Guild Wars 2

Simply put, mobs take too long to die. A single mob should not take five players beating on it for a full minute to bring it down. You wonder why people run past mobs when they could just fight? It’s because the vast majority of enemies offer no challenge but it still takes five minutes to take down a group of enemies if your team isn’t specced for massive DPS. Why waste that time when you know you’re going to win anyway? Just run past. The end result is the same anyway.

To be honest, I don’t see the virtue in having mobs have so much health, except that it makes the possibility of losing by attrition higher as mobs begin to deplete defensive/heal options and drop players. That said, I’m not sure why enemy groups couldn’t have less health but come in larger numbers or deal more damage. I would gladly fight twice the gravelings at once if they all had a quarter of their normal health. It would simultaneously make dungeons less tedious and also more challenging.

If we compare this to GW1, I don’t remember the instances being populated by healthsink mobs that posed no threat. Either you could handle a group or you couldn’t. If you couldn’t handle the mob, it wiped you immediately. If you were good enough, you cleared it quickly and moved on. That’s ideally how dungeons should go.

I agree. There aren’t enough true zerg rushes. Basically every fight is made up of about 3 guys that take a massive beating before going down. The gravelings come close, but ANet gave a lot of them too much health

i kind of agree, but nowadays my average dungeon group steamrolls those guys, and none of us is particularly specced for dps. in fact, i just finished a dungeon, and we could wipe groups without even getting downed in 2-3 minutes.

i’d rather the challenge of dungeons be on tricky puzzles and traps, bosses with interesting mechanics (like that ghost with the instadown attack from AC explorable and the giant from CoE story, or even better, the final bosses from SE and CoF story) and clever combat situations than just “this enemy is really strong”.

In my experience, very few (non-boss/miniboss) encounters in dungeons have enemies with particularly unreasonable health pools. In groups that I’ve been a part of (PuGs, typically with at least 2 or 3 players specced for defense and intra-team support rather than huge damage), encounters against ‘silver’ enemies typically take an average of about 20 seconds per enemy to complete, assuming that the encounter is properly handled and we aren’t on the backfoot (kiting, multiple downs/revives, etc) for most of the fight.

If dungeon enemies had an across-the-board reduction in health, most/all of these encounters would be over long before the enemies actually had a chance to present a real threat. I’ve asked it a few times, but nobody’s really answered me: If 20 seconds per enemy is an unreasonable amount of time required to complete an encounter, how long should it take to kill them? In my opinion, the balance of health/damage per enemy in dungeons is about right.

There are individual enemies (mainly bosses and minibosses) that I feel have too much HP, though. The Cave Troll in AC comes to mind, as does the Hunting Hound encounter in CM. Neither of these enemies can really do anything to kill a party that isn’t absolutely awful, and yet they both take longer to kill than any of the legitimately dangerous bosses present in either dungeon.