Guild Wars 2

Some people want dungeons to be harder.
They want their skills and knowledge to be tested. They want another challenge, a higher bar to jump over. They play the game to beat challenges.

Some people want dungeons to be easier.
They just want content they can play through without challenge requiring larger investments of time and energy. They play the game because it’s a game.

This is just how it is. The main issue is even if they added a hard mode, people, who want dungeons to be easier, complain that they’re blocked from accessing all the content; whereas if there is no further challenge created then the people, who want the game to be harder, get bored and quit.
No one group is more important than the other. Enough of that. We’re all people who play for different reasons.
I’m not some hardcore gamer myself, but I play with a guild of people who are more hardcore (At least the leader is) and his ability to learn the dungeon and our tendency to all run together consistently allows me to solve all the problems put forth. I can agree that it would be nice to have more challenging content.

I wonder what the solution will be?

Technically they already done that with storymode/explorable

Yeahhhhhhhhhhhh technically. Now it’s an expectation that everyone should be able to complete explorable and it is being tweaked so everyone can access the content.
I find it hard to argue since this is one of the ways to go about getting your end-game gear. Everyone SHOULD be able to access it, for the most part.

I wonder what would happen if they added a hard mode to explorables and the only rewards were purely aesthetic?

As someone who gets bored of the themes, I’ll of course ask they develop whole new dungeons for this next-level content, but then people who can’t meet the challenge will argue that they’re being ripped off of not being able to access all areas ;P

The more I think about. This would solve it:

1. Story mode
2. Explorable easy mode
3. Explorable hard mode

Story mode would be a easy thing that can be done with a PUG it would teach basic dungeon mechanics and teamplay and would have encounter that explains how to work together. Anyway you are here for the story anyway so the difficulty is fairly easy.

Explorable easy mode needs a full party and is probably about the current difficulty, perhaps a bit easier. This is about methodical exploration of the dungeon and fighting tough bosses.

Explorable hard mode is basiclly the same experience the easy mode just in hard… very very hard and more rewarding, of course. Here you have the challenge for all the hardcore people. You should have maxed out gear a well organized party this one is for the best of the best that they can feal archivement in their game.

I tink this covers basiclly all things which are needed and would have so much coding work. In fact the hardest thing about this suggestion is to design story mode that you are tought how to play these things. But yeah I think that would solve most problems.

I don’t understand why you think things have to be on either extreme. Either no challenge easy or soHard as to require 100% concentration and usage of every trick and ability you have.

A lot of people complaining are asking for specific balances that would make the game more enjoyable for them.

In addition we can have improvements like boss cast bars, target of target and so forth that don’t change the encounters in anyway, just make it a bit easier for the player to know whats going on.

I think that there should be an easy mod lats call it a training mod and a hard mode, in my opinion the hard mode should be the same but with more enemies (those enemies will have a bit less HP and attack damage but thy will act like a coordinated group).
I want to see some fun and surprising mechanics, as example from the top of my head:
The party will see a wounded enemy laying near a strange symbol and most logically go to investigate, when the party is close to the symbol a mesmer boss teleport himself and a party of few more enemies to the symbol location, one of the mesmer’s party members bend down to res the wounded enemy and then all of them attack the players. this encounter can be avoided if the player doesn’t go there.

Story mode being a teacher of sorts. I saw this in a post earlier a player suggested that the NPCs interact with you more, calling out when to dodge, when to combo field, what types of boons/conditions to use over the course of all the story modes. Second their should probably be a warning on the difficulty of exploration mode with (recommended level 80 down-leveled) not to say it isn’t do-able without being level 80. Just recommended.

There should be some things people just can’t complete because there is a gap. Not every players skill level is the same, just like every other game or videogame in the world.

Everybody can’t do everything. You add a ‘hard’ mode in that gives different rewards and people will complain that the ‘hard’ mode is too ‘hard’ and I should get the rewards from it. Which doesn’t make sense but it will happen.

Most people expect to be able to get everything. That is how our internet generation has been taught. Instant gratification. Luckily I was born before the internet (I’m 29).

Hate to use WoW as an example, but my guild could not do Naxxramus (vanilla), we could only clear the spider wing and a couple other bosses. Did I think I was entitled to be able to beat the whole thing? no, I did not, I did not think myself and my fellow guild mates were able to; without a large amount of time, more than we were allotted before BC came out. There was a gap and when I saw people in full Tier 3 gear I felt amazed at their co-ordination and dedication. I did not think “Wow, this guy has no life”, or “Nerd!”. As I was probably just the same as him anyway.

MMOs have now changed, WoW now set the bar that casual and low skilled people can be in the same gear as the rest of the people playing. Now, if you get into the financial side of things, do you spend money to create content that only a certain percentage of people can achieve? I think this great, I wouldn’t want to be able to complete everything in the game. Keeps me playing. When I beat every dungeon in WoW in the first month I get bored and they stop getting money from me.

This is coming from someone that probably will not complete the hardest thing to do possible. Although I have beat Arah and I didn’t think it was that hard, or my skill level has increased since the days of vanilla WoW.

- Xhaine

There’s a difference in what we percieve to be a good degree or type of difficulty as well. If the mechanics are good and challenging, great. If something is “hard” because it has a billion HP, that’s not good.

For instance, I don’t think CoE explorable is hard. In fact, today I ended up running all of everything past the first Subject Alpha fight in a group of 4 (front door path) because someone had a game to go to. We wiped once on the last instance of Subject Alpha, but considering we had one person who’d never run it before, were a random PuG, and were a man short, that’s pretty good. Actually being able to complete CoE explorable is easy, especially if you’ve got a knowledgable group.

The problem is that everything there has a metric kittenton of health, and even if you’ve got the mechanics down it takes a long time. Subject Alpha, for being a boss you have to fight 3 times per path, has way too much health. Evolved Destroyer has dumb mechanics that just make it seem like a giant exercise in patience. Bjarl is incredibly simple and easy and you can pretty much afk while killing him, and again is just an exercise in patience.

Bosses need to have actually challenging mechanics, not just be giant health bars.

Fay.2735:

Technically they already done that with storymode/explorable

Hmm, explorable mode dungeons are not that hard (imo) despite all the whining and moaning on these forums….!

I think that for those looking for a bare bones test of their skills, dungeons should offer a higher difficulty level option, once you clear all 32 dungeon paths you get nightmare mode or similar.

Of course this mode should be entirely optional with a gw2 website ranking system of sorts for bragging rights, but never included in things needed for any sort of game related rewards like legendary weapons for example.

As far as I’m aware they intend on adding more dungeons in the near future so perhaps they will be harder if you find all of the dungeons and paths easy (Which despite having done most I don’t think they’re all easy).

It’s only the first month and people are still going through content and learning their skills. There’s not enough people who have done all dungeons to warrant an increase in difficulty or another dungeon added yet but would be cool if they added a creepy one for halloween.

Fay.2735:

Technically they already done that with storymode/explorable

Technically no it isn’t. Story mode doesn’t give tokens as rewards so nobody wants to run it.

Kain.9167:

Fay.2735:

Technically they already done that with storymode/explorable

Technically no it isn’t. Story mode doesn’t give tokens as rewards so nobody wants to run it.

That’s because the special dungeon gear is intended for those who are able to run them.

Fay.2735:

Kain.9167:

Fay.2735:

Technically they already done that with storymode/explorable

Technically no it isn’t. Story mode doesn’t give tokens as rewards so nobody wants to run it.

That’s because the special dungeon gear is intended for those who are able to run them.

On that note though one thing they need to change is that you can run a dungeon in explore mode even if you haven’t done story mode at all, all that is needed is for one person to have done story mode to go in 1st and select explore mode.

If they make it an absolute requirement that you need to have done story mode 1st to enter explore mode, this might solve at least part of the issue that no one wants to run story mode at all.

Also minimum level requirements need to be met I’ve seen people doing dungeons at lv 28 and stuff and those are probably the ones also complaining that dungeons are to hard !

What happened to the old faithful you do not meet the minimum requirements to run this dungeon message ?

Latinkuro.9420:

On that note though one thing they need to change is that you can run a dungeon in explore mode even if you haven’t done story mode at all, all that is needed is for one person to have done story mode to go in 1st and select explore mode.

If they make it an absolute requirement that you need to have done story mode 1st to enter explore mode, this might solve at least part of the issue that no one wants to run story mode at all.

Also minimum level requirements need to be met I’ve seen people doing dungeons at lv 28 and stuff and those are probably the ones also complaining that dungeons are to hard !

What happened to the old faithful you do not meet the minimum requirements to run this dungeon message ?

Because the game isn’t strict about levels, It’s just a rough indication of what level you’ll want to be when doing the dungeon.

As for people not wanting to do storymode, If you’re in a friendly guild there should be plenty of people willing to help out.

And in case of people not having done storymode I suppose it makes sense that they should but then that would also make it harder for people to find people for explorable dungeons.

Fay.2735: “That’s because the special dungeon gear is intended for those who are able to run them.”

In other words – “Only awesome people need an end game group content, go be scrubs elsewhere” ?

Sorry to say, there needs to be more options for groups who aren’t as awesome as you obviously are, and I say this as part of a group that has been able to clear the explorables we’ve done so far.

yandere.9176 has it best so far, there needs to be an intermediate difficulty between (a much toned down) story mode, and the current explorable. Have it reward half what full-on explorable mode gives, then you can get your shinies faster, and other people have something to occupy their time when grouping.

I get that that means that you’re going to have “bads” walking around in the same stuff you’ve got, but to be honest, no one is really impressed with what you’re wearing anyway, so I don’t really see that being an issue.

The problem we currently have is that Guild Wars 2 is very new and Arena Net is having trouble fine-tuning. They did an amazing job in creating all these systems, but when it comes to balancing and fine-tuning, they’ve been overdoing things, or, in some cases, not doing enough.

It’s easy for us to say Story Mode should be accessible to everyone and train them to survive Explorable and there should be various difficulties of Explorables—including extremely difficult ones—to satisfy all types of players. In actuality, it’s a very difficult thing for Arena Net to do at the moment, because they suck at balancing right now.

It’s sad. I’m sure they’ll come into their stride a few months from now, though.

Meh, why make it ‘harder’?

Why not just add more ‘depth’?

Sure, some people can find depth inside painful, frustrating experiences, and some people, especially those woefully unprepared, can find painful frustrating experiences inside of content with depth, but a correlation is not a cause.

I find that many dungeon encounters I’ve experienced so far, do have a lot of depth, especially those that I have entered into blind. I love the challenge of figuring out the mechanics and adapting to the fights and events. That being said unfortunately oftentimes figuring out the mechanics means reading up on something someone else has discovered (e.g. Hodgins burrows order).

There are two things I think remove depth from an event.
1) Absurdly high HP pools: (“This boss is dead, he just doesn’t know it yet.) and,
2) Unblockable, reflectable, AoE spamming skill rotations (”I came to fight, not to dance.")

These things have their place, few and far between, but what I’m starting to notice is that they are often used as a crutch for a challenge or depth. Maybe it’s to lengthen the dungeon, maybe it’s to give the illusion of difficulty.

I think a good design would better reward creativity, timing, and coordination. For example, try fighting 3 nightmare court knights at once (TA F-F). I’m sure a few groups with specific skillsets and professions could do this encounter in one go by popping well-timed rotations of slows, interrupts, stability, blocks, and heals. The rest are relegated to pulling one at a time which results in a slow arduous drawn out battle, and while that’s a perfectly valid way to defeat the encounter it seems so shallow in comparison to going toe to toe against 3 or 4 at once. IMO opinion, an ever so slight tweak in the cooldown of the knockdown combo could make the encounter tough, but enjoyable to face head on.

I get what you’re saying, but since the bosses in explorables tend to have massive amounts of needless HP, it shouldn’t be much more work than creating a method for people to join a dungeon with 50% less HP/25% less damage (or so, I’m just saying numbers) on creatures across the board but the same mechanics. I’m saying this not at all knowing what that would take admittedly, but since their approximation of difficulty is essentially more damage/more HP period, it’s not like they’d need to create an entirely new dungeon from scratch.

Ideally a difficulty slider would be perfect, with rewards given, and difficulty scaling at a 1:1 ratio.

Quote from Colin Johanson:
“I’ll point out ironically, when we first turned on DoA back in Gw1 the posts you’re seeing in this forum from a few folks about difficulty were the exact same comments everyone had about DoA. It was “impossible, mobs were just tuned to do insane damage and have huge HP, there was no tactics to defeat DoA”, etc. I went back and read through the original DoA launch feedback and it was literally identical to the comments folks on the forums are leaving now.
We made the choice back then to stick with the difficulty, and give people time to learn how to play the dungeon better and overcome it. A few months later, people viewed it as the most fun thing in the game and totally reasonable without us changing anything.

We’ll be doing the same with the Gw2 explorable dungeons, our own internal testing teams and alpha test groups learned to beat them using a combination of player skill, synchronous builds, strong use of cross-profession combos, use of cooking/consumable buffs (these make a huge difference!) and well formed player tactics. By comparison, after having months to play the game and the time our alpha was complete, some of our better dungeon groups felt the explorable dungeons were too easy for launch, we decided not to make them any harder given the expected player skill on launch.
We’re actively monitoring every dungeon and working on balancing issues we encounter appropriately. We’ll be keeping an eye on bosses we think don’t have enough varied mechanics to warrant their large health pools and updating them over time to make them more varied/interesting fights. We’ll be monitoring, and continually tweaking/adding to dungeon rewards over time and of course balancing where we see the need. And of course, we’ll be looking at adding more dungeons as well!

All of that being said, the game is VERY new for most of our players, and I can absolutely promise with more knowledge of the game and advanced player skill, the explorable dungeons can all be overcome by being skilled groups. We’ve seen many groups do it just fine in our internal alpha test once they had time to learn how to play the game well. Just like Domain of Anguish in Gw1, it takes time and practice to learn how to overcome stuff as hard as our explorable mode dungeons, and that’s exactly the kind of players they are designed for.
If DoA was any indication, a couple months from now, many of you will likely be posting saying most of the dungeons are too easy and you need better challenges.”

That implies the people who don’t find dungeons enjoyable are just the ones who can’t complete them.

Well, I give up.

Hawken.7932:

Quote from Colin Johanson:
“I’ll point out ironically, when we first turned on DoA back in Gw1 the posts you’re seeing in this forum from a few folks about difficulty were the exact same comments everyone had about DoA. It was “impossible, mobs were just tuned to do insane damage and have huge HP, there was no tactics to defeat DoA”, etc. I went back and read through the original DoA launch feedback and it was literally identical to the comments folks on the forums are leaving now.
We made the choice back then to stick with the difficulty, and give people time to learn how to play the dungeon better and overcome it. A few months later, people viewed it as the most fun thing in the game and totally reasonable without us changing anything.

We’ll be doing the same with the Gw2 explorable dungeons, our own internal testing teams and alpha test groups learned to beat them using a combination of player skill, synchronous builds, strong use of cross-profession combos, use of cooking/consumable buffs (these make a huge difference!) and well formed player tactics. By comparison, after having months to play the game and the time our alpha was complete, some of our better dungeon groups felt the explorable dungeons were too easy for launch, we decided not to make them any harder given the expected player skill on launch.
We’re actively monitoring every dungeon and working on balancing issues we encounter appropriately. We’ll be keeping an eye on bosses we think don’t have enough varied mechanics to warrant their large health pools and updating them over time to make them more varied/interesting fights. We’ll be monitoring, and continually tweaking/adding to dungeon rewards over time and of course balancing where we see the need. And of course, we’ll be looking at adding more dungeons as well!

All of that being said, the game is VERY new for most of our players, and I can absolutely promise with more knowledge of the game and advanced player skill, the explorable dungeons can all be overcome by being skilled groups. We’ve seen many groups do it just fine in our internal alpha test once they had time to learn how to play the game well. Just like Domain of Anguish in Gw1, it takes time and practice to learn how to overcome stuff as hard as our explorable mode dungeons, and that’s exactly the kind of players they are designed for.
If DoA was any indication, a couple months from now, many of you will likely be posting saying most of the dungeons are too easy and you need better challenges.”

That quote means absolutely nothing to me.

To me, dungeons aren’t hard and challenging. They aren’t really fun, either. They’re tedious. They’re made artificially longer and “difficult” by having enormous health pools. Many of the bosses are simple and easy, but take a long time to burn down. Some bosses you can basically AFK on. That shouldn’t be happening.

omgwtflolbbl.7142:

Hawken.7932:

Quote from Colin Johanson:
“I’ll point out ironically, when we first turned on DoA back in Gw1 the posts you’re seeing in this forum from a few folks about difficulty were the exact same comments everyone had about DoA. It was “impossible, mobs were just tuned to do insane damage and have huge HP, there was no tactics to defeat DoA”, etc. I went back and read through the original DoA launch feedback and it was literally identical to the comments folks on the forums are leaving now.
We made the choice back then to stick with the difficulty, and give people time to learn how to play the dungeon better and overcome it. A few months later, people viewed it as the most fun thing in the game and totally reasonable without us changing anything.

We’ll be doing the same with the Gw2 explorable dungeons, our own internal testing teams and alpha test groups learned to beat them using a combination of player skill, synchronous builds, strong use of cross-profession combos, use of cooking/consumable buffs (these make a huge difference!) and well formed player tactics. By comparison, after having months to play the game and the time our alpha was complete, some of our better dungeon groups felt the explorable dungeons were too easy for launch, we decided not to make them any harder given the expected player skill on launch.
We’re actively monitoring every dungeon and working on balancing issues we encounter appropriately. We’ll be keeping an eye on bosses we think don’t have enough varied mechanics to warrant their large health pools and updating them over time to make them more varied/interesting fights. We’ll be monitoring, and continually tweaking/adding to dungeon rewards over time and of course balancing where we see the need. And of course, we’ll be looking at adding more dungeons as well!

All of that being said, the game is VERY new for most of our players, and I can absolutely promise with more knowledge of the game and advanced player skill, the explorable dungeons can all be overcome by being skilled groups. We’ve seen many groups do it just fine in our internal alpha test once they had time to learn how to play the game well. Just like Domain of Anguish in Gw1, it takes time and practice to learn how to overcome stuff as hard as our explorable mode dungeons, and that’s exactly the kind of players they are designed for.
If DoA was any indication, a couple months from now, many of you will likely be posting saying most of the dungeons are too easy and you need better challenges.”

That quote means absolutely nothing to me.

To me, dungeons aren’t hard and challenging. They aren’t really fun, either. They’re tedious. They’re made artificially longer and “difficult” by having enormous health pools. Many of the bosses are simple and easy, but take a long time to burn down. Some bosses you can basically AFK on. That shouldn’t be happening.

Well I copied in the quote to clarify their position on the dungeon difficulty.

As for fun factor, that’s a matter of taste I suppose. I both pug them and do them with guildies and have fun every single time I do one, so it’s not a universal opinion that they are not fun.

quote from omgwtflolbbl.7142 since quote button isn’t showing up
“There’s a difference in what we percieve to be a good degree or type of difficulty as well. If the mechanics are good and challenging, great. If something is “hard” because it has a billion HP, that’s not good.”

I read you state similar in another thread that i was going to post in until i checked later that day to see it gone and wholly agree with this statement.

So far my dungeon experience has been a bit limited as i haven’t had too much time thanks to having classes ramp up, but from what i have done (AC story and explorable paths 2 & 3, CoF story. and several attempts of TA story; would like to do more but didn’t realize when I’ve had time that i didn’t need to have finished story to do explorable) The dungeons felt more tedious and frustrating than actually hard. This was mostly due to the combination of enemies having such giant health pools while at the same time being able to consistently dealing high percentages of dmg to myself or party members on a failed dodge.

Based on what I’ve dealt with, the dungeon experience just isn’t very interesting as it usually boils down to beat on the sack of health while trying to avoid getting 2, 3, or 4 shotted. Very few of the bosses that I’ve seen have very interesting mechanics. To me its the well thought out mechanics that make the dungeon experience fun as they are things to learn in order to surpass the fight in addition to just playing your class effectively. In my opinion it is also the mechanics that make a boss “challenging” rather than the idea of them being bloated sacks of health.

If they took the time to possibly redesign the dungeon model with the idea of creating more interesting encounters via mechanics and making the difficulty based on that rather than high hp and damage numbers I think you would find a lot less controversy surrounding the actual difficulty of the dungeons as its a difficulty that actually would lessen noticeably as people start learning how to handle the mechanics which would usually have a more concrete way of being tackled comparative to just raw numbers.

In terms of this I feel like you could take certain other games such as Dark Souls as an example of this. During my time playing Dark Souls i got to experience the challenge of its in my opinion well done boss fights. This might not be the best game to pull examples from, but the majority of the bosses in Dark Souls could seem outright impossible to some players much like how it seems part of the community sees the dungeons now. But usually these bosses had some key feature/mechanic that observant players could find that eventually through trial and error could be used to make the boss much easier or just more manageable. Right now it seems that few of the fights have a manageable mechanic that is easily picked up on and overcome, based on what i have been reading of the arguments of the crowd asking for difficulty decrease.

Overall the difficulty is about what i expected from a new MMO to differentiate themselves from the crowd in the dungeon scene, unfortunately i believe they created artificial difficulty through sheer numbers which can turn an otherwise possibly fun experience into a frustrating mess.

My main point i guess is to suggest that the difficulty be maintained but be created through the use of mechanics for both bosses and trash mobs rather than rely on numbers for difficulty.

Fay.2735:

Kain.9167:

Fay.2735:

Technically they already done that with storymode/explorable

Technically no it isn’t. Story mode doesn’t give tokens as rewards so nobody wants to run it.

That’s because the special dungeon gear is intended for those who are able to run them.

“Able to run them”

Sounds pretty elitist to me!