Guild Wars 2

I just want to say AMEN..I really enjoyed AC before the overhaul even though it was a bit easy (it was an interdictory dungeon after all) atm the odds of a PUG group completing AC are slim especially with low lvl’s, new players and only text communication to get through it. It’s really sad the decline of interest in AC now that it has such poor roi. Because it got abused by more experienced players it was outfitted for more of a challenge, but in the wake it destroyed it for casual player, and the pug groups. The funny thing is they catered to all the people who complained about AC being too easy and now those people have lost interest in AC and have move on to easer dungeons with bigger and faster payoffs.

Tomb V.6421:

I just want to say AMEN..I really enjoyed AC before the overhaul even though it was a bit easy (it was an interdictory dungeon after all) atm the odds of a PUG group completing AC are slim especially with low lvl’s, new players and only text communication to get through it. It’s really sad the decline of interest in AC now that it has such poor roi. Because it got abused by more experienced players it was outfitted for more of a challenge, but in the wake it destroyed it for casual player, and the pug groups. The funny thing is they catered to all the people who complained about AC being too easy and now those people have lost interest in AC and have move on to easer dungeons with bigger and faster payoffs.

One of the problems developers face with content design is that people stop doing the content at some point unless the loot pinata gets refilled regularly with more, better or different rewards. There’s only so many times a lot of folks will go back to a dungeon “just for fun.” That’s all people, not just the cutting edge players.

Old AC was being run, as you say, because of its RoI. Now that people have to relearn the mechanics to get anywhere close to their old speed, the same old pinata is not as attractive. I saw someone asking for an AC group in Queensdale last night. Seems he needed one more run for his Gift. Unless they PM’d, there were no takers.

Frankly, the game needs both casual and cutting edge dungeon content. Both are in short supply, and it’s not because there are no dungeons. There are just few dungeons that the cutting edge players acknowledge as hard and fun even when you know the mechanics, and few dungeons where a relaxed, fun experience can be had.

I feel like Fractals of the Mists should be inspiration for dungeon creation from now on. Sure you can throw a horde dungeon because those can be fun, but we can’t have all the dungeons be random hordes. There are moments of greatness in current non-fractal like the plant-boss, new Destroyer and laser defense in COE and Ginva the Butcher in HoTW, the burrow onslaught in path 3 of AC, and path 2 of CoF.

If they did things like lock you in with Kohler AND the Cave Troll in a nice free-for-all where both enemies switch between targets, that breaks the silly immersion-breaking “wait around for the cave troll to demolish kohler.” Make Baelfire’s ghost do some damage.

Basically make more dungeons that require more team organization, like fractals. I recall someone saying that Zhaitan should still be alive (un-undead?) and we fight him in another explorable mode that mixes jumping puzzle, attacking multiple targets, requires pact weapons AND our own equipment. It would be pretty cool to increase that to an 8-person dungeon

Part of what the OP is asking for is for dungeons to be designed around pugs where there is minimal communication and coordination.

I am very much against that idea- at least as a blanket concept (story modes should be easily puggable). In explorable dungeons, however, I would love to see more mechanics like the bomb run in CM (or – an even better example – the Ghost Eater fight in AC). Pugs should have a more difficult time than organized groups (imo, to the point where some – not all – paths are virtually impossible without coordination/communication).

I don’t think dungeons are so bad, when seen as a whole. Sure, the risk/reward across the paths needs fixing and the exploits. Standard runs should be 20 minutes to one hour. Fractals shouldn’t just have increasing numbers of mobs at higher levels. However this would all be hidden if we had new dungeons coming in patches. We’ve hit the point seen in many MMOs where players want nice new content to play and until it comes they will complain about the old content.

What’s wrong with dungeons in my opinion:

-Bad boss designs. There are too many bosses that are just there to waste the player’s time by having massive amounts of HP, and are barely a threat to the team. Even if they are a threat to a team, having to bash on the same thing for 10+ minutes gets old really fast. There need to be more bosses that:

-Are a threat to the whole party (not just being melee-hate only, or only focus on 1 guy the whole fight).
-Do more than 1 or 2 different attacks.
-Have somewhat less HP.

-Better trash mobs, or no trash mobs at all. I don’t know what ArenaNet wants players to do, but skipping trash mobs is in most cases way and way faster and more rewarding than taking the time to kill them. Currently only inexperienced parties are forced to kill trash mobs on the main path.
If trash mobs are so worthless, and so easily skippable, why have them at all? They don’t serve any purpose other than making the player run through longer corridors while skipping the trash groups.
Some options for handling future trash mobs:

1. Make killing trash mobs more rewarding in some way.
2. Make killing trash mobs less of a chore by lowering their HP (and lower some trash mob’s use of CC abilities…)
3. Make killing trash mobs mandatory to progress the dungeon.
4. Make skipping trash mobs raise the difficulty on bosses further on in the dungeon (the more that gets skipped, the harder bosses become, effectively making skipping more of a risk vs. reward thing).
5. Remove trash mobs altogether and focus purely on designing more interesting boss fights.

-Illogical difficulty curves. The difficulty of dungeon content is all over the place. Some of the lower level dungeons are way harder than higher level dungeons. Some paths are way harder than other paths in the same dungeon. Some dungeon’s story mode is harder than some of the explorable paths. Some dungeon mid-way bosses are way harder than the dungeon’s end bosses.

Difficulty needs to be much more consistent. Story should always be easier than any explorable path. No exceptions. Story was meant to be a noob’s introduction to the dungeon, but with some of the current story modes, this is not the case.

Lower level dungeons should be easier for a level 80 party than higher level dungeons. If you can’t make the difficulty more consistent, consider just making all dungeons level 80. I mean, why have those minimum requirements at all when the difficulty is way above what it advertises?

Bring the difficulty and length of paths in the same dungeon closer together. If you make 1 or 2 paths way easier and/or faster than the other, no one is gonna run the harder path(s). What I liked about AC was that all 3 paths shared the same difficulty, which made people run all 3 paths. Some dungeons don’t have that, and people only run the same 1 or 2 paths over again.

-Rewards don’t match up. I get 26 silver for completing a 5 minute, facerollingly easy CoF run. I get 26 silver for a hellish, 6-hour long torture through Arah path 4. Rewards don’t match up with the actual content. Lower the rewards for shorter and easier dungeons. Raise the rewards of longer and more difficult dungeons.
Also, add some useful consumable rewards to the token traders. Let players buy stuff like crafting materials with their dungeon tokens. Let them buy cores and lodestones with tokens. Hell, let them buy precursors with tokens (like, 1K tokens from all 8 dungeons for a precursor). Would finally fix the terrible RNG system.