Guild Wars 2

First to set the stage:

Fun
Noun
1. A source of enjoyment, amusement, or pleasure.
2. Enjoyment; amusement: have fun at the beach.
3. Playful, often noisy, activity.

From there we can derive that the opposite of fun is anything but those things. I propose the word “maddening”.

Fun, to me, is when I do something and I’m able to walk away with a sense of accomplishment, some cash in my bags, and maybe some loot that makes me think “wow that was sure worth my time and effort, even if I can’t use this stuff I could sell it and make a small but tidy profit.”

You know what running GW2’s story mode dungeons is like? None of that. It is an investment for which there is little to no return. Luckily for most it is a one time investment that allows them to get to the explorer mode dungeons where not only is the content generally “easier” (by way of meaning it doesn’t down your whole party and involve the strategy of graveyard zerging) but also nets you an actual reward in the form of tokens, which should be universal. Account bound was the first step but having to slog through the same dungeon day in and day out to acquire an armor set we might like is just drudgery and completely removes the desire to go back and do it after said armor set is acquired. In fact it promotes an ideal of “WHEW I got that dungeon set complete. NEVER going back there again!” (Which is not really helping out the community who still needs to run it so they can access explorer mode. You want people go back and help others? Make it worth their time and not hair-rippingly frustrating).

Bottom line is that these dungeons are generally NOT FUN. I’m not the only one who thinks so and I’m sure a PvP hero will be along shortly to tell me to L2P and stuff but the team I run with is not stupid or bad. We’re well geared out, 2 of us working on our legendaries (which btw? The price of the precursors is kitten should probably look at that, too), and train explorer mode dungeons like nothing even on bad days. When something isn’t fun in a game the appeal to do them diminishes and disappears. People decide that the PvE in the game is crap, more fun elsewhere, and leave. Your customer base shrinks and then your game ends up in the pile of “not as good as WoW” which is already a small hill of corpses.

MMO’s cannot be supported by just their PvP content alone. This is proven again and again so please, do yourself a favor Anet, and try not to make PvE a giant frustrating suckfest. We’ll appreciate it, we’ll love you for it, and we’ll continue to shove our money down your throats for it.

Also knowing the logic employed so far by you guys, this isn’t a call to make Explorer mode dungeons harder to match the difficulty of story mode. Just stop yourself right there, slap yourself in the face for even thinking it, and help make this game’s PvE more fun. Thanks.

So all you’re saying here is that dungeons aren’t fun, but without explaining exactly what you’d want to see change to make them fun?

Well I guess if you want me to be extremely clear, then sure.

Bosses are ridiculous in Story Mode Dungeons. Abilities that can one shot a heavy armor wearing class in full exotics etc. Bad balancing in general that leaves a group running a steady stream from the nearest way point which is pretty far off (and I might add, in Explorer modes there is only one of which is really silly).

To be blunt the story mode dungeons NEED to be balanced around a group of the minimum level required to enter and assuming that that group is in full blue-quality gear. Explorer modes are fine, don’t touch them.

Rewards from dungeons need to be upped so there’s a definite gain from running them other than tokens which are a limited hook anyways. The state of the trading post’s economy might suggest either more valuable items should be rewarded or more money rewarded (upwards of a gold+ for completion) or even both to try and counteract the ridiculous amount of inflation. (Yes I’m aware the injecting more money into the economy doesn’t always fix inflation or even makes it worse but until the TP is reworked so things aren’t default posted at a copper above vendor price then the TP will always be borked.

Dungeon finder and summoning stone style rallying device should be implemented. As it stands we spend upwards of 3 silver (I know it’s not that much but it does add up) just to GET to a dungeon and then another 3 silver to return to a town (High average, of course).

I’m sure there’s more but it is late. I do post this at the risk of sounding whiney or gasp entitled but try to understand that what I really want is a fun dungeon crawling experience, to feel that I was well rewarded for my time and effort and that even if no gear I could actually use dropped that I still wasn’t walking out at a total loss. I hope that makes sense.

Some explore mode dungeons are really hard, I would much rather have each boss reward tokens instead of when you complete the dungeon. Some last bosses are too hard for your averege pug.

Completely agree with OP. I’ve done 6 exp paths or so and while theyre frustrating with pugs I can appreciate that they’d be fun with a good group. But story modes need to be tuned WAYYYY down. Especially AC, CM, and TA. these are the first three dungeons a player is going to encounter and it’s likely they’re going to be in terrible gear with NO toughness/vitality on it. On top of that, theyre not going to have their rotation memorized so theyll be looking down to watch cds, and won’t know what visual cues to look for to avoid the NUMEROUS 1 shot mechanics.

And since the dev’s are always asking for examples, how about this. Go roll an elementalist to 30, grab a bunch of crappy blue gear, and let someone who didnt design the encounters try to play through AC. After they die for the 12th time and finally finish the dungeon take special note of the “Never doing that **** again” look on their face. There’s your example.

Honestly, I only play PVE and even though I’ve been trying to drop WoW for a long time, the dungeons and all 3 Orr zones have completely convinced me to go back.

Is this a thread seriously trying to argue the presence of something as subjective as fun isn’t prevalent in x y or z?

lol

Great post OP. I agree 100%. I keep asking myself word for word in game, “WHO THE CAT THOUGHT THIS WAS FUN?!”

I later found out it is Isaiah Cartwright, whom I’m waiting to contact me so we can discuss his brilliant skills and how terrible I am at this game. /holdingmybreath

ArenaNet found nearly EVERY SINGLE option to SUCK the fun out of Guild Wars 2. I honestly think they did it on purpose. “Well, no one is paying a monthly fee, so gives a CAT!?, let them suffer and cry.!”

Which isn’t smart for a company that has their address displayed publicly… I guess it’s up to the players to fix the problem because I don’t see anyone from ANet commenting on this issue.

..Still waiting Isaiah, game is a wreck.

Uh….? Rare helm and a decent bit of silver seems like a pretty good reward for story mode to me.

Fun to me is when something is fresh, new and exciting – regardless of the reward. I don’t care if I get zilch for something as long as I had fun doing it. I’ll be looking forward to trying it again and perhaps having better luck at a better reward.

Fun is when your eyes widen and your ears prick up when you discover a new way of doing something or a particular mechanic you didn’t even realized would work before.

The dungeons in this game do not do this. Well they do at first but then BOOM your dead… again and again and again. Some people find them easy, some people find them far too hard. Easy or hard (i personally find them too hard) its not fresh or exciting. It’s similar to most other dungeons. Find the pattern and rinse and repeat while you wait for the health bar of your foe to reach 0. Find that ONE way that works and keep exploiting it/repeat it.

Yes these battles are a lot more fast and action packed than other MMOs (I do love that), but once you find the pattern they are the SAME! And if you can’t find that patter then its just a mess. Aggro going all over the place, people going down all the time. One shot here and there, and rezzing someone can usually lead to your own death if your not careful.

I understand its important to make things a challenge, but this is a little TOO much. At the moment there is no way of easing us into it. In TA for instance the first pull is one of the hardest to do. 4 wolves in an area of killer flowers. Ease us into these fights so we slowly learn the mechanics and then increase the difficulty as we go along. For example in TA, perhaps start with 2 wolves, and increase the respawn time of those volatile blossoms. Then perhaps the next area will have 3 wolves etc etc.

When I keep dieing over and over and get no real reward at the end then it makes me NOT want to keep playing it.

You’ve removed the holy trinity. Great! I LOVE that idea! But then you through me into the very first dungeon with no idea on how to control these new situations. These situations (of not having a tank or healer and aggro being a mess) is NEW to each and every player (especially those who enter the dungeon for the first time), so we have no idea how to properly master them at first. So ease us into it! Not only have you removed the one consistent MMO game mechanic that we’ve all been used to for YEARS, but then you go ahead and make it absolutely too hard for us to get used to.

This game has promoted the idea of making your own story. Doing whatever you want and getting rewarded for it regardless. You have achieved this in almost ALL of your game, EXCEPT for the dungeons.

PvE questing can be hard if you’re not prepared, but atleast in those situations (of smaller battles against 1 or 2 mobs) you can figure out what went wrong, and next time you fight that mob you’ll be better prepared. In dungeons there is so much going on it just takes 1 or 2 hits and your down. You have no idea what just happened? It’s too chaotic!

So the suggestion I have is to ease us into these new paradigms you’ve introduced in this game. Ease us into these new ways of dealing with aggro management, the proper use of our support abilities, the tells that bosses have before a big attack, the effectiveness of our combinations etc. Help us learn them. You don’t have to necessarily make everything a great deal easier. Just HELP us get there.

Good responses so far, save a few silly people ;-P

So what about it, Anet? Anything to say on this?

I think the dungeons are fun. Then again my static and I dont do them for the tokens. We have cleared every explore mode multiple times and been doing it since second week of release. Ive got enough tokens to kit 4 alts out with. We go in with the attitude to have fun tho. We kid each other when we screw up. We talk BS and we laugh at most of the GW2 playerbase who dont like these dungeons and cant do them.

We also dont try to exploit the bosses and run past mobs. If you people would put as much effort into doing the bosses as Anet OBVIOUSLY intended, you would have a better time as well. Instead you’d rather make these posts.

@Ruien, here’s a unique idea, before you post in a topic, read what the people are talking about. If you’d have done that you wouldn’t have said anything in the first place.

I have to agree with Riuen, even though my circumstances are different and I never have a static group. I feel that the dungeons in this game already do vary the difficulty — they make story mode easier, ‘easing’ people into the more challenging explorable modes. I’ve also found that groups that are diversified, in the sense that some people focus on healing and support and some DPS, have a lot more success. Also, the one- and two-shot issues that people have are counterbalanced by the fact that a player can easily be revived from the downed state. This also usually happens during a power attack that can be dodged if the player is watching the boss.

In conclusion, I feel that the dungeons in this game do an excellent job of making it so that everyone has to pay attention, put some thought into their builds and use good teamwork to accomplish things. It’s made it almost impossible to be successful if you’re sitting back and spamming your auto attack. For that, I say plaudits. I have tons of fun in these dungeons!

Albrizz.5047:

@Ruien, here’s a unique idea, before you post in a topic, read what the people are talking about. If you’d have done that you wouldn’t have said anything in the first place.

They already said they were ‘laughing at the playerbase’. You think a person like that would ever post anything remotely constructive?

Honestly I don’t think either story mode or exp mode dungeons are fun at all, just tedious and unrewarding. Boss fights are too long, drops are poor, mobs have too much hp, etc.. even figuring out the boss mechanic (and learning the tricks to beating them) gets old fast cause then you have to keep hitting them for a very… disproportionately long time.

Anyway, once I’ve completed a dungeon, I feel zero desire to do it again. Sorry. It’s not a matter of “toohard!!!” or “L2p lololol”. I just don’t enjoy it. And I’m not sure what can be done about that either, except maybe a complete rehaul of the system.

Also, if “most of the playerbase” dislikes dungeon running, then its only logical to presume that the problem does not lie within the players, but within something else.

Yea, walking into AC for the first time at like 40 for a 30 dungeon I was like “yea, this’ll be interesting” and it went to “holy hell what went wrong” in that first room.

Course now I understand that place and do just fine, but that first impression is pretty bad.

Kaemrys.5320:

First to set the stage:

Dungeon Fun
Noun
1. A Fast source of exotic sets
2. easy golds
3. chance of drops

this is the real truth…..people learn dungeons details farming them forever (because they are the easiest way to get exotics), they don t play them for fun….then come here to complain they are too easy….

Want a proof? try to watch a cutscene in a random party….they will go mad…

If a boss can oneshot you with an attack it’s obvious that you’re not supposed to be hit with it. If you are, your strategy is wrong. I’ve ran so many dungeons with party members raging on anet for making things too difficult while I haven’t died even once, it makes me sad.

Just my 2 cents and imo i love dungeons. I don’t do the same dungeon over and over, i may do 1 ac path and 1 ta path on evening then 1 cm and 1 coe path the next evening. Each dungeon is different and their are great fun if you get a nice chatty group who doesn’t skip the good parts.

So to sum it up imo, i love the dungeons. I’m in no rush to get the armour, if they meant for you to get it during a short period, they would. I will prob get my armour in a good month or so, but in the process i shall enjoy running them. =)

Kaemrys.5320:

Well I guess if you want me to be extremely clear, then sure.

Bosses are ridiculous in Story Mode Dungeons. Abilities that can one shot a heavy armor wearing class in full exotics etc.

Heavy armor wearing warrior speaking. This is not true. I’ve yet to be one-shot in a dungeon, either story mode while levelling or explorable mode. Hasn’t happened. Don’t spec glass-cannon and stand in the fire. Spec glass cannon and be on your toes or spec into some survivability and you can even stand in the fire.

Kaemrys.5320:

Bad balancing in general that leaves a group running a steady stream from the nearest way point which is pretty far off (and I might add, in Explorer modes there is only one of which is really silly).

If you need to grave-run over and over, you can do so. However, This is not the norm. Almost every fight is doable without deaths if the group is well prepared and well coordinated (explorables) or if the group is not just plain bad (story mode).

Kaemrys.5320:

To be blunt the story mode dungeons NEED to be balanced around a group of the minimum level required to enter and assuming that that group is in full blue-quality gear. Explorer modes are fine, don’t touch them.

Agreed and I think they are (I’ve heared they nerfed AC story, which was an outlier before)

Kaemrys.5320:

Rewards from dungeons need to be upped so there’s a definite gain from running them other than tokens which are a limited hook anyways.

The dungeon-developer who frequently posts here has already said that they’re working on it, but that it won’t be in today’s halloween patch, probably in the november patch.

Kaemrys.5320:

Dungeon finder and summoning stone style rallying device should be implemented. As it stands we spend upwards of 3 silver (I know it’s not that much but it does add up) just to GET to a dungeon and then another 3 silver to return to a town (High average, of course).

Oh, c’mon – really?

Dungeon finder is debatable. I’m not opposed to one if it’s server-only, but I don’t miss one, either. But OK, I’ll grant you the dungeon finder thing. But summoning stones? It’s “go to the heart of the mists, port to nearest capital city, port to area – unless it’s AC or CM or TA where you just have to leave the area.” Port to the area that holds the dungeon costs roughly 2 silver – some a bit more, some a bit less. And I’ve found walking to be surprisingly fast.

Kaemrys.5320:

I’m sure there’s more but it is late. I do post this at the risk of sounding whiney or gasp entitled

Well… you did, to a degree. Entitled, I mean. As in “hand me my dungeon, now!” entitled.

Kaemrys.5320:

but try to understand that what I really want is a fun dungeon crawling experience, to feel that I was well rewarded for my time and effort and that even if no gear I could actually use dropped that I still wasn’t walking out at a total loss. I hope that makes sense.

Personally, I’d rather have them remove the flowers from TA (except for boss fights like the worm, of which they are an integral part) and I’m a happy camper. Lower some boss HP to a degree that the boss still requires a certain amount of concentrated, more or less flawless play but not 15 minutes of autoattack from max range with occasional dodging (I’m looking at you, TA endboss treething!)

I enjoy the dungeons but the tokens a bit off, I feel that it would be more rewarding if you got a small amount of tokens for partial completion and that completing all the different paths should have a reasonable reward, I understand that you have to earn the tokens for the armor for it to be meaningful but if you go to the trouble of completing all the different paths you should have something to show for it

Fun
Noun
1. A source of enjoyment, amusement, or pleasure.

I enjoy being challenged. I find amusement when I fail miserably in what are often hilarious situations to me in dungeons because I know I can do better next time. I gain pleasure when I overcome an obstacle that was difficult. Multiply these by 10 when it’s done by working well with others.

In short I find dungeons fun. Be more subjective?

But here’s some real logic for you. Who’s more likely to post in threads like these. People who hate it? Or people who enjoy it? The people enjoying it are usually out there doing it, therefore taking a small amount of posts on these forums that agree with you and saying that “the majority of players hate it so change it” is hardly a logical request.

I do think chest rewards need to be revamped to bring them into line with EoTN’s dungeons but other than that the “difficulty” is par for the course for Guild Wars normal mode’s harder areas. I can’t wait to see our first true Elite areas, I know I’ll have even more fun in them. Keep it up ANet!

I am gonna have to go ahead and…. COMPLETELY AGREE with the OP. I want to like dungeons so bad, but it is just not happening. Every story mode I have done, has been the exact opposite of fun. They actually make me say out loud that I will never do that again.

Explorable modes have been… okay. Hit or miss with them, but for the most part I can’t stand the dungeons in this game. Its unfair, but I actually get disappointed when someone joins my group and they are at the recommended lvl for the dungeon. Something is definitely wrong there.

I have totally opposite opinion from OP. I think dungeons are fun because they are challenging and unique as they require you use real skills not stats.
For me, I get sense of accomplishment when I beat the tough enemy or boss, not just because how much coin or gear I stack up.
If you want this is to be stat based game, then you are playing a wrong game perhaps, this isn’t WOW.

What’s fun in dungeons is stuff like AC explorable end bosses, or interesting ones like magg’s path final boss in CoF explorable.

What’s not fun is pounding on otherwise generic monsters for extended periods of time because they have arbitrary high hp counts. You can’t just pump up damage and health on a monster and call it a “challenge”. If you know how to beat it, you still know, and now it just takes longer. The main reason people skip what they can is because of what a snore fest some encounters are. Do you want to pound on pumped up monster X for a few min? It completely breaks the flow and feel of smooth runs when you pause just to beat the tar out of some silver/ gold mobs.

The real issue is this…. most of the people who dislike these dungeons are the people who play bad DPS in other games and get carried by the tank or healer. Cant be carried too much in this game(altho my static is taking guildies who are noobier than any pug we’ve ever taken). Thats why I posted earlier about laughing at the people who cant do these dungeons. It isnt that I am being a butthead. Its that bad players are actually finding out for the first time that.. they are bad players. I find that to be funny.

Ruien.9506

Thats why I posted earlier about laughing at the people who cant do these dungeons. It isnt that I am being a butthead. Its that bad players are actually finding out for the first time that.. they are bad players. I find that to be funny.

Got to admit, this holds some truth, but it’s not always the case. Sure, not dying and wasting hours in the same place makes these experiences more bearable.
But does steamrolling most dungeons like such equals having fun? Not always.

Not if the process itself was still bland and dull. The dungeons themselves, whenever I get a pug, are doable. More often than not, my groups don’t ever wipe entirely, save for a select few members of the group dropping, but that’s about it.
Does it mean I always had fun during these runs, even if I was the star player of the day? Nope.

So far, I’ve not met any dungeon I found so much fun I wanted to do it and its exact same path again right away, even if nobody died, we played perfect, yadda yadda.
That pretty much proves that the dungeons could really be improved, and that it’s not just the player base needing a kick under the bum and a “grow up and learn to play” speech. But yeah, as you said some people do need a push in the right direction, and should look into their professions’ traits, skills and potential use a bit more than “OMG DAMAGE EET ALL!”