Guild Wars 2

By artificial difficulty, I mean Bosses with over excessive health pools. 1 shot abilities I can live with, as there are many ways to work around this other than dodge (aegis,protection, reflects). But the HP amount on some of the monsters and bosses seem way too high and halfway through the boss fight it feels repetitive and dragged out. This can even go for trash as well. My example for this is Crucible of Eternity. The bosses are doable, but they feel so long and dragged out, the subject Alpha mechanic is just dodge out of red circle and DPS….DPS for a long long time.

If not reducing health pool, give us mechanics to kill the boss faster that rewards skill and coordination. For example, have the boss shoot a projectile that increases the targets damage taken by 100%. If you can reflect the projectile back at the boss, you get that 100% damage bonus on the boss. If you miss it, one of your teammates will be in serious danger.

As for rewards, no need to go in detail here. I think most people are frustrated at the fact they went into Guild Wars 2 consistently hearing an anti-grind philosophy. What do we get? A dungeon grind. If A-net doesn’t want to inflate gold prices with constant running of dungeons, buff the token/exp reward but keep the 26s reward the same. Also, this is a bit on the side, but I think once the dungeons are all balanced out in terms of difficulty, reward chests should drop (or chance to drop) Glob of Ectoplasm. 3 blues and some copper feels so minuscule.

TL;DR – Reduce artificial difficulty (heck, I wouldn’t even mind a buff to “real” difficulty") and increase rewards.

I think the intention was for higher hit point totals to increase the length of the encounter and give you more time to make a mistake. Other MMOs have toyed with this, and usually solve the repetitive part with multi-phased encounters. WoW did a lot of this with their Lich King dungeons, but took it too far imo. I felt like I was part of a line-dance instead of fighting an epic boss level monster.

An idea that I’ve yet to see attempted, and have really been wanting, is something I haven’t seen since tabletop D&D. Basically, why don’t they just create a few templates for boss monsters and assign abilities and aggro mechanics randomly by combining various templates together. You could control the overall style of the encounter by restricting what goes into your templates, and keep encounters interesting and difficult by the random combination of different abilities.

It’d be more difficult to tune, but not as bad as it sounds since there are only so many boss level mobs to work with anyway.

Anyway, just an idea for making PvE interesting, unpredictable, and challenging without having to memorize a bunch of Youtube dance steps.

That is a great idea, i could definitely look forward to that if implemented.

I just hope they come up with something different. I think most of us can agree the state of dungeons isn’t what we envisioned it to be. A lot of us have our own solutions, but the best we can do is let Arena net know how we feel about the current situation and let them use their expertise (making games) to come up with an answer.

I agree. Most of the bosses have an unusual amount of health.

Give the bosses a heal ability that if timed right could be interrupted, that IMO is a 100% better than an insane amount of health.

PinCushion.7390:

I think the intention was for higher hit point totals to increase the length of the encounter and give you more time to make a mistake.

This is exactly it. Its a matter of statistics. Being able to avoid something once has a statistically significant probability that its just a completely lucky fluke. Twice, still possible. If you avoid something a significant number of times then you have proven that its your skill and not just a lucky roll of the dice. If you make a mistake every other time and have to be picked up off the floor, well you obviously haven’t mastered the encounter yet.

I agree with the health pools, but I disagree with a boss being able to 1 shot you. A boss should never be able to 1 shot you unless the fight has been going on for an extreme amount of time or an ability is tripped or something. Dieing repeatedly and quickly is not fun. Even if there were no repair costs, it still wouldn’t be fun. Its annoying.

In HoTW explore the Ice Svnir guys are over 10 minutes of wailing on a massive health bar. I know it was over ten minutes because my 10 food buff ran out.

Worse is there are two of them.

Then the boss with the pet dogs, wiped the group over and over.

I agree somewhat, but honestly I could deal with the hp pools so long as their was adequate rewards as almost everybody states. Coming from the side of a player, it does feel boring, but at the same time if you look at the bigger picture from a developer’s perspective it makes sense as was previously stated the longer the fights get dragged out the more consistent you have to be.

The idea of mixing in different templates I think was actually implemented in Diablo 3 with their elite packs. They have certain skills/properties(increased speed,reflect damage, etc) that elites could have on top of the increased attack/def/health pools. In that game it too after a while seemed repetitive(but there’s also much less content there), but you face a lot more elite packs din Diablo 3 than you would be able to fight dungeon bosses in GW2 so it may work better in this game.

The HP pools are large but I wouldn’t call them abnormally large. At least not compared to other mmo dungeons I played. The time to run through a dungeon for me and my friends can be from one to two hours. A time we could definitely shorten once we learn to never die or get downed and maintain a constant dps.