Guild Wars 2

So, last night I ran CoF 2 and 3 with a good pug group. We had 2 Guardians, rest were ranged. All were pretty well geared. Everyone seemed to be a bit older, and the atmosphere was relaxed, and wipes were taken with humor, not emorage.
Previous to this, I thought the dungeons were artificially made harder with stupid number of too hard mobs. But these runs made me see the light, it was fun and challenging.
But, this did present a problem, as 80% of pugs are not like that, and present “end game content” does not just simply scale. Why would it be so hard to give pug people dungeons that let them grind (sorry farm) tokens, or even yellow gear. Let the fanboys have their insanely hard must-have-guild-and-voicecomm dungeons and flashy armor skins.
I am sitting with 80 Guardian, and I have most fun discovering cooking recipes, and that is borderline depressing. In all other games I have played (wow rift lotro) I loved running dungeons and raids, now I have family, and I can’t invest time to pro raiding. GW2 penalizes casual players trying to run dungeons, kitteny rewards that you get at the end, and moronically balanced repair bills make it a bit of a gamble to enter a pug.

Hmh, I read my post, and I dont really give any new insights, but it is so long that I dont want to discard it

you just need aware players, I have never once used voice comms and only pugged. Some groups are bad but we finish…with a kitteny repair bill. Some are great and we finish without a repair bill. Some are terrible and I leave mid dungeon. If people are aware as to what is going on. Dungeon runs are a breeze and, most times, really fun! I got work and family as well and I don’t play more than 2 or 3 hours a day, maybe more on week-ends. I like hard dungeons makes people play better. The days when you could mindlessly dps are over now. All members have to be aware of what the hell is going on, evade, rez, support. It’s nice from my point of view. Before the only people really aware were the tank and the healer and they got blamed for wipes. I think the frustration of failing now comes from the fact that there is no-where to put the blame. We don’t know who is failing to do their job and who we have to blame for screwing up. Therefore we come to the forums and rant that the dungeons are too hard when in fact is a human error, not in coding but in playing that is making us fail. The error comes from our failure to try new builds and tactics on these month old dungeons that we just met.

Most explorable dungeons are PUG-able, i PUG like 95% of the time. Sometimes you have to be a little picky though. From personal experience, you really don’t want to bring more than 2 non-80’s to an explorer-able (more than 1 is bad enough). For example, the difference between a 35 and a scaled down 80 running AC exp is huge. You’re talking about a difference in multiple hours/graveyard runs with wipes, vs 1 shot speed runs. The balancing of dungeons is really a fine line, especially for the lower leveled ones, because if they nerf them, they become way too easy for geared 70s, and if you buff them they basically become impossible for non-80s.

Some dungeons/paths are much longer than others. Find out which are which, so that if you’re on a time constraint, you don’t attempt a long one.

Yea, the level issue is a good point. It could be fixed probably by allowing story mode to be run several times for yellow drops etc., so under 80’s could do that instead? Exp modes could be restricted to only lvl80.