1) Linear.
Dungeons are a linear path from one room (cavern, encounter area, etc.) to the next. It basically goes, a) Skip boring non-sensical cutscene, b) run into next room and DPS down all enemies, c) open chest and auto-loot it, d) repeat in next room.
On top of that, there are very few of these ‘rooms’ per dungeon, I think Citadel of Flame is like 6 or so encounters, then it’s down. It’s literally a series of combat encounters (not counting the final encounter, which is just running back and forth and throwing rocks).
Where are the multiple paths? The miles deep catacombs and hard to explore dungeons with dead ends, with sections that are literally off the beaten path and have nothing to do with whatever linear objectives we’re told to perform?
Ancient castles with multiple levels (both above and below ground)?
In short, where’s the exploration aspect? All you do is run from one room to the next gunning down enemies. Yes, sometimes there’s some wonky mechanic you have to perform in that room to complete it – but that’s it.
It’s pure farming.
2) Mob encounters.
We need enemies that do really interesting stuff. Like spiders that climb walls. Enemies that know when to retreat and hide (and regroup). Ambushes and chases. Being cut off by cave ins and blockades.
Enemies that can dodge, or form shield walls. You know, basic combat behaviors, that require tactical thinking to beat them (instead of just DPS button mashing).
3) Choices.
The dungeon should physically change based on things you do. For example, causing a cave in that blocks an exit, or opening up a flood gate, making certain passages swimming only. Or closing and barring doors so enemies can’t get in/out. Or whatever. Just stuff that actually changes the layout or configuration of the dungeon in small, subtle ways.
Choices should make large groups (tribes) of enemies behave differently in the dungeon. For example, let’s say you cause a rockslide and wipe out a dozen Skritt – maybe the rest of the Skritt in the dungeon will be afraid of you, and retreat on sight. Or something else. But the idea being that exactly how they behave changes depending on choices you make.
4) Loot.
Although this applies to the game in general, it’s especially bad in dungeons. Never any exotics drop. A handful of tokens that forces you to grind for a long time to get any dungeon based skins (in the year+ I’ve played, I’ve bought precisely one piece of dungeon based gear – a medium Citadel glove).
And nothing really interesting, either. Not like loot in Diablo 3, for example, No legendary items that have unique proc effects. Unique armors that provide auras or passive benefits that cannot be had on any other set.
Hell, even alpha GW2 had Ghastly armor sets that were supposed to glow at night, and give a dmg bonus. What happened to that idea? There should be tons of stuff like that.
5) Solo-ability.
I understand that dungeons should be “hard”, but I also think it’s a huge let down that I cannot do a dungeon unless I can find other people, or have a very narrow pre-set method of soloing (that requires an exact build and armor set).
Yes, I’ve watched the solo videos of people running dungeons, and they’re boring.
Mostly, I think that dungeons should scale, both in difficulty and in rewards – make solo dungeons less rewarding, but give enemies less health, so the average player at least has a chance of winning a fight against a few elites and surviving to heal up before the next fight.
Soloing a dungeon is about the ability to freely explore – I put dungeons off for a long time because they seemed to be exclusively group events, which I don’t do often (since then, I have done some, just to get tokens – but I prefer to solo). But, the main reason for doing this is that many of us just want to be tomb raiders – that is, we want to explore dungeons (and come away with some good loot for our troubles), but we’re not token farmers. We don’t want to speed clear dungeons just to farm tokens.
We actually want explorable content, that we can tackle at our own tempo – I personally enjoy dungeons that take multiple days to complete – I want to log out/camp at key points in the dungeon, picking up my explorations the next day.
I want to reach the 99th floor of the dungeon – after weeks of descent.
In a nutshell, I want dungeons I can explore – not just farm.
Please. Give us exploration players something to do.
Exploration was something that was promised in the Manifesto, and I have to say, that of all the promises Anet reneged on, this was the most disappointing.