Guild Wars 2

TL;DR in bold on the bottom.

In BWE2 I played AC-Story mode as Guardian. Sure it was fun. Sure it was hard. We all know that.

So after I played my main (Mesmer) up to level 70 on the release-build I decided to visit a dungeon. Since I’ve already played through AC in beta I decided to go the next dungeon level-wise. Caudecus’s Manor (I’m pretty sure I spelled that wrong but I’m too lazy to look it up so I’ll say CM from now on). I picked up a group of 4 other randoms. We finished the dungeon fairly easily. Most of you who have already done CM will know that it is not a very long dungeon.

So we stood there with this “That’s it?” feeling as we all got the (crappy) final reward. Someone had to do something so it was me who asked: “Wanna try explorable mode?”
A bunch of “why not?”s later we went in explorable mode. We picked the Asura-route (I won’t spoiler anything more) and we played. We wiped against bosses. We wiped against normal mobs. But every time we wiped and retried we got better. We got further. And bosses went down. We learned to play together and against specific threats.

Then the shock.
Two rooms in a row FULL of enemy mobs. We wiped. Multiples times. Usually didn’t kill one single enemy at a try. We were shattered. Then one of us got the great idea to run by. I grabbed my Mass Invisibility and we rushed by. Some died. I unpacked my portal and got them to where my team is. We wiped a few times between the first and second room. Then we made it through the second room full of enemies with the same strategy.

Endboss. We wiped. Back to waypoint in front of the rooms of death. This time I ran by the enemies alone (with a swiftness from one of the Warriors and my invis) and portaled my whole team after me. I felt so great not only being useful but CRUCIAL to the success of the mission. I have literally NO idea how else we could’ve passed those groups. Maybe there’s a trick to it we didn’t discover so for our team it was crucial.

Then the endboss…again. I wrote down what I’ve observed the first time. Told me team what I think we can do to avoid the same fate. Then we went for it. We all knew. Who is DEAD can’t recover and run all the way from the waypoint because there are large groups mobs between us and there. Some of us died (when I say dead I mean dead…not downed). The boss had even more attacks than I prepared my team for. We didn’t only manage to overcome those threats without being prepared for them, we also managed to do full rezzes (from death, not from downed) in the middle of a kinda hard bossfight.

I don’t CARE what loot I got from this boos. What the dungeon-reward was. I don’t care how much I’ve spend to repair my armor. I’ve had SO much fun playing this and overcoming our weaknesses. Figuring out what to do…as a TEAM.

I’ve also done some TA runs since then and I finished the dungeon at the end of the personal story. But this experience I had in CM is something I will never forget. So much fun, so much thinking.

So please. Don’t make any dungeons easier. I know it’s hard to beat the explorable mode of some dungeons with a group of players you don’t know (I think TA in exp. is too easy after the first boss, I’ve only played the upper route though). But trust me. As long as they are smarter than a piece of toast you will have fun. And isn’t it either fun or challenge the thing we strive for when we game? Dungeons provided me with both.

Ps. If someone knows a trick how to get past those enemies without exploiting stealth and portals…feel free to tell me.

My experience is similar. I would much rather be faced with a genuine challenge of strategy and teamwork that must be outskilled and out-thought, than be faced with the potentiality of loot.

I like the general difficulty of the dungeons (played them all). However, there are some really strange design choices that disrupt the flow of progression in a way that doesn’t make sense. For example, in Honor of the Waves explorable path 2, some of the bosses have some decent AI, and their tricks are typically non-threatening once you figure it out, but they have an unnecessarily large amount of health. Even though my team has high DPS, these bosses can take anywhere from 10-20 minutes and you’re just standing there bored out of your mind.

My dungeon group once found TA to be too difficult with all the volatile blossoms, but once we memorized where they were and started killing them effectively, the runs went a lot smoother. We considered the dungeon to be hell, and some of our members felt like they didn’t want the TA skins anymore, but now, TA is part of our rotation and they’re aiming for that goal again.

Lightrayne.7829:

My dungeon group once found TA to be too difficult with all the volatile blossoms

Don’t remind me.
I always die because of those volatile blossoms. Being a staff-mesmer makes you almost unable to kill those things. Your autoattack misses them a lot (“obstructed” on plain sight my a**) and if you hit they need two hits to go down.
Never forget that they are good when you’re downed though since they go down with one hit of your downed-spells (at least for me) and insta-rally you.

Explorable modes are supposed to be a challenge for experienced groups, and too hard to beat for pugs.

I’ve yet to come across an explorable mode that we didn’t beat THE FIRST TRY. So they fail to live up to the “intended” difficulty standard. On subsequent runs I almost always clear dungeons without a single wipe. They’re still a challenge, but considering I see a wipe maybe in 1 in 10 dungeon runs they’re really not that challenging.

Cerise.9045:

Explorable modes are supposed to be a challenge for experienced groups, and too hard to beat for pugs.

I’ve yet to come across an explorable mode that we didn’t beat THE FIRST TRY. So they fail to live up to the “intended” difficulty standard. On subsequent runs I almost always clear dungeons without a single wipe, this means they’re not really challenging at all.

I feel that GW2 is a tad too easy in general. DE’s, hearts, the personal story AND dungeons all suffer from this.
I have had struggles in CM on that Asura-branch and we were close to giving up when we faced this huge group we bypassed later.
But in overall the game feels a little bit too easy for my taste. But it at least feels challenging when playing explorable’s with PUG’s so I’m fine for now.

yea cause whole idea that you should die, rez, rush boss, die rez rush boss, ect ect ect is a great concept… oh not its not >> sorry i just dont see it the same way. When i run a dungeon i want a boss is feesable to beat and i dont have to worry about getting one shot because i sneezed….

Mirodir.1672:

Cerise.9045:

Explorable modes are supposed to be a challenge for experienced groups, and too hard to beat for pugs.

I’ve yet to come across an explorable mode that we didn’t beat THE FIRST TRY. So they fail to live up to the “intended” difficulty standard. On subsequent runs I almost always clear dungeons without a single wipe, this means they’re not really challenging at all.

I feel that GW2 is a tad too easy in general. DE’s, hearts, the personal story AND dungeons all suffer from this.
I have had struggles in CM on that Asura-branch and we were close to giving up when we faced this huge group we bypassed later.
But in overall the game feels a little bit too easy for my taste. But it at least feels challenging when playing explorable’s with PUG’s so I’m fine for now.

Too easy… compared to what? I’ve played WoW and this is like a sparkling breath of fresh air.

Of course if you have a group that plays together often and puts a strategy together that works – ultimately you should be doing fine if you are well oiled machine. Then the challenge comes from PvP

Too easy… compared to what? I’ve played WoW and this is like a sparkling breath of fresh air.

You’re right. It is indeed challenging AND hard compared to most other games. I always played a healer in WoW-dungeons because I felt like this is the only role that really makes and breaks a dungeons. I’ve duo’ed a lot of bosses with my tank-friend alone from 25% down because our other 3 people were too stupid and ran into AoE’s where even the best healer couldn’t save them anymore. Playing tank was also fun, DPS-classes/specs were super boring to me.
This is also a reason why I love gw2. I get to be the healer. I get to be the tank. I get to be the DPS. All at ONCE…and I have to decide in a second if I rather dish out damage, prevent a mate from being hit (tank)/or heal a mate or myself. And every second I have to decide again. If I pick the wrong thing it might cost us the fight and makes us wipe.
That’s how it is supposed to be and how it should be in every good MMO. There can’t be classes that can just sleep on their keyboards without letting their team wipe, even in heroic. (Yes, WoW-DPS’ers, I’m talking to you!)

The game is hard. But I personally wish for even more, almost unbeatable, challenge. The harder the challenge felt the better I feel once I made it through.

I’m probably spoiled because I played Dark Souls for a bit right before GW2 was released.

I completely understand there are people who think dungeons as of now are too hard. And I would appreciate if A-Net would create an easy-mode for them, with less tokens (maybe half). They should be allowed to play the game at their own pace WITHOUT having to miss out all those skins you can only get in dungeons. BUT it should always take less time to farm normal mode (as it is now) dungeons if you’re only in for the tokens.

But if they nerf the dungeons in general I would be VERY unpleased because I like the dungeons as they are now.

I can agree with the OP. No one wants to make them easier per say but they want the loot to be on par with the difficulty. This is great what you had to do but, doing it five times will it still be fun? What about even more? Eventually it will come to a point where it is not fun because the fun part was learning how to actually beat the dungeon and cooperate as a group. The risk reward is not high enough by any standards. And while you could care less about loot the first few times because it is fun, eventually you’ll be wanting something for your efforts. And that is where the problem lies.

I’d love for them to add a 4th path on explorable… a skull and crossbones DEATH DEATH DEATH dungeon. Something that 80% of the people will never be successful at doing.

I like challange, though some paths should reward more tokens as they are harder to others. You don’t have too much of incentive to do them rather than the 15 “first of the day” tokens and even then some paths are so kitten hard people aren’t gonna do it.

Mirodir.1672:

TL;DR in bold on the bottom.

In BWE2 I played AC-Story mode as Guardian. Sure it was fun. Sure it was hard. We all know that.

So after I played my main (Mesmer) up to level 70 on the release-build I decided to visit a dungeon. Since I’ve already played through AC in beta I decided to go the next dungeon level-wise. Caudecus’s Manor (I’m pretty sure I spelled that wrong but I’m too lazy to look it up so I’ll say CM from now on). I picked up a group of 4 other randoms. We finished the dungeon fairly easily. Most of you who have already done CM will know that it is not a very long dungeon.

So we stood there with this “That’s it?” feeling as we all got the (crappy) final reward. Someone had to do something so it was me who asked: “Wanna try explorable mode?”
A bunch of “why not?”s later we went in explorable mode. We picked the Asura-route (I won’t spoiler anything more) and we played. We wiped against bosses. We wiped against normal mobs. But every time we wiped and retried we got better. We got further. And bosses went down. We learned to play together and against specific threats.

Then the shock.
Two rooms in a row FULL of enemy mobs. We wiped. Multiples times. Usually didn’t kill one single enemy at a try. We were shattered. Then one of us got the great idea to run by. I grabbed my Mass Invisibility and we rushed by. Some died. I unpacked my portal and got them to where my team is. We wiped a few times between the first and second room. Then we made it through the second room full of enemies with the same strategy.

Endboss. We wiped. Back to waypoint in front of the rooms of death. This time I ran by the enemies alone (with a swiftness from one of the Warriors and my invis) and portaled my whole team after me. I felt so great not only being useful but CRUCIAL to the success of the mission. I have literally NO idea how else we could’ve passed those groups. Maybe there’s a trick to it we didn’t discover so for our team it was crucial.

Then the endboss…again. I wrote down what I’ve observed the first time. Told me team what I think we can do to avoid the same fate. Then we went for it. We all knew. Who is DEAD can’t recover and run all the way from the waypoint because there are large groups mobs between us and there. Some of us died (when I say dead I mean dead…not downed). The boss had even more attacks than I prepared my team for. We didn’t only manage to overcome those threats without being prepared for them, we also managed to do full rezzes (from death, not from downed) in the middle of a kinda hard bossfight.

I don’t CARE what loot I got from this boos. What the dungeon-reward was. I don’t care how much I’ve spend to repair my armor. I’ve had SO much fun playing this and overcoming our weaknesses. Figuring out what to do…as a TEAM.

I’ve also done some TA runs since then and I finished the dungeon at the end of the personal story. But this experience I had in CM is something I will never forget. So much fun, so much thinking.

So please. Don’t make any dungeons easier. I know it’s hard to beat the explorable mode of some dungeons with a group of players you don’t know (I think TA in exp. is too easy after the first boss, I’ve only played the upper route though). But trust me. As long as they are smarter than a piece of toast you will have fun. And isn’t it either fun or challenge the thing we strive for when we game? Dungeons provided me with both.

Ps. If someone knows a trick how to get past those enemies without exploiting stealth and portals…feel free to tell me.

I’m always the first in line for difficult content. Like hardcore difficult. But dungeon encounters are “difficult” because of mob’s big HP pools and massive damage they deal. That’s cheap.

I want encounters to be difficult because enemies are “intelligent”, and their play forces you to think, develop smart strategies, use ALL your skills (hamstring, portals, barriers, knockdowns, dazes, blinds etc.) and require close teamwork. I want the enemies to bring out the best in you.

So ANet needs to come up with more intelligent AI, more complex mob encounters (not to mention bosses), remove GY rushing and integrate good rewards because, while you may not care about them, I and many others do.

Mirodir.1672:

… and portaled my whole team after me. I felt so great not only being useful but CRUCIAL to the success of the mission. I have literally NO idea how else we could’ve passed those groups.

Yeah it sounds like awesome game design that you NEED a mesmer to go past those two groups.

Moss.5371:

Yeah it sounds like awesome game design that you NEED a mesmer to go past those two groups.

This is ONE of the ways you can do it, my group simply chilled/immobilized/snared the entire group and killed em slowly with a lot of kiting.
Hard, but very doable.
So yea, it’s awesome design that you can do encounters different ways.
Even trash, because who ever said that trash has to be trivial? Heck, I’ve found some trashpacks to be more difficult than some bosses but that’s the beauty of it, it means you always have to be on your toes instead of mindlessly spamming a max dps rotation.

It’s not Arenanet’s fault that people can’t think outside of the box.

The dungeons are unimaginative and uninspiring, which is a shame because the rest of the game is great. In their attempt to create encounters without the trinity they’ve given us boss fights that are at best zerg fests with some dodging, then to give the illusion of “difficulty” they throw in some one shots.

I hope they tweak the dungeons because at the moment they are the least appealing thing in the game.

….
All bosses are perfectly doable in 1 shot without zerging, if you zerg, you choose to zerg, and then you come complain that you HAD to zerg, instead you could regroup, figure out what went wrong, fix it, and go again.

But I guess creative thinking is too much to ask for.

The thing about it is, once you learn how to play with combos and everything they offer, as well as getting the wow style trinity out of your head, the dungeons become easy. Almost too easy. Try it and you’ll see, without having to zerg, or even dying, to anything.
You are getting one shot? Why? Do not get hit and you wont get one shot. Wow, that was easy.

I like the challenge of Explorable Modes, its a lot of fun trying come up with a strategy with your friends. I do think Arah should have been harder. Especially an Elder Dragon, I think each Elder Dragon fight should be near unbeatable. Zhaitan was a disgrace. He didn’t really do anything. Except watch himself die.

Dobbelsteen.9273:

This is ONE of the ways you can do it, my group simply chilled/immobilized/snared the entire group and killed em slowly with a lot of kiting.

I haven’t done it myself. Just wanted to point, OP made it sound like there is only one way to do it, with a mesmer.
Kiting sounds fun too. Not.
I like being in melee, and melee is suicide in these dungeons.

Moss.5371:

Dobbelsteen.9273:

This is ONE of the ways you can do it, my group simply chilled/immobilized/snared the entire group and killed em slowly with a lot of kiting.

I haven’t done it myself. Just wanted to point, OP made it sound like there is only one way to do it, with a mesmer.
Kiting sounds fun too. Not.
I like being in melee, and melee is suicide in these dungeons.

Reflects, blinds, interupts, shields ..oh, you only have 1 shield ability? did you know there are several others that you can trigger through combos? That should make staying in melee much easier. There are 5 people in your group, each of which have access to at the VERY LEAST 1 blind 1 knockback/down, and interupts, that, at the VERY LEAST, is up to 15! control abilities that will make it easier to stay in melee.

Efaicia.3672:

Reflects, blinds, interupts, shields ..oh, you only have 1 shield ability? did you know there are several others that you can trigger through combos? That should make staying in melee much easier. There are 5 people in your group, each of which have access to at the VERY LEAST 1 blind 1 knockback/down, and interupts, that, at the VERY LEAST, is up to 15! control abilities that will make it easier to stay in melee.

So instead of “tanking” a mob, we now have to “control” it. Because if you’re hit you’re dead. Fine.
To me this just sounds like ping-ponging, kiting, and chaos. So I guess this is not for me

Mirodir.1672:

TL;DR in bold on the bottom.

Then the shock.
Two rooms in a row FULL of enemy mobs. We wiped. Multiples times. Usually didn’t kill one single enemy at a try. We were shattered. Then one of us got the great idea to run by. I grabbed my Mass Invisibility and we rushed by. Some died. I unpacked my portal and got them to where my team is. We wiped a few times between the first and second room. Then we made it through the second room full of enemies with the same strategy.

Ps. If someone knows a trick how to get past those enemies without exploiting stealth and portals…feel free to tell me.

actually, you can get past them without stealth on asura walking in the right places

I’m confused here, for those who are saying the dungeons are too easy, are you talking story or explorable? Because there are definitely some interesting/challenging story modes. There are also some explorable modes that are easier than 80% of the story mode dungeons, but then you have explorable mode Arah. Go sit in that place clearing it for 2.5 hours (if your group doesn’t suck and you picked the most reasonable/easiest path) and try and tell me that everything is fine and dandy with dungeon design as a whole.

Here is a link to our experience in The Seer path of Arah explorable. Half of the time it wasn’t even the fact that the dungeon was “to hard” or “to easy,” it was more so a matter of poorly tested mechanics, mob health, and bad tuning. I don’t think fighting a boss for 20+ minutes is allowed to be called challenging or epic because he cant kill you if you’re properly specced, yet he has so much HP that you can’t kill him in a reasonable amount of time.

If a mob hasn’t killed you within 2 minutes because you’ve mastered whatever silly mechanic he might or might not have going for him, it should probably be close to dropping dead, if not dead already. For bosses this number can probably be increased to 5-7 minutes. Take Giganticus Lupicus in any path of explorable Arah for example. He has many ways to royally screw your day up (some of them like the bouncing auto attack – green and black ball of poison – have very inconsistent graphics as to if it will hit you or not to boot) but I don’t believe I should be fighting him for 20 minutes because our group isn’t 5 overpowered Shortbow Rangers auto-attacking with a machine gun for a bow stacking bleeds like it was going out of style. The mechanics have clearly been mastered if we haven’t died within a couple minutes of him using them, why drag it out if he can’t kill us?

Kilroy Avarth.7309:

Mirodir.1672:

TL;DR in bold on the bottom.

Then the shock.
Two rooms in a row FULL of enemy mobs. We wiped. Multiples times. Usually didn’t kill one single enemy at a try. We were shattered. Then one of us got the great idea to run by. I grabbed my Mass Invisibility and we rushed by. Some died. I unpacked my portal and got them to where my team is. We wiped a few times between the first and second room. Then we made it through the second room full of enemies with the same strategy.

Ps. If someone knows a trick how to get past those enemies without exploiting stealth and portals…feel free to tell me.

actually, you can get past them without stealth on asura walking in the right places

We always got spotted when we ran without stealth. Some went through, some died. I had to go back and portal the rest.
We had no Asura in our team though…but I don’t think race matters much.

Mirodir.1672:

I don’t CARE what loot I got from this boos. What the dungeon-reward was. I don’t care how much I’ve spend to repair my armor. I’ve had SO much fun playing this and overcoming our weaknesses. Figuring out what to do…as a TEAM.

This is really the answer for all those people asking what the point of dungeons is, complaining about their difficulty and lack of epic loot rewards. ANet made the game to be fun to play as they see it, and I suspect a lot of their customers agree with them.

There’s no point in grinding away at a dungeon you like to get better gear because that’s not the kind of game the developers at ANet wanted to play; they wanted to play a game they enjoyed. I want to play a game I enjoy, and I do enjoy this game immensely.

Dungeons are difficult, yes. I’ve wiped hard on some dungeon paths, yes. My mesmer power/precision build gets beaten to a bloody pulp by some mobs if I’m not careful, yes. But you know what, I’m not playing dungeons because at the end there’s some golden treasure that I have to torture myself to get to; I play because I like the combat system, I love that skillful play will make me an effective, contributing member of my party and that coordination and communication turns a wholly impossible foe into a challenge that’s just sokittensatisfying to beat.

DirtyHoudini.2917:

I can agree with the OP. No one wants to make them easier per say but they want the loot to be on par with the difficulty. This is great what you had to do but, doing it five times will it still be fun? What about even more? Eventually it will come to a point where it is not fun because the fun part was learning how to actually beat the dungeon and cooperate as a group. The risk reward is not high enough by any standards. And while you could care less about loot the first few times because it is fun, eventually you’ll be wanting something for your efforts. And that is where the problem lies.

You do realize that you do get rewards in the form of awesome looking gear right? I dunno if you want higher stats for ????, but this content was made with the current gear in mind. So you actually do get rewarded.

Pallar.5728:

Mirodir.1672:

I don’t CARE what loot I got from this boos. What the dungeon-reward was. I don’t care how much I’ve spend to repair my armor. I’ve had SO much fun playing this and overcoming our weaknesses. Figuring out what to do…as a TEAM.

This is really the answer for all those people asking what the point of dungeons is, complaining about their difficulty and lack of epic loot rewards. ANet made the game to be fun to play as they see it, and I suspect a lot of their customers agree with them.

There’s no point in grinding away at a dungeon you like to get better gear because that’s not the kind of game the developers at ANet wanted to play; they wanted to play a game they enjoyed. I want to play a game I enjoy, and I do enjoy this game immensely.

Dungeons are difficult, yes. I’ve wiped hard on some dungeon paths, yes. My mesmer power/precision build gets beaten to a bloody pulp by some mobs if I’m not careful, yes. But you know what, I’m not playing dungeons because at the end there’s some golden treasure that I have to torture myself to get to; I play because I like the combat system, I love that skillful play will make me an effective, contributing member of my party and that coordination and communication turns a wholly impossible foe into a challenge that’s just sokittensatisfying to beat.

Dungeons are NOT fun to play, that’s exactly the point. Since you obviously missed it, here are the two reasons for it:

1) no drop chance loot – this eliminates the randomness and the expectation/surprise factor when something awesome drops for you. There is no real incentive to do dungeons, at least not more than once.

2) the “difficulty” you speak of is artificial. No one here objects difficult content, but we want it achieved without 987897907080 HP mobs who can kill you in one or two hits. We want intelligent encounters with some in-depth mechanics, complex encounters we need to learn and develop strategies for.