Guild Wars 2

Hey. As we all know, Dungeons as we see them today are far from perfect – for some of you even they are hardly enjoyable. I believe that happened due to ArenaNET’s take on different style of mmorpg – resignating from using the so called ‘Holy Trinity’, making the gameplay more skill-based etc. However, the whole experience with dungeons is currently pretty bland. Don’t get me wrong I like the game a lot. Nevertheless I see that it has many flaws that are (luckily) improvable. Therefore, here are my ideas of imrpving the experience connected with DUNGEONS:

1. Strategy oriented BOSS battles. The battles with the big guys are currently all about dps, dps, dps, dodge, dodge, dodge. With the removal of tank/heal/dps it is imperative to add strategy elements to these battles – they have to be demanding. Many will probably flame me, but the good example is…well… WOW. In my one-year experience with this game I remember every time I had to do a new Instance I was to look up the correct way of beating each encounter or we had a briefing. Something not needed here. All you have to do is simply hack’n’slash the boss remembering to dodge. There is no teamwork apart from reviving downed allies. In order for those battles to be interesting you have to make them strategy based. You got that just right in GW1 ANet, why not here?

2. Adding tokens as drops. Let’s not kid anybody here. All people want to do is to get to the end as fast as possible skipping as many enemies as they can. Fighting trash is just a time-consumer. Not rewarding and not fun (considered that most of the groups are unnerving to fight). Adding tokens as drops would definitely solve that problem – people would fight standard enemies in hopes of getting some additional rewards.

3. Adding dungeon specific drops. In my honest opinion this is a must. The token system is nice but listen to that – once most people get the maximum gear they need what incentive do they have to run the dungeons again? You had that thing nailed in GW1 – I still remember doing Urgoz, The Deep, Domain of Anguish and Slayer’s Exile in hopes of getting the rare drops. It just makes people want to do the content again and again – the hope of getting what they need ex. a special weapon skin or armor. It’s simply rewarding. Everybody wants to feel that they accomplished something and have a trophy to prove that. Add special boss drops – some rare skins etc. – this would definitely make people do the dungeons more.

4. Weaken the trash mobs. This is in many times brutal. Although I run dungeons with competent people most of which know their characters fighting trash is NO fun. 10s fears, multi knockdowns – what is that? Sometimes you cannot even dodge the whole thing – you are dead in seconds. And some battles – I don’t if this is your idea or simply a miscalculation – require you to run into into mobs like wild pigs and whack away anything you see. I’m talking for example with TA Leurent fight. The most conscious idea is to pull one Knight at a time and do away with him. But NO. They all run up to you and if you try to pull they RESET. You have to actually glitch the game, run back and forth and try to get rid of them. So what are we supposed to do – do a Leeroy Jenkins on them? Instant death. The whole INVULNERABILITY thing simply killed one of the most important the strategy elements – PULL. With no crowd control all you can do is mindlessly whack at the enemies. In most cases I skip trash mobs whenever I can – as above no incentive to fight them and I risk losing my money on repairs – speaking of which…

5. Dungeons repair cost should be lower. In the current system you die, die, die and die. A LOT. That’s not the case with me but I know players whose dungeon silver reward covers the repair cost of the dungeon. Not only you have to run miles but pay for repairs… Don’t think it should be like that.

6. End reward SHOULD NOT be the only one. Imagine that: you play with friends, you do well, everything goes smoothly then at the last boss BAM! Disconnect… and somehow you cannot reconnect. All the effort WASTED. Another situation: as above but mid-dungeon you get announcement: the servers will go down in 10 mins! – there is now way you can finish the run in that time so again you time is wasted. I’m not speaking about people that just have to log out for some reason – their effort is also wasted. In current system you have to stick to your PC and finish the whole run – instead you are left with broken nerves, less money (repairs!) and some useless trash items.

That’s all from me for now. If any of you have other CONSTRUCTIVE ideas, please post them – also try to mark the numerically or in other way so we can easily distinguish them.

I do hope ANET takes all that we say into consideration. They made a great game but it NEEDS an extreme overhaul in some parts

Thank you for your patience

I can only echo the first notion. The only “hard” aspect in the dungeons are more often than not seeing small attack animations delivering lots of spike damage amongst a ton of particle effects, it’s cheap and applies the same to all fights which creates little to no variation.

I find that most bosses lack interesting mechanics or possibly side items to do other styles of fighting bosses. For example I hate bosses that are break the protect “totem, rock, charm w/e” then dps boss. Instead why aren’t there maybe special rifles or special whips or something that gives more flavors to the boss fights(some bosses have these mechanics, but why shouldn’t all of them have options) rather than just 1,1,1, 2, 1,1,1, roll, repeat.

I love mechanic based bosses like the guy in CoE who runs into walls, or the tree thing that you direct robots to blow up on him. That adds a little more thought to the fights and makes them interesting.

PvE mobs have a little too much health and honestly better if you just run past them and not even care. Dungeons runs can take a little too long to complete because of this. Stop padding dungeons with too many mobs with too much health.

I also notice bosses and mobs having a little too much AoE(or too high damage) and prevents players from melee or makes fights much easier if everyone is ranged, giganticus lupicus(sp?) from Arah is a prime example. This boss has way too many anti-melee mechanics and forces me to play ranged when i want to use my mystic hammer/GS i invested my time in.

This isn’t a problem just with dungeons; all of the “tough” enemies in the game basically hit so hard that they eliminate half the possible strategies in the game and take so much damage that you are bored of the fight by the end.

For example: I can apply protection to allies on my guardian. Then they get 1 shot. What is the point of that ability if it effectively does nothing?