Guild Wars 2

Recently there have been some posts complaining that the rewards from dungeons are too low now, and suggestions that there should be a single, unified dungeon currency. I agree with the first point, given the increase in difficulty of the easy paths, and whilst I don’t personally like the idea of a single token type for all dungeons, I can see that this idea has some merit.

I’ve also read a lot of posts where people are moaning “I can’t make money any more, because CoF path 2 can’t be facerolled!”, or just generally stating how dungeons are too hard (both story and ex), or pointing out it will take a while to get a full set of armor from a single dungeon.

Firstly, CoF path 2 was waaaaaay too easy to begin with. I actually think Anet waited too long to buff it up, the CoF armor is already seriously common, and wearing it doesn’t show that you’ve achieved anything, only that you know how to move and attack. This is a shame, since the CoF armor DOES look nice, and SHOULD be something you can show off, and feel a kitten wearing. Oh well, too late for that now.

On the second point, IMHO story mode is not hard. I will admit my first ACsm with a pug was a horrific experience… Dem lovers. But I went back a little later with some random guys from my guild, who never played together before, and we finished it with ease, about 5 downs between the lot of us, none of which were me. Ive done most of the other sm’s since, with no one in our party having done them before, and have generally died only once, or not at all. Why did it get so much easier? I was a higher level sure, but not much, and the group was essentially a pug, so either I just got some bad players the first time, or my experience in explorables helped me. Yes, they are harder than world PvE, but once you do a few story modes or explorables you should find that they are really quite easy.
I think many people’s problem with sm may be due to their expectation. In most other mmos you get a pocket healer, and predictable aggro, so if you are dps you can stand around, hitting your rotation and not really worrying about damage (i know it can be harder than that, but remember this is base dungeon difficulty, you really wanna tell me you had to pay max attention in non-heroic 5 man dungeons?). In gw2 you have to be a jack of all trades really, sure you can spec for dps/support/survivability/cc, but you will still have to self heal mainly, step out of melee if you are taking too much dmg, watch out for the tells of dangerous attacks (and learn these, mainly by getting downed by them), rez allies, watch out for aoe circles… the list goes on.
That might seem like a lot, but if you play through a few dungeons you will probably find that you’ve learned it all, almost by accident!

tl;dr: l2p! But I mean that seriously, and not condescendingly. Did you really expect to buy a new game, which actively tries to be different to it’s peers and instantly be good at it?

I need 2 posts for this, please see below

Explorables ARE hard. I’ll get that out there. They are intended to be. A net has said many times that they intended them for top end players, who are well organised and looking for a challenge. I think they have delivered; you really need to take your time in ex, and learn the mechanics for each one. Cookie cutters might as well just give it up, trying to tank and spank every encounter will just see you dead. 
I started running some explorables with some more guildies shortly after my first sm experience. There’s probably about 10 of us who regularly do ex, so we don’t always have the same team, and we often have multiples of the same professions. We don’t use voice chat, but we do discuss why we have failed an encounter before trying it again in party chat. We have one person who calls targets, although sometimes others might if we feel the designated caller has missed something. None of us have full exotic gear, and some of us aren’t even 80, yet we have done the majority of explorables (and by that I mean paths, not just 1 per dungeon). Everyone has had to adapt their play style at one time or another, swapping weapons/traits/armor to deal with specific fights is not uncommon.
A couple of encounters have been truly hellish, but getting through them was that much more satisfying, and I can honestly say that right now explorables are my favorite part of the game.

tl;dr: They’re hard because they are meant to be, and I personally love it.

Finally on the cost of a full set of dungeon gear; why do people even want to get this fast? Remember exotic armor is the top tier, and so essentially what you are getting from your favorite dungeon is both the best gear, AND the skin you like, which should be a badge of honor which has people going “:o that guy is the boss of dungeon x!!!”. Remember getting nice skins and titles is the end game, since it isn’t too hard to stump up the cash to get exotics, and the stats aren’t that much better than rares anyway. Do you really want to get to 80, farm for 2 days, then say “ok, game done”?.
Also, compare doing a few dozen dungeon runs to what you have to do to get a top tier weapon with a prestige skin (a legendary weapon), and give your thanks that Anet doesnt want you to spend 10 years going after armor!

I know I’ve compared gw2 to other mmos (read wow) in the above, and it may seem like I’m dissing it, but I am not. I like wow, it’s the best at what it does, and what it does works and is popular. All I am saying is that gw2 is different, by design, and should be treated as such.

I am also well aware that this will probably end with me receiving a torrent of abuse from people who don’t share my views (its an mmo forum, after all), but I’m cool with that.

I like what you’ve done with dungeons Anet (though maybe a couple of encounters should be tweaked?). Thanks for a great game, and keep up the good work!!!

You forgot to add a Potato at the end How dare you forget! Long post and no Potato!

But yes, you cant expect to be the best in GW2 within 24hours.

The main problem i’m finding is that everyone whining in the forums seem to think dungeons are the games main source of end game gear, it isn’t, not by a long shot. Anyone can buy a full set of exotic gear simply running story mode dungeon for the money at the end, farm materials to get them crafted, or simply spending karma to get the max stat gear. From the look of it allot of people here seemed to have hit 80 and decided to go farm a full set of dungeon gear, dungeon gear wasnt meant to be the first set you get, it was meant to be exactly like all the other pieces of armor that are far easyer to get, except for its looks. Anet stated that gear would not require a grind, and it doesn’t, i have a full set of exotic gear and most of it i bought with karma/gold, but if you want a full set of the top armor that looks the best, you have to grind for that.

Any argument about the end reward nerf or rapair costs are just nonsensical in themselves. Personaly when repairing my armor after one piece has broken it costs 10-13 silver, you get 30 silver at the end of any explorable, if you seriously died enough to break your armor more than 3 times over i fail to see how that’s the games fault, stop corpse running and l2p. As for rewards, if you run a story mode/explorable mode in less than 30min and cannot be bothered to either do a different story dungeon (which are all easy imo) or just do a different explorable path, and would rather do the exact same content over and over, then you are making yourself grind by refusing to play any other part of the game, again, not the games fault.

people are corpse conga’ing without gear on to avoid the costs of both repairing which scales disgracefully, and to avoid having to dps down badly tuned mobs

Ignoring this and considering it “working as intended” is basically saying imho “sure what did you expect. clearly we’re supposed to bang our heads horribly on this content and get cheesed by kittenmechanics” shouldn’t we at that point say “why bother with dungeons” oh that’s right… many JUST did

but hey, we should be thankful for all the flaws right? no, it’s not what they promised it goes against their own manifesto which seemed to want something better than the tried and tested garbage. instead we have badly tuned pseudo gating via grinds.

You’re one of the few defending Anet that I don’t immediately wish would just wake up, and stop being a fanboy. But I cannot agree with you because I feel you’re missing and or ignoring the issues with combat mechanics that should be fixed LONG before they start buffing the difficulty of challenging content that often feels like a corpse conga/conveyer belt of deaths and repairs.

edit: @above poster.

everything ends up in a grind, why? is that not what they promised to do away with?

earning is not =/= grinding or at least it shouldn’t HAVE to be unless it’s LAZILY designed. you’re ignoring the issues in favor of being a fanboy or trying to look hard in a game that just succeeded in “kittening” off a huge chunk of it’s own paying customers and playerbase, I am completely sure the 1k people left if they continue to break their own manifesto’s promises and refuse to redesign to further meet those goals again, as well as fix issues will REALLY care that you enjoy this part of the content in it’s current horribly tuned state.

oh look people found a way to beat a gearcheck which should have been a “skillcheck” let’s buff the segment…

that is not a good design move

or, perhaps you were telling us to be playing marketwars2, where item flipping and beating the anti farm code is paramount and the earlier you got into it the better, and where there’s so much overlap of certain mats or overuse of them that the rest become pointless and pigeonholing occurs

or perhaps we should be doing those Dynamic events which are honestly great, but eventually end up as feeling like all there is to the game outside of dungeons which they just succeeded in breaking, or are bugged, broken, badly tuned (to a lesser degree than exp dungeons) take too long, require pickup quests that bore me to tears, some of which ruin areas such as the sylvari starting areas due to it disabling the crafting tables for upwards of 15 minutes. OR my personal favorite are attempted to be farmed by idiots such as the kite risen to hela so she dies event that is often extended for insane amounts of time due to people farming the risen xD

so much wrong, and they’re breaking more than they fix and offering less content?

To be honest I’m happy they did what they did to dungeons. I WILL say however that gear should degrade at a slower rate

Anet is slowly ironing out any way a player can make gold ingame. Will it get to a point where buying gold from gems is the only option?

Time will tell.