Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone.

I can’t put my finger on the exact mechanics that make these two dungeons more fun than any others, but I thought we really would need more fun dungeons like that. My guild and I enjoy CoE and Arah the most of all dungeons (we’ve done all of them, plenty of them been repeated countlessly many times). Anyone else feels like that?

On the begining they might be harsh, and I can understand (a bit) the haters who can’t get pass Giganticus Lupicus or Subject Alpha, which I find the most fun bosses in game. But the more we did it, the more we enjoyed.

I love the variety of encounters in both dungeons (I won’t comment on path 1 and 4 in Arah, enough many people described the issues there, and I wholeheartly agree). We enjoy the puzzles (laser tunnel in CoE, passing the orb to ignite the lantherns in Arah), which are easy and very fun to do. They don’t require all 5 members to do them flawlessly, so they get easier on the impatient players, and you can always find 1 or 2 of those in your party. The mechanics, looks and environment of each boss are quite different and keep the dungeon being interesting to the very end.

It’s really hard for me to nail the exact difference. Could be music, colors of the envionment, unique mechanics, very fun puzzles or a mix of easy content with demanding one in a very balanced way. I think that CoE has perfect amount of foes in dungeon – I never feel like I want to skip anything in there. Maybe some other players could help to identify the source of fun in these two dungeons, so we could use it as nice feedback for the designers, so they could deliver us even more fun in future.

As a side note: Subject Alpha shouldn’t be nerfed as much as it is now. It used to be more fun before that patch, which caused many bugs with Alpha. It often seems to be stunned, it doesn’t do any attacks and just allows our party to bring it down by 40% of its HP before it starts doing some lazy moves again. HP of some bosses can be reduced, but let their mechanics be still challenging

Other than that, good job ANet on CoE. I would award it with the most fun dungeon title, so far. I really hope that more dungeons of this kind will be coming!

CoE3’s boss, the destroyer, is just a sign of a very bad design – the dps window is very, very short, and just keeping 3 people up to man the lasers while 2 people stay down and hit the boss every so often is plain dull. It’s not a hard fight, but extremely boring and long because of the mechanic. I’m sure it looked much better on paper, during the design phase, but it’s not enjoyable OR demanding at all, making it probably the worst boss fight throughout all dungeons.
Other than that, CoE is indeed awesome – ATTENTION!

This.
These fights are fun, well designed and rewarding, wish there were more at this level of difficulty.
Love them, I’m hoping the new dungeon has something like this that takes ages to learn.

Aside from the Evolved Destroyer and the HP of the MARK T-B-something boss I agree. CoE is probably the most fun dungeon in the game at the moment.

CoE is definitely one of the better dungeons; not perfect, but definitely overall good. Not tons of trash, good diversity in mobs, varying mechanics in the encounters (though still not a lot of real teamwork cooperation except for the Evolved bosses and hacking the security system), WPs that aren’t too far or too close. Just generally well done.

I like CoE. I don’t like that Subject Alpha is the boss for every single path, and recurs multiple times in every single path. When I was going for dungeon master, I did all 3 paths back to back for CoE, and by the end I thought I would never go back into CoE because I was bored with Alpha and the destroyer fight is just god awful. CoE is good in small doses for me, subject alpha just gets boring when hes everywhere.

Arah is okay, Giganticus is the best boss fight in the game, although I think he could use from fine-tuning (getting hit when he spams red circle goopy stuff and you’re not in the circles, etc.) Alot of the fights just don’t match up to it though, Dwaynas mechanics are just terrible, the final boss in path 4 is as boring as all the bosses that its made up of.

Also, I know its beating a dead horse at this point but, for Arah, the loot in comparison with the amount of time and effort just doesn’t match. At least CoE has charged cores/lodestones and a few mobs that potentially drop destroyer and corrupted materials. Arah doesn’t have squat.

Bukkebruse.2810:

Aside from the Evolved Destroyer and the HP of the MARK T-B-something boss I agree. CoE is probably the most fun dungeon in the game at the moment.

^ Agreed, its weird since they like to toss in mini – bosses with no real reward followed by a chest even (Mark-whatever followed by hacking for instance).

The Destroyer is just laughably boring. Sit there, watch a progress bar go down – play – rinse and repeat. They should have had players trapped in the forcefield and have guns do something else.

Another annoying one if the champion guy after you break down the door with the laser. Tons of hp etc, no real reward.

One of the parts that kind of shocked me when I first played it was the “life or death” choice for the Inquest. I wish more dungeons had something similar.

CoE is fun, but not hard anymore, only Arah remains a challenge for my group of friends for now and we are working on our last path, it gets a lot easier once completed a path for once. Feels like we’re running out of challenging things to do. Looking forward to the new dungeon next week.

And in other news. 5 posts up there is a thread complaining CoE path 2

These dungeons are fantastic with a group of friends, especially when everyone’s competent.

But they are needlessly punitive towards new groups, groups that don’t have the same organization level as a long-acquainted nakama, or are simply having a bad day. Want some specifics? Off the top of my head:

• Waypoint disparity in Arah, particularly for the Lupicus runback. The Forgotten waypoint is fairly far away, back at the second boss. The Mursaat waypoint run has about half the duration of the Forgotten’s, while the Jotun route is bugged (and has been, like everything else in this dungeon) and doesn’t even have a waypoint near Lupicus.
• Alpha’s Essences not proccing their stun-on-death mechanic with any reliability or regularity.
• Alpha’s Essences having an inconsistent spawn rate in general, in addition to the massive healing they do prolonging the final fight to a nightmarish duration. This serves no purpose.
• Waypoint bug in CoE, Teleporter route: there’s supposed to be a waypoint that spawns immediately after the Evolved Husk is killed, to make the runback to the Alpha fight easier. This waypoint only spawns after Alpha is defeated and the dungeon finishes.
• CoE Front Door Route. The Evolved Destroyer fight is decently designed on its own merits, but the lack of a nearby waypoint kills it. Nobody wants to risk jumping down to burn the boss since it entails a three-minute runback if they fail, which can span up to six minutes if there aren’t enough people left to fire lasers. Yes, that’s right – you are dissuaded from having fun and actually fighting the boss, which leads to the awful safespot strategy that every pug group uses.

No amount of rallying or threads has ever brought any attention to these issues, though. Probably because so few people actually run the dungeon. Which is caused in part by the reputation the punitive mechanics lend the instances. Hmmmmm.