Didn’t see a better place for this. Don’t know if anyone from Anet actually reads these, but these are my feelings about dungeons from a longtime GW1 and MMO player.
In other MMOs, everyone is given a role. One guy tanks the boss, one guy tanks the adds, one guy heals the main tank, one guy heals the group, one guy is in charge of kiting, one guy kills adds, etc. If there are fight specific mechanics, like an object someone has to use, someone is designated to go perform the task. Everyone has a job to do and everyone can feel like they were useful to the completion of the fight.
In Guild Wars 1, even though it itself was not an MMO, it still had that sense that everyone could bring something to the table and help the group. (I know people rarely ran balanced groups in the later years of GW1, but before power creep, PvE skills, permas and other gimmicky farm builds took hold they were predominantly what people ran to defeat missions, especially before heroes.) A necromancer might summon his minions to tank, a monk could keep the party buffed with protection spells, a ranger could set up spirits with a range that wasn’t abysmal while doing decent damage from afar, an elementalist could set up defensive wards, a warrior could run in to engage, tank, or pull the enemies around a corner to body block them, a mesmer could interrupt or shut down deadly caster mobs, etc. Sure, this led to people demanding their groups have 2 monks in them, especially during Prophecies, but at least when those monks got there everyone was performing a role of their choosing and felt like they were contributing.
In contrast, my GW2 character feels like a generic mishmash of roles with bland skills on long cooldowns that produce barely noticeable results. I’m looking at my ranger’s (my preferred character archetype in GW and other games) skills right now, and almost all of them are practically worthless in group PvE aside the raw damage they do. My pet can’t stand up to a boss, hell, it can barely survive a few trash mobs beating on it or an aoe before I have to swap it out and hope the next one lives for more than 15-20 seconds. My skills can only snare mobs for a few seconds, and my spirits would suck if they lived long enough to do so.
So what exactly is my job? Neither my pet nor I can tank anything for very long. I can’t heal or buff people very well. I can’t CC mobs with anything more than cripple for very long. Basically I’m just a generic damage dealer with a bunch of skills so worthless I’d wager nobody would notice or even care if I just slapped on some signets and did nothing but auto attack and res downed people. The only skills that have any noticeable effect on fights are the Spirit of Nature and Entangle, both of which are elites on egregiously long cooldowns. The whole experience is just “meh,” because everything I do seems to have such a minimal impact on the fight, whereas the enemies have huge health pools and insane damage.
Every fight seems to be some variation of “take turns taking damage and swap out when your dodge/heal skill is down.” It might sound simplistic, and maybe it is, but I’d much rather just be assigned a job, carry it out, and win feeling I accomplished something, no matter how small. “OK, Blix, you’re on interrupt duty,” is much more satisfying to me than “OK, everyone run around in circles, DPS, and try not to die.”
I don’t have any proposed solutions or specific complaints/vulgar insults to lodge at Anet. I enjoy most of the game, the overworld, the WvW, the sPvP. But I don’t like the dungeons at all. Once I get enough tokens for my legendary, I don’t think I’ll be doing any more dungeons. I just don’t find them fun or engaging, regardless of how easy or difficult they are. If anyone from Anet actually does read this, thank you.