Guild Wars 2

Xhaine.4120:

stuff

The problem is that there are players who feel the time investment for these dungeons is not good. It’s not about blaming the game, and the thing I consistently see ignored by the “nope dungeons are totally ok, it’s all your fault” camp is when the people who have issues with the dungeons readily admit the dungeons become much simpler upon completion.

So the issue isn’t that the dungeons require strategizing, coordination, teamwork, or quick thinking. Players are ok with these. What isn’t ok is that, for what appears to be a significant pool of players, is the time it takes to get all these variables under control is not consistent with dungeon rewards nor does it provide an enjoyable atmosphere. Look at the thread about Arah, and people saying “yup took us 6 hours to complete Dwayna path.”

Six hours? Are you kidding me? That is absurd, and it’s not the first place I’ve seen the comment that Arah is insanely long. It would be different if this were, say, a raid instance like WoW or Rift that you complete over several days. Six hours, for me, is literally my entire evening after work. Assuming I don’t get up to eat or do some chores, I would have to dedicate the entire night to a single dungeon.

When I talk about players being “locked out” of content, this is what I mean. I simply don’t have the time to spend that much of a day inside a single instance. Nor do I want to. Now you couple the length with the fact that the trash monsters cause the dungeons to drag. Then consider that the mechanics are not immediately obvious to players who don’t have entire nights to dedicate to this stuff.

For my money, here’s what I think the best route to addressing the dungeons is:

• Cut the health and damage of trash packs.
• Make the modifiers clearer. For example, in AC Ghosteater, the graveling scavengers have the modifier “Leap” which is the same modifier that other monsters out in the world have. Except that the scavenger leap is actually an attack that pins someone to the ground and deals a massive chunk of damage. Or the summoned spiders by the second champion in Twilight Arbor, they have a “Poison” tag, but they don’t apply poison on melee hit like every other monster in the game with a Poison modifier. (Poor wording is an issue across the game, though, and you can see it in things like traits.)
• Take one of the boss mechanics a boss uses and attach a watered-down version to trash monsters, maybe two or three tops, before that boss. In this way, players can still learn strategies and coordination and mechanics, but it becomes more intuitive. A lot of these mechanics or abilities are seen nowhere else in the game, and the game doesn’t do much to teach them to you.
• Scale up the trash models by maybe 50% of player models, and scale boss models up by maybe 100%. Not everything needs to be the size of the first golem boss in CM Story, but some of the trash/boss models are so small that the animation tells get easily lost behind the player effects, monster effects, particle effects, melee characters, other monsters in the pack, or general things going on in the environment like enemy necromancer wells. Minor scaling modifications will help these be more visible, which will alleviate a lot of the (incorrect) concerns that bosses or trash monsters can one-shot people.

I’m all for letting these dungeons be challenging, but they have some Dark Souls caliber tuning issues right now. To me, the difficulty feels artificially jacked up instead of an honest challenge.

Wethospu.6437:

Then we need at least 5 bosses in same room.
Bosses need to have something to prevent cc-locks.

If the bosses represent the different classes in the game, they will get anti-CC powers.

I think the reason dungeons don’t feel right to OP is because dungeons are set up much like a boss gauntlets, whereas up until dungeons such as in DEs, you’ve been fighting mobs of mooks who die in seconds. Dungeons in GW2 feel especially odd coming from GW1 where dungeons were 90% mobs of enemies and exploration based, whereas in GW2 it’s mostly running back from a waypoint to fight a boss.

To me, the difficulty feels artificially jacked up instead of an honest challenge.

you don't even need 100% bigger mobs, a tell via sound or chat would be enough. as for hp, if they nerf that down it's obvious how uninspired dungeons are.

the real problem is dungeon are somewhat ok (still drag on tho, thanks to pointless trash and boss hp) if everything works right: good team composition, coordination etc., but having that hapkitten (EDIT: seriously, “happen” and “is” gets censored because it’s male genitalia with a space? get your frigging filter right.) even more rare than getting an exotic in a chest.
add to that the difference between an uncoordinated team and the one above is way bigger compared to a dungeon with the trinity and a uncoordinated team makes the gw2 dungeons feel even more tedious.

tbh I’d rather have the trinity with proper dungeons back than a “pseudo” non-trinity (where people still have to spec into support for protection and heal) and a downed/waypoint zerg system to accommodate said “non-trinity”

The idea behind the dungeons and removal of tank/healer/dps setups is awesome, the dungeons themself and particulairly the bosses are simply very poorly designed.

99% of the bosses are the same from the pull to finish, no different phases or exciting things, just the same abilities over and over (and over!) again. This leads to a very unfullfilling aftertaste.

With the lack of any real -fun- dps/optimization rotations or basically anything that really puts any depth into the gameplay might explain your feeling.

Jordan.6157:

Hi,

Not sure if it’s just me but I am finding that dungeons don’t feel right. There is something about them that feels off for me. I cannot place my finger on it. My main concern is that I don’t feel that the trinity system arena-net has adopted fits in with their dungeons. It just feels like dungeons are missing something.
Just wondering other people’s opinions on this.

Thank you.

No, it’s not just you.

Almost everyone I know who plays GW2 agrees that the dungeons are bad and just not fun.

Like you, I also find it hard to put my figure on exactly why I don’t even bother to run them any more.

All I can suggest is that you should try the f2p (i.e. it cost nothing to get and nothing to play) game Vindictus which is 100% dungeon based with no open world content and play past the level 10 raid dungeon and see how you like it.

Vindictus has no holy trinity, no class can heal, and no class has much support. Roll a standard sword and board class called a “Fiona” and just try it. I found the dungeon’s, especially the raid dungeons, in that game (level 10 and up raids) a lot of fun and I played them 100x of times over and over just because they are fun encounters. I can’t put my figure on exactly why I found those dungeons to be so much fun I just did. If you end up liking the Vindictus dungeons, then you might be better at explaining what elements in that game make their dungeons better than the GW2 ones and help the GW2 devs to improve their dungeons.