Guild Wars 2

The very philosophy of “pugs shouldn’t be able to run every explorable dungeon mode” is inaccurate, as there are some paths that are significantly harder than others across different dungeons. It is also unrealistic to enforce as ANet know that most dungeon mechanics are not interesting, and raising artificial difficulty, such as hp and strength of bosses, isn’t the answer.

Let’s look at the current reality of the game. There are only two end-game pve activities: farming DE in Orr, and running explorable dungeons. Yes, being lv80 with exotic gears does trivialize lower level dungeons, but it is infinitely better than making every explorable dungeons inaccessible to pugs, which is what I’m seeing many elitists are suggesting.

There are just too many stupidly hard (and easy, on another hand) encounters in dungeons that are ought to be the most unfun MMO experience I’ve ever had—when I did them for the first time. Even after many tweaks in the dungeon, this still remains my number one complaint: new players deserve better than being kittened in the face, and the dungeons are only fun after we know everything.

Since ANet is pretty adamant with discouraging player from redoing story mode dungeons, there need to be an “easier” mode for explorable dungeons that is pug-friendly. By the way, story mode dungeons in their current state mostly fail at introducing players to their explorable modes; another thing that needs to be fixed.

I’ll end this post with my proposal.

• More tutorials in SM and make them friendlier to players who never done/rarely do dungeons. Currently, the Ascalonian Catacomb is a terrible choice as the first dungeon because the steep learning curve for its target audience. SM dungeons should be more about progression and the lore, so the difficult need to be progressing from easy to hard as well (which of course, isn’t happening right now). There needs to be more incentive to rerun a SM dungeon, not for farming exp/whatever, but to help others completing it the first time.
• Normal mode explorable dungeons should have similar mechanisms that players have familiarized from doing its SM version. Lower level dungeons should be easier than higher level ones. Different paths of the same SM dungeon should roughly have the same difficulty, failing that, the token rewards should be properly adjusted to reflect their comparative difficulty. Finally, this version of the EM dungeons need to be pug friendly, provides more leeway in syncing timing, etc, and hand out tokens at each boss chest like before.
• Hard mode EM dungeons. Requires lv80 characters with difficulty scaled at full exotic equipment, voice comms of party members, and optimal class builds. Obviously more rewards, such as special tokens that helps with the grind for legendary weapons and other high-end shinies.

I say this as someone who logs in and do pretty much only EM dungeons on my two lv80 chars. But knowing how many bugs and design flaws in the current dungeon mechanics, I won’t hold my breath hoping a large revamp that will considerably make dungeons a more relevant pve activity. But at least ANet is acting as they know that making dungeons cater more to elitists isn’t the solution; I don’t want this to change.

exactly opposite in Arah Explorable… and that is sad too, lack of waypoints and Giganticus Lupicus being IMPOSSIBLE

They’re not only too easy, they are also too short. If most paths in the L60+ dungeons (not to mention the three lower level ones) can be done in under 30 minutes with a group of medium proficiency, you know somethings up.
ANet apparently dropped the notion of storymode as “regular difficulty”, and explorable as “hard mode/elite content” somewhere along the line, due to concerns of casual players being locked out of the rewards. Fair enough, but instead of adjusting rewards for the story mode (at the point of writing: a hat. Big freaking deal.), they half-arsedly levelled the difficulty between the two, with effect that story mode in many places remains actually harder than explorable.

And no, this isn’t about the exclusivity of gear, and I think most speaking out against this agree with me here. It’s about not snoring off while doing the supposedly only challenging PVE content this game offers.

@kgptzac.8419
I don’t think ANet will add normal mode/hard mode any time soon. It fractures the playerbase way too much, and for some dungeons PUGs are already hard to find.
And please refrain from labelling everyone that doesn’t agree with your opinion elitist, thank you.

My biggest gripe with dungeons are the parts where you have to dodge things in the environment or even mini jumping puzzles. EG the boulders in CoF or the lasers in CoE. I know they aren’t the caliber of the jumping puzzles and vistas but I go to a dungeon the fights and not to jump over stuff.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the movement controls were not typical of an MMO but they are. It’s like they want me to play a mediocre mario. The one thing that makes me quit doing something in a game is if it has bad controls. The movement is not fluid like any other platformer so please ANet stop trying to make me use your medicocre movement controls for platforming.

It just annoys me so much that the hardest parts of the dungeons are the parts where you fight nothing at all.

Short is good when there are no save points. Raids in WoW could take hours, but can can also be done in hour or half hour chunks, because the entire instance was saved for the week. Everyone has their time limit when playing the game, and most of them will be short.