Guild Wars 2

I’ve been looking over a lot of the posts in this forum and I think that many of you are missing the point of the complaints posed on this forum.

While it is the opinion of many that dungeons are too difficult, this — to many of us — is just a side issue. In fact, I don’t actually think that the dungeons are too difficult. And yet, many of the most common replies are some version of the same tired L2P variety.

Many of us who are frustrated are not looking for advice about how to survive or how to see what bosses are doing or how to not die. We survive just fine and have finished these dungeons same as you have. The point is that dungeons as the currently stand are NOT FUN.

They aren’t un-enjoyable because my repair bills are too high and they aren’t un-enjoyable because I can’t finish them. Honestly, for me they aren’t even un-enjoyable because the rewards are too low. They are un-enjoyable because so many of the components that make for great group play are missing. They are NOT FUN.

For example — One of the best thing about PUG dungeoning in my past MMO experiences was that each character in some sense knew when they had been helped, were helping, or had fulfilled a crucial part of a task required. And in some sense this could even go without saying – though frequently these things are commented on by players since it is so easy to notice. Of course the most obvious cases of this are traditional tanking or healing situations where a healer does particularly well in a rough situation or a tank makes well coordinated grab of some stray adds or even when a DPS’er observantly burns down some stray adds that are on a healer.

That said, I’m not a wow player and not a particularly big fan of the holy trinity. I was excited by the prospect of GW2 and the breaking down of these fixed roles. But I did expect that what I’d see was a more sophisticated version of roles that included possibilities for control, protection, stealth, and some interesting combinations I had never even considered before.

Instead what we now have is a situation where basically everyone’s role is exactly the same. Dodge, evade, stay alive, revive whenever you can, and otherwise pile on the boss preferably from range. And most importantly, understand the cheesy fight mechanic in order to beat the cheesy boss. Even if you try to build a support based class, you can’t do much about bosses that 1-shot players and even if you try to build a tanky or control based class you simply cannot weather the damage you will be faced with. Mitigation and heals are absolutely so far away from the power of evasion that they are permanently relegated to an almost vanity feature of characters. Damage is similarly treated since basically everything in dungeons has 54656735962569365346 health and you can’t beat even the smallest add by trying to just burn it down.

Psychologists have long understood the effects of selective perception and the ways in which maintaining focus on a task can blind us nearby and concurrent events. This ‘invisible gorilla’ effect is pretty common in my experience of GW2 dungeons so far. I’m so busy running around dodging out of various 1-shot effects that I lose all sense that I am even on a team except for the fact that sometimes they are getting shot at instead of me.

Late in the game I actually turned my warrior into a pretty great support profession and found that dungeons became quite a breeze. But again — my contribution, like everyone else’s certainly, has essentially gone unnoticed. I’ve done some runs in guild on comms and it’s a much more enjoyable experience since we can actually communicate how we are able to help one another, though even there it has the same chaotic feeling of every-man-for-himself fighting to survive.

And even if it is more fun to be on comms in guild, dungeons should not be designed just for this crowd. There needs to be some way for even PUGs to rely on each other as more than meat shields and revivers and for this reliance to be recognizable.

But as it is, the best most effective support you can provide is to revive downed allies and not get downed yourself. Heck, there’s not even much that players can do in order to make stand out as revival experts, especially when bosses drop aoe on downed players.

Dungeons right now are all about every PLAYER — not CHARACTER, but the player behind it understanding how to play right and do all the right things in order to defeat the boss based on some particular fight mechanic. There is no sense in which a big strong norn warrior is better for throwing the boulders at the bosses than a puny elementalist.

Anyways I’ve gotten off topic here. All this has been said and more and as much as I could go on, I think this is all well understood. The point of this post is just that I am sick of the amount GW2 fans chalk this up to players not being able to handle the dungeon content or longing for some other mmo.

The complaints are not about any of this. The complaints are about loving dungeons but these dungeons being NOT FUN. As I have said, I like the departure from the holy trinity of tank/heal/dps but that shouldn’t mean a complete departure from roles of any kind at all. When every fight is simply about understanding the particular fight mechanic combined with dodge, evade, revive, range then there is little opportunity for any character too feel like their in-game character skills mattered at all and just as little opportunity for others to recognize anything that you did to help the group.

“Mitigation and heals are absolutely so far away from the power of evasion that they are permanently relegated to an almost vanity feature of characters. Damage is similarly treated since basically everything in dungeons has 54656735962569365346 health and you can’t beat even the smallest add by trying to just burn it down.”

So true and very sig worthy.

I totally agree with you. In GW1 dungeons such as Urgoz Warren had pretty awful rewards for the time they took ( over 2 hours ). But you know what? They were a ton of fun to do!

What made them fun: playing with a group of 12 people, talking about your strategy and team setup, adapting your play for every single encounter, the tension that was created by fast and deadly encounters (no corpse running), mobs had a large variety and much skills instead of a ton of health, there were constantly new objectives and sub-quests instead of just ‘kill mini-boss x’, environmental hazards were actually original and required thougt instead of ‘you lose health if you stand here’.

Monsters actually felt they were like the player, not some magical guardians who only auto-attack and have 2 bazillion health. They carried the same skills, had around the same health as a player ( except for huge encounters or bosses ), did the same damage, etc. This made the fights fun because the enemy actually had a strategy too. Their difficulty came from complexity ( skills and variety ) rather than grind ( base damage increase, base health increase ). Quality vs Quantity is what they call that, and I well prefer the enemies to have quality.

Furthermore, their whole obsession with trying to get rid of the ‘holy trinity’ has gone way overboard. The dual-class system was the perfect solution for the holy trinity. Even a necromancer or elementalist could heal if they wanted to. Sometimes having a role is fun and makes more options for making a strategy. Right now everyone is just a ‘jack of all trades’, which foregoes all need of complex teamwork. I believe this was made only to casualize teamplay, so any well geared pug can run a dungeon without any thought to it. Sure pugs were a bit of a pain in GW1, but they were fun and made the game more social, until heroes were released ofcourse…

Cant agree more…

Anet went so far trying to different at cost of removing some great things about MMOs :/

And those guys/funboys who instantly jumps on you when u say something against these dungeons with “l2p they r not too hard” even tho ur post has nothing to do about dungeons difficulty…

Funny thing is that if they think this is great dungeons system/design they proly never played any other mmo with good designed dungeons…

I think they tried to go in a direction away from the things that were making MMO’s stale. But sure I get it, I hate things that are different too.

I can’t agree here. Have you tried combo fields? I’ve run dungeons with some friends where we worked toghether to do combos. Fire fields give 3 stacks of might with a blast finisher, and getting 25 stacks of might is not impossible with 3 people working toghether to get blast finishers on the field. A water field can full heal an entire party with blast finishers. A whirl in a light field can clear off all conditions. There are lots of ways to work toghether. Talk with your pug about setting up combo fields, and who has the best finishers.

And if you consider mitigation useless, you are plain wrong. Protection is 33% damage reduction. Weakness is 50% damage reduction. Aegis blocks a whole attack. These things means the difference between life and death for party members. If you feel a mob hits too hard, stack protection to lessen the damage. If mobs do big and slow attacks, use blinds to negate all their damage.

Proper use of teamwork also lets you burn some trash mobs down. Work up 25 stacks of might on your team and 25 stacks of vulnerability on a mob, and it dies very fast. This isn’t very hard to do either, when your entire group works toghether to combo properly.

Different professions have different fields, and different finishers. Necromancers can get great dark fields, thieves have lots of smoke fields, and elementalists have water and fire fields. Warriors got lots of blast finishers, as does engineers. The player interactions are very much there, you just need to find and utilize them.

That’s quite the blanket statement you’ve made there, and one that is very subjective.

I find the dungeons fun.

What would your idea of a fun dungeon be?