing team. either way it seem that dungeons are being looked at. Cof P1 had a wall added and players are reporting changes to Arah as well that i haven’t had a chance to see them yet.

Agreed, the new changes are promising. Sure they missed tons of stuff that probably should have been done first. Arah p2 is in far better shape than it used to be. So at least there is some attention going on. Hopefully this is only the beginning of this trend.

You guys are so starved for anything positive that you think these are a sign of more dungeon attention. It’s like a starving man having delusions of a massive feast before he drops dead.

Lord Kuru.3685:

laharl.8435:

MastaNeenja.1537:

on the plus side we are seeing more tweaks in dungeons as of late than we have in quite a few months, so I suspect something’s going on over there. They may have made a new team or just assigned a few tasks as a side project to an existing team. either way it seem that dungeons are being looked at. Cof P1 had a wall added and players are reporting changes to Arah as well that i haven’t had a chance to see them yet.

Agreed, the new changes are promising. Sure they missed tons of stuff that probably should have been done first. Arah p2 is in far better shape than it used to be. So at least there is some attention going on. Hopefully this is only the beginning of this trend.

You guys are so starved for anything positive that you think these are a sign of more dungeon attention. It’s like a starving man having delusions of a massive feast before he drops dead.

Starved? No, more like cautious optimism at best. That’s why I said it could just be a side project, no more than a sticky note on some guy’s monitor. “Place wall in COF 1”

MastaNeenja.1537:

Lord Kuru.3685:

laharl.8435:

MastaNeenja.1537:

on the plus side we are seeing more tweaks in dungeons as of late than we have in quite a few months, so I suspect something’s going on over there. They may have made a new team or just assigned a few tasks as a side project to an existing team. either way it seem that dungeons are being looked at. Cof P1 had a wall added and players are reporting changes to Arah as well that i haven’t had a chance to see them yet.

Agreed, the new changes are promising. Sure they missed tons of stuff that probably should have been done first. Arah p2 is in far better shape than it used to be. So at least there is some attention going on. Hopefully this is only the beginning of this trend.

You guys are so starved for anything positive that you think these are a sign of more dungeon attention. It’s like a starving man having delusions of a massive feast before he drops dead.

Starved? No, more like cautious optimism at best. That’s why I said it could just be a side project, no more than a sticky note on some guy’s monitor. “Place wall in COF 1”

Still not sure why the optimism. We’ve had stealth dungeon changes in pretty much every patch (mostly invisible wall and JP “fixes”). I don’t really see anything out of the ordinary for this patch — just the usual two-minute bandaid fixes.

They fixed Belka, Abomination and Alphard exploits last time, while also making Alphard a more challenging fight. This time they (haphazardly) fixed a cof exploit?, an Arah jp exploit and improved Brie. Sure, I’m disappointed they didn’t go further or choose different things to fix, but this is more attention than dungeons have received for some time. We’re just saying its a step in the right direction, yet leaps still need to be made. Nothing wrong with a little optimism.

I don’t know. I just didn’t know that the cof room was an exploit. It makes me fearful of what else they might consider an exploit, because I really don’t wanna get hurt if they decide next time to swing the ban hammer or something at people for unknowingly exploiting.

Like there’s, I think, a very clear difference between going into a room that is textured and decorated and swimming beneath a map to skip bosses. I thought there was a line, but now I’m not so sure where it’s drawn.

Lilith Ajit.6173:

I don’t know. I just didn’t know that the cof room was an exploit. It makes me fearful of what else they might consider an exploit, because I really don’t wanna get hurt if they decide next time to swing the ban hammer or something at people for unknowingly exploiting.

Like there’s, I think, a very clear difference between going into a room that is textured and decorated and swimming beneath a map to skip bosses. I thought there was a line, but now I’m not so sure where it’s drawn.

They’re not going to ban every person which stepped into CoF. They might decide to change how we run dungeons (which might slow us down a bit in a few places), but hell, they don’t even ban Arah swimmers. I’ll start worrying once we see any evidence of a ban related to dungeon running.

maxinion.8396:

Lilith Ajit.6173:

I don’t know. I just didn’t know that the cof room was an exploit. It makes me fearful of what else they might consider an exploit, because I really don’t wanna get hurt if they decide next time to swing the ban hammer or something at people for unknowingly exploiting.

Like there’s, I think, a very clear difference between going into a room that is textured and decorated and swimming beneath a map to skip bosses. I thought there was a line, but now I’m not so sure where it’s drawn.

They’re not going to ban every person which stepped into CoF. They might decide to change how we run dungeons (which might slow us down a bit in a few places), but hell, they don’t even ban Arah swimmers. I’ll start worrying once we see any evidence of a ban related to dungeon running.

I know they aren’t. But let’s just say they start punishing things that they say are exploiting that aren’t all that clear (like I don’t think that room was clearly an exploit). I just don’t like not understanding what they consider an exploit and what’s not…. I guess that’s my concern.

I could be wrong but in my also cautious optimism. I am not looking at the CoF wall as an “exploit” fix. I would like to think that they put it there to make it “more challenging”

I could be wrong though.

I wonder if they will fix the broken rail in CM and take away our LoS safe box. That and frost’s rock and the gear in SEp3.

I think this has alot to do with the business model they have chosen.

1. If you make stuff hard, less people will be capable/interested/willing to do it.
2. If you make stuff easy, not only do you get more people doing the content, you get more people willing to repeat the content to chase a carrot than would be repeatedly attempting and sometime failing to do hard stuff.
3. The more people you have in a game, the more people there is to ‘do stuff with’ over all time zones, adding to your chance to do easy content and get carrots faster.
4. The more kinds of flavours of carrots you add, the more appealing doing repeated content successfully whenever you want becomes.

All this leads to a F2P with cashstop model that gives the ROI they want because the formula for people spending money in the cashstop isn’t if you’re hardcore/casual or pro/noob, it’s how much the game appeals to you and how long you figure you’re going to play it to get value from whatever you buy in the shop.

If they were to introduce ‘hard’ content, I would really question Anet’s confidence in the viability of the game, because from a business case, that seems like too much work for too little gain. It doesn’t fit their model.

I personally dont see a point in fixing (if you can call some of them that) dungeons when the lfg merge bug is still in effect. You can go and do a whole dungeon and when someone leaves to do something anyone can join your party and click merge, BAM everything is gone. Doesn’t matter how many fixes if the dungeon can still be ruined by a click of a button.