Guild Wars 2

My question is a simple one: why can’t Anet vary its dungeons with some GW1-like dungeon content?

It seems to me that there are important and fundamental differences between the GW1 dungeon design philosophy and the GW2 design. In GW1, dungeons were largely about exploring large areas, finding secrets, dealing with dungeon-wide gimmicks for opening new areas, dodging traps, and dealing with wandering groups of normal but fairly threatening enemies and boss-level but generally not gimmicky stronger enemies.

GW2, on the other hand, has relatively linear dungeons with little to no exploration. Instead of wandering around an expansive dungeon, it goes like this: trash mobs -> gimmicky boss encounter with tons of HP -> more trash mobs -> another gimmicky boss -> final boss. There’s no exploration or secrets to find, and there’s no real sense of progress other than moving forward through a predetermined path. No finding and using bombs to blow down walls that may or may not take you where you want to go if you don’t have a preprepared map, no hidden treasures to be uncovered, no torches that all have to be lit within a certain amount of time to open a door, etc.

Now, this isn’t to say there are some similarities between GW1 and GW2 dungeons. Some GW1 boss battles in particular were comparable to the ones I’ve seen in GW2, like the Ilsundr fight in Catacombs of Kathandrax where you had to move to avoid getting hit by fiery rolling balls of death (similar to the new Frizz boss fight) or the Rragar/Hidesplitter fight where killing Rragar first would send Hidesplitter into a berserk state (like the Mai Trin/Horrik and Molten Alliance duo from the Living Story dungeons). Fights like those would be right at home in GW2. Moreover, some levels of the GW1 dungeons were linear and did have a trash mob -> (non-gimmicky) boss progression--but they weren’t the only aspect of dungeon play.

GW1 dungeons were tons of fun in my opinion. For the casuals, you could go through at your own pace and not have to worry about new mechanics every 5 minutes or a seemingly limitless health pool on bosses, to say nothing of the murderous trash mobs. For the hardcore players, you could try hard mode, where the enemies all got significant buffs and were often extremely challenging, but you got double rewards for completion too. It wasn’t hard to find groups for casual play OR speedclears; plenty of people were interested in both. Dungeons could be completed (depending on which one you were in) in 30 minutes to an hour or so, with little variation in how long it would take (unless your team was particularly ill-prepared or bad).

GW2 dungeons, in contrast, are quite unappealing to me. It’s not terribly fun to drag through tough trash mobs and then get to a (generally) gimmicky, high-HP, powerful boss that takes 5 minutes to kill if you’re prepared—and then that’s not even the end of the dungeon. If you’re in a good group dedicated to speed and precision, dungeons are over extremely quickly. If not, expect to be there for a very, very long time.

My question is, why not vary the current dungeon lineup with some GW1-like experiences? How about a dungeon that involves exploration of a huge map, semi-random secrets to uncover, and larger groups of regular-strength enemies rather than 2 to 3 really tough ones? And bosses that shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to down and present unique challenges rather than frustrating gimmicks?

I thought of this topic after trying the new Aetherblade dungeon yesterday, so most of my points are in response to what I saw there. For instance, I thought that the regular Aetherblade enemies were placed in groups that were challenging but not unfair. My group had a few people get downed by those mobs, but nobody died to them, even when we encountered the section with 4 veterans and another 10 or so regulars. That’s a good level of challenge that made me think of GW1, and what I think Anet should continue to try to match. The pacing was good, though I wouldn’t have minded a less linear path to follow or non-obvious/semi-random Aetherblade caches along the way. I appreciated the miniature jumping puzzle towards the end, though the springs were a little hard to manage at times because of bad collision with the environment and getting hung up on jagged edges of things.

The first boss was in many ways like Ilsundr in that you had to be aware of your surroundings and pay attention to what the boss was doing—but there was simply too much going on. There’s a fine line between challenge and frustration/gimmick, and I think Frizz crossed the line, just as the NULL fight from Southsun Cove had just a little too much action to be fun. Take any single element of that fight out, and it’s balanced…keep them all in, and it’s frustrating and not very fun. If even one small aspect of the difficulty were lowered, then I think that encounter would be much more entertaining, but keeping up with two pulling, healing, shielding, might-stacking golems, AND lightning walls, AND lazer walls moving at different speeds, AND having to jump up on top of boxes with slippery collision detection was just too much to keep track of. Why not just limit bosses to one central mechanic that everyone can focus on? Look at Fendi Nin, Zoldark the Unholy, and Murakai fights from GW1. The mechanics for those fights were easy to understand and challenging but manageable, as in you only had to focus on one particular strategy and keep at it for a few minutes while you whittled the boss down (or his/her minions, in some cases). If GW1’s bosses were like throwing a baseball at a target, GW2’s bosses are often like juggling three balls while throwing them at three separate targets, and having to hit each target with a ball of a corresponding color at the exact moment someone raises a flag of that color.

The final bosses were fun at first. I even said to my team “does this remind anyone of the Lich/Shiro fight from Nightfall?” and they agreed. But then two things happened that drained all the fun out of the encounter. First, Mai Trin has WAY too much health. Either make it easier to get rid of her shields, or give her less HP to contend with. The combination of both made an initially fun fight drag out into something tedious. Second, the cannon barrage was epic…except that it lasted WAY too long. Sure, make us dodge for 20-30 seconds each time, but not 50, then 1:20, then 1:50. That’s needlessly long and it adds nothing to the level of fun—on the contrary, it significantly diminishes it. I want to be fighting, not running laps for two straight minutes at a time, and FOUR MINUTES TOTAL! It’s an unnecessary time extension to an already too-long fight.

All in all, I liked this new dungeon more than any that I’ve tried so far, but it’s still way too frustrating to keep me interested. I’ll be doing it for the skill achievements (since the dungeon won’t be here forever and I can’t put it off for as long as I want) and then never look back. This is definitely a step in the right direction, but I think that Anet would do well to emulate their GW1 dungeons even more than they did with this last one, if nothing else to give us more options for challenging group content. What do you think?

Agree good thread a few minor things I disagree with but largly everything you say is true. Also what was so addicting about gw1 dungeon speed clearing was the meta setup , you had a job riding you actually feel like you have some value to the team and you can make choices that can make or break runs gw2 is no roles so no importance you mean nothing but more damage in a team of 5. Also I know people don’t like rng but I think unique dungeon skin should drop from ea dungeon like bone dragon staff in gw1 . One last thing I would rather a jade maw chest at the end of was dungeon than these crappy minichests full of blue and green crappy. It would also be a great place to put that unique dungeon skin

GW1 didn’t have dungeons. Maybe if you wanted to call them alternate zones with higher than average mob density?

Zindrix.1750:

GW1 didn’t have dungeons. Maybe if you wanted to call them alternate zones with higher than average mob density?

They were definitely more than that. “Average zones” didn’t have special mechanics that required you to act differently than normal. Dungeons, unlike explorable zones, required that you go to certain places in a certain order, do something to advance that isn’t generally required, or navigate maze-like passages to progress. Explorable zones were, 95% of the time, wide-open areas that could be traversed in any number of ways and had everything out there for you to experience in any order. In North Kryta Province, for example, you were free to travel throughout the entire zone, there were virtually limitless paths for you to take, and there were no objects you had to find or use to travel to different parts of the map. In Sepulchre of Dragrimmar, on the other hand, you had to unlock different parts of the map by opening the virtue doors by finding their corresponding “proof” pressure pads. In Vloxen Excavations you had to deal with the constantly-respawning undead on the third floor and plan your movements accordingly. Virtually ALL dungeons had traps of some kind, or environmental hazards that you didn’t see in the “regular” game. Moreover, a lot of those maps were pure hell to navigate unless you’d memorized the best route; the overhead map was often intentionally difficult to follow so that you couldn’t see the best route from the get-go.

Perhaps the dungeons weren’t as gimmicky as the ones in GW2, but you have to admit that they did have their gimmicks and unique challenges that were absent from “regular” explorable zones. They are most certainly distinguishable from standard PvE content.

Zindrix.1750:

GW1 didn’t have dungeons. Maybe if you wanted to call them alternate zones with higher than average mob density?

They added areas that were called “dungeons” in Eye of the North. The end chest awarded rare mats plus a couple of items (golds — which were top tier in GW or a Green — also top tier but less valuable), some with a chance for very rare, salable skins. GW2 dungeons award blues/greens and tokens. If they do not take dungeon ideas from GW to import into GW2, they should at least look at the rewards system there, which is better than the one in GW2.

Syn Sity.5826:

Unfortunately I think it’s just the way gw2 is, any casual player can join any dungeon group and do it, just means alot of them probably won’t do it well. In the end i think their intent was to make their dungeons accessible to any group and not just for the serious players / speed clearers like in gw1 (imagine a balanced group trying to do uw/doa).

GW1 dungeons (the EOTN ones) WERE balanced so any group could do them, at least on normal mode. You just had to be a halfway intelligent player and be willing to work with the team. As I always used to tell people, you can run virtually any build you want and be successful—so long as you’re smart about it. I played GW1 for 8 years and I thought the dungeons were very well balanced.

The other challenge areas, on the other hand, were awful. FOW was fine if you had a balanced team, it just took 5 hours. DOA was so horribly balanced that ONLY a gimmick team had ANY chance of beating it, which is why I never beat it—I refuse to submit to gimmick builds just to complete content. Ditto with The Deep and Urgoz’s Warren. I feel like GW2 dungeons emulate these types of content too much, and not in a good way.