Guild Wars 2

If you ignore the,
-Pseudo-difficult trash mobs that will frequently one-shot even the tankiest of players and often take more effort to clear than the bosses themselves.
-Punching bag bosses that make up for their lack of difficulty in health padding tenfold.
-Crippling bugs that rampantly make some dungeons incompletable or make your life miserable.
-Rewards that don’t even cover the costs of the instance.
-The “zerg from the grave” tactic that most of the bosses seem to support/encourage/demand. (I thought we were supposed to be fighting the undead, now we’re using their tactics).
-The grind for tokens that’s totally not a grind and is totally a blast to do the same three instances 60+ times to get a set of armour, not even including weapons.
-Stale “Tank&Spank” mechanics about 50% of the bosses employ.
-Confusing/counter-intuitive/down-right-impossible-to-do-smoothly mechanics another handful of bosses employ.
-The amount of communication required which is nigh unattainable with pugs. This is an MMORPG which does imply a social aspect, but if you’re not in TS or Ventrillo or some other audio communication with the other four members of your team you just are not going to be able to do some explorable modes without first tearing your hair out.
-The lack of variety in dungeons. There are three different paths for each explorable dungeon but a lot of those paths are extremely similar to other paths in same dungeon. Splitting them evenly so I get the chance to love them all equally and still having to do each of them 30 times or more is almost as fun as my daily commute. It even comes complete with all the frustrations I thought were only possible in busy city roads.

But come on guys, the dungeons are just fine.

They almost are.With a little more balance and they will be perfect.

I like the part where they allude to how they tested them in alpha and found them to be too easy

then they nerf profession skills, and trait builds for pvp balance and forget to re-test them

but don’t worry guise, you’ve got the awesome scaling of healing power to help with that loss :P

But we should all “get past it” right? XD famous last words

In all honesty, the most serious problem with dungeons at the moment is the fact that there is absolutely zero learning curve. I think we can all agree that the mechanics used in dungeons are somewhat different than the normal mechanics of leveling PvE and in some cases slightly different from those of DE’s. The issue here is, the game makes no effort whatsoever, to communicate those mechanics to the players. What you get instead is a mail @ level 30, inviting you to AC, one of the mildly difficult dungeons (why not pick CM as the starter dungeon is beyond me), in comparison to the rest and most players choosing to step foot in there, at the appropriate level, equiped with greens/blues and leveling specs, soon realize that they were completely unprepared for it. It’s basically like throwing a person into shark infested waters and demanding that he makes it to shore. Don’t even get me started on combo fields, finishers and their proper usage. Even today there are tons of 80’s running around, being almost completely ignorant of combos and how they can be used to optimize gameplay on encounters. To be perfectly honest, I can’t really blame them that much.

Even in a specific dungeon, difficulty is usually all over the place. For example you can have Boss 1 being mildly difficult, Boss 2 being nearly impossible and Boss 3 & 4 being so mind numbingly easy that you are left scratching your head.

The mechanics themselves aren’t really anything to write home about. If you’ve played MMO’s before and got into the endgame, you’ve probably seen it all. 9 out of 10 you will be required to dodge/block/los/immune red circles/telegraphed attacks (assuming that you can properly notice them, through the gazillion particle effects), control/kill adds, kite adds/boss/trash/whatever and try to put a dent into HP sponges. Luckily there are a few encounters that are genuinely interesting and stand out from all this mess, problem is you can probably count them on one hand.

My point from all of the above is simple. Providing incentives for players to actually experience the content, instead of punishing them is a given, assuming of course that your intention is to maintain a healthy player base for this particular activity. There is not even a discussion here. That’s game design 1on1. Tuning your content for appropriate levels, gear, getting rid of serious bugs (NPC’s or events bugging out for no apparent reason, requiring an instance reset) and creating a difficulty curve is another pretty simple “lesson”. It really isn’t rocket science. If all you provide is a grind of otherwise unattactive content to the masses, for basically vanity stuff (skins), then don’t get surprised when very few people opt for it, or those that do choose the path of least resistance. It’s simply human nature to do so.

GW2 dungeons, both story and exploration modes, give me the impression that have been designed to be artificially tedious, grindy and prolonged (I’m not going to use the word ‘hard’ here) in order to mask the lack of an interesting and attractive PvE endgame. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve completed all story modes and most of the explorable paths but the question remains, is it worth doing them all over again just for the challenge or “fun” if you’d prefer plus the chance to, at some point, complete a vanity skin set ? In my very humble opinion, no, at least not at the moment.

Tristanian.6084:

Don’t even get me started on combo fields, finishers and their proper usage.

http://www.guildwars2.com/en/manual/combat/combo-attacks/

wait, that’s not enough explanation? well, you can always /wiki combo, but how many people know about the wiki or even the command, let alone want to research stuff on their own?

tbh the introductions to new mechanics like combos (which according to colin are essential to beating dungeons) is – sorry to be so blunt –kitten poor. and the mechanics copied from other games are implemented mediocre. I mean you do the story modes with npcs (which are useless most of the time, but that’s another topic), how hard could it be to explain at least some moves as an introduction? did really no one with their collective dev experience thought of this?

and there is a reason you have voidzones in a different color area and not just a ring that’s easy to miss (if it’s visible at all) or special oneshot moves by bosses that have a 1 second timer and are impossible to see in that cluster of particles.
fighting while watching the boss like a hawk for the easy to miss move is hardly “hard” or “challenging” – just tedious.
and dumping high-hp trash inbetween which is just dull to fight is hardly revolutionary.

Hahaha. +1 OP.

Good job man.

No rewards EVER /thread

As ground-breaking as the removal of the ‘holy trinity’ is, we need some equally ground-breaking dungeon design to make the most of it.

Currently, it seems to me, that we have a round peg in a square hole.