To those posters who feel that increasing the difficulty and coordination level needed to run dungeons will raise the skill level of the player base, I would say based on my experience in another MMO and more than one real life organization I have been in that that is unlikely to happen. What does tend to hapkitten that people who either can’t or don’t want to learn to have to play at that higher skill level don’t get involved in those events, leaving you with a smaller population to draw from. The same population that can do them easily now. So, if you don’t like death zerging as an exclusive tactic, limit your grouping to that small, competent population. If that subset of the population isn’t large enough right now for you to find competent teams when you want them, that situation is not likely to improve by making dungeons harder. The harder the content, the smaller the group of players who is willing to put the effort into learning it, that is a universal truth about any hobby that most people play to relax and have fun. I’m not praising death zerging as a tactical option, far from it, I’m just saying I don’t think the changes you propose will lead to the outcome you want.
If the developers want to add still another tier of difficulty both down, as a learning curve towards “real” dungeons", and up, for the players who find Explorer Mode insufficiently challenging, I’m always a fan of more content. In fact I think adding an easier mode for dungeons might actually be more likely to lead people to higher skill levels, since they could be a chance to find out that “hey, if I get a couple of combos off this suddenly works a lot better” vs. hitting a rather high difficulty wall pretty suddenly and giving up on the whole dungeon idea. A carrot is more likely to get a mediocre player to up his game then a stick, I think.
Anecdote time; a group of friends and I just tried our first dungeon, AC, since the highest of us was 41 and nobody else was over 35. Only two of us even have “planned” stat groupings for our gear, the rest are in whatever weapon and armor drops looked good, with minimal or no jewelry. None of us know each others powers yet, and can barely figure out how to do combos with our own. Only one of us had his Elite skill yet. Four grueling hours and a couple dozen deaths (each) later we finished, and we are already discussing how we can improve our tactics. If we hadn’t been able to recover at Waypoints and even do quite a big of zerging from them, we would not have been able to finish, and at least 2, maybe 3 of my friends would never have been willing to try another dungeon. Getting through at least gave us hope that we can improve, and I am already applying some of the things I learned in that to my regular play.
TL:DR – Making existing dungeons harder is likely to lead to fewer people playing them, not more people resolving to improve their skills. People who don’t enjoy hard content for its own sake will just give up.