The issue
Skipping dungeons is the most effective way to complete them. This is obviously no issue for anyone who prefers this kind of playstyle but there are also those who want to clear the dungeons the way they’re used to from other MMO games. The problem is that those people don’t feel rewarded for their “effort”, because despite them investing more time into a path or complete dungeon, they get nothing in return. As a result, those people are forced to play ‘handicapped’ in order to enjoy the game.
The reason
People are neither forced to – nor are they rewareded for facing the content.
- The AI is lackluster, bossfights are predictable and trashmob fail to stop the linear progress through the dungeon all the time. There are also tons of exploitable areas and bugs.
- There is but one thing that matters concerning dungeons: their currency and gold reward, which is only rewared for completing the dungeon regardless the circumstances. Not everyone runs dungeons for the sake of green and yellow salvage-ables.
The Solution
Rework the entire PvE and AI. I know, lol.
My suggestion
A bandagefix!.
a) Split the final reward of each path into a bounty on every single boss.
The amount of bounty on every boss should represent it’s difficulty, thus the harder a bossfight – the more it is worth.
b) Change the final reward to scale with stage completion.
The final reward should depend on how much % of the monster in this path have been slain and also reflect the relative length of the path(which it already does but only for the gold part).
This will give you:
- A gamemechanic that can be tweaked to adjust the reward for every possible playstyle.
- Make people re-evaluate the content and how much of it they want to skip, in they case they previously just did it for the sake of efficiency.
- Reward harder bossfights especially those that currently don’t yield a reward at all, thus reducing frustration (arah p3 pirate mesmer anyone?).
- Promote a more immersive and satisfactory playstyle
- Introduce a reason to have more difficult content (which we currently lack)
This will not:
- solve the burst dps meta, unless more difficult and nicherole demanding encounters have been added.
EDIT: I do not want to abolish the common tactics and playstyle that apparently quite a lot of people have learned to love. The only result of following my suggestion would be, that Anet gets a handle on the topic. You may agree or disagree that the content right before any dungeon’ss final boss matters or not – is disireable or not, but you should see that there are valid concerns about how it is right now and that Anet currently has no way of adjusting things one way or another, even if they chose to.
Therefor, my suggestion says nothing about how the exact balance between stagecompletion and time invested or reward for monster/bosses slain vs time-saving speedruns should look like. In my personal opinion, both should come out equally, which they currently do not at all.
Any further adjustments to things like difficulty or the entertainment value of the dungeons can only be made after we have a rewardbasis that doesn’t bring frustration or extreme inequalities to any of the possible ways through them, imo, so please don’t bring them to this topic.
My apologies to everyone who feels insulted or feels that my choice of words was unjustified. This merely reflected my personal opinion, whether legit or not, and should not stop a manture discussion. /Please cut me some slack.
(edited by Escadin.9482)