Guild Wars 2

Let me first say that in Guild Wars 1 ArenaNet absolutely perfected how instances should be done. They were fun, balanced and took a fair time with many different objectives and things to do. Every instance required a different strategy and never really had a point where you would become bored. After experiencing GW2 I find the contrast between GW1’s and GW2’s instances quite disheartening to say at least. The instances in Guild Wars 2 have a huge flaw that totally breaks the fun for many:

Mobs are way, and way too tanky while offering zero strategical challange other than kiting and dodging once or twice.

Dungeons in GW2 are made artificially long by giving every random mob the health equivalent of Abaddon or Mallyx. I’m fine with them doing quite a bit of damage, but their health is absolutely ridiculous, makes dungeons feel like an artificial loading screen. The dungeon champions are even worse makes me temporarily feel like I’m playing an average free Korean mmo. This isn’t like Guild Wars, this is generating artificial gameplay time at the cost of quality.

Think back to those moments at Domain of Anguish or Urgoz’s Warren, which I consider some of the best instances. They were fun and especially DoA required a vast veriety of strategies to succeed because of the area debuffs. That is what I consider a challange, not having to kite and hit every single trash mob for 2 minutes ( which does not require any skill whatshowever ). What made them so enjoyable is that there were a ton of mobs and they did a lot of damage, but they also had a reasonable hp bar. This allowed you to create killing zones and allowed tanks to function properly. I prefer to wait 15 minutes outside of the dungeon gathering people for my ‘holy trinity’ group than to have no trinity and wait 2 minutes at every basic mob in the dungeon itself.

Now build variety is gone and strategy apart from kiting isn’t possible, please atleast make the process of going through the dungeon fun. Things like traps and puzzles are fun, defeating huge waves of enemies are fun, but standing still for 2 minutes on a virtual loading bar waiting for a trash mob to go down is simply NOT fun! This definitely needs to be looked at, it makes the endgame a huge pain to play instead of a challange like it should be.

Lower mob health means that the Damage role – especially melee Damage, which actually takes a risk to do what it does – will be more useful. Thus, I fully support this message. Trash mobs can be difficult, but they shouldn’t be dumb/slow difficult. Running out of endurance after properly and successfully dodging two hard-hitting attacks shouldn’t leave you with a trash mob at 95% health if you’re playing the Damage role, but that’s what’s happening.

I also fully support dungeons that are less about grinding down tanky mobs and more about other stuff, as was mentioned by the OP.

It felt pretty bad to me as well, considering the mobs are basically just nonstop spewing out a stream of dmg that WILL down you unless you’re mitigating all of it. I wish there were either more bigger/slower attacks or as you said, lower hp.

Blind fields are too good as it is lol.

Everyone who has experienced dungeons feels the same way. Putting loot out of the question, the mechanics at hand are no where to be seen. It’s like they just took monsters from their database, slapped them in and than changed the value of their health to be whatever ridiculous number they could come up with.

I hope dungeons get a overhaul because that is whats needed.

Agree. I had a much higher enjoyment of the high-number low-health mob style of Guild Wars. I know it encouraged a lot of tank and spank, but it was good old fun. It rewarded good aggro control and setting up danger zones. Maybe it’s because I’m used to that style of play that I feel like dungeons are super slow and every mob is a boss mob.

It also slows down what should otherwise be a fast gameplay experience. In GW1, it was all about fast execution and positioning. My experience so far as an Elementalist is to stand as far back as possible while a heavy armor class draws aggro and just mindlessly roll over my highest DPS element until the enemy dies 3 minutes later. Combat is very fast paced outside dungeons, but in dungeons themselves there is no fast paced execution.

your reference to gw1 adds credibility to your statements
doesn’t the stamina require a certain economy of skill though? dodging the wrong move doesn’t mean that much if the target is going to be dead soon anyway. i’ve got pretty limited explorable experience (the problems that have affected me the most have been player-caused…i’m the only limited support and nobody has cc…)

Lower health mobs and adding more importance to the dps role will leave us with nothing but what has made every other game stale to many, many people. That is what every game to date since wow has been about, “OMGDPSPEWPEW!” I really enjoy the thinking aspect of this game. If you can’t handle it and must have your facemash dps spam game, please for the love of god, go to one already made that way, do not demand devs turn yet another game into it.

The strategy in this game isn’t about kiting. It is about utilizing combos while staying alive. Go learn something about them, they are actually quite interesting and fun and can be used for such things as shields, confusions, cures, heals, vulnerability, which will help you stay alive while you OMGFACEMASHPEWPEW all over your keyboard.

I feeel that I should remind you that Guild Wars is still running and today DOASC groups are still going and the price of gemstones is relatively stable.

How people only have 2 dodges I dont know. I can crap out 4 wait 8 or do seconds and do again.

I can’t speak for GW1 dungeons, I only played PvP. But I definitely think that the PvE in GW2 is extremely weak. Is it because the holy trinity is gone? Absolutely not. The dungeon design is sloppy, that’s the bottom line. There is nothing wrong with requiring support/dps/toughness for dungeons. Since every class should, in theory, be able to fill any of these roles. The biggest mistake a lot of developers make in MMOs is not understanding that PvE and PvP can never share the same mechanics/progression and both be good.

Unfortunately, it seems like the entire system for PvE wasn’t particularly well thought out. The PvP systems work well, but there’s no progression to be done in PvE. The way gear progression works, by which I mean there is none, won’t keep anyone running dungeons past the slow grind towards a full armor set of whatever level 80 dungeon, and right now that looks like CoF because it’s quite easy. I mostly PvP and save up for legendary weapons, in the meantime I’m running CoF to get a full armor set, after which it will be pointless to do anything in PvE anymore.

The main problem is that they are trying to artificially lengthen the game by stretching 15 minutes of quality content over an hour just by increasing enemies’ health bars. Some people who are used to Korean grinding mmo’s might not have a problem with it, but after showing how it’s done with Guild Wars 1 this is a HUGE step backwards in game design philosophy and entertainment value.

This essentially makes their whole joke about “I swung a sword, I swung it again. Hey! I swung it again” really ironic. I was sitting in awe the first time I played a dungeon in this game, they can’t be serious.

“I swung a sword, I swung it again. Hey! I swung it again”

I don’t think Anet knew dungeons would end up this way when they made that trailer years ago.

I agree with the OP strongly. Now that the game out the door, they should work on further polish. Starting with a complete dungeon overhaul.

I have said this before, but yeah, the HP on mobs (mostly bosses) is extremely ridiculous. There is nothing fun about a 20 minute boss fight where you just avoid AoE and auto-attack 20 minutes long.

I’d really like to see this changed at some point, because right now I really do not feel like playing dungeons for the armor sets.

Has anyone in Arenanet played the Impossible Bosses custom map on Warcraft 3?

That’s what epic boss fights are in my head (though those were pretty difficult).

It feels basically like your strafing while pressing buttons non-stop without thinking for 20 minutes for everything in a dungeon and bosses just in the world.

Efaicia.3672:

Lower health mobs and adding more importance to the dps role will leave us with nothing but what has made every other game stale to many, many people. That is what every game to date since wow has been about, “OMGDPSPEWPEW!” I really enjoy the thinking aspect of this game. If you can’t handle it and must have your facemash dps spam game, please for the love of god, go to one already made that way, do not demand devs turn yet another game into it.

The strategy in this game isn’t about kiting. It is about utilizing combos while staying alive. Go learn something about them, they are actually quite interesting and fun and can be used for such things as shields, confusions, cures, heals, vulnerability, which will help you stay alive while you OMGFACEMASHPEWPEW all over your keyboard.

I strongly disagree that the strategy in this game isn’t about kiting. If you play ranged, you can absolutely OMGFACEMASHPEWPEW all over your keyboard. Your DPS uptime is nearly 100%, and enough enemy attacks are avoidable through the combination of endurance-dodging and kite-dodging that you do not have to spec for defense at all.

Go into melee, and the game is still about OMGFACEMASHPEWPEW, except that the enemies are the ones doing it. You can use every single avoidance skill you have, including all of your endurance-dodges, to cancel out genuinely hard-hitting attacks, and you will be left high and dry with no other option but to kite, and the mob will still have plenty of health left over.

Sure, combo fields might help. You know what helps more? Never being in melee range in the first place, and never having to actually put together a combo-dependent strategy because kiting works so well. And hey, you can activate combos with ranged specs too just to speed things up!

Granted, this isn’t true 100% of the time. Gimmick encounters, in their majestic equality, often prevent both ranged and melee alike from simply doing what they do. That’s not the point. The point is that all the other encounters prevent melee from doing what they do, but let ranged perform the thoughtless DPS-spam that you seem to be so forcefully against.

I’ve been in a dungeon. I’ve swapped to a rifle. I’m speaking from direct experience. If you genuinely dislike strategy-free DPS’ing, you should be campaigning ANet to take an extremely harsh look at ranged specs in higher-level PvE content.

Yeah, honestly I was really excited for dungeons in GW2 and they’ve all been really lackluster for me thus far. The Lovers were the only really exciting fight mechanic I’ve encountered, and even that is a “been there, done that” sort of mechanic. Keep them separate, kill adds. Whoo!

I wasn’t bored to tears, I guess, but it just felt shallow. Just hit trash mobs til they die, focus the important ones first, not a huge amount of strategy required. I thought dungeons were supposed to be cripplingly hard in GW2, not “zerg the boss and if you die spawn at a waypoint and run in” or “auto-attack for 3 minutes a pull”. Idunno. Hopefully with expansions they release more interesting content on the PvE side of things. W3 and sPvP will keep me content for quite some time.

Yep. Dungeons just don’t look interesting.
And taking in account all that ‘mini-dungeons’ spread around world where you don’t get rewards.. looks like dungeon department wasted money.