Guild Wars 2

As most of you know, due to the insane state of dungeons right now, it is impossible for all players to complete a dungeon without dying at least a tonelade of times.

I find myself fighting these gangs that simply steam roll you. You can’t fight them one at a time. You can’t defeat them all at the time. The only strategy is to do some damage, die, and rush back. Do this n times and they will eventually die. That is very dissapointing and frustrating in my opinion. Death should not be a requisit for a dungeon.

And for worse, that is the advance strategy. If by any chance you go in with a random group you will end up not finishing it because everybody quits and with 20 coins less in repairs. No one wants to go in with strangers and is killing the dungeons.

Places like Caudecus mansion are just ridiculous, with 25 monsters gang in one place, packed with 200k hp and enough power to kill a toughness build in 4 hits.

I think the best way to fix this is to add Easy, Normal and OMGwhatisthis (current state) modes. If you guys have a team for doing this, I encourage you to play a couple hours of Dungeons and Dragons Online. Because they got the dungeons just about right.

I’ve played almost all dungeons now and…to be honest…its been a pain…and thats terrible since dungeons are so fresh and well done. Let us enjoy them.

There’s almost always tricks to these. We farm CM day in day out and its really rare to see a death, aside maybe in the seraph path, and even that one isn’t too hard. Those huge groups of enemies can either be totally avoided if you’re sneaky, or you can pull them and spam blind/knockdown/etc, or in one instance, you pull and kill them faster than they reach you by stacking up.

Btw, I’ve played DDO. A lot. And while this game doesn’t have the difficulty setting, the different paths are different in difficulty, so it evens out somewhat. Almost all dungeons have an easy path, an average path, and a hard path…and the hard paths are almost always easier than the harder mode in DDO (even if you include epic). The difference is that in DDO, people figure out all the tricks long ago

AOE Blind and projectile reflect are the best ways to blow through CM. We just did it last night with Ele/Guard/War/Necro/Necro.

It’s been said before, but these dungeons are not ment to be pugged by 5 randoms with no tactics. There are plenty of games with faceroll zerg dungeons. This isn’t one of them.

Get to know what combo fields, boons and conditions can do to enemies; then use them as much as possible. It’s really as simple as that.

Are you saying you go through CM without dying? haha, film it. Then I’ll believe.
You can’t lure them, you pull one, even with scorpion wire and they all jump into you. You can’t run away, they will just turn back and reunite again.

If there’s a video of an organized group making these impossible run look possible, then I’ll delete this thread. But I doubt I’m that bad at this game.

It’s not a matter of you being bad, it’s a matter of your group not working well together. Dungeons are much different than general leveling PVE. You can’t approach them the same way.

Our Rogue actually has a livestream and we ran CM path 3 (Butler) tonight. I think the only time anyone died was to the Rocket hallway, which our Mesmer and Rogue had never done before. I’ll post a link to the specific video when he’s done streaming but in the meantime, here’s his channel if you want to check out some of our dungeon runs and how we approach fights. I’m the sexy Warrior that yells all the time.

twitch.com/Max_Mcgee

EDIT:

Here it is, CM Path 3 starts at 2:21:00. http://www.twitch.tv/max_mcgee/b/336444849

I understand your feelings op. it is how I felt and everyone else. But all at once the mechanics click and your having a good time. Been running dungeons a whole lot now and haven’t wiped in I don’t know when. I promise it gets easier. It’s all a matter of everyone understanding their class and having learned to work the utility abilities.

@ Makube

SM or EM? Which pack and which path? There is quite a bit of differences.

I do agree though. I played DDO up till about 12 or 14 as a Cleric healer. I loved the difficulty settings and though Story Mode was the same idea (SM = something similar to Easy/casual in DDO) while EM would be something like Elite mode in DDO (Which is btw harder than most dungeons in any game I have played due to Mana System).

My first AC ran back at lvl 30 was a dying fest.

Till I learned how to play No offense, but there is no room for glass cannons in dungeons.

The very SECOND you figure out that downed state does not = dead is the second this game will click for you. You must work together as a group. You must bring survivability utilities and utilities to help get other people back up. The reason pugs have a hard time is because pugs are notorious for no communication and thats what these dungeons take.

What you call insane, Ive been clearing since the second week of release with enough tokens to kit 4 alts out with now. It isnt the game. Its you.

Dungeons involve a lot of death when you’re first learning. That’s how it should be.

However if you’ve been running dungeons for a while and you’re STILL dying over and over then there’s a problem with something you’re doing…

Team-content. If people are not pulling their weight you will have a hard time.

Tweek.3190:

If that is how you feel about the current explorable dungeons then you should either:
A) Get a better group with players who know their profession and can play in a team.

This, a thousand times this. Dungeons are a group effort. They require some basic coordination and communication. They are also much easier if the group not only coordinates what they do but also the composition of the group.

Tweek.3190:

B) Go learn your profession and learn team play yourself.

If every group you’re in fails, maybe it’s not every group that’s responsible for the failure.

Tweek.3190:

C) Go play WoW.

That’s uncalled for.

The last game I played there were up to 3 levels of difficulty which worked well. I would say what we have now is all 3 levels squeezed into one dungeon.

Good idea allowing people to choose their level of difficulty.

MakubeC.3026 Here you have: http://www.livestream.com/norax/folder?dirId=8601b0b8-592d-46ca-a585-416085ed4fde

phooka.4295 if with every group you fail, maybe its not the dungeon, its you. Just saying, no offence.

Thord.2017:

The last game I played there were up to 3 levels of difficulty which worked well. I would say what we have now is all 3 levels squeezed into one dungeon.

Good idea allowing people to choose their level of difficulty.

You can choose your difficulty:
Easy: random veterans on world maps and world events.
Medium: Story dungeons.
Hard: Group events on world map, explorable dungeons.

Having everything in the dungeons hit for massive amounts of damage, even on non-telegraphed attacks, is a laughable design. It seems that is all ANet is capable of though, using jacked up damage and spammed 1 shot attacks in place of more interesting mechanics.

Norax.2405:

MakubeC.3026 Here you have: http://www.livestream.com/norax/folder?dirId=8601b0b8-592d-46ca-a585-416085ed4fde

phooka.4295 if with every group you fail, maybe its not the dungeon, its you. Just saying, no offence.

No offense taken. Read my post again.

If you are dying you are doing something wrong.
1. Have bad gear.
2. Stand in red circles on the ground.
3. Are in a group with players in bad gear who like to stand in red circles on the ground.
4. Aren’t trying to learn the dungeon.

Yes there are a few ridiculous bosses but 99% of the qq’ing in this game is caused by bad players playing badly that want the content difficulty lowered because they are bad.

Not trying to be mean but it’s the truth.

Tweek.3190:

If that is how you feel about the current explorable dungeons then you should either:
A) Get a better group with players who know their profession and can play in a team.
B) Go learn your profession and learn team play yourself.
C) Go play WoW.

A) Knowing your profession isn’t the answer. In my opinion learning the encounter’s mechanics is as, if not more, important.
B) See A.
C) This is a silly comment.

I’ve now made a tanky guardian and can take a hit or two from all the bosses I’ve encountered so far, but literally only one or two hits. It seems rather harsh. Were more encounters based on comprehensible mechanics such as Gaheron or Kohler, then I would be happy, but it seems that many are simply based on the concept of kite-until-you-die-and-run-back-before-it-resets.

We know that Arenanet know (a known known, for all you Rumsfeld fans) there are problems, and can now only pray.

TL;DR: Some encounters are done right, but too many are one-shotting players.

Kierlak.5209:

Having everything in the dungeons hit for massive amounts of damage, even on non-telegraphed attacks, is a laughable design. It seems that is all ANet is capable of though, using jacked up damage and spammed 1 shot attacks in place of more interesting mechanics.

You didn’t read any of this thread did you?

There are multiple posts here telling you how to clear these dungeons, without getting 1 shot by working with your group. There are very few mechanics that suddenly one shot you with no warning (none that I can think of offhand other than obvious bugs).

As someone said earlier, there’s no place for selfish specs or glass cannons in PUGs. You can do it if your group is well organized, or if you’re very experienced, but it’s still largely not worth it. Every time you die, you not only lose your DPS, but the DPS of every team member that has to stop to revive you. Take survivability talents/gear and the overall group damage will go up.

Was that nicer, since my last post was infracted and deleted? Sorry but people need to be told when they’re frankly either bad, or not looking at the mechanics well enough, otherwise they’ll never get better. Hand waving and claiming that dungeons are too hard when the majority of people in this thread are not having issues, and even offering advice on how to improve is ridiculous.

Go ahead and infract me again, it’ll save me from having to read all these posts by people who haven’t bothered to learn how the game works, and call for nerfs instead of asking for tips to improve, or worse yet ignore tips that are offered up. These forums are filled with self entitled players looking for boring easymode gear farms. There are plenty of MMOs which offer that type of gameplay, this is not one of them, and I’d rather it not become one because of pointless whining with no effort put in to understand the game as it is.

In fact, why is this thread even up? The OP said he’d delete it if he saw a video of a group doing the “impossible” CM (one of the easier Explorable Modes by the way). There are two videos in this thread showing it done, one of which I provided with feedback and tips on how to function in dungeons, with another stickied at the top of the forums.

In before I get infracted again for telling the truth.

Darsha.9780:

Kierlak.5209:

Having everything in the dungeons hit for massive amounts of damage, even on non-telegraphed attacks, is a laughable design. It seems that is all ANet is capable of though, using jacked up damage and spammed 1 shot attacks in place of more interesting mechanics.

You didn’t read any of this thread did you?

There are multiple posts here telling you how to clear these dungeons, without getting 1 shot by working with your group. There are very few mechanics that suddenly one shot you with no warning (none that I can think of offhand other than obvious bugs).

As someone said earlier, there’s no place for selfish specs or glass cannons in PUGs. You can do it if your group is well organized, or if you’re very experienced, but it’s still largely not worth it. Every time you die, you not only lose your DPS, but the DPS of every team member that has to stop to revive you. Take survivability talents/gear and the overall group damage will go up.

Was that nicer, since my last post was infracted and deleted? Sorry but people need to be told when they’re frankly either bad, or not looking at the mechanics well enough, otherwise they’ll never get better. Hand waving and claiming that dungeons are too hard when the majority of people in this thread are not having issues, and even offering advice on how to improve is ridiculous.

Go ahead and infract me again, it’ll save me from having to read all these posts by people who haven’t bothered to learn how the game works, and call for nerfs instead of asking for tips to improve, or worse yet ignore tips that are offered up. These forums are filled with self entitled players looking for boring easymode gear farms. There are plenty of MMOs which offer that type of gameplay, this is not one of them, and I’d rather it not become one because of pointless whining with no effort put in to understand the game as it is.

In fact, why is this thread even up? The OP said he’d delete it if he saw a video of a group doing the “impossible” CM (one of the easier Explorable Modes by the way). There are two videos in this thread showing it done, one of which I provided with feedback and tips on how to function in dungeons, with another stickied at the top of the forums.

In before I get infracted again for telling the truth.

Off the top of my head, the fire elemental in Metrica Province (technically the embers), and the Krait Witch in Caledon both have zero warning instagibs, whether by bugs or not, I don’t know. The embers routinely display no warning circle for their firebomb, and the Krait Witch has no visible wind up for her pull mass damage ability. No, neither are in a dungeon, but it does show that there are nonsense abilities like that present in this game.

I have stayed away from the dungeons in this game due to reading about how bad they were, but last night I decided to do one, as someone in the guild was needing one more person, and maybe, just maybe, what I had read wasn’t true. But it was all very true. Now, keep in mind that I am saying this not because I died over and over, because I did not. I died twice the whole run. I am saying this because there was no mechanic of any note other than massive, unrelenting damage, and abilities with no telegraphing doing more massive unrelenting damage. The one part where an actual mechanic should have been in play, the lovers (it was AC story mode), the mechanic was simply ignored, and they stood in the center of the room together as if locked in some sort of perverse ghostly face sucking while the group rained fire and destruction on them until they died.

Can these dungeons be run as they are? Yeah, people run them everyday it seems. Are these dungeons well designed and interesting, or fun? No, under no circumstances are these dungeons well designed or fun, if AC story is even a hint of an indicator of what the rest of them are like.

My two cents. I am an older guy and sadly I lost some of my reflexes down the age road. I have been playing most of AAA MMO releases starting with SWG, later on EQ2, surely WoW etc. I am a PvE player, with occational venture into PvP. I have never had such an enjoyment before as I had in GW2 while levelling two of my toons due to its exceptional event based system and wonderfull world design. Never. It was a gulp of fresh air, and it was so addictive and fun.

I ended up with with the gear I wanted and the looks I wanted via karma and gold (last gear piece I had to get doing some HotW runs since it was too expensive on the broker). Since then I tried to like dungeons and I just cannot. Lots of reasons, most of the covered by the OP or elsewhere in this forum section. It’s not fun for me and I don’t even get anything valuable to me by doing them.

As I said I don’t have the reflexes of the young and it appears to be a huge factor in GW2, I even ended up buying Logitech G600 MMO mouse just for GW2 to stay level with all this dodging/strafing while doing abilities – and still no fun. I approach a dungeon run like a soldier in WW1 anticipating some chemical/shelling warfare battle.

At the same time I can sucessfully multibox heroics in WoW (which I am back to doing now) – and that requires quite a lot of tactics – and I have lots of fun doing that. Needless to say that to be able to 5-box WoW I pay more per month than just buying GW2 game. I am not a solo player, and the boxing is just given as an example of how I am willing to support the developers if I like the gameplay (and multi-boxing in GW2 is not even possible).

So, bottomline – great multi-coop RPG game, sadly no endgame; and weird dungeons. I guess I am going to draw some unfriendly fire in this forum, but I felt I needed to say it, and I sure want to return to this game down the road, thus the post.

Again, downed is not dead. if your team mates do not have utilities to help get you up then its thier fault. Not GW2’s. Theres a reason all of those revive options are in the game.

Biggest problem in this game is everyone building a character just for themselves just like they would do in other games. Thing is tho, if you do this you will fail at this game. Build your character around your team and this game becomes flat out easy mode. I havent died in a dungeon in weeks. i have been downed multiple times but my team mates who built around the team have abilities that will get me back up in seconds.

Its gotten to the point where now on my dual axe warrior, if my health is low and my heal is down, I will TRY to die because 2 seconds later Ill be back up with more hp than i had before I died and little loss of dps compared to having to back away and wait on my heal.

This game is exceedingly easy once you figure out its a team based game and not all about you.

First time i went in a dungeon was like OP. I went in my “simil-berserker” greens, all pumped up because i “cut mobs in the open like a knife in the butter”.

Enter Ascalonian Dungeon, Story Mode.

I died so many times, i thought dungeons were something to do only at lvl 80, if at all. We zerged and zerged till we finish that terrible adventure in ONLY 2 hours and a half.

I wondered if it was the game or rather it was me at a fault.
This is the step nobody of the forum trolls and whiners seem to do. Wondering if you’re playing the game right, instead of immediately jump to the conclusion that “the dev messed up”.

I went into research, and i spent 15 silver (i was 45 at the time and didn’t have much money) in buying some decent greens with toughness. I even went to the Karma vendors to spent my ill-earned karma in jewels that had a bit of toughness or vitality to help me.

Being leader of a casual guild in which i was the only one who went into dungeons at the time, i brought several groups in AC story. Surprise, i was not dying so much, while my buddies dropped like flies. I gave them the same counsel i had, and now the same buddies do Arah Exp alone and without me.

So, to recap this long story, i suggest you take a moment to criticize yourself and your way of playing before dumping your failure to others. It will work wonders.

Fabsm.5897:

We zerged and zerged till we finish that terrible adventure in ONLY 2 hours and a half.

Why you keep using that word? I do not think it means what you think it means.

http://starcraft.wikia.com/wiki/Zerg

i think that some scenarios are specifically set up so that you will go down over and over. there’s 1-2 down hits that you can’t anticipate, or groups of enemies that will down you in several seconds just from their combined basic attacks. then there’s the ones that knock you down before you even get up from the first one. then there’s the fact that in many cases stun breakers don’t even work in dungeons.

and honestly saying you didn’t die in CM and it’s easy because you effectively bypassed all the hard enemies is a little rich.

i think that some scenarios are specifically set up so that you will go down over and over. there’s 1-2 down hits that you can’t anticipate, or groups of enemies that will down you in several seconds just from their combined basic attacks. then there’s the ones that knock you down before you even get up from the first one. then there’s the fact that in many cases stun breakers don’t even work in dungeons.

If this is happening, and you just stood there taking the hits, why apparently didn’t your teammates rush to revive you?

and honestly saying you didn’t die in CM and it’s easy because you effectively bypassed all the hard enemies is a little rich.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance#Argument_from_incredulity.2FLack_of_imagination

vespers.1759:

…because you effectively bypassed all the hard enemies is a little rich.

Key issue right here. Let’s not Fixate too much on CM, but I do it all the time without dying and it comes down to simply running past certain broken encounters where even the non-Elite mobs for some reason can 1-shot a Toughness-Stacked Protect-Booned Guardian who had no issues at all tanking real Bosses.

Gimmicks aren’t the solution to this. The A.I. & scripting potential in dungeons simply isn’t being lived up to. Mobs are given artificially overpowered running speed, attack damage, and immunity to certain CC effects but they’re also dumb as rocks with the same level of awareness which allows content bypassers to trivialize overly difficult content that stops a lot of puggers dead in their tracks. A better middle ground is possible but it won’t happen if everyone spends all their time arguing in “Lrn 2 Play” instead of trying to be more creative.

So please. Stop polluting threads like these with justifications built on exploits and Class choice. It didn’t help in Gw1, and it won’t help here. All it does is slow the entire process down.

I couldn’t agree more with the original poster. And you GW lovers who think this game has no flaws and tell us to just go play wow or we suck need to really lighten up and not speak. This is our experience and our opinions if you don’t like it keep it to yourself but don’t trash us for it. These dungeons are mass chaos.

You can have any opinion you want.

And we can tell you that this opinion is wrong. See, an opinion is not immune to criticism. An opinion is also not sacrosanct.

Fact is that most people that do explorable dungeons die at most 2 times per run, and even that is rare. I rarely die even once, and that is with doing all trash, since I HATE skipping trash with a passion.

I have, to date, pugged 21 of the 25 explorable paths in the game.

If I can do dungeons and not die, then it is quite obvious that the problem is not the dungeons. Those do, in fact, have no encounters that automatically kill you.

The problem is your gameplay.

And your problem is that you do not want to admit this, because it’s easier to accuse the game of being wrong than admit that you are not good and should improve. Improving is hard, and so is admitting that you’re bad and need improvement.

I understand that, I really do. Trainees at the company I work for generally tend to have the same problem. But you just have to get over it, you really do. You won’t get far if you keep blaming everything else for your own errors.

You need to own up to your mistakes and work to fix them. This thread gives you plenty of hints where to start. Use them.

(Addendum, since I just remembered: Sorrow’s Embrace path 2 is excluded from this, because that boss was bugged. He is indeed ridiculous, and the bug was already admitted to being a bug that will be fixed)

But skipping trash? Why would you, unless you were doing a speedrun? I sure don’t, and neither do most pugs I played with. In pugs, passing mobs usually leads to deaths, while doing them usually is what makes a run smooth

i stopped reading when you said that an opinion can be wrong.

i stopped reading when you said that an opinion can be wrong.

“The earth is flat”
“The earth is carried by four elephants”
“Snakes only eat earth”
“Angela Merkel is a lizard”

All four are opinions. Three of these are opinions once held by the majority of the people in a given country. All of them are factually wrong.

Opinions can, in fact, be wrong. It takes a really, really bad education to think that opinions cannot be wrong.

I think it depends on the time, my first character’s AC story run was horrible, didn’t even complete it because we couldn’t pass the couple boss. But now, I can run exp mode without dying or just a few times.

Zefiris.8297:

i stopped reading when you said that an opinion can be wrong.

“The earth is flat”
“The earth is carried by four elephants”
“Snakes only eat earth”
“Angela Merkel is a lizard”

All four are opinions. Three of these are opinions once held by the majority of the people in a given country. All of them are factually wrong.

Opinions can, in fact, be wrong. It takes a really, really bad education to think that opinions cannot be wrong.

lol no they are beliefs. an opinion would be “this book is good”. try again.

opinions are how you FEEL about something and therefore they cannot be wrong.

The downed state is the reason there’s so much constant high dmg and random one shots everywhere.

It’s simply not fun being in the downed state half the time. Nor is it hard, someone get’s randomly one shot? Just pick em back up. It’s not challenging or thought-provoking either, there’s barely any interesting mechanics or gimmicks, especially with bosses, most were just KITE and spank.

I’d say the story modes really tarnish peoples’ view of dungeons, first dungeon I did was AC story, was a nightmare, 3-4 ranged mobs that just sit there spamming non stop dmg that hits for like 1/3 – 1/4 your health, there’s not enough dodges for that, nor uptime on reflect/blind, atleast not with a PUG for STORY mode. It was just terrible.

I finally decide to bother with dungeons again in my 70’s, run CoE story mode, it wasn’t hard, there was SO many one shot abilities, some you can’t even see because it’s from an asura mob that’s doused in particle effects, but that doesn’t make it hard, the mob just had a billion hp, you sit there killing it over like a 10 minute period, it randomly one shots people, you run over pick them up in 2 seconds, repeat til it’s dead, that’s pretty much how most of the fights went.

Then there was the room that spawns like literally 30 mobs that all do a bunch of dmg and have a ton of hp, we ended up spending 30 minutes or so just kiting mobs in a giant circle in the room while we slowly killed them all off.

Then of course I finally do some explorable modes, easiest thing ever and short, it was almost like it was backwards, story mode is the hard mode apparently…

vespers.1759:

Zefiris.8297:

i stopped reading when you said that an opinion can be wrong.

“The earth is flat”
“The earth is carried by four elephants”
“Snakes only eat earth”
“Angela Merkel is a lizard”

All four are opinions. Three of these are opinions once held by the majority of the people in a given country. All of them are factually wrong.

Opinions can, in fact, be wrong. It takes a really, really bad education to think that opinions cannot be wrong.

lol no they are beliefs. an opinion would be “this book is good”. try again.

opinions are how you FEEL about something and therefore they cannot be wrong.

I feel that destroying all man kind is the right thing to do. Just my opinion.

poor guy … dying too much?

Balance your traits and your stats for defence also (you are your own tank in GW2, glass canon doesnt work in dungeons usually)
Learn your class and his skills
Learn combat mechanics
Cooperate with your party

problem solved

It comes down to how many people Anet wants to make happy.

The best way is difficulty settings if the goal is maximum player happiness.

No one here is wrong.

Some have the skills, the desire, the team to want the hardest settings possible, it’s an achievement in itself.

Some have limited skills, time, team finding and just want to enjoy the content. I for one am just a wee bit above avg, but play with some that will never be average. The depth of understanding they need just isn’t in them to find out, but they like playing and hitting the buttons, seeing the views. I would rather play with them then seek a uber group, that is my choice.

DDO does do it well, with several choices, the harder choices give you better loot/gold etc.

I play with the same group in both, in DDO we move up and down the ladder between Normal – Elite as needed. Each mission can vary, they also have the jumping puzzles and other types of puzzles that challenge different parts of the player, so we move around in the slider mission to mission. But in the end we find our happy place with the mission, get through it (less a few that are made by evil people) and are satisfied in doing so. To me that is success.

I do sort of expect that this will come in time.

OR… That they said in so many words, “There is a lot of work being done to Dungeons”. So I do expect changes based on that bit of intel.

The core of the problem with dungeons is that being one-shotted without warning is *not* fun. After a horrible attempt at AC story with some guild mates. The following went up on the guild forums:

I’m not a raider, never have been. The endless dying trying to figure out the next little trick, hours of respawning to make incremental progress has always been anathema to me. What I do enjoy is working through progressively harder dungeons with interesting encounters so I can gear up. Where GW2’s dungeons have gone horribly wrong is in the colossal leap in difficulty between the overland PvE and the first dungeon. They immediately start at raid-like difficulty, requiring split-second timing on dodges and complete knowledge apriori of what skills and specs to have slotted and when to use each in response to each of every boss’ special attacks. The dungeon play style is totally unconnected to the overland play style.

Compare this to EQ2’s progression from overland PvE through progressively tougher dungeons to raids. The raids themselves had a progression over no less than 4 tiers. The top tier raid went unbeaten for several months on the Kunark expansion while people geared up while learning the earlier tiers. This worked for me because the first dungeons in the progression punished mistakes relatively gently so I could recover from the mistake and have a chance to figure out what had gone wrong. Dungeons could be done with different sets of skills from different classes. Once those were learned, the progression required better timing, more attention paid to Big Hit warnings and the like.

I simply don’t learn by being punished with instant death for failing to react in the 250ms required to dodge/interrupt a mobs attack. It just leaves me baffled, pissed off and wondering WTF happened. This is made even worse when some mobs supposed telegraphing of an attack is relatively subtle and utterly lost in the particle storm that is a boss mob under focus fire. Quite apart from not learning this way, I find it deeply unfun and a quick route to being disillusioned with a game and cancelling a sub.

GW2 doesn’t have a monthly sub but a player that gets disillusioned with a game won’t stay playing and buy gems/bank slots/whatever.

To those whose response can be summed up as "L2P" I say give us a chance to learn. Lower the huge step between general PvE and the first dungeons. Give us a progression of difficulty. Done all the dungeons already and think they’re easy? Good for you and I’d fully support any calls for additional, harder modes for dungeons for those who can walk them.

Rob

Posted by game director Colin Johanson

“What I would call ‘hard’ was trying to run Domain of Anguish and Mallyx with a balanced setup in the first weeks it was released. Many people called it impossible, but it was a heck lot of fun to do! Why? Because it offered veriety and fluid gameplay, quick and deadly like it should be. Not kiting a mob for 2 minutes and then walking into the next mob rinse and repeat.”

I’ll point out ironically, when we first turned on DoA back in Gw1 the posts you’re seeing in this forum from a few folks about difficulty were the exact same comments everyone had about DoA. It was “impossible, mobs were just tuned to do insane damage and have huge HP, there was no tactics to defeat DoA”, etc. I went back and read through the original DoA launch feedback and it was literally identical to the comments folks on the forums are leaving now.

We made the choice back then to stick with the difficulty, and give people time to learn how to play the dungeon better and overcome it. A few months later, people viewed it as the most fun thing in the game and totally reasonable without us changing anything.

We’ll be doing the same with the Gw2 explorable dungeons, our own internal testing teams and alpha test groups learned to beat them using a combination of player skill, synchronous builds, strong use of cross-profession combos, use of cooking/consumable buffs (these make a huge difference!) and well formed player tactics. By comparison, after having months to play the game and the time our alpha was complete, some of our better dungeon groups felt the explorable dungeons were too easy for launch, we decided not to make them any harder given the expected player skill on launch.

We’re actively monitoring every dungeon and working on balancing issues we encounter appropriately. We’ll be keeping an eye on bosses we think don’t have enough varied mechanics to warrant their large health pools and updating them over time to make them more varied/interesting fights. We’ll be monitoring, and continually tweaking/adding to dungeon rewards over time and of course balancing where we see the need. And of course, we’ll be looking at adding more dungeons as well!

All of that being said, the game is VERY new for most of our players, and I can absolutely promise with more knowledge of the game and advanced player skill, the explorable dungeons can all be overcome by being skilled groups. We’ve seen many groups do it just fine in our internal alpha test once they had time to learn how to play the game well. Just like Domain of Anguish in Gw1, it takes time and practice to learn how to overcome stuff as hard as our explorable mode dungeons, and that’s exactly the kind of players they are designed for.

If DoA was any indication, a couple months from now, many of you will likely be posting saying most of the dungeons are too easy and you need better challenges“

SOURCE: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Do-NOT-nerf-please/first

I am really happy Areanet dont nerf things cause of QQ od bad or not patient players.

I hated dungeons from first, but now found them easy … there is no hard dungeon in this game. If you say there is, you really dont know what hard boss fight means

happy with this statement

I absolutely agree with this statement. When GW2 first came out dungeons were like omgwtfisgoingon, now they are easy and fun enough, in fact I am waiting for hard mode options now. They made ME, the player, adapt to their difficulty and learn to play. The dungeon should not have to get easier because I cant be bothered to up my game. It was the same with DoA, when I first did it, I HATED it. Then I developed strategies and builds to conquer it. In time the number of people complaining about dungeon difficulty will go down as they learn strategies and etc.

instance runs are a huge waste of time and $ for garbage loot. I refuse to run em anymore.

swiftpaw.6397:

vespers.1759:

Zefiris.8297:

i stopped reading when you said that an opinion can be wrong.

“The earth is flat”
“The earth is carried by four elephants”
“Snakes only eat earth”
“Angela Merkel is a lizard”

All four are opinions. Three of these are opinions once held by the majority of the people in a given country. All of them are factually wrong.

Opinions can, in fact, be wrong. It takes a really, really bad education to think that opinions cannot be wrong.

lol no they are beliefs. an opinion would be “this book is good”. try again.

opinions are how you FEEL about something and therefore they cannot be wrong.

I feel that destroying all man kind is the right thing to do. Just my opinion.

not sure what the point of this is.

Join a guild that do dungeons a lot.
Ask them what each dungeon is able and what you need for each dungeon.
Do said dungeon with them, and listen to their advice.

See red circle, dodge.
See downed group mate, res.
Bring a condition removal.
Group utilities & debuffs are helpful.

In CM exp, projectile reflection is king since it makes the many range trashed mobs riflemen/enforcers/scatter-shots/archers/bombers eat their own bullets/arrows/grenades. Usually just one mesmer Feedback will get them to half-health with them shooting themselves alone! Mesmers can also trait projectile reflection on both the focus skills, Temporal Curtain and Phantasmal Warden turns CM into cakewalk since one mesmer can basically destroy all the ranged mobs by rotating these skills.

Alternatives are Guardian’s Wall of Reflection and Ranger’s Whirling Defense and Thief’s Dagger Storm though these require more coordination to upkeep if lacking mesmer.

Alternatively projectile destruction’s, Smokescreen and Swirling Aura are an option though less efficient.

Then you only have to worry about the melee-based cutpurses/thugs/saboteur which can easily be crippled/chilled/immobilised and kited.

All trash mobs in general can be dealt with by blind spamming via Black Power on Thief or Well of Darkness and combo finishers through Dark fields set by necroes.

tl;dr many options to deal with trash mobs. Mesmers shine brightest where there are many projectile mobs especially CM and SE.

zencow.3651:

In CM exp, projectile reflection is king since it makes the many range trashed mobs riflemen/enforcers/scatter-shots/archers/bombers eat their own bullets/arrows/grenades. Usually just one mesmer Feedback will get them to half-health with them shooting themselves alone! Mesmers can also trait projectile reflection on both the focus skills, Temporal Curtain and Phantasmal Warden turns CM into cakewalk since one mesmer can basically destroy all the ranged mobs by rotating these skills.

Alternatives are Guardian’s Wall of Reflection and Ranger’s Whirling Defense and Thief’s Dagger Storm though these require more coordination to upkeep if lacking mesmer.

Alternatively projectile destruction’s, Smokescreen and Swirling Aura are an option though less efficient.

Then you only have to worry about the melee-based cutpurses/thugs/saboteur which can easily be crippled/chilled/immobilised and kited.

All trash mobs in general can be dealt with by blind spamming via Black Power on Thief or Well of Darkness and combo finishers through Dark fields set by necroes.

tl;dr many options to deal with trash mobs. Mesmers shine brightest where there are many projectile mobs especially CM and SE.

Feedback is on my utility list 95% of the time.
I absolutely looove my well of darkness on necro.
And when I start leveling my thief, I already decided I would trait him for blindness with Black Powder.

So since we all know it’s possible to run a dungeon without dying is he going to delete this post as promised?

Not sure if they have done some fixes since you posted this but me and the 2 other people I do dungeons with are not having this problem. We are VERY strong PvPers so I am sure this helps as far as dodging and evades and using defensive cd’s but we might die 2 times total in Dungeons. Granted we are only Doing CM/AC/COF due to low lvls. We have done all paths of these as well and I am having a hard time reading all the complaints about how all the dungeons are overpowered. If anything they are too easy. I can’t even imagine how easy they will be when we hit 50 and get gear……….