Guild Wars 2

Compromise must be reached.

Tons of people are saying “The dungeons are too hard!”, and “Everyone should be able to experience them.”.

Tons of people are also saying “The dungeons are too easy!” and “You should have to work for your rewards.”

So how about this, folks. We nerf the existing Explorable dungeons so that more people can complete them. However, take away dungeon tokens, and in exchange increase the drop rate of Rares and Exotics. Give the hardcore players a new level of challenge that are even harder than the current Explorable modes: Hard modes. Make this the only way to earn the dungeon tokens, and on top of that even more chance of getting Rares and Exotics from these runs. Maybe even add in dungeon-specific unique drops in hard modes. Think unique-looking non-legendary weapons/armors/whatevers.

Sound good?

No. We have a group running around that apparently thinks everyone should be able to do something in an MMO. Even if they put in as little effort as possible.
Unless you want a terrible game, don’t compromise with the lazy ones that want things handed to them.
They are trying to apply the trinity to this game. Let them fail for not paying attention.

Xlore.9234:

No. We have a group running around that apparently thinks everyone should be able to do something in an MMO. Even if they put in as little effort as possible.
Unless you want a terrible game, don’t compromise with the lazy ones that want things handed to them.
They are trying to apply the trinity to this game. Let them fail for not paying attention.

With this system, people who only ran the Explorable modes would never get dungeon armor. There’s still an exclusive tier for learning how to play better, it’s just that now they get to at least experience the content without a huge skill barrier in place.

Time Glitch.2460:

Xlore.9234:

No. We have a group running around that apparently thinks everyone should be able to do something in an MMO. Even if they put in as little effort as possible.
Unless you want a terrible game, don’t compromise with the lazy ones that want things handed to them.
They are trying to apply the trinity to this game. Let them fail for not paying attention.

With this system, people who only ran the Explorable modes would never get dungeon armor. There’s still an exclusive tier for learning how to play better, it’s just that now they get to at least experience the content without a huge skill barrier in place.

That’s not the problem.
It would just be a never ending loop.
People would complain that they couldn’t do these elite dungeons and want those nerf ed too.
Give them an inch and they take a mile. They can learn, I’ve seen them get better.
I wiped with my team at level 55-70 on TA exp vines boss 10 times.
We finally pulled through and did it even though it seemed impossible and every time afterwards we had less and less problems.
They want to do the dungeon once, with as little difficulty as there can be and then get great rewards.
They are the same as the ones that want exotics to drop more often, but when you bring up that if that happens they won’t sell as much on the TP they suddenly back down.
Or the ones that want cultural armor to be cheaper, not thinking ahead to the fact that further in the future 100g won’t be a lot of money.
These people don’t think ahead, and they will probably quit in a month.
Why give them what they want?

I don’t understand the OP. The way I see it, every Dungeon has 3-4 different paths, each with a different difficulty level. They have good objectives, but the implementation is atrocious.

All they have to do is make Story Mode….“Story Mode”!!!

I’m looking forward to the challenge of Explorable but right now Story mode is ridiculously hard. Not challenging, because i’m a little disappointed with the boss fights
(basic comes to mind), they are just buffed way too hard and hit like no other!

Reduce HP and Hit Points in Story mode so it becomes fun, and not frustrating and expensive for very little reward!

Edit: Plus the step up in difficulty after spending 30 levels:

Waking drunk people up
Filling water troughs
Fixing fences
Catching bugs
Playing fetch with skelps

Plus some tough bosses….BUT there’s always sooo many players about you don’t even realise if your build or tactics are making that much of an impact!

Story mode should be the easy mode ran by PUGs, so the rewards need to be worthwhile.

Explorable mode should be the hard mode ran by experienced groups, so it needs to be made a lot harder because right now it’s not a challenge at all for a decent group.

But this doesn’t make sense, 90% of the groups are PUGs… so 90% of the people have 25% of the dungeon content to work with(only story mode), and only 10% of the people playing have the ability to clear 75% of the dungeon content(the 3 explorable paths)?

That needs to be flipped around.

Pick one or two paths for explorable mode that are hard mode and have the prestige rewards.

Pick one or two paths for explorable and put these on the same difficulty as story mode, but have some decent non-prestige rewards, maybe a new token that lets you get armor with the non-cool skins but with the same stats as the cool skins.

This way there is something for everyone.

OP i rly dont know where do u come with these things…99% of ppl that complain about dungeons dont complain that they are hard, they complain that they are boring and unrewarding.

PPL want hard but not in form of 20 mil hp with one shot attack along with red circles on the floor that u have to avoid. Thats boring and thats why ppl complain.

IMO this token kitten should be removed completly and put normal drop chances on armor in these dungeons. It may be frustrating not to get gear, but that moment when u kill something and that excitment when u looting is what makes u do it over and over again ( look at diblo 3 for example, thats only thing that makes that game running-chance of getting something good when u kill boss/mob ).

Also Dungeons should have items scaling with difficulty like in all other normal games…So Ascalonian catacombs drops armor with stats as they r now on best armors and then start scaling slightly up so arah drops 20-30% better stat armors.

I know some will say “this is not wow this is skilled based game” Yes i know, thats why you cant use pvm obtained items in spvp so i dont see the reason why wouldnt be proper items scaling and progression in pvm?

Also make them soulbound on equip so ppl do them for gold/items/helping friends/excitment etc and keep end game alive for long time.

story → easy meant for pugs. In it’s current form, dungeons doesn’t seem to satisfy this unless you are spec’d in vit/tough and running as a non-pug, and/or studying up about the dungeon out of game.
explorable → make it as difficult as you want, just reward adequately. (which we may be rewarded adequately and the rewards are just broken) Give it time and lets see what happens.

All they have to do is make Story Mode….“Story Mode”!!!

This would be a good start.
What they do with Exploration Modes is a total different story.

Story Mode should be doable by 70%-80% of the playerbase. Even if that means you have to nerf them to hell. If ArenaNet does not want the better players to mis-use StoryMode for farming gold and loot, then make the rewards diminishing. You can come up with a simple formula. E.g. something like:
Rewards for finishing a SM dungeon = ((dungeon level) / 2) * (1 / amount of times you finished this dungeon) * 1 silver).
Result:
AC first run = reward = 15s, second run = 7.5s, third run = 5s, etc.
CM first run = reward = 20s, second run = 10s, third run = 6.66s, etc
Arah first un = reward = 40s, second run = 20s, third run = 12.33s, etc.
Tweak as necessary. Now ArenaNet doesn’t have to be afraid lvl80s will farm StoryModes.

I am not in favor of the attitude “everybody has the right to see all content”.
However, in a leveling-game, I do think everybody has the right to see the dungeons during leveling. In GW2 you can not wait 10-20 levels to out-level and out-gear dungeons, so you can go back and see lower-level content. Therefor there must be another solution for players to see the leveling dungeons. And by ArenaNet’s own design, it means the SM dungeons must be made a lot easier.

I’m not arguing to nerf Exploration Modes.
Exploration Modes are a different story (no pun intended). But that doesn’t mean EM doesn’t need a big overhaul. For the majority of players, they are not fun. Even if you know you can get better, they are still not fun. EM needs tweaks like more acceptable damage, less spike damage, no unavoidable deaths, mobs signalling their special abilities in a more clear way, etc. And make them more rewarding or less grindy. And more incentives to run all different paths. (There was a good suggestion here yesterday. The thread got deleted. Someone suggested that you have to finish each path of a dungeon once, to get an item. That means: if a dungeon has 4 paths, and the set had 6 items, you need to run the dungeon 6×4=24 times to get the full set. You can tweak it, like requiring to run each path twice for an item. But the idea is very good).

The dungeons should be hard, the reward is the unique weapons and armor. Those are badges showing you completed that dungeon a difficult challenge. Nerfing a dungeon or creating an easy mode just kind of takes away from that even if they don’t get the armor.

They can get rare drops and loot from playing the game normally or save up and buy something special at the TP.

That being said the dungeons aren’t perfect I’m all for tweaks right now because the game is new. I think its great that people who design the dungeons are actually posting comments in this forum. We need to report bugs and things like that as we find them and things will smooth out. But no easy mode, no class participation trophies.

Xlore.9234:

No. We have a group running around that apparently thinks everyone should be able to do something in an MMO. Even if they put in as little effort as possible.
Unless you want a terrible game, don’t compromise with the lazy ones that want things handed to them.
They are trying to apply the trinity to this game. Let them fail for not paying attention.

You are 100% correct that everyone should be able to do something in an MMO. Was your $60 dollars more important than mine?

Tiered difficulty has thus far been the most successful way to handle the situation of allowing all users to see content, while keeping some prestige for the best of the best. Is tuning down story mode to allow 80-90% of players in to it going to hurt you in some way?

As someone who ran AC, CM (pre-patch) and TA story mode and cleared them with their first PUG, I think their difficulty is a bit off, but not by much. CM was definitely too easy, while AC was too hard. I’d say that the perfect sweet spot in difficulty would be TA.

Dungeons, even story mode ones, shouldn’t be cleared without a little bit of effort. Nothing too hard, mind you, but there should be just a little bit of coordination, not 5 players all individually spamming their l33t “dps rotation”. You could say that most of our playerbase wouldn’t be allowed to “experience the content” if the skill floor doesn’t get lowered to “button mashers” tier, but what’s the pleasure in a fight you just won if all you were doing was mashing keys? I enjoyed TA and AC way more than CM.

Voxnor.1657:

Is tuning down story mode to allow 80-90% of players in to it going to hurt you in some way?

I don’t have anything against another, lower tier of difficulty, except for the fact that it would take the developers time/resources to develop that, and I’d rather them work on something else. Also, where are you pulling those numbers from? Forums are not an accurate way to analyze statistics, and even here I’d say that the % of people complaining about difficulty isn’t even near what you said. The lower tier of difficulty would be implemented for, at best, 20% of our playerbase, the one who pretends to do dungeons with their brains switched off. Are you seriously trying to tell me that 90% of the players couldn’t decently clear TA story mode?

Honestly the current set up is the worst implementation of an “instance” set up i have ever seen in a game. I have been in groups of lvl 80’s doing AC Story and group wiping over and over to the point where the game isnt even fun anymore….whats the thought process here?

Dilemma:

There are very few elite players. What would you put it at? 1% of population?
Pointless to reward 1% of customer base in ANY business unless these business customers are VIPs.

The majority of other players want things handed easy to them because this game boasted ‘no grind,… never have to go collect 10 things and hand em in’. The success of this game is built on something that is so different. There aren’t many MMOs that actually hand players things on dishes but this game does it to an extent.

Please don’t pretend that elite players stand on a better moral ground for playing a game better than another person. Such stuff should be left to games that have subscriptions and hardcore dedication and not a game that has successfully appealed to so many casual gamers who just want to have fun.

Wolfheart.1938:

I don’t have anything against another, lower tier of difficulty, except for the fact that it would take the developers time/resources to develop that, and I’d rather them work on something else. Also, where are you pulling those numbers from? Forums are not an accurate way to analyze statistics, and even here I’d say that the % of people complaining about difficulty isn’t even near what you said. The lower tier of difficulty would be implemented for, at best, 20% of our playerbase, the one who pretends to do dungeons with their brains switched off. Are you seriously trying to tell me that 90% of the players couldn’t decently clear TA story mode?

You’re perfectly welcome to wish that they’d rather work on something else. But, if you’ll allow me, i’d like to use WoW as a hisorical example (which I believe is fair, given its popularity and years in development).

Take a peek at the percentage differences between a normal raid, and the looking for raid tool (and please read the subtext before instantly quoting me the 34% and moving on):

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/2614-Dragon-Soul-and-Firelands-Statistics-Blue-Posts-Poll?page=8

Now, if your unfamaliar with it – the raid finder tool, even when just introduced, provided a difficulty of content that had a VERY low learning curve, and resulted in almost zero deaths to even new players within the content. If you check on that graph – over 8.5 times as many characters have run and completed that content.

Is my 80/90% estimate above pure guestimate? Absolutely. But historically, it very well may be accurate.

You make a good point, and altough the guestimate % still seems too high I can understand that a decent portion of the playerbase isn’t able to clear SM dungeons in their current implentation. Let’s leave it at this, since I don’t think we can really gauge the proportions and it’s not really helpful either.

What really bothers me is the amount of exagerations going around. See above crimson and xielkino to confim my point. You see, I’m not an “elite” player by any means, I think I’m pretty average as far as “skill” goes. When I run a SM dungeon I don’t prepare before-hand, don’t respec, don’t bring specific/good gear and group everyone regardless of their class. Still I got through AC (whose difficulty, imo, should be slightly lowered), CM (pre-patch you could do it with your eyes closed), and TA with relative ease and little-to-zero wipes

All I do is call a target, read the text under the enemies, don’t overaggro and write some lines in /party when a particularly tough boss/trash requires a strategy ( “kite the melees, focus the rangeds” or “equip condition removals for this fight” are good examples). I don’t think this classifies me as an “elite/hardcore/pro gamer” but rather as an average mmo-player. Mind you, my PUGs weren’t perfect: one guy in TA kept dying, yet we made it through.

Now, who am I to judge how easy/hard SM dungeons should be? Nobody. You want Anet to lower their difficulty? Fine to me, I’ll start to play explorable dungeons anyways. But when doing so, keep in mind (I really hate to be that guy but I have to do it) that dungeons are impossible for you because you have yet to understand the basics of your class/the game and are playing with your brain switched off.

tl;dr
Should SM dungeons be faceroll-easy? I don’t care, as long as there’s an intermediate options for players like me who aren’t yet ready for explorables but would be bored by less difficult story modes.