Personal take on GW2's dungeons.
That’s not even too bad – I can twitch game. (Those that know Touhou will know I used Touhou name and there’s not a lot of games more twitchy or pattern-oriented than bullet hell) I can twitch game for 20 minutes or 30, even. But dungeon isn’t designed to be 20 or 30 minutes. If your group has 1 or 2 person that’s just slightly under par, perhaps because they are your IRL friends and it’s socially awkward to ask them to “play better or kick”, that dungeon run will go from 30 minutes to an hour or so. If someone’s new to the dungeon, that’s 30 minutes to an hour again. If someone’s wearing level 50 gears while doing HotW or Arah? Yeah.
Duration of the dungeon isn’t even that bad – I just turned 25, I am totally young and energetic. Twitch gaming isn’t even that bad. But the lack of variance in a boss’s pattern…! It’s either tank n’ spank, or “Watch Iron Forgeman magma LAZORZ and don’t get hit, and pick up rock and throw it at him” for 5 minutes, or “Ok, did our engi kitten up the pull on the Lovers AGAIN? Else we have no problem it’s only 5 minutes of doing the same thing over and over”. Yeah, patterns are way too simple, there’s never anything unexpected (beside for CM story, the golem boss – missile spam x 6 waves wtf. That was the absolutely worst case and I’ve encountered it ONCE in about 30 runs, of course.). Often the boss attack pattern falls into the same few categories for solutions, as well:
A: Dodge a REALLY obvious attack move.
B: Fall down on the floor because there’s no distinct animation on the move, and get ally to pick you back up.
C: Kill some popups on the side. Maybe do some stuff with stuff they drop.
D: Range the boss while Mesmer/Guardian/Engineer with flamethrower reflect projectiles and watch boss kill himself. Optionally, thief + smoke screen with less success.
The hardest fight (and the most interesting) was the Lovers in AC Story, because you actually need to break away from the 4 patterns… or not, since you can just do a variation of C, except the popup-killing part. Just rock em’. With boulders.
Every dungeon boss fights, even Tequati and Claw of Jormag is like this. Tequati it’s “dodge the vines on the ground, ignore the fear, ignore the popup zombie boomers or dodge them, close eye and 1 unless you are on turret (in which case you aren’t dealing with Tequati as much as 20 popups trying to kill you and the occasional walls)”. Claw of Jormag is “A: Pick up a Pact Rocket. B: Autocast 1. C: Target something, preferably Claw of Jormag. Dodge anything you see coming.”
I… I miss GW1 dungeons and dungeon-like missions. I mean, sure, stuff are obvious in a lot of them (Fleshreaver gonna spear ya), but there are a lot more… Variance in the fights. Before the dungeons I’d never imagine I’d have to fight Ilsundur’s Savanna Heat with rolling balls of fire trying to crush me, or deal with environmental hazard (selfnote: magma is hot) against the Great Destroyer, or that I’d be facing a Ritualist with dozens of level 24 spirits (Slaver’s Exile, of course… was it lv24 spirits?).
The bosses here? Sure, they do /special/ stuff, but you deal with their special stuff about all the same ways – you don’t need to get creative to fight against them. And yet they are artificially hard – bosses have tons of hp making fights last forever, you make one mistake you die horribly, your party make a collective mistake and the boss resets hp to full health… (at least we don’t get kicked back to outpost due to lolHM)
I guess it’s why I’ll always love the Lover’s fight. They are freaking annoying, but it really brought the team together trying to find a solution between thief’s steal/skull + warrior’s fear me and an AoE stealth. Erm, that’s before boulders, of course, after boulders we never did things the “fun” way, we just rock em’. Q_Q
I want dungeons to be fun, not “do the same motions with same strategy because it works for 90% of content”, I guess is what I am asking… And I guess I am asking if anyone else is having the same feeling?
I am one of the worst player in GW1 AND GW2, skill-wise, I am pretty sure, else I wouldn’t be having the sentiments that… GW1 dungeons were almost better in most aspects… (Beside for Dynamic Events inside dungeon – those rock and you should have more of them. A lot more. Like a table of 30 – 100 per dungeon, with higher frequency. That’d be fun and kittens and rainbows and unicorns.). Heck, they even ALWAYS have a big chest in the end that almost always give something cool and shiny, a drive to kill the boss so dead, Zhithan won’t be raising anything from the remains…
Anyways, sorry about this long, incoherent rant, my poor English, and the whole 7:42 AM in the morning thing. If my 2 cents is worth a latte, I’d buy you one for wasting your time reading this, as an apology.
+1 it was a very fun post, thanks for sharing your point of view.
That is a good point about having to concentrate. Be nice to be given chance to breath every once in a while and to be able to chat lol >.< But like you said in your first post, you let up for one second and you end up dead.
To be honest, concentration isn’t that bad – you get used to it as a gamer. When you play DotA/LoL/HoN/whatever, you don’t want to NOT pay attention to the river when you or you allies warded it just so you don’t get ganked, or NOT call missing on lanes. And you get used to dodging veils of bullets after a few months. Geek talks aside, there are other action-y MMOs. Vindictus comes to mind immediately as a … fairly subpar version of GW2. It’s got it’s boring battles, and every bit as action-oriented and require just that much concentrations… But it doesn’t require everyone on your team to be as concentrated. You screw up, it’s your head that’s rolling, people are gonna get you up and they are going to carry on.
In GW2 when you go down, it becomes that much longer to kill a boss, you want to rez your allies – but it become so much MORE of a burden as a stray aoe hit from boss suddenly go from “possibly deadly” to “guaranteed death” (double the damage, double the death!) when ressing someone, and you all know how finicky dodges can be when ressing someone…
It’s probably why my Engi never leave house without [Toss Elixir R], and my Thief never leave for party without [Shadow Refuge] …
You write an interesting post, but let’s not forget that the HM dungeons in GW1 were all incredibly difficult until players took the time to think up efficient strategies to run them.
Getting a non-meta PUG in DOA = constant pwipes. The same for FoW, UW, Slavers, EoTN. Even the missions in all campaigns could fail if someone made a mistake (i.e. aggro’d too many mob) or overstretched the healer.
I don’t think we need to be so hasty in our judgment that Dungeons in GW2 are ‘too difficult’. We’re only a month in to the game and it’s gratifying to see challenging content which is aimed at players who want to innovate and experiment with their builds and groups and tactics to get through these dungeons. I don’t think we can judge how difficult they are until we, the player base, have spent considerably more time trying to find ways to best them.
Wellllll to be honest FoW wasn’t that hard even on HM, beside for the griffons, and the entire thing can be done while I am half-asleep with just one other guy and maybe some heroes… But that’s beside the point, since you are right – it’s only easy because it’s all established :P
I am not sayin the dungeon’s too difficult or too easy, per se. I am saying that it’s overall boring because the solution to them are all just A, B, C, or D. You want a guardian or mesmer on your party because it’ll trivilize some bosses (CM Explorable Butler mode boss only ranges, for example) and solve D. A is simple, B doesn’t have a solution (beside for perhaps player skills?), C is… perhaps their only way to make dungeons interesting?
But I want to have imaginative ways to solve a problem that dungeon represent, not “throw things until enemy die, dodge everything they have to throw at us” for 90% of the game’s content.
Interesting mechanics I’ll remember and like: Lovers, see above. Fun.
Interesting mechanics I am kinda meh about, as an example: TA Story boss fight. The boss resses the nightmare/illusions. Ress that gets interrupted by damage? So the whole mechanic still devolves into “DPS, then DPS some more”. Except you get a priority change, which in our case is our warrior pressing Ctrl + T on the Big Boss, and rest of us press T, problem solved. Not as fun.
Yes that is the point I was trying to make: GW1 dungeons felt easy because we had established how to beat them easily. Now lots of people complain GW2 dungeons are too hard but we just need some time to work out how to beat them better.
Your point that it’s boring is well made but I do think that this is partially because most player skill and ability are not yet up to scratch. In GW1 parties would look specifically for certain build combos to neutralise threats but at the moment it seems most dungeons are pugs where the skill level is much more casual and players are not utilising cross-class combos and finishers, are stacking the same conditions and not using the terrain effectively to pull mobs to desired areas such as corners etc. I have yet to see players asking for specific abilities to bring to a dungeon. It’s going to take some time.
At the moment I prefer GW2 mechanics to GW1 mechanics which became a few meta builds doing all the high level content: we all remember 55 hp monks and perma sins running through everything and the only way to keep up would be to roll one yourself. At the end of the day the content is always going to be as much DPS as possible and as much damage avoidance as possible.
That said – I’m not sure that I like the cost involved in rerolling your skills and traits, as this makes it harder to adapt to different situations and new environments. I suppose as time goes on the cost will become less and less significant as we accumulate more gold and it becomes a necessary gold sink. As it is early days however, this may be one of the reasons so few people are attempting or willing to try different builds for Dungeons (glass cannon = great for explorable PvE but not so great for story/explore dungeons).
(Btw i don’t disagree with anything that you’re saying.)
One problem with “gimmick” boss fights, where you have to figure out some specific strategy to defeat a boss (a strategy that isnt used elsewhere in the game), is that you get one of two options:
- People know the gimmick because they looked it up on youtube = boss fight is trivialised
- People don’t know the gimmick because it’s their first time = a frustrating series of trial and error deaths whilst you try to observe the boss behaviour and figure out a solution.
A good boss fight that is accessible yet requires skill would require mostly familar techniques (with a single simple gimmick per boss fight for flavour and variety), but they need to be executed with timing, reaction and coordination that’s strict enough to be difficult to do without a lot of concentration.
Take Dark Souls as an example. For most of the bosses, it’s just about rolling to avoid damage and attacking to kill the boss. But perfectly timing your rolls to avoid every attack is far from trivial and is often a white-knuckle exercise.
(lol Shadow Form)
I completely understand where you are coming from and what you meant. You are awesome and actually spent time to spend some insight to understand my rambling. Thank you.
A thing about working with your teammates: Not to brag, since it’s actually pretty shameful, but I find that as long as I take good care of myself, and take care of my teammates while at it, I will “carry my team to victory” more often than not. I can DPS ok on my thief (Sword/Pistol + Shortbow stealth-recover-init-oriented + dual attack focus) while doing some fairly amazing saves (Shadow Refuge, Sig of Agility for 4 rolls in total). I find that if everyone have that, since you can change utility in dungeon, it’s a matter of going “Hey Guardian, you got that Consecration skill I read about on the wiki that reflects projectile?” to your teammate and generally even novices will perform fairly well.
It’s bad since it prohibits learning on their own initiative (heh…), but as long as you know all the classes or at least read about them in a few glances, you can generally ask your teammates to do certain stuff, and any dungeon would become much easier. Sure, you can’t tell your teammate to retrait to 5 venom-sharing thieves team in dungeon, but you can make sure everyone has properly utility to deal with mobs, as long as you spend the effort.
… I don’t WANT to spend the effort, of course – I want teammates that will do that automatically, even suggest it when I forget (and I am forgetful, at best) without some amatuer in their profession asking them about using certain skills. That can come later. The game isn’t difficult as long as you have just a little bit of leadership and initiative in taking it, analyze and discuss situation with your allies. (Barring recent update, CM story is so hard right now it hurts my mind. Not because it’s hard, but because there’s no room for mistakes – and there’s lots more places where you can make mistakes!).
I guess traits are less adaptable than utility skills and weapons – you can always bring a rifle with you as a warrior and leave it in your inventory, but you can’t swap out Deadly Arts for Shadow Arts on the spot as a thief. I am ok with that, though – it gives me some sense of character and reminds me what possibilities I have at hand, thus making me vigilant of what I am capable of, should situation turns out that I need a certain special something.
(btw, you are an awesome person, Flik.)
Yes that is the point I was trying to make: GW1 dungeons felt easy because we had established how to beat them easily. Now lots of people complain GW2 dungeons are too hard but we just need some time to work out how to beat them better.
This captures my frustration with the latest patch.
I had a method of playing my Guardian in a sure-fire way to complete the dungeons making my team survive for as long as they could possibly survive, tanking and kiting enemies.
Pre-patch was fun, but repetitive. Changing the way dungeons act every once in a while would be nice, fresh. Too soon for this change though, at-least for me.
No heads up.
According to a youtube video which will not be linked, these instance maps appear to have a bit more to them than what is currently released. Maybe the dungeons we want, the painful, rewarding, self-accomplishment dungeons, will be shown further down the line. Not as an expansion, but hopefully as just a content boost.
I’m looking forward to future content.
Dungeons/Instances in this game feel like quests in Dragon Age 1 to me, the stories are not at all complete, but I appreciate the way they’re done.