Guild Wars 2

1) In their current state, dungeons reward absolutely nothing for partial completion. This means that if you kill a boss or two, and then have to leave for real-life reasons, or because you cannot successfully kill the last boss, you get NOTHING. I understand that this was implemented to combat farming easier bosses over and over rather than full clearing, but it has the terrible effect of punishing people who have spent time and effort killing some bosses and cannot complete the dungeon for ANY reason. This is not cool. Prior to the patch, I did speed runs to kill the first two bosses in Arah Explorable Mode quickly, and got 8 tokens per run. Since this patch, I have attempted to full clear that dungeon several times and gotten absolutely nothing for it because the group disbanded before killing Giganticus Lupinus. We’re talking hours of time and effort, playing with other people (this is something I’ll address in my next point), in an attempt to work towards a goal that should be attainable, and all in vain. This just makes players bitter.

2) GW2’s entire design philosophy seems to be about bringing people together, creating a sense of community through gameplay. I’d like to compare GW2 to WoW for a bit, and dungeons in GW2 to dungeons and raids in WoW. Consider: dungeons in WoW are 5-person instances that are VERY PUG-friendly. Raids are 10/25-person instances that are NOT PUG-friendly (unless you count the Raid Finder versions, which are super easy and serve only to help casual players gear up on the chance that they might start real raiding). If you are trying to design a game that brings people together more kindly and organically than WoW, how can you possibly justify the current dungeon design philosophy? Are GW2 dungeons supposed to be more like WoW dungeons or WoW raids? If they are not supposed to be PUG-friendly, they start to become much more like raids, and in that case, a huge problem you run into is this: raiding in WoW is a lot like a part-time job, and is consequently terribly exclusive. GW2 isn’t WoW, and I don’t want to have to schedule nightly/weekly dungeons with the other great players that I know just to get my shiny armor and weapons!

3) If you want to make “Heroic”/“Nightmare”/etc. (whatever you want to call it) versions of the explorable dungeons that require players to be amazingly skilled, perfectly coordinated, precisely specced, and very specificially geared… awesome! I’m 110% fine with this. But in that case, make the rewards AWESOME. And don’t make us run them over and over to get them. Elite players shouldn’t have to prove they are elite multiple times day-in and day-out to get those rewards. Make that mode so difficult that clearing it even once yields some really impressive stuff! But the NORMAL version of even Explorable Mode dungeons should be fairly PUG-friendly, and not have such specific gear requirements that players can’t jump into a group wearing whatever set of Exotic-quality armor they have already. I’m not saying players shouldn’t need to pay attention to the boss animations, know their class mechanics, and dodge/attack/revive etc. accordingly… but players who have killed the first couple bosses shouldn’t get to the end boss and not be able to figure it out or execute properly in a couple attempts. If a dungeon isn’t meant to be cleared by the group entering it, the very first boss should give them hell and be the gatekeeper, not the last boss.

1. I agree. we do need partial completion rewards – and i think the way they’ve tried to prevent it by lumping them up at the end is less rewarding, it feels like you’re grinding to one place where as with small injections of reward the whole way through, you feel like you’re constantly earning something even if you leave with the same amount as you do from the 1 end chest. it’s a mental thing, but also offers something to some players if they disconnect, or if their team ragequits after wipeing on a boss 12 times. you don’t wanna find yourself 50 silver down on repairs and with nothing to show for it. The best counter for this issue i can think of is, is just make a lockout timer for people who leave the dungeon early. that way they cant just farm 1 boss then quit, they have to wait increasingly longer each time they try from 5 minutes the first time they do it, 10 the second, 20 the third time and the 4th time onwards, 30 minutes. that surely would deter such advantage taking of the first boss.

2. Agree again.. I say this loads of times, and anyone who has noticed is probably thinking “oh this again….” but, we dont all have access to dungeon expert guilds and friends who play. alot of us are on our own and have to use PuG’s, but that’s a chance to meet new players and some day form such guilds. if we meet on frustrating terms like wiping on the last boss a bunch of times, i see less chance of that happening.

3. Agree again. an intensely hard dungeon mode/path, but worth it like at the end have a merchant with an exclusive armour and weapons set that provides one peice of it much like the end-game tokens in GW1, except a different peice can be obtained every time you do it. that way, rather than running it 50 times and establishing “yes, you can”, you just gotta clear it 6-7 times to get all the stuff you want. that’s a fair challenge but not stupidly repetitive, and other players without dungeon guilds can acheive something similar as a reward for their preseverence and time put in..doing the easier path alot more times, a fair trade off IMO.

The thing about speed runs is that they almost always happen for one of two reasons:

Either A) players are looking for the fastest way to achieve something that they think takes too long to achieve via normal methods or B) they want to challenge themselves with doing something the fastest way possible simply because they can.

If A, that might indicate something (the speed at which people are able to attain certain rewards) to consider changing or tweaking about your game.

If B, know that this is just how this type of player enjoys gaming. That said, you shouldn’t take it away from them… if the result of their speed runs has a detrimental or degenerate effect on something like the in-game economy, you can certainly try to fix that. I would argue that you should consider finding some other way to reward these players, though. Give some kind of achievement or reward for clearing a dungeon in a certain time period, or in record time, even. You want people to play your game? Give them reasons to do so, however they want, instead of punishing everything that doesn’t conform to how you think people should want to play it.

More thoughts:

1) The current system doesn’t incentivize running dungeons; it only really incentivizes running SPECIFIC dungeons, because people want SPECIFIC armor sets. The experience, karma, and gold can all be gotten doing plenty of other things. Personally speaking, it took less than two weeks for me to see a huge drop in interest among my friends for running most dungeons. One possible solution is to allow people to trade tokens from any other dungeon for those they want at an exchange rate that is acceptable. Or, perhaps similar to the way WoW has daily heroics, GW2 could have daily dungeons, and tokens from the daily can be exchanged at a 1:1 ratio. Something, anything, to give people reason to care about dungeons that don’t award the specific gear they want.

2) One of the major guiding principles behind GW1 that I love that has carried over to GW2 in part is that gear is a non-factor. I say "in part" because it’s still that way in PvP, but in PvE, my experience so far is that gear matters a whole lot more than I’d like it to. Between Magic Find sets and sets for maxing damage and survivability, I feel like GW2’s PvE has taken a step towards WoW in the wrong direction. In GW1, the only classes I played who had different armor sets were those who had very specific gimmick builds that needed very specific armor sets to work (such as my 55-health farming Monk).

2. Agree again.. I say this loads of times, and anyone who has noticed is probably thinking “oh this again….” but, we dont all have access to dungeon expert guilds and friends who play. alot of us are on our own and have to use PuG’s, but that’s a chance to meet new players and some day form such guilds.

that’s something a lot of people have been saying ever since that devpost from colin popped up about dungeons supposed to be like DOA (and only to be answered by the fanbois with “you’re a scrub who wants welfare armor” – reading comprehension is a rare commodity these days…).
but then again you have to see what they sell you as “endgame” and how DOA worked in gw1 but would not work in gw2 without changes to the bigger picture.

I disagree on point 1. I really hate when people leave in the middle of a dungeon run. It’s just wasting everyone’s time, especially when they have to look for a replacement. If you can’t spare the time to do a full run, then don’t join a dungeon run until you can.

“I disagree on point 1. I really hate when people leave in the middle of a dungeon run. It’s just wasting everyone’s time, especially when they have to look for a replacement. If you can’t spare the time to do a full run, then don’t join a dungeon run until you can.”

So if your grandma/mother/wife/significant other/sibling falls down the stairs and breaks the leg, you’re just gonna ignore them cause you’re in the middle of a dungeon?

My god the things people say

I believe this OP brings up some very appropriate comments in a none aggressive, or insulting manner.

I really really really hope ArenaNet takes these posts into consideration.

I know this statement has been used numerous times on these forums, but to me dungeons are really punishing. The amount of time, and difficulty just do not equal the rewards given. Not to mention the Diminishing Rewards system is an absolute mess. It doesn’t even seem the developers understand how their system works.

ANet: You get 60 tokens for first path completion.
Player: Well I didn’t get 60, I was given 15 or less.
ANet: Well that’s because you ran it too fast.
Player: We ran it as was intended. We didn’t do anything differently.
ANet: Well the DR system is just holding over runs you did in the past, you have to do different dungeons.
Player: Ok, so now I have to do different dungeons. I did that, it still isn’t working. Still getting low rewards.
ANet: Silence.

Sorry for the tangent. In any case, I avoid dungeons. I also know I’m not the only one. Sure there will always be people out there that will suffer the time loss for low rewards, and ANet’s buggy system.

That still doesn’t excuse the fact that people have either stopped logging in with very little incentive to play, and people avoiding dungeons since they’re just not worth it right now.

So if your grandma/mother/wife/significant other/sibling falls down the stairs and breaks the leg, you’re just gonna ignore them cause you’re in the middle of a dungeon?

My god the things people say

Erm… if a serious emergency happens that requires your immediate attention, chances are that the last thing you should be thinking about is whether you’re going to get your proper rewards for the video game you’re playing.

“My father is having a heart attack? God kitten I’m not going to get my tokens! Freakin’ Anet! I’m quitting this game!”

That said, life will always throw unexpected curve balls and it can something as simple your internet going out in the middle of a dungeon.

Anet changed the rewards system in order to stop people from farming the easy bosses at the start and to force people to actually properly play out their dungeons. That’s fine, except it totally shafts everyone who falls into the above catergory (has to leave) as well as anyone who is unable to complete their runs as a result (depending on when/where you play, getting a replacement party member can be incredibly hard). Add in the fact that people generally seem to have an incredibly difficult time clearing dungeons to begin with, and this just generally makes people unhappy.

Personally, it’d make far more sense to implement a system where you still get parts of your reward at certain intervals throughout the dungeon as you used to, but if you quit out of a dungeon, you are hit with a status that lasts for a set amount of time (say, 1 hour). This status would make it so that if you run through a dungeon and quit without completing it yet again in that 1 hour time frame, you will the rewards you got in that second dungeon as well as reset the 1 hour timer on the status effect. However, if you quit a run after that 1 hour timer is up, then you’ll still retain your rewards from that run (though you will still have a new 1 hour timer put on you).

This would allow for people to still be rewarded for partial runs. However, this would also mean that you cannot constantly milk partial runs for fast and easy rewards because you’d have to wait a full hour each time anyways (and of course, that could be adjusted), and having this status apply globally across all dungeons would mean that you cannot just hop dungeons to milk multiple at the same time. Granted, this could still be abused by simply waiting out that one hour timer, then running the dungeon of choice again, but this would significantly hamper both the speed at which you can farm like this as well as test the patience of any who would actually try to do so. You can also make sure people are much more willing to run things through to the end depending on how you decide to distribute the token rewards per chest in tandem with this, so that while maybe you could still farm the first boss or two of a dungeon, it’d be far slower and far more inefficient to do so.

If you had to leave a run due to some kind of emergency or the random meddling of life, then you’d should be totally fine with this situation because you’d still get rewarded in part for what you had done. If you failed a run and legitimately attempted another and failed yet again, between finding a new party and banging your head in failure in this second dungeon, you’d probably outlast that one hour timer easily enough, and you’d still get something out of your failed attempts so you won’t feel as though you wasted your time.

If that isn’t enough, if people were still subject to the current diminishing returns system across each path and each chest, that’d make this even more difficult to farm up.

For example, if you were supposed to get 4 chests along a certain path for the first run of the day along that path, and they gave you 10+10+10+30 for a total of 60 for a full run, and instead someone decided to farm the first 2 bosses, they’d only get 20 tokens. If they decided to run that path and quit after the second boss again another time that day, they’d only get 6 tokens total for the second run after waiting a full hour for the 1 hour timer to end while if they fully played out that second run, they’d get 3+3+3+10 for a total of 19 (or 3+3+4+10 to keep it even with the current 20).

Hayden.7920:

2. Agree again.. I say this loads of times, and anyone who has noticed is probably thinking “oh this again….” but, we dont all have access to dungeon expert guilds and friends who play. alot of us are on our own and have to use PuG’s, but that’s a chance to meet new players and some day form such guilds. if we meet on frustrating terms like wiping on the last boss a bunch of times, i see less chance of that happening.

I heartily disagree with this. Sure certain things could use tuning tweaks, but I do NOT want to see mindnumbingly boring zergfest dungeons like WoW. People should be punished and punished HARD for speccing glass cannon and trying to be lone heroes rather than properly adhering to mechanics and prioritizing group synergy and group play. There are some stupid things like RNG 1hko mechanics which should be looked at on an individual case basis, but making dungeons as painfully easy as queensdale veteran mobs is just silly and will bore me to tears.

As for risk/reward, there are two aspects which need to be addressed:

1 – the collective community, especially casuals, should not be punished with zero rewards for incomplete runs because of exploiters. Restore per-boss rewards and impose escalating token-lockouts starting at 1 hour for each incomplete path which are lifted only once the path is complete (the lockouts would be on a per-boss basis.. if you downed 2 bosses on a path you can’t get rewards from them for 1+ hours unless you down the rest of the bosses in that path).

2 – think a better median for dungeons to cut down the risk-penalty vs learning curve is to lower repair costs while in the dungeon and/or make sure the worst you can do is break even. Surely the time-sink and the fact that you didn’t make anything (as opposed to multiple gold loss in extreme cases) should be enough of a “punishment mechanic”

They should add partial rewards back in.

The DR implementation and the moving of all tokens to the end of the run have somewhat overlapping effects. You gotta throw the guys who can’t complete the dungeon a bone, even if its only 5-10 tokens. Sometimes you run in a sub-optimal pug, that is slogging its way through only to run into something that they can’t beat, and has to call it quits. The current system just kind of discourages them from ever trying again.

I saw a few notes in here about dungeon difficulty. I’m just going to say this.

ive got 6/8 dungeons 100% completed. The only two I dont have are arah and CoF. Arah because ive never tried, and CoF because path 3 cant be done with your average pug, and no one wants to do path 1.

I have pugged every explorable path in all the other dungeons.

We got through them.

Usually in under 2 hours.

to me that says the difficulty is fine.
Now, most of that really wasnt fun, and there are a horde of problems with dungeons. But the difficulty right now really isnt one of them.

Zenyatoo.4059:

I have pugged every explorable path in all the other dungeons.

We got through them.

Usually in under 2 hours.

Now, most of that really wasnt fun, and there are a horde of problems with dungeons. But the difficulty right now really isnt one of them.

Yeah, I’m right there with you, now that I think about it. It’s perfectly fine to spend 1-2 hours doing something in game THAT ISN’T FUN over and over again. I also like hammering my own hand to my desk and watching Jersey Shore…

(Just kidding! I’m not really masochistic.)

Auturgist.8256:

Zenyatoo.4059:

I have pugged every explorable path in all the other dungeons.

We got through them.

Usually in under 2 hours.

Now, most of that really wasnt fun, and there are a horde of problems with dungeons. But the difficulty right now really isnt one of them.

I dont think you really understood the point of my post.
Perhaps some reading comprehension might help?
Im saying the dungeons are easily doable, even with PuGs. Whether you find it fun with PuGs is mostly subjective. And there are still a lot of issues with dungeons. But right now difficulty is really not a concern. (with the exception of maybe 1-2 things)

Yeah, I’m right there with you, now that I think about it. It’s perfectly fine to spend 1-2 hours doing something in game THAT ISN’T FUN over and over again. I also like hammering my own hand to my desk and watching Jersey Shore…

(Just kidding! I’m not really masochistic.)

I would like to add a few things to this thread, i did my 1st two Dungeons last night and completed none of them due to group break ups and the amount of time and from what i see as bad design.

1:
The Dungeons on GW2 seem to me (coming from WOW) like Raids i loved WOW’s 30 mins dungeon runs and i also raided a lot the past two expansions, but at least in raiding we talked on Vent so could communicate about best ways of doing fights etc, as they weren’t pug-able, GW2 seems to base its self as a fun game where u play ur class (most get one/two shotted by bosses) and due to the lack of a trinity (see point 2) you should be able to do the content, which is clearly not the case due to bad design.

Are the dungeons supposed to be PUGed? If so they are too hard!! If not please tell us that!!! Instead of players waisting hours and gold finding out!

2:
The trinity
During both runs yesterday we had to bang our heads repeatedly against a wall dieing just to kill one mob to make the boss pull easier there was no way of controlling the fight which makes the encounters very messy and ment we spent a very long time wiping and getting frustrated which is not why i play GW2 i play for the enjoyment and world. these dungeons CM and AC which i tried were not fun for me.
Also due to the lack of control (no tank) the 1st thing that was asked was that our guardian become a healer!! I am sorry but it seems the design is flawed is you are getting ride of the trinity but having it means you can succeed better!

I really feel there are some adjustments needed here and hope that these things arent ignored!

Love the game except for this one thing and hope to see some changes in the near future.

Zenyatoo.4059:

I dont think you really understood the point of my post.
Perhaps some reading comprehension might help?
Im saying the dungeons are easily doable, even with PuGs. Whether you find it fun with PuGs is mostly subjective. And there are still a lot of issues with dungeons. But right now difficulty is really not a concern. (with the exception of maybe 1-2 things)

No, I understood the point of your post. But this thread is about dungeon design overall, not just difficulty. And since the point of the game is to have fun, when that goal is missed, for ANY reason, it might be worth considering that something needs to be fixed. And both of us had admitted so far in this thread that we’ve gone into dungeons and not had fun.

Zenyatoo.4059:

Auturgist.8256:

Zenyatoo.4059:

I have pugged every explorable path in all the other dungeons.

We got through them.

Usually in under 2 hours.

Now, most of that really wasnt fun, and there are a horde of problems with dungeons. But the difficulty right now really isnt one of them.

I dont think you really understood the point of my post.
Perhaps some reading comprehension might help?
Im saying the dungeons are easily doable, even with PuGs. Whether you find it fun with PuGs is mostly subjective. And there are still a lot of issues with dungeons. But right now difficulty is really not a concern. (with the exception of maybe 1-2 things)

Yeah, I’m right there with you, now that I think about it. It’s perfectly fine to spend 1-2 hours doing something in game THAT ISN’T FUN over and over again. I also like hammering my own hand to my desk and watching Jersey Shore…

(Just kidding! I’m not really masochistic.)

This made me laugh because this is exactly what I was thinking that last few runs I had done of the first 3 dungeons youa re able to do (all in SM mode).

One of the things that hooks me in a new game is my first experience in a dungeon. I put alot of stock in that first experience and how its designed. I think that game designers should make that first experience great so that you’ll want to come back.

My first few runs we nothing short of ridiculous. Just seemed like mass choas and a huge cluster F. I feel like i’m doing pvp all the dodging and CCing i’m trying to do (i’m an elementalist) and worrying about my own life, let alone care what the others in my group are doing. In many cases, the trash mobs were over abundant and just NOT fun. As a caster, i can only dodge and cc so many times before i have to stand there and take melee beatings from mutltiple mobs at one time.

Maybe this style is not for me. Maybe i prefer more organization of having the holy trinity in dungeons. Regardless, i’m still waiting to actually have fun in a dungeon. Until dungeons are tweeked, I cannot see myself spending too much time in them.

Auturgist.8256:

Zenyatoo.4059:

I dont think you really understood the point of my post.
Perhaps some reading comprehension might help?
Im saying the dungeons are easily doable, even with PuGs. Whether you find it fun with PuGs is mostly subjective. And there are still a lot of issues with dungeons. But right now difficulty is really not a concern. (with the exception of maybe 1-2 things)

No, I understood the point of your post. But this thread is about dungeon design overall, not just difficulty. And since the point of the game is to have fun, when that goal is missed, for ANY reason, it might be worth considering that something needs to be fixed. And both of us had admitted so far in this thread that we’ve gone into dungeons and not had fun.

thats why at the start of my post I explicitly stated that I was responding to the specific points of posts about difficulty.

Reading
comprehension