I’ve been keeping up with the dungeons forum for a while now, reading all the complaints. I’m going to address the one I hear the least because I actually think it’s the most important to Guild Wars 2 as a game, but I’m going to start off with summarizing the problems people are having right now
1. “Dungeons are too hard”. Some groups, mainly PUG’s filled with inexperieinced and/or under geared players have been having trouble clearing both Story mode and Explorable mode. The latter doesn’t concern me, but the former does, and perhaps some slight difficulty tweaks need to be made to story modes, since they’re supposedly designed for casual play.
2. “The reward does not match/exceed the risk.” The repair costs/waypoint costs are astronomical in this game. It can cost me as much as 4 silver just to get to a dungeon entrance, not to mention I may spend upwards of 25 silver on repairs depending on how my group fares. Considering how difficult it has been made to get money, this seems like an unnecessary money sink, especially when me and my friends might be learning a new dungeon/path for the first time. This discourages people from attempting dungeons. The barrier for entry should be SKILL not MONEY on explorable modes.
3. “Dungeons are broken/bugged/exploitable.” For instance, today I witnessed a new exploit in the CoF Magg path in the same location as the old one. It seriously begs the question whether any of these were tested at all. When I’m unable to run Arah story mode last night because all 5 members of my party spawn into their own separate instances, we have issues. I’ve also heard rumors that Zhaitan is actually supposed to attack you during his fight, but instead does nothing. Again, no one tested the Zhaitan fight? No one looked at it and said “You know, this isn’t working right”. That SCREAMS a lack of due dilligence.
4. “Dungeons are not fun”. This is the one I’m getting at. I’ve played plenty of games with really bad dungeon design, pure tank and spank, mobs just have tons of HP for no reason, etc. The dungeon design in this game is 1 notch above that. BARELY. I hate to bring WoW into this, but the designs in that 8 year old game in terms of structured PvE are far and away better than GW2 right now. Dungeon mechanics are bland excluding mini-games, which actually have somewhat interesting premises. (ex. Dodging barrels and walls to hit the final boss in CoF Story, throwing boulders and dodging lazers in the final fight of SE Story, etc.) Look, it does not make me feel accomplished to kill a guy with a bigger health bar than the trash. And “By the way I summon adds” Is not a valid mechanic(which seems to be more than half the bosses I’ve seen). GW2 has some really unique systems in place as far as combat goes, and overall presents a more mobile, active play style, that is very much not utilized in most of the fights I’ve seen thus far.
The point is, that people would be complaining FAR less about the other 3 things if the 4th wasn’t true. People already have chosen to ignore the myriad of game breaking bugs this game has right now, because the game is FUN. Dungeons are, however, not, and need a serious overhaul if the system is going to improve. Right now, I’d rather go complete low level zones and work towards 100% map completion then play dungeons. That is silly.
TL;DR-Dungeons are not fun, your thoughts?