Can’t find better words to describe it. I’ve just tried Caudecus’s Manor (exploration). Christ, the HP wall of enemies there was absolutely ridiculous. The whole experience was basically running in circles and repeating same sequence of skills to the end of time. It was not much else than patience and sanity check. We got almost to the end (at least I think we did) of the seraph path but I simply couldn’t stand it, apologized to the team and quit. It was my second dungeon run (AC was the first) and I’ve had fun with the game up until now (despite numerous flaws) but now I’m left with distaste. The AC also suffered from this but not quite so bad. I honestly haven’t seen such a lazily designed and dull piece of content in a very long time. Are the other dungeons designed in the same way or is the CM an exception?
Some parts of dungeons are truly great.
Other parts, as noted, are …
It feels to me that the dungeon-team didn’t really “get” the purported design goals of GW2.
So often I feel like this could be the best game ever if they could just delay its release another 6 months or so, especially the dungeon team. Alas, in game launches there are no mulligans.
i feel there is something to be done there; but it would need a total rethinking.
maybe if the dungeons had more of a diablo3 feel?
with lots of weak mobs and some strong “elites” mixed in.
so you would have to be more tactical on teamplay.
I had the pleasure and luck of finding a good pug last night for ac exp. The run was successful and very smooth but that said it was boring boring boring and poorly designed.
If you ask me, Caudescus Manor is the worst dungeon of GW2.
There are times when <insert foulest word you know here> trash mobs literally destroy you, and then when you get to the boss, you kill him without any effort. Moreover, the first boss of path 3 is harder to kill than the final boss ! Clear disappointment to me.
So, the majority of the dungeon is completely unbalanced compared to other dungeons. Even in Sorrow’s Embrace, which has dredge (!!), the trash mobs are not even remotely as annoying as for CM.
Anyway, bottom line is : CM is completely unbalanced, no interesting boss fight, always the same path/boss, you’ll enjoy other dungeons much more.
I finished it yesterday, never gonna go back there again. Ever.
its not a question of difficulty as much as simple “fun and nicely designed mechanics”.
the dungeons could require more team work.
maybe splitting the party here and there, or incorporating more trash mobs.
i feel now it feels like; next group of ennemies / pull / woodchop, then repeat.
there is no feel of being heroic at all.
There is a general problem of mobs and bosses having too much HP, forcing you to repeat the same attack pattern for a lot longer than would normally be considered “fun”.
And while I agree that some bosses especially have rather lackluster mechanics I’m not sure how you could improve Dungeons much. I mean the feeback in this thread hasn’t been all that specific.
I’d hate to see Dungeons become another zergfest like “heroic” dungeons in WoW.
Good to see it’s not just me being impatient. I suppose, the biggest issue for me was the lack of sense of progression. Small area packed with dmg sponges every few steps to pin you down. Little penalty for dying due to conveniently placed wp and repair doesn’t help either. Cutting down the hp wall while increasing death penalty would be a good start imo.
The seraph path of Caudecus is hands down the worst dungeon path i’ve played i the whole game. I’ve never heard party swear so much trying to make our way through it.
I dislike the fact that alot of the time, the trash feels harder than the actual bosses. And sometimes they throw tons and tons of trash mobs at you. Dunno what people consider fun, but to me that is not fun.
Reducing all mobs health in dungeons by 25-50% and stopping people from skipping 90% of the mobs would be a start.
I dont think doing that for all mobs is a good idea, the better (but more time consuming) would be to tweak each trash pack separately. Some might need more health, some less. Some packs might need thinning out. Some trash packs could be replaced with a mini-boss. A longer cooldown on some mobs abilities, shorter on some. But yeah, dungeons need an overhaul, both difficulty tweaks and increasing the fun factor.
Colin Johansen casts – Working As Intended
Colin Johansen hits you for 239407889 damage
Game over
If you pug and dont communicate – forget it there is no point. They are difficult and mindless at time and unfun. Even with voice communication it can be difficult. I just dont find satisfaction doing them and not worth the time except an odd run with guildies.
I just dont do them. Like orr too annoying and a pita. The mechanics I have found to be will bad for a lack of a better term. I love hard but fun however this isnt it. So there is part of the game i dont see much of and that does sadden me.
Good to see it’s not just me being impatient. I suppose, the biggest issue for me was the lack of sense of progression. Small area packed with dmg sponges every few steps to pin you down. Little penalty for dying due to conveniently placed wp and repair doesn’t help either. Cutting down the hp wall while increasing death penalty would be a good start imo.
what do you mean no penalty. I can’t stand the dungeons. traps that one shot you, continuously in the same encounter. By one shot i mean not dead but where you have to use your stupid keep going skills and pray (which is usually answered) that someone will help rez you.
It’s funny someone bends over to help you and the trap springs again, finishing you off and making him need someone to rez him repeat ad nausium till we all end up in the port room repairing.
If the repair room and port room were outside the dungeon to “punish us” I would never enter a dungeon again. By the time I am done running them any cash i might have made is soaked up in repairs.
I haven’t gotten one thing to use in my runs not one thing. the only gear i have is the blue and maybe green gear i can buy. The dungeons suck kitten There is absolutely no reason to waste you’re time in them. Get to 80 and pray the gear you get then is worth the time. Explore and quest is all i got.
I usually don’t jump on bandwagons, but I’ll take a seat on this one.
I’ve only seen all the story mode dungeons because I just wanted to experience the content. The dungeons have not been interesting to me. There’s not a single one of them that I want to return to.
Contrast this with Sorrow’s Furnace in GW1. That was a VERY popular dungeon that people ran over and over and over. Devs need to recapture that desire with unique drops and a complex dungeon design (meaning: you can get lost + it took a long time to get my head around how SF was pieced together).
Finally, LFG tool. Getting into a hotw story group tookittenerally a week of me spamming in LA and just standing there waiting for a guild group to advertise for one more. Most people would have just said “Kitten This.”
oh a great thing id o love is the fact the dungeons i have encountered all have port things near them so its not to hard to put a group together on the fly. So kuddos to that.
true if your looking for the story part of the dungeon your going to need a guild cause no one wants to do that. Which is the only reason i like to do the dungeons i want to know what happened to the humans. My guild has been good at getting the story runs done for people
I usually don’t jump on bandwagons, but I’ll take a seat on this one.
I’ve only seen all the story mode dungeons because I just wanted to experience the content. The dungeons have not been interesting to me. There’s not a single one of them that I want to return to.
Contrast this with Sorrow’s Furnace in GW1. That was a VERY popular dungeon that people ran over and over and over. Devs need to recapture that desire with unique drops and a complex dungeon design (meaning: you can get lost + it took a long time to get my head around how SF was pieced together).
Finally, LFG tool. Getting into a hotw story group tookittenerally a week of me spamming in LA and just standing there waiting for a guild group to advertise for one more. Most people would have just said “Kitten This.”
unique drops are being added to dungeons, probably with the 15th nov patch.
I haven’t gotten one thing to use in my runs not one thing. the only gear i have is the blue and maybe green gear i can buy. The dungeons suck kitten There is absolutely no reason to waste you’re time in them. Get to 80 and pray the gear you get then is worth the time. Explore and quest is all i got.
Actually I got my char to 80 and nicely equipped this weekend thanks to lucky Halloween skin drop during the event, so I’m not really looking to gear up in dungeons. Just wanted to run each of them at least once for fun (and story) but it would seem it’s not there atm.
As for the penalty, I believe a good dungeon should slowly “wear you down” as you progress rather than kill you in a cheap way and let you restart from checkpoint with repairs and everything. I liked death penalty of the original GW. If you accumulated too much of it the boss fight could get really difficult (yeah, I know there were consumables for that but still). It was frustrating but in a good way imo.
Anyway, I’ll end my rant now. Judging by some posts other dungeons are better. I guess, I’ll give it a go another time.
For those of you who use Voice Chat during dungeon runs, can you provide some examples of how it helps exactly?
I’m familiar with using voice chat in games and I know where it comes in handy in others, but I just can’t picture how it would help that much in a GW2 dungeon. It’s not like you can call out that something is about to use a nasty ability, it’s too late they’ve already used it before you could begin to call out. Are you just calling out which mob to hit next?
I mean it’s not like the “tank” is calling out for focused heals during a burst phase or something. Not that kind of game.
I’m curious as to how voice communication helps here.
Yea, I think I have run exactly two or three dungeons, because they were part of the story line and that was enough for me. Dungeons are predictive and repetitive and therefore, boring.
“There are two types of people in the world…and I don’t like them.”
If you ask me, Caudescus Manor is the worst dungeon of GW2.
There are times when <insert foulest word you know here> trash mobs literally destroy you, and then when you get to the boss, you kill him without any effort. Moreover, the first boss of path 3 is harder to kill than the final boss ! Clear disappointment to me.
So, the majority of the dungeon is completely unbalanced compared to other dungeons. Even in Sorrow’s Embrace, which has dredge (!!), the trash mobs are not even remotely as annoying as for CM.
Anyway, bottom line is : CM is completely unbalanced, no interesting boss fight, always the same path/boss, you’ll enjoy other dungeons much more.
I finished it yesterday, never gonna go back there again. Ever.
Well, it’s not like other dungeons are far better, actually. Dungeon gameplay is utterly dull, leveling is more of a challenge, actually. You just don’t die so often.
for every person who said “dungeons are ridiculous, way too hard”, there is probably a person who says “dungeons are way too easy, give me more challenge”. Just maybe, think about that for a sec.
The funny thing is, people who say “dungeons are ridiculous, way too hard” are probably people who have done them only maybe twice or a few times. Imo, the transition from that to “dungeons are ok” is pretty quick, esp if you get lucky going with a good pug. What most of them don’t understand is the level of gameplay between open-world pve and dungeons is drastically different. Maybe you all should try out the fire elemental in metrica province to get a taste of what a dungeon should feel like.
oh and seraph path is really fun and challenging. At first you have no idea what’s happening. But once you realize that getting the barrels has a higher priority for mobs than hitting you, it gets much easier. I’d reckon ac path 3’s burrow thing is gonna be much harder for people lacking in the dps department.
Don’t disturb me, I have a cat in me at the moment.
but yeah, it isnt an highly strategic game.
its an action rpg game, like diablo.
Are you serious? This game is NOTHING like diablo. The combat is completely different and diablo is a loot based game that requires zero combat skills.
It’s just a matter of getting used to dungeon play; they’re significantly more demanding than any other PvE in the game, and it takes an attitude shift to get used to that. In a reasonably effective group (In my experience, any PUG that is even slightly above average), encounters in dungeons versus Silver/Elite enemies take about 20 seconds, on average, per enemy.
In don’t feel that’s an unreasonable amount of time to kill the enemy; I think if they had any less HP, they’d be dead before they actually had a chance to present a threat to you. How much time do people think it should take to kill them?
(Note: I agree there are specific enemies that are just giant HP sinks, but those tend to be one-off encounters against certain bosses/minibosses – for example, the hunting dog that shows up in one path of CM, and to a lesser extent the Cave Troll in AC.)
but id like to see some weak mob swarms too; like 10-20 ettins or wolf packs.
mix in with one solid giant or such.
to make different skills useful and to feel slightly more heroic.
I hate to say it, but maybe this is the one area of the game that needs to be more trinity focused. It can be done in ways that are not dull. EQ2 for the most part had very challenging dungeons that were fun and challenging. What if dungeons were set up in a way that allowed for this type of gameplay and awarded armor specific to dungeons only much like the spvp armor is for that purpose only? It would be one way to satisfy need of a challenge, and make people want to get the cool dungeon gear a little more.
Or another idea since the above could lead to people/classes being left out due to not being the preferred class to take into a dungeon, make all classes able to have a damage ward and some better heals? that might help all around.
Dungeons are okay. The difference with them and generic PvE is the jump in hp and dmg output of enemies. Assuming one is new and are, at least, the level cap of dungeons (implying he/she have leveled multiple times in normal PvE and more comfortable with normal PvE situations), he/she is likely to feel the “difficulty” being out of place. My advise is keep at it for a few times. Once the experience running a dungeon sink in, you will probably have a more enjoyable time. Or even think that is too easy. Hate to say this but if you don’t like dungeons because it is too different from the generic PvE and you are not willing to “learn the ropes”, maybe dungeons are not for you.
Yep its sad I ain’t played in about 6 weeks because the dungeons just ain’t fun, and have been hoping for some changes so i can come back the main problem for me is the HUGE amount of health on mobs and boss’s it makes playing a chore and removes any fun also makes my character feel weak like I’m throwing cotton wool balls at them as opposed to arrows in the face. I’m not asking for 1 shot kills but atm there health is far to high.
1 other thing I’m unhappy about is medium skins to many coats, but that’s for the art dept the poor dungeon designers have had enough stick in the last couple months lol
I ain’t played in about 6 weeks because the dungeons just ain’t fun, and have been hoping for some changes so i can come back the main problem for me is the HUGE amount of health on mobs and boss’s it makes playing a chore and removes any fun also makes my character feel weak like I’m throwing cotton wool balls at them as opposed to arrows in the face. I’m not asking for 1 shot kills but atm there health is far to high.