Guild Wars 2

Honestly, there are some pretty horrible bugs and game design flaws in the “old” dungeons. I love fractals, but look at this sub forum – no-one talks about the broken old content that was never fixed. Finding a group for it is becoming increasingly difficult (and we still have no LFG tool) because of FotM. Why is ArenaNet working so hard on pushing out new content, making the old rewards redundant, and not fixing the original dungeons?

I have done AC too many times with groups that break up, often hostile to each other, over obstructed graveling burrows. Why was this bug never fixed? Why was there not one less fractal dungeon and instead that team was instead put on fixing this encounter in AC path 2, either fixing the bug or reworking the entire encounter so it did work? If you can’t fix the encounter, replace it with a working one. I have done this dungeon so many times and every time I get a group inexperienced with dealing with the bug and we wipe, I get really angry that you guys haven’t dealt with the content. There was a time for patience, but we’ve reached the point where the old content is becoming redundant before it was ever fixed.

Can we get an update on the direction the old dungeons are going to go in? Where are ArenaNet’s priorities? We keep getting content patches while some servers are still unable to access Arah. We get new dungeons while old ones are still broken. Couldn’t this time and resources be spent fixing up the existing options (or even expanding them) instead of pushing out new stuff? What is going on?

Actually the graveling burrows were finally fixed. It took about 2.5 months but they finally fixed them. Melee can actually hit them while standing still.

However, there are so many problem with dungeons right now. Currently 5 paths are genuinely bugged. CoE 1, SE 1/2, and Arah 1/2. Three of these bugs are flat out run enders. SE can be powered through, although it isn’t worth your time.

Other paths vary from poorly designed to very poorly designed. A big part of the reason people shouted no end game was because so many of the dungeons were broken and so many people end up just repeating AC as a result over and over.

I also love the new dungeon, but still want to play the old ones. There are still skin sets i want to acquire, but cant do this because it is really hard to find people.

Everyone wants to do Fractals because its new and the rewards are better compared to the older dungeons. The game needs some balance to make the older dungeons more appealing to everyone.

I don’t want this game to turn into what WoW is like, where new content is released and old content is forgotten.

Would love to know what Anets plans are on fixing this, if there are any!

Graveling burrows are not fixed. They might be better but they are not fixed. I had a group with a thief who had no melee weapons (a separate issue) and she was unable to him them at all. Some other members of my party were also having issues. I know with my ranger I often swap out my shortbow because it has trouble still. This encounter is also much easier with classes which don’t rely on condition damage because the burrows are immune to those, something which makes certain classes (like necro) less useful here. I smash through this encounter with eles, engineers, warriors and guardians. Too many of the other classes (or just people with the wrong weapons/builds) and this encounter is a road block. It’s a bug that still exists, and a design flaw which hasn’t been changed which cause this encounter to be so difficult.

There is plenty of work to be done on the launch dungeons, I don’t know how they found time to create a whole new set of dungeons when the old ones are so broken.

Well, FoTM makes the ‘old’ dungeons redundant. We’re being forced to grind for Ascended gear, because it is necessary for Wv3 (which it going to take ages), and the ‘old’ dungeons don’t help us do that.

SE path 1 and 2 are not bugged,people are just bad at tactics.

wow, Ned .. brutal.

Guess if i got my head chopped off I would be too.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

We haven’t scrapped the old dungeons. We tried something new with Fractals, and so far it’s been very successful. I was on the team that built fractals, and now I am on the bug-fixing live team with a focus on our ‘old’ dungeons to fix bugs in there and see what I can do to spice them up a bit.

We’re certainly not going to just sweep the old dungeons under the rug. I will be working very hard on improving the dungeons.

The dungeon itself is a wild success and I thank you for having the ingenuity to designing it.

The leveling system is terrible. I just have a sneaking feeling that in a few weeks or months, all the low lvl fractal runners will have a hard time finding a group.

Also, I have not touched any other PVE content since the patch because I want to keep up with the masses that are progressing their own fractal levels. I havent seen any other part of Tyria other than LA since the patch because of this level system.

BTW – i never had any issues with burrows as a melee toon, you just need to turn autotargetting off and don’t have the burrow targeted, just use your skills on it without autoattacking or anything like that. Only projectiles constantly miss and get obstructed, but then projectiles won’t deal them enough damage to destroy them (save for ele’s staff fire 1, but it hits burrows just fine with its splash damage).

The only really important bugs are those that block progression, like the norn fight in CoE1 at the moment, or Lupicus refusing to fight at all. Everything else is doable – and if you find pugs not the way to do it, just as i do, find a decent guild to do dungeons with.
My guild actually prefers ‘old’ dungeons to FotM and our currently highest difficulty across the whole guild is 5 or 6, with daily AC runs, amongst others. If you’re tired of pugging, start looking for a guild.

Maybe add ascended gear for token purchase in the pre-fractals dungeons? Or a chance of getting it out of the final boss chest? Then we could do whatever dungeon we wanted without feeling like we have to grind fractals for ascended gear. (Don’t get me wrong, fractals is amazing, but candy every day will still make you sick of it after a while) The rest of us who want dungeon armor/weapons can then convince others to come with us. Lol

If it does become a chance to drop in a chest or off a last boss, could it be higher than .001% please? Maybe 5-15%. Stats are random and its account bound, so it should drop way more since it’s unsellable. Otherwise a chance to keep getting defensive/condi/mf ascended trinkets is not going to make my offensive build warrior happy! Or let us mystic forge the ones we don’t want into the stats we do, without 250 tier 6 crafting mats.

SeventhSon.8172:

wow, Ned .. brutal.

Guess if i got my head chopped off I would be too.

I LOL’ed.

Signs of a good software company with mature software engineering processes —> prioritizing fixes for existing content first before releasing new content or changed content, the rationale being that if you do it in reverse, you will keep releasing new content which will always contain bugs, and which will be a nightmare to do NNIT (no negative impact testing) with, and it will be a vicious cycle of new content = more bugs to fix, and the people on the bug fixing team will never see the end of it.

Speaking to devs and to ANet development team in general, please consult best practices as per ITIL, and apply modern project management and software engineering principles PLEASE.

I’m providing you the wikipedia link below. You’re welcome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Infrastructure_Library

But with more bugs to fix, they give more people a job, fighting unemployment in the industry.

Robert Hrouda, might I suggest you make all the Explorable dungeon feel like an adventure, like a real explorer. For example in CoF Path 2 Magg, my guild mate noticed an Ooze King/Queen. We ventured forth a hidden path away from the main and jumped to defeat the ooze in which they fused to become a real boss. I don’t know what the intention of that was, but after beating it, all we had was an event completion. No chest appear, no achievement, just a simple event completion that had nothing to do with anything. Our sense of adventure was shot down because all that effort was meaningless.

Which brought me to the idea of sub-set missions of boss rewards, that we don’t have to do, but have an option to do so while exploring uncommon path ways. In Ascalonian Catacombs, after defeating the Salamander in that giant chamber there are stairs to the left that lead all the way to the top ceiling of the place, which had an entrance leading to another area. After venturing to the other side of the hallway, there was a giant empty area which was unused. I hope in the future they have some meaning.

Why don’t you start fixing CoE path 1 ice svanir boss!?!?

SE 2 isn’t broken it is just long and boring. Too much trash and everything has too many hp. Two golems could use about 50% fewer hp since the fight doesn’t have any phases.

WE GET IT. BACK AND FORTH. EASY. NOW DO IT FOR 20 MINUTES!

And that gets to the heart of the matter, efficiency. 20 minutes is all a dungeon run should take to clear with a skilled group. Nobody wants to do a dungeon that takes 45 minutes to get 60 badges when they can do another path that takes 20 minutes and then do a 20 minute path in another dungeon.

I would love nothing more than if they (eventually – taking time to do it right) applied the same difficulty scaling/leveling (complete with new mechanics/fights/etc) to every explorable dungeon in the game – again offering higher rewards the higher you move up.

“yea, great, you are at level 345 in Fractals, but how far have you gotten in CoE?”

Dungeons should be epic (and fun) experiences that push us to the highest levels of performance – and should be designed as such (not as quick 20 minute farm sessions where the only real goal is the shiny piece of virtual loot). Since that level is different for every player, the scaling used in Fractals seems like a perfect fit across the board.

@Warskull:
I don’t understand why you listed SE1/2 as bugged. These are the only dungeons that are not bugged currently. SE1 has a minor issue with mobs spawning after you kill second boss, but on the other hand, why not?

Path 3 of SE is bugged because it is exploitable and faceroll-easy, requres nothing from the player. Why design an encounter in the dungeon if it doesn’t matter what you do and if you know the boss abilities? You could as well just put the same mobs that are outside and just scale them up a bit. All paths of all dungeons sffer from this except very few → Namely SE path 1, and final encounter in path 2.

SE1 was the first dungeon in ages that we actually wiped several times before completing. I don’t understand why the dungeons should be doable by absolutely anyone without any deaths on first approach.

@Robert
Good to hear. Finally!

@Nonlinear
Maybe you should try to take some party members that deal damage? Sorry, couldn’t help myself, but if you did the final boss fight for 20 minutes you did something wrong.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

We haven’t scrapped the old dungeons. We tried something new with Fractals, and so far it’s been very successful. I was on the team that built fractals, and now I am on the bug-fixing live team with a focus on our ‘old’ dungeons to fix bugs in there and see what I can do to spice them up a bit.

We’re certainly not going to just sweep the old dungeons under the rug. I will be working very hard on improving the dungeons.

The reason it’s popular is that FotM hands out rewards that are better than you can find anywhere else in the game world. Had it come with unique looking Exotic skins the demand for FotM would have been much better balanced. But right now, there is not one reason to run the old dungeons, unless you want one of the dungeon skins.
FotM has superior rewards, with 20-slot bags and new Ascended gear drops.

RakaNishoo.6071:

@Nonlinear
Maybe you should try to take some party members that deal damage? Sorry, couldn’t help myself, but if you did the final boss fight for 20 minutes you did something wrong.

twas hyperbole. The point being: boring easy mechanic is easy for 5-10 minutes it will remain easy for 15, 20, 25 minutes etc. more health on a boring mechanic doesn’t equal challenging or fun.

If player can’t figure out the encounter in less than in a minute and figure how to tab then player is bad. Meanwhile everyone else understands to run around for X minutes avoiding lighting AOE simply tabbing to the other golem when they see the icon. All the hp on the golem just make the encounter long and boring.

Well, FoTM makes the ‘old’ dungeons redundant. We’re being forced to grind for Ascended gear, because it is necessary for Wv3 (which it going to take ages), and the ‘old’ dungeons don’t help us do that.

True. So long as the old dungeons don’t give progression towards Ascended stuff, there’s not a lot of point to them anymore for most people.

Unfortunately, Robert, if you don’t put BIS gear into the “old” dungeons, they will continue to be under-utilized. Your company’s own departure from the promise of no gear progression proves that.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Unfortunately, Robert, if you don’t put BIS gear into the “old” dungeons, they will continue to be under-utilized.

This is 100% correct. That’s just how MMO’s work. Max-level dungeons are either part of the path toward BIS gear, or most of the population ignores them.

Honestly, current exotic dungeon sets should, like the legendaries, be updated to ascended.

Kitting out in Exotics is a small accomplishment. Kitting out in dungeon armor is a much more involved and trying process.

In addition:

WvW exotics > Ascended This is a similar effort to dungeon exotics and should be rewarded accordingly.

MF transmutes for top tier crafting mats>vial of condensed mists. This should require a large number of crystals or philosopher’s stones, as these are purchased with skill points gained from completing all types of content. For instance, 20 orichalum+200 philosopher’s stones+20 dust = 1x vial.

The current ascended rings should be added to crafting discovery, or MF craftable as an upgrade from a similar crafted ring, a vial, and X amount of dust.

If Ascended is the top tier, we’re not going to ever invent new top tiers, and we’re going to stick with the idea that ascended items should be statistically superior to exotics in all content, then the tokens, mass collections of skill points, crafting material, crafting skills, and other time consuming tasks that currently exist should reflect that reward.

There’s baseline Exotic that you can put together the week or two after 80, there’s ascended which is a touch better to give you something to work at, and there’s legendary for the optional ultra long haul.

Can it be done something with the legendaries about the tokens because i hate Arah and i Must do it for Gift of Zaitan(500 tokens) can you atleast make exchange from other dungeons. Like every token can be exchanged or tokens to be tradable or buyable with Karma.

Btw i love Fractals just i hope you will fix the bug with erors on some maps i have eror on Asura style map with Harpies at start.

We need party search for dungeons, global party search.
We need a fix in rewards. Long paths or hard paths = more tokens.
Now im suffer to get ppl for path 1 in arah. Nobody wants to do it, only path 3.
We need a daily dungeon achievement or npc. with rewards in tokens, same how in gw1 is, Zaishen bounty.
sry for my bad english ty

xvalkyrie.6742:

Maybe add ascended gear for token purchase in the pre-fractals dungeons? Or a chance of getting it out of the final boss chest? Then we could do whatever dungeon we wanted without feeling like we have to grind fractals for ascended gear. (Don’t get me wrong, fractals is amazing, but candy every day will still make you sick of it after a while) The rest of us who want dungeon armor/weapons can then convince others to come with us. Lol

If it does become a chance to drop in a chest or off a last boss, could it be higher than .001% please? Maybe 5-15%. Stats are random and its account bound, so it should drop way more since it’s unsellable. Otherwise a chance to keep getting defensive/condi/mf ascended trinkets is not going to make my offensive build warrior happy! Or let us mystic forge the ones we don’t want into the stats we do, without 250 tier 6 crafting mats.

You know if they have done this and allowed a path through all content in the game to aquire the ascended gear Anet would not be having these incredibly negative PR issues right now and everyone would care less about a new tier of gear. No one likes being forced into 1 thing over and over just to keep up.

pyronix.4081:

SeventhSon.8172:

wow, Ned .. brutal.

Guess if i got my head chopped off I would be too.

I LOL’ed.

Signs of a good software company with mature software engineering processes —> prioritizing fixes for existing content first before releasing new content or changed content, the rationale being that if you do it in reverse, you will keep releasing new content which will always contain bugs, and which will be a nightmare to do NNIT (no negative impact testing) with, and it will be a vicious cycle of new content = more bugs to fix, and the people on the bug fixing team will never see the end of it.

Speaking to devs and to ANet development team in general, please consult best practices as per ITIL, and apply modern project management and software engineering principles PLEASE.

I’m providing you the wikipedia link below. You’re welcome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Infrastructure_Library

Sweet good to see you have a job at the one company in the world that allows devs to decide on the priority of things. You know cause that makes total business sense.

I often tell my internal customers, no you can’t have this new feature because we have to fix these bugs that you have decided are lower priority. Oh wait I do not do any of that because I’m not an arrogant 30 something who read a few books and now thinks he knows better than all the dumb kitten people who pay his salary.

cesmode.4257:

The leveling system is terrible. I just have a sneaking feeling that in a few weeks or months, all the low lvl fractal runners will have a hard time finding a group.

Also, I have not touched any other PVE content since the patch because I want to keep up with the masses that are progressing their own fractal levels. I havent seen any other part of Tyria other than LA since the patch because of this level system.

I agree. We already see this kind of exclusionary nature with people struggling to get Story mode done so they can do Explore if they took their time getting into dungeons (Which I personally have, though I mostly avoid them now due to their flaws making them not feel worthwhile to even try).

The leveling system of Fractals seems to have taken no notice of this at all. It will force people to keep up, or not find a group anymore, which is hardly going to make the dungeon ‘fun’ in the long run.

Just scrap the entire idea of increasing the stats over current exotic gear! Allow the ascended gear the option to have a one time infusion to tune it to FoM agony so people can go further. Allow higher scale runs to offer more fractals and achievement points ever few levels. Then have gear skins available for FoM just like ‘old’ dungeons.

This also means future content releases can follow similar patterns. Introduce another ‘new’ stat that can only be acquired by running the new content.

But I repeat not superior gear.

Wouldn’t it have been better to fix the “old” dungeons first ?

Nobody want’s to do them now anyway.

cesmode.4257:

Robert Hrouda.1327:

We haven’t scrapped the old dungeons. We tried something new with Fractals, and so far it’s been very successful. I was on the team that built fractals, and now I am on the bug-fixing live team with a focus on our ‘old’ dungeons to fix bugs in there and see what I can do to spice them up a bit.

We’re certainly not going to just sweep the old dungeons under the rug. I will be working very hard on improving the dungeons.

The dungeon itself is a wild success and I thank you for having the ingenuity to designing it.

The leveling system is terrible. I just have a sneaking feeling that in a few weeks or months, all the low lvl fractal runners will have a hard time finding a group.

Also, I have not touched any other PVE content since the patch because I want to keep up with the masses that are progressing their own fractal levels. I havent seen any other part of Tyria other than LA since the patch because of this level system.

There is no point in doing “old” dungeons. I have done the same. As have thousands of other players in my Server, Sanctum of Rall – just visit our Lion’s Arch to see.

Yes, Fractals are quite fun if taken as a separate dungeon-like feature . Including ascended items there only, and REQUIRING ridiculous grind to get them? Horrible!

I don’t know what else to say.

It is frankly shocking that no developer has responded directly to this inequity.

I agree with all of the complaints I have read. If i wanted to grind gear there are much better games that do this much better. I like the “concept” of GW2 for what it was supposed to be and because it was not like other MMO’s. Sure they say “oh you dont need the new gear and oh its not THAT much better” but this is just the beginning. Of course now that it has started it will continue and if this happened just a few months after release, I can only imagine what it will be like in a year.

And i’m sorry Robert but yes the other dungeons are now obsolete unless you change the loot tables which then just reinforces and increases the need to grind. Lets be honest if you change the loot table i highly dout you will make it the exact same loot as Fractals because if you did and loot was the same then people would just run the easiest of the dungeons for a better chance at loot. So to fix that you will have to add different and/or better loot to “encourage” people to run these newly updated dungeons. Is any of this starting to sound familiar to anyone? It should…. It’s the same cookie cutter setup that every MMO to date has adopted.

Uloi.8593:

pyronix.4081:

SeventhSon.8172:

wow, Ned .. brutal.

Guess if i got my head chopped off I would be too.

I LOL’ed.

Signs of a good software company with mature software engineering processes —> prioritizing fixes for existing content first before releasing new content or changed content, the rationale being that if you do it in reverse, you will keep releasing new content which will always contain bugs, and which will be a nightmare to do NNIT (no negative impact testing) with, and it will be a vicious cycle of new content = more bugs to fix, and the people on the bug fixing team will never see the end of it.

Speaking to devs and to ANet development team in general, please consult best practices as per ITIL, and apply modern project management and software engineering principles PLEASE.

I’m providing you the wikipedia link below. You’re welcome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Infrastructure_Library

Sweet good to see you have a job at the one company in the world that allows devs to decide on the priority of things. You know cause that makes total business sense.

I often tell my internal customers, no you can’t have this new feature because we have to fix these bugs that you have decided are lower priority. Oh wait I do not do any of that because I’m not an arrogant 30 something who read a few books and now thinks he knows better than all the dumb kitten people who pay his salary.

Wow… u mad bro? Ad hominem attack right there without knowing context.

I never said devs should be the ones deciding priority of changes. I said devs and development team (which, if you don’t know, includes Project Managers and stakeholders). More to the point, this actually applies to the project managers and decision makers higher up in the chain since they have lateral visibility on various aspects of the business. These are the people who decide which changes need to be coded/fixed first.

Secondly, I’d hate to work for your company. If clients are demanding changes while there are pending bug fixes in the pipeline, best practice would be to do risk analysis and advise your clients that there is a possibility that their requested change would aggravate existing bugs, create newer bugs, make older bugs harder to fix, etc. That is what makes business sense. In the long run, your clients will appreciate your service better if you make sure that they understand the situation and the risk involved.

If they want to push ahead despite all of this, well that’s fine and that’s their call. But really, I don’t see clients (in the sense that we are ANet’s clients) demanding to have class balance issues prioritized over class bug issues. If you would like to opine differently, please cite your source.

Also, I’m not 30 something. I’m younger than that.

Also, the people who pay my salary in real life know better than me which is why they’re the once making sure we know ITIL. There is a reason it’s called “best practices”. Dude, go do research and check out how many top IT companies are using ITIL or a similar paradigm before you randomly bash people in the forum with your rage. You’re not being constructive at all.

Warskull.3096:

Actually the graveling burrows were finally fixed. It took about 2.5 months but they finally fixed them. Melee can actually hit them while standing still.

However, there are so many problem with dungeons right now. Currently 5 paths are genuinely bugged. CoE 1, SE 1/2, and Arah 1/2. Three of these bugs are flat out run enders. SE can be powered through, although it isn’t worth your time.

Other paths vary from poorly designed to very poorly designed. A big part of the reason people shouted no end game was because so many of the dungeons were broken and so many people end up just repeating AC as a result over and over.

AC 2 (Detha) is also consistently bugged with a brick wall progress stopper: if you don’t kill the breeder in the spike trap room on the first try, you are hosed and just wasted X amount of time. Detha will not start the turret repair sequence if you fail to ace the Breeder encounter on the first attempt.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

We haven’t scrapped the old dungeons. We tried something new with Fractals, and so far it’s been very successful. I was on the team that built fractals, and now I am on the bug-fixing live team with a focus on our ‘old’ dungeons to fix bugs in there and see what I can do to spice them up a bit.

We’re certainly not going to just sweep the old dungeons under the rug. I will be working very hard on improving the dungeons.

Could you please fix the bugged waypoints in CoE appearing after you finish the last boss, this running half the map hoping the insanely hard boss doesn’t reset isn’t fun at all…

Also a similar issue with two waypoints on top of each other in Arah (just before the swimming part) make running half the dungeon to the giant boss not fun…

Deadcell.9052:

xvalkyrie.6742:

Maybe add ascended gear for token purchase in the pre-fractals dungeons? Or a chance of getting it out of the final boss chest? Then we could do whatever dungeon we wanted without feeling like we have to grind fractals for ascended gear. (Don’t get me wrong, fractals is amazing, but candy every day will still make you sick of it after a while) The rest of us who want dungeon armor/weapons can then convince others to come with us. Lol

If it does become a chance to drop in a chest or off a last boss, could it be higher than .001% please? Maybe 5-15%. Stats are random and its account bound, so it should drop way more since it’s unsellable. Otherwise a chance to keep getting defensive/condi/mf ascended trinkets is not going to make my offensive build warrior happy! Or let us mystic forge the ones we don’t want into the stats we do, without 250 tier 6 crafting mats.

You know if they have done this and allowed a path through all content in the game to aquire the ascended gear Anet would not be having these incredibly negative PR issues right now and everyone would care less about a new tier of gear. No one likes being forced into 1 thing over and over just to keep up.

I agree with this completely, it would be better for less insanely hard to get them and regenerate the old dungeons asap..

Robert Hrouda.1327:

shaktiboi.5194:

AC 2 (Detha) is also consistently bugged with a brick wall progress stopper: if you don’t kill the breeder in the spike trap room on the first try, you are hosed and just wasted X amount of time. Detha will not start the turret repair sequence if you fail to ace the Breeder encounter on the first attempt.

I just tested this out about 6 times and couldn’t get it to happen in the way you describe (let them kill Detha, then succeed the event). Could you give me some more info in the form of a PM? I haven’t heard of this one being reported before either, so I’ll alert our QA team to look into this chain.

Edit:
Also folks, I know everyone here is very passionate, but please don’t pick at each other. Let’s keep things clean and constructive.

Yep, I have encountered the same with some of the peoples around too and could not proceed when we arrive at the turret room. Myth is, if Detha comes in contact with any glob of slime baddies, she’ll be bugged.

And letting the mobs kill Detha, or even leaving her far behind and coming back doesn’t fix the problem either. Tried.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

We haven’t scrapped the old dungeons. We tried something new with Fractals, and so far it’s been very successful. I was on the team that built fractals, and now I am on the bug-fixing live team with a focus on our ‘old’ dungeons to fix bugs in there and see what I can do to spice them up a bit.

We’re certainly not going to just sweep the old dungeons under the rug. I will be working very hard on improving the dungeons.

About the only thing you can do to salvage the situation, is to make every explorable dungeon chest give at LEAST 50 t6 mats. And even that’s a rather weak incentive at this point.

I hope you reply with some answers.. Have you PERSONALLY tried to see how long it takes to get 250 t6 mats? The droprate, even for the best areas, is around 2-3 every 40mins.

If you didn’t intend this game to be a grind, then please look into speeding up the average player’s acquisition of t6 by at least a factor of 30.

Slic have you gone full mental? Tier 6 mats are supposed to be hard to obtain. Also everyone farming gets 2-3 every 40 min (wich is an exaggeration, i can get way more than that). Also you get the silver you can buy them with during those 40 min.

Why would even be the incentive to play when everything could be obtained in 1 day. The game would lose its charm in a week when everyone would be running around in legendaries, and have all armors availible.

The right incentive would be make the dungeon gear look better. I mean i know its a matter of taste. But with the friends i spoke, we all agree that maybe 1 dungeon set out of all is likable. And most weapons from dungeons look like giant plastic toys. Those chinese ripoff ones, not the cool ones.

PiSquare.2904:

Slic have you gone full mental? Tier 6 mats are supposed to be hard to obtain. Also everyone farming gets 2-3 every 40 min (wich is an exaggeration, i can get way more than that). Also you get the silver you can buy them with during those 40 min.

Why? And says who? T6 shouldn’t cost 20 times more than a T5. There are better ways to add arbitrary grind or slow down progress without making one of the most needed materials harder to get than a rare.

Phy.2913:

PiSquare.2904:

Slic have you gone full mental? Tier 6 mats are supposed to be hard to obtain. Also everyone farming gets 2-3 every 40 min (wich is an exaggeration, i can get way more than that). Also you get the silver you can buy them with during those 40 min.

Why? And says who? T6 shouldn’t cost 20 times more than a T5. There are better ways to add arbitrary grind or slow down progress without making one of the most needed materials harder to get than a rare.

T6 mats are necessarily that rare because they are “end-game” mats. Please imagine, if you will, that they were not as rare. That means people will get bored with the game more easily. The point of the “grind” is to make sure that you keep playing longer – and I don’t mean that in a negative way. These mats, as PiSqure already mention, are meant to be rare. I suppose it’s just a difference of perspective but for me, there’s no point of having “rare” mats if they’re as easy to get as grains of sand on a beach.

You mentioned of better ways to slow down progress. Could you care to cite some? The problem I think we’re going to have if you start citing example are that these examples will impact other areas of the game unfairly. Crafting has to have a difficulty curve as well. Right now, it’s already one of the easiest ways to level up… provided, of course, that you are rich (either in-game or in real life).

Robert Hrouda.1327:

shaktiboi.5194:

AC 2 (Detha) is also consistently bugged with a brick wall progress stopper: if you don’t kill the breeder in the spike trap room on the first try, you are hosed and just wasted X amount of time. Detha will not start the turret repair sequence if you fail to ace the Breeder encounter on the first attempt.

I just tested this out about 6 times and couldn’t get it to happen in the way you describe (let them kill Detha, then succeed the event). Could you give me some more info in the form of a PM? I haven’t heard of this one being reported before either, so I’ll alert our QA team to look into this chain.

Edit:
Also folks, I know everyone here is very passionate, but please don’t pick at each other. Let’s keep things clean and constructive.

I run AC with some friends pretty much daily (all 3 paths) and we have never encountered any bugs with the NPCs getting stuck with one exception. The only time we did see it was on a run with a rather over zealous warrior who wanted to skip as much as possible (essentially all trash packs and some bosses). During this run we encountered the hodgins bug where he doesnt initiate the event to hunt down the scepter pieces being guarded by the scavengers.

In total we have run the dungeon at least 50+ times on every path and only ever seen the NPCs bug out when you try to skip bosses/mobs. Our run is relatively organised and especially due to the recent rewards buffs we kill everything in our path. The only thing we used to skip was cave troll pre reward buff.

I have noticed that in many pug groups it is the norm to just skip trash packs as well as Kholer. I wonder if possibly these issues with the NPCs getting stuck is related to skipping mobs/bosses? As this is the only noticeable difference between how my group runs it compared to the average group.

I would be interested in knowing what mobs the people reporting these bugs skip if any.

If this is any further help also I have noticed that most people report Detha and Hodgins to bug frequently, I am yet to see anyone claim to have Tzark stuck. One possibility is that running past the oozes on path 1 and 2 could cause this? The main places Hodgins gets stuck is pre scepter gather and Detha pre cannon event, both of which take place directly after an ooze pack. The above mentioned time we saw hodgins bug was also when the oozes were skipped. This may seem a little farfetched but it could be worth a try.

If you are looking at improving the old dungeons you need to look at why people are running the new stuff over the old stuff. Obviously FotM is more rewarding. The best gear in the game drops there, the most valuable mats drop there, the drop rate on rares seems to be much higher (why am I getting level 80 rares every run on low level fractals which are easier and faster than every explorable dungeon I’ve ever done? Why am I getting several exotics in 12 fractal runs and I’ve never found an exotic in over 100 explorable path runs which were harder and took longer?). There is a massive reward disparity in the game with this new content and as much as I don’t like loot driving content, when you have such an imbalance in rewards (even after the original dungeons were buffed) people are far more likely to go where the money is, especially when it’s easier, takes less time and honestly, it’s more fun.

The lower level fractals are more fun than most explorables. Mechanics are more skill/co-ordination based, encounters don’t feel like time sinks to create the illusion of challenge and there is a great diversity of gameplay (and environments). I think I’ve also noticed some fractals have different bosses/paths to complete (like dolphins vs lights, Mossman vs Bloomhunger), that stuff would be more fun in the orginal dungeons. In TA, even if you took a different path, the final boss is mostly the same. Even if you fixed all the bugs, the original dungeons are clearly the early work, which was greatly improved upon with the latest dungeon.

Problems specific to explorables that FotM doesn’t have to deal with is path equality. There is an imbalance in the time and difficulty of the different paths in explorables. If you are looking at original dungeons and spicing them up, rebalancing the path equality might be another thing you can do to improve them.

I don’t want to see gear progression drive explorable dungeon content, but loot equality in the game is very important and as fun as FotM is, I know a large part of the popularity is riding on the coat tails of epic loots and not just their design. I don’t want to see level progression locking people out of explorables. I like that the fractals can be experienced at different difficulties for different skill sets, but level progression is locking me out from playing with my friends. Having to level up explorable dungeons would kill them.

I’m in favour of shaking up the original dungeons, applying some things that worked from new stuff and smoothing out the experience to improve the overall quality, but FotM has some pretty big flaws that come from double edged sword choices in their design.

pyronix.4081:

Phy.2913:

PiSquare.2904:

Slic have you gone full mental? Tier 6 mats are supposed to be hard to obtain. Also everyone farming gets 2-3 every 40 min (wich is an exaggeration, i can get way more than that). Also you get the silver you can buy them with during those 40 min.

Why? And says who? T6 shouldn’t cost 20 times more than a T5. There are better ways to add arbitrary grind or slow down progress without making one of the most needed materials harder to get than a rare.

T6 mats are necessarily that rare because they are “end-game” mats. Please imagine, if you will, that they were not as rare. That means people will get bored with the game more easily. The point of the “grind” is to make sure that you keep playing longer – and I don’t mean that in a negative way. These mats, as PiSqure already mention, are meant to be rare. I suppose it’s just a difference of perspective but for me, there’s no point of having “rare” mats if they’re as easy to get as grains of sand on a beach.

T6 aren’t “rare”, they’re “fine”, and as it is now, the grind for these mats will bore me long before I get bored of the rest of the game. Just because they’re hard to get now doesn’t mean they should be.

Shiren.9532:

Problems specific to explorables that FotM doesn’t have to deal with is path equality. There is an imbalance in the time and difficulty of the different paths in explorables. If you are looking at original dungeons and spicing them up, rebalancing the path equality might be another thing you can do to improve them.

I can’t agree more with this. I’ve been trying to unlock all paths and I’m yet to find a group willing to do some of them, namely :
- Sorrow’s Embrace – path 1 (and I had a really hard time finding groups for the other paths),
- Citadel of Flames – path 3,
- Arah – path 1 & 4.

I’ve managed to clear all paths of Crucible of Eternity but there was a disparity there too, I recall.

On the other hand there’s no issue with Catacombs, Caudecus or Honor of the Waves.

When I ask my fellow PUGs why shouldn’t we try the aforementioned paths, the answer is always that’s “it’s not worth it”.

On the other hand, I’ve tried the new FotM dungeon and my feelings are quite mixed up. Some of the mini-dungeons are more than tedious (Swamps and Underwater) while other are very fun (Snow, Sentient Statue or Ascalon) while remaining challenging. I’m not on board with the mandatory grind for the gear threadmill, and can’t see myself repeat runs on this one.

So, yes, rebalancing the paths equality of the original ones would be a good thing.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

We haven’t scrapped the old dungeons. We tried something new with Fractals, and so far it’s been very successful. I was on the team that built fractals, and now I am on the bug-fixing live team with a focus on our ‘old’ dungeons to fix bugs in there and see what I can do to spice them up a bit.

We’re certainly not going to just sweep the old dungeons under the rug. I will be working very hard on improving the dungeons.

For starters how about you cut the hp of bosses in Honor of the Waves in half. The bosses are kittening boring and are not the slightest bit difficult. Yet you make them take a minimum of 5 minutes to kill.

Geoffroy.3685:

Shiren.9532:

Problems specific to explorables that FotM doesn’t have to deal with is path equality. There is an imbalance in the time and difficulty of the different paths in explorables. If you are looking at original dungeons and spicing them up, rebalancing the path equality might be another thing you can do to improve them.

I can’t agree more with this. I’ve been trying to unlock all paths and I’m yet to find a group willing to do some of them, namely :
- Sorrow’s Embrace – path 1 (and I had a really hard time finding groups for the other paths),
- Citadel of Flames – path 3,
- Arah – path 1 & 4.

I’ve managed to clear all paths of Crucible of Eternity but there was a disparity there too, I recall.

On the other hand there’s no issue with Catacombs, Caudecus or Honor of the Waves.

When I ask my fellow PUGs why shouldn’t we try the aforementioned paths, the answer is always that’s “it’s not worth it”.

On the other hand, I’ve tried the new FotM dungeon and my feelings are quite mixed up. Some of the mini-dungeons are more than tedious (Swamps and Underwater) while other are very fun (Snow, Sentient Statue or Ascalon) while remaining challenging. I’m not on board with the mandatory grind for the gear threadmill, and can’t see myself repeat runs on this one.

So, yes, rebalancing the paths equality of the original ones would be a good thing.

Path 1 in SE is buged and the Mobs will spawn on themself over and over and fallow you all the way back to the waypoint

I spent an hour trying to get a hotw pug today, I ended up hopping overflows in LA and asking people to save polar bears.

But yeah, no more new content until the current content is fixed please, doing a broken dungeon on my broken mesmer makes my heart broken