Guild Wars 2

Several of the game’s dungeons are absolutely horrible and desperately need improvement. Some are so incomplete that they belong in alpha-testing.

The primary issue with explorable dungeons is that, for some reason, players are allowed to run back to a boss encounter after being defeated. This means that it is almost impossible to lose to any boss in the game. For example, while Lieutenant Kholer in the Ascalonian Catacombs is challenging, the bottom line is that a group will never lose if they simply play defensively while their allies are running back. Such game design may make sense in story mode, but in explorable where content is supposed to be challenging, absolutely not.

The second issue with several (not all) of the dungeons is that they are, simply put, incomplete and therefore boring. For example, going through the Zealot path in Honor of the Waves was honestly the worst dungeon crawling experience I have ever had in a video game since Occulus in World of Warcraft.

For those who have not done that path: every single boss is laughably easy (which should not be the case in explorable), either because of their simplistic mechanics or because players can run back after being defeated. The worst part is the final underwater boss: his mechanics are so simple that a group can literally stand in one spot and press one button over and over again to be victorious (just like Zhaitan in Arah story mode).

Repeat: the final boss in an explorable mode dungeon can be defeated through mindless repetition. Oh, and just for fun, it takes over 30 minutes. How is that challenging? How is that not horrible game design?

The dungeons in Guild Wars 2 are an utter shame because otherwise I believe that it is one of the best games ever made. I really hope that ArenaNet can improve the dungeons – they obviously have plenty of potential.

It’s the saddening truth. One of the things i love the most on MMOs are the dungeons/raids. A controlled environment where a group of people (even if a PUG) will be put together to a challenging content. Problem is, none of the dungeons are challenging on the right way.

How they are challenging: large numbers, the boss hits you for half your life. That’s the very same difficulty of D3, large numbers are NOT FUN, not mention the boss life….

How they should challenge you: Mechanics, things that does not happens anywhere else in the game and are unique to that boss (especially fun if there is more than one way to overcome this). Let me give a example:

Boss X at a certain trigger (either lost x% health or y time has passed) will mark two players.
Marked players after z seconds will shot a beam at each other that will mostly instant kill anything(even enemies, except the boss) in it’s path (they will damage each other if they are too close).
There are some pillars on the room that block the beam, creating safe spots for the other 3 players.
During this phase the boss will stop attacking and start summoning suicidal adds that move slowly and have more life than the boss, those never follow the players that are marked, can be further slowed, knocked back and whatnot and they spawn from both sides (flanking the 3 players that are not marked). They suicide when the phase ends regardless where they are
That leaves 3 ways to deal with this encounter.

First: Someone that have a high mobility/invulnerability will pop(they are suicidal enemies, like some risen) the enemies without getting killed while the two marked players stay still with the beam being blocked by the boss.

Second: Use the beam to kill the suicidal enemies, having the other 3 players standing on the safe spot created by the pillars.

Third: Someone will kite all the suicidal enemies until the phase end and they suicide on the spot they are

THIS would be fun, well, at the least different, and therefore the fights don’t need to take 30 minutes to end. It would also remove the zerg from the fight. This is just something i came up with on the fly, took me longer to type in the idea than to think

I agree

Gudz.6809:

Text

/clap

The biggest design problem is that trash mobs have a stupid amount of health. Should we really be spending an extended period of time killing trash which eventually results hours upon hours of time spent running the dungeon? It just starts to feel like a drag after a white

Gudz.6809:

It’s the saddening truth. One of the things i love the most on MMOs are the dungeons/raids. A controlled environment where a group of people (even if a PUG) will be put together to a challenging content. Problem is, none of the dungeons are challenging on the right way.

How they are challenging: large numbers, the boss hits you for half your life. That’s the very same difficulty of D3, large numbers are NOT FUN, not mention the boss life….

How they should challenge you: Mechanics, things that does not happens anywhere else in the game and are unique to that boss (especially fun if there is more than one way to overcome this). Let me give a example:

This is exactly how I feel, I immediately thought of D3 when “challenging” was proposed. Since when did getting 1-2 shotted become challenging? That’s ridiculous. There’s nothing to improve upon, there’s no flaw in your decision making because if you want to participate you’re going to get hit. Only way to avoid it would be to not melee.

Gudz.6809:

It’s the saddening truth. One of the things i love the most on MMOs are the dungeons/raids. A controlled environment where a group of people (even if a PUG) will be put together to a challenging content. Problem is, none of the dungeons are challenging on the right way.

How they are challenging: large numbers, the boss hits you for half your life. That’s the very same difficulty of D3, large numbers are NOT FUN, not mention the boss life….

How they should challenge you: Mechanics, things that does not happens anywhere else in the game and are unique to that boss (especially fun if there is more than one way to overcome this). Let me give a example:

Boss X at a certain trigger (either lost x% health or y time has passed) will mark two players.
Marked players after z seconds will shot a beam at each other that will mostly instant kill anything(even enemies, except the boss) in it’s path (they will damage each other if they are too close).
There are some pillars on the room that block the beam, creating safe spots for the other 3 players.
During this phase the boss will stop attacking and start summoning suicidal adds that move slowly and have more life than the boss, those never follow the players that are marked, can be further slowed, knocked back and whatnot and they spawn from both sides (flanking the 3 players that are not marked). They suicide when the phase ends regardless where they are
That leaves 3 ways to deal with this encounter.

First: Someone that have a high mobility/invulnerability will pop(they are suicidal enemies, like some risen) the enemies without getting killed while the two marked players stay still with the beam being blocked by the boss.

Second: Use the beam to kill the suicidal enemies, having the other 3 players standing on the safe spot created by the pillars.

Third: Someone will kite all the suicidal enemies until the phase end and they suicide on the spot they are

THIS would be fun, well, at the least different, and therefore the fights don’t need to take 30 minutes to end. It would also remove the zerg from the fight. This is just something i came up with on the fly, took me longer to type in the idea than to think

BIG TIME AGREE, I hope Anet see these complaints and improve it, I know ANet can do better than this.

another issue for me is too much waypoints in the dungeon that make the fighting with the boss can defeat through mindless repetition, there is no challenge there when you know if you die you just back to nearest waypoint and march up to zerg the boss again, also making resurrection downed players become pointless.

Even though I find dungeons as they already are fun, I have to agree that it doesn’t take very much skill, even in explorable mode, to complete. Strategizing simply doesn’t have as large a role I was hoping it would. I was doing Caudecus’s Manor in explorable mode the other day with a PUG. We kept dying at certain parts, so I told my teammates, “guys, we keep wiping, can we come up with a strategy?” Do you think that happened? Nope. They just continued to zerg until we defeated the enemies that were giving us trouble, very little skill was needed other than using repairs and waypoints. The same thing happened when I tried Twilight Arbor story mode. Nobody wanted help come up with a strategy when I asked, they just kept zerging the one boss we had trouble with (the one that summons nightmare spiders). I would like something to be done about the zerging so players are actually forced to play skillfully and strategically.

Of course, if this were to happen, then I would also expect Anet to tweak the dungeon difficulty accordingly so as to keep it challenging, but not frustrating. An example of this would be the Caudecus’s Manor explorable mode, finding the butler path. There’s a part where players have to cross a corridor filled with traps to reach a mob of three bandits with very little room to fight due to another mob of around five being in close proximity. Maybe I’m missing something here, but I don’t know how you’re supposed to get through the traps safely and kill the mobs without dying.

Edit: An example of forcing proper skill and strategy would be Sure-shot Seamus in the Caudecus’s Manor explorable mode dungeon (the path with the asura, I think). This was the only time that my teammates listened to me and actually used tactics to win because zerging was of no use, and here’s why. You encounter Sure-shot Seamus in a room with very little space to maneuver around. Seamus is a ranged boss with a shotgun attack that knocks a player down for a few seconds. Because you have very little room to consistently dodge this attack (you can’t kite him because the room is too small), you will always be defeated if you mindlessly rush him down, no matter how many times you try. In order to beat him (maybe not the only way), you must lure him outside to the open, where it becomes much easier to kite him, thus allowing you and your team to dodge his attacks and eventually defeat him. THIS is the sort of boss encounter design that I would love to see.

Amadeuz.4617:

another issue for me is too much waypoints in the dungeon that make the fighting with the boss can defeat through mindless repetition, there is no challenge there when you know if you die you just back to nearest waypoint and march up to zerg the boss again, also making resurrection downed players become pointless.

You are not beating the dungeons correctly if you are respawn-zerging and losing money. You can’t say a dungeon “is easy” if it took you 5 times longer than it should and a lot of gold.

Also some dungeon have far waypoints.