Guild Wars 2

From what I can tell, the vocal players on this forum do not quite appreciate the “nerf” to speed-clearing dungeons. A majority of the threads I have seen seem to just be pointing at the issues without offering appropriate feedback on how to improve the state of this decision. Others start out constructive, but quickly devolve. It would be nice to concentrate improvement suggestions in one place, so that the good ideas don’t get buried amongst the other threads.

First, I’ll throw out my suspected reason as to why the change was implemented in the first place: inflation. Currently, at level 80, each dungeon run rewards the players with approximately 50 silver. This introduces easily obtainable money into the economy that the gold sinks may not be able to soak up once the game’s populace at large starts using this method. In essence, if this continued the price of items would inflate because gold was too easy to make, which is what happened in GW1 and caused the game to be rather unfriendly to new players because the amount of money they needed to obtain items was rather daunting.

If ANet intends to keep the speed-clearing change in place, which they likely do, then perhaps some other changes could happen as well in order to remedy the lessened rewards overall that occurred as a result of this change. Just to throw out a few ideas:

• Generic Tokens from all dungeons that can be used on any dungeon set (in order to offset the amount of time added by the patch to get the large amount of tokens per dungeon required).
• Change the reward at the end of the dungeon to be non-gold based. Perhaps random exotics/rares, depending on the dungeon, not unlike those provided at map completion.
• Boost loot drop rates throughout the dungeon to give better incentive to participate.

By making dungeon rewards item-based; it should alleviate some of the economic concerns that may be stemming from speed clearing, as gold is not just appearing, but rather changing hands. That’s not to say that the rewards from the dungeons should be rare exotic skins; obviously there still needs to be highly valued items on the market. However, perhaps completing dungeons would provide a better chance at getting those rare skins than other methods.

This is merely just thinking about possibilities and I’d be interested to see what some of you have to think about these ideas and, perhaps, what else you may be able to think up. We’ve already got boss improvements coming somewhere along the road, so that should help make some of the duller encounters more fun and thus the dungeons more fun by extension.

Actually what might work well with Generic tokens is one of the following :

• Have a ‘drop’ that everyone gets at the end of a dungeon — a ‘completion medal’ of sorts. You can only have 1 of these at a time; in order to buy an item from that dungeon you need a decent amount of generic tokens plus one of these medals. This would require people to run the dungeon for more reward, but if you already have the Generic tokens you can buy items readily.

• If that’s too complicates, put the dungeon token vendor in the dungeon, after the last boss. This guy would only require generic tokens.

Both of these solve the issue of someone farming or simply doing runs on ‘easy’ dungeons and getting the look of loot from the extremely hard ones.

Actually thinking about it even more — having dungeons reward Karma and adding in the unique Dungeon token system ( 1 item per token drop — i.e. 1 item per run if you have enough Karma ) would perhaps be ideal.

I didn’t quite get why they didn’t use karma in the first place.

One aspect of dungeon rewards that I miss, is the acquisition of rare dungeon items from their respective chests. For example we were rewarded with diamonds and onyx gemstones in GW1, which is somewhat similar to the reward system we currently have in GW2. We also had a chance to get unique items from these chests. One example, is getting Cyndr’s Aegis from the Heart of the Shiverpeaks Dungeon.