Guild Wars 2

Anyone here think that the AI of dungeon enemies should be changed to stop us stacking? Kind of like the spider queen?

Honestly i hate it so much when people just stack everything.

yes it’s faster but what if you are playing just to have fun. I’ve seen many many people being bad at a profession for example because they never have the chance to play the paths and learn how to play their profession properly /as they were intended because everyone skips everything.
I think the part i dislike the most is how stacking/skipping has become the norm.

What are others views on stacking/ skipping? Do you think it should be changed or left as is?

Aren’t you at least half a year late with that kind of question? Dungeons have been officially abandoned, with fractals now being the 5- man endgame content. Compared to dungeons, (high-level) fractals contain various counters to stacking and skipping, so that might be what you’re looking for. Even though regrettably, there is little chance that dungeons will get an overhaul at this point.

But in the light of having the discussion anyway:

Tyseyh.1083:

yes it’s faster but what if you are playing just to have fun. I’ve seen many many people being bad at a profession for example because they never have the chance to play the paths and learn how to play their profession properly /as they were intended because everyone skips everything.

How do you judge what has been intended and what not? Various classes have stealth-mechanics, various melee-weapons cleave – concepts such as skipping and stacking are logical consequences in order to make use of these game mechanics.

Secondly, having fun is highly subjective. After having run dungeons for several hundred times, one might start caring about completion times (see record runs for example) rather than enjoying the view. By allowing multiple ways to complete a dungeon, several types of players can have fun.

Satenia.9025:

How do you judge what has been intended and what not? Various classes have stealth-mechanics, various melee-weapons cleave – concepts such as skipping and stacking are logical consequences in order to make use of these game mechanics.

This is an argument from ignorance. “You don’t know, therefore I am right”. It really doesn’t work like that. All that aside, intention is much easier to read than you’d expect. If you actually pay attention to how enemies in dungeons are placed, you can tell that they’re meant to be a series of engaged encounters. Dungeons have a progressing system where you will face new, different mechanics behind the enemies at each step. Mob groups are diverse and have a series of quirks that each have different weaknesses. Mobs are placed thematically, put in spots where you can see the imposing forms of bosses, are scripted to run around corners to ambush, etc. The enemies give experience and have loot tables which give rewards for killing them. Also, take into account that very single dungeon made after launch has a series of gates that exists specifically to prevent skipping. The intention is pretty clear: the devs didn’t design the appearance, test the difficulty, balance the rewards, organize enemy groups by type and dungeon progression, and script various behaviors for players to skip them all.

With that licentiousness aside, I’ll answer the OP’s question: The answer is yes. In fact, the developers agree with you. However, we run in to the problem of practicality. Dungeons were on a lifeline before the reward nerf, and anyone who wasn’t already on board with the skip/stack tactic was driven away. Any reformations to the dungeons would be a costly and time consuming endeavor that would be for the sake of players who’ve already left, and against the only players who are still there. Dungeons were abandoned largely because the ROI on them is poor.

Stacking is a bit of a different beast than skipping. The thing with stacking is that it is a product of how the combat system was designed. If you get 5 people together to melee one enemy, you’re going to be standing on top of each other. While the dungeons were clearly designed to be played, they were also designed with the intent that any group is going to consist of 5 random people randomly running around spamming random skills at range. It is an oversight that a coherent combat strategy ends up being a messy presentation. But, visual clutter and poor aesthetic aside, there isn’t anything wrong with stacking.

You can tell from Silverwastes onward that the developers are also trying to discourage stacking, mostly by having enemies that refuse to play by the rules of how legacy content was designed. A lot of their skills include a large amount of movement, as well as high damage patches plenty of CC. There are also some less than effective measure that the devs have taken, particularly in 90s+ fractals. Seriously, the guy who came up with the social awkwardness instability should be forced to pug 94 cliffside for a week straight to see how bad an idea it was.

If you want to stack, run with people who want to stack. If you want to do it normally, run with people who want to do it normally.

Good luck finding people who don’t want to stack now that it’s not even worth the time to rush through a dungeon though.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

This is an argument from ignorance. “You don’t know, therefore I am right”. It really doesn’t work like that. All that aside, intention is much easier to read than you’d expect. If you actually pay attention to how enemies in dungeons are placed, you can tell that they’re meant to be a series of engaged encounters. Dungeons have a progressing system where you will face new, different mechanics behind the enemies at each step. Mob groups are diverse and have a series of quirks that each have different weaknesses. Mobs are placed thematically, put in spots where you can see the imposing forms of bosses, are scripted to run around corners to ambush, etc. The enemies give experience and have loot tables which give rewards for killing them. Also, take into account that very single dungeon made after launch has a series of gates that exists specifically to prevent skipping. The intention is pretty clear: the devs didn’t design the appearance, test the difficulty, balance the rewards, organize enemy groups by type and dungeon progression, and script various behaviors for players to skip them all.

If you are going to call ignorance, you might want to start with sweeping your own floor first. That aside, I was giving two quite specific examples of how game mechanics support concepts such as stacking or skipping. However, judging by the rest of your post, there might be the need to first clarify what exactly can be considered as stacking or skipping. As far as stacking goes, I’m referring to standing on top of each others in order to maximize the effects of cleave as well as boon distribution. As far as skipping goes, I’m talking about bypassing a series of mobs through means of stealth/swiftness in order to get to the next “gate” that the dungeon path requires to be completed (skipping a gate itself is obviously neither intended or has it been in question).

As for the rest of your post, I don’t consider the oversimplification helpful to a discussion: Cluster of “trash-mobs” (begs the question why the community even named them as such) are not necessarily diverse, on the contrary, in several dungeons they are just a bunch of the same enemy types with the same basic behaviour. Thematic placement is completely irrelevant for dungeon completion, it’s just a visual thing really. But most importantly, the main reward component comes from the completion of the dungeon aka the final reward, neither implying nor suggesting that you have to complete EVERY non-gated step of the dungeon in order to qualify.

In short, there are certain “gates” in dungeons, often resulting in a (small) chest reward. Then there is the main reward component obtained by completing the dungeon. However, the tiny reward-pieces spread across “trash-mobs” are hardly relevant in this picture and there are no indications that Anet mandatory wanted you to defeat every single one of those (lack of gates). If you bother to actually do your research on this kind of content, you will come to realize that it’s these later parts that are being skipped.

Everyone who has been running dungeons since release (or even beta) figured out how to do the dungeons the “normal” way before stacking became a common thing.
Dungeons are just (or at least they were before the nerf) a means to farm gold quickly once you get used to them. Stacking increases your speed and lowers the difficulty by substantial amount.

If dancing around in circle for a minute, then taking off all of your gear, putting it back on, dancing around again (this time counterclockwise) would reward you with the fastest and most effcient way of doing dungeons then people would do that as well and I would not blame them for it.

The introduction of stacking and evne more so the stealth skipping actually made certain dungeon paths profitable when before they were either too hard for most or just not worth your time.

Newer content seems to be designed with the stacking in mind while dungeon development is abandoned completely. Doubt a change like that is likely.

I remember when people talked about how hard some dungeons were. I actually felt accomplished when my team and I beat the three knights just before the boss in Twilight Arbor since that part really got to people. I’d get in some good dodges and really mind my mechanical rotations (I did that dungeon on thief.)

Satenia.9025:

If you are going to call ignorance, you might want to start with sweeping your own floor first. That aside, I was giving two quite specific examples of how game mechanics support concepts such as stacking or skipping. However, judging by the rest of your post, there might be the need to first clarify what exactly can be considered as stacking or skipping. As far as stacking goes, I’m referring to standing on top of each others in order to maximize the effects of cleave as well as boon distribution. As far as skipping goes, I’m talking about bypassing a series of mobs through means of stealth/swiftness in order to get to the next “gate” that the dungeon path requires to be completed (skipping a gate itself is obviously neither intended or has it been in question).

As for the rest of your post, I don’t consider the oversimplification helpful to a discussion: Cluster of “trash-mobs” (begs the question why the community even named them as such) are not necessarily diverse, on the contrary, in several dungeons they are just a bunch of the same enemy types with the same basic behaviour. Thematic placement is completely irrelevant for dungeon completion, it’s just a visual thing really. But most importantly, the main reward component comes from the completion of the dungeon aka the final reward, neither implying nor suggesting that you have to complete EVERY non-gated step of the dungeon in order to qualify.

In short, there are certain “gates” in dungeons, often resulting in a (small) chest reward. Then there is the main reward component obtained by completing the dungeon. However, the tiny reward-pieces spread across “trash-mobs” are hardly relevant in this picture and there are no indications that Anet mandatory wanted you to defeat every single one of those (lack of gates). If you bother to actually do your research on this kind of content, you will come to realize that it’s these later parts that are being skipped.

I find myself having to explain this every time: The “Argument from Ignorance” is a fallacy in which someone uses the lack of information to assert a claim. This generally takes the form of “X is true, prove me wrong”, but also takes the form of “How you do you know that X isn’t true?”. I.E., how do I know that Burger King and Enron aren’t related? In your particular example, you’re asserting that skipping is intentional because the OP doesn’t have concrete, irrefutable proof that it isn’t intentional. This is troll logic at its core, because you can sustain your point by being utterly indignant and defiant instead or rational and reasonable. To break it down:

Satenia.9025:

That aside, I was giving two quite specific examples of how game mechanics support concepts such as stacking or skipping

No, you are manipulating the mechanics hoping that whomever you’re talking to is misinformed. GW2 was designed PVP first, and as such Stealth and Swiftness were made for aggro management and active evasion. They’re meant to be used in-combat, not to avoid combat.

Satenia.9025:

(skipping a gate itself is obviously neither intended or has it been in question).

You’re distracting from the point. The issue is the profound use of gates after the initial dungeon launch. Hrouda himself said the only reason why he didn’t stop skipping is because he couldn’t come up with an elegant enough solution. Of course, he was fired, then Anet tried gates, and after everyone hated gates Anet stopped trying.

Satenia.9025:

Cluster of “trash-mobs” (begs the question why the community even named them as such) are not necessarily diverse,

You’re trying to use an exception to disprove an obvious general trend. It doesn’t work like that.

Satenia.9025:

Thematic placement is completely irrelevant for dungeon completion, it’s just a visual thing really.

Its not. Encounters and combat are part of the theme. Otherwise it’d just be a movie.

Satenia.9025:

But most importantly, the main reward component comes from the completion of the dungeon aka the final reward, neither implying nor suggesting that you have to complete EVERY non-gated step of the dungeon in order to qualify.

Here you’re either lying out misinformed. Dungeon rewards were originally spread more evenly throughout the dungeon. It was intended that you would do everything, because the rewards were everywhere. The “end completion” award was made when it was discovered that all players would do is farm the first boss over and over again. To fix the problem of people not actually playing any of the dungeon at all, the end-focused rewards were added.

This is also contradicted by the heavy use of gates in later dungeons. If they devs were happy with players running past everything and still “qualifying” for a full reward, then they wouldn’t have made it impossible to run past everything in future updates.

Satenia.9025:

However, the tiny reward-pieces spread across “trash-mobs” are hardly relevant in this picture…

Except they are. Loot, placement, and experience are facts. They do not go away because you aren’t satisfied with how much they give.

Satenia.9025:

and there are no indications that Anet mandatory wanted you to defeat every single one of those (lack of gates)

Except everything in the dungeon wants you to defeat those enemies. Dungeon skipping is the equivalent to picking up a book, only reading the first line of every page, then saying “There’s no indications that the author mandatory wanted you to read every single word on those (lack of pages)”. It is so backward, alien, and self motivated licentious thinking that of course Anet didn’t prepare for it. Silly devs thought players would actually play the game, and spent a tremendous amount of effort at launch to make rewards homogenized throughout all PVE content. It is an interesting if not depressing history of how this was changed throughout time:

First: Dungeon rewards were end-loaded so players wouldn’t just grind the first boss.
Second: Dungeon rewards were set up daily and diminishing returns were put in place so players would run something other than CoF P1.
Third: Dungeon rewards were re-balanced to encourage players to run longer dungeons instead of the same short few.
Fourth: Champ Boxes were added to make killing champions more worthwhile, as players were just skipping them.
Fifth: World bosses received large daily rewards because players were just skipping them.
Sixth: Events were altered to give no experience and loot until completion, because players were purposefully failing events to grind them.
Seventh: Map wide currencies and progress were added to encourage players to do events for greater goal, instead of just grinding the few same easy events and champs.

The history of rewards in this game all reflect on a single fact: They aren’t happy with how we are playing their game.

The entire case for skipping is based solely on the exploitation of negative space. It isn’t about making a point, but cultivating an immunity to rebuttal. So long as you can be difficult enough to stave away all the common sense, you win. You have no point.

Line of sighting then cleaving all the mobs in one go is smart play, and in fact if you don’t want to skip mobs I would suggest you make peace with it – mostly 5 man groups have dead weight but even 2-3 well geared good players can melt all those mobs much faster than letting the new guys skip and die repeatedly. In the same way they melt the boss in seconds, they can line of sight a crowd and melt in seconds – it’s just mainly a waste of time.

Crucible of Eternity made people to learn how to stack. After that trying to forget was like trying to forget the use of the fire, or the power of the atom.

And talking about the power of the atom, the power creep from HoT melt dungeons in the nuclear fire, albeit is fine due the monetary rewards were also nuked…

Any way of play that doesn’t involve hacking, botting or macroing is also fine. Exploiting bugs is against the rules, exploiting the game mechanics isn’t.

Tyseyh.1083:

Anyone here think that the AI of dungeon enemies should be changed to stop us stacking? Kind of like the spider queen?

Honestly i hate it so much when people just stack everything.

yes it’s faster but what if you are playing just to have fun.

When I do a dungeon for the first time I want to experience it “properly” and try clearing everything etc. But doing it for the 50th time I’d much rather clear it efficiently than waste time pulling things that aren’t necessary or kiting things around because people won’t melee.

The problem comes when people who are at that first run stage and people at the 50th run stage are in the same group. Inevitably they will find their conflicting approaches irritating, especially if they’re playing with strangers whom they probably won’t see again.

The best solution is to group with people with a similar mindset, or friends rather than randoms.

Welcome to 2012 oh wait…

They attempted it in fractals with the instabilities (to an extent). In the 50s, enemies explode on death. A group stacking and burning could potentially kill themselves. However in practice, it really makes no difference. You still stack and burn and just dodge when you need to. The ones who fail will get rezzed by those that succeed.

They also tried to combat zerk meta by having some levels (the 40s I believe) give enemies random boons every time a player crits them. This basically means 100% retaliation uptime, which I’ve seen completely wipe teams. One person boon stripping solves that though.

Pandaman.4758:

If you want to stack, run with people who want to stack. If you want to do it normally, run with people who want to do it normally.

As long as you can do more damage within melee range and buffs are limited to melee range, stacking will always be efficient. As long as it remains efficient, people will continue to do it.

Similarly, as long as there are mobs that can be skipped, people will skip them unless people think there’s a ‘reasonable’ reward for slowing down long enough to kill them.

There’s no ‘proper’ way to do content. People will always look for the most fun and/or efficient method that the tools of the game allow.

A topic about stacking and skipping?

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Stuff.

I’m going to have to disagree with you – since Anet has never officially stated anything one way or the other all you’re doing is presenting arguments in favor of your point of view – while others do the same form their point of view.

You cannot know for sure what they intended – but you can deduce that skipping was something that they didn’t completely want to shut down – because if they had wanted to they could have.

Haven’t killed all mobs? next door won’t open – the fact that dungeons were designed and built without this feature means that either the developers were too aloof and disconnected with game design to realize it needs to be implemented OR that they didn’t intend to stop skipping.

Considering the fact that the same developers that made GW2 also made GW1 – a game where skips were frequent and people did them regularly ( speed clears, runs to places) I find the former situation to be far less likely.

Yes – I do agree with you that you can sort-of deduce the way some fights might be intended to go by the way they’re set up in the room and whatnot BUT that doesn’t mean they intended for the fight to only be done that way.

In my opinion the developers wanted to let people play the game as they see fit – and they did that.

Also – out of curiosity – you claim “Guild Wars 2 was designed PvP-first” – what exactly do you have as proof to back this up? Was there ever a statement that this was the case?

I followed this game’s development ever since it was announced – I never came across any such claims – so if you’re here promoting rational discussion and facts – then please stop throwing things around unless you can actually back them up.

Again – you mention that stealth and swiftness “are meant to be used in-combat, not to avoid combat” – how exactly do you know this? Because I disagree.
There are certain skills and mechanics in the game that are only meant to be used in combat – adrenaline as a warrior resource and the adjacent F1 skills are one such example – sources of adrenaline outside combat are incredibly limited so one can reasonably assume it’s meant to be an in-combat thing.

Same goes for the Necromancer’s F1 mechanic – it charges up when the necro is in combat – so it’s an in-combat thing.

Now given that these two resources and their associated skills and mechanics are gated by being in combat for use if swiftness and stealth were designed to be used only in combat similar gates would be applied. No?

The fact that we don’t have these gates could lead us to conclude that they’re not in fact meant to be used only in combat – and as such can be used for all other purposes including avoiding combat.

When you mention Horuda do you mean this?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/16tbxt/robert_hrouda_on_skipping_mobs_in_dungeons/

Because nowhere does he say what you claim he said.

Anet tried gates? Anet tried new dungeons and those dungeons failed and people hated them not because of the gates but because of the abysmally low rewards they gave.

The problem here is that you’re also looking at “what the devs wanted” in different periods of time – the new dungeons vs the old.

If that’s the case then the developers’ intent should be assumed at the point of content creation – not later.

Yes the new dungeons worked differently – but that doesn’t mean that the developers clearly want you to do the old content the same way.

Look at mastery tracks in HoT vs Core Tyria – they nerfed all fast ways to get the xp in HoT ( all the really good farms people did) while in Core Tyria you can do CoF P1 to your heart’s content even now.

Dungeon skipping is the equivalent to picking up a book, only reading the first line of every page, then saying "There’s no indications that the author mandatory wanted you to read every single word on those (lack of pages)”.

First and foremost comparing books to dungeons is wrong.
Books have their reward (information) evenly spread out across their entire length while dungeons have their rewards end-loaded.

So your comparison is wrong – skipping through a book is useless because you’re not going to get the most bang for your buck – but if you were searching for a specific thing ( like let’s say the reward at the end of the dungeon) it makes sense to skip to that specific thing – ever used a dictionary? Did you read every page and every word up to and including the one you wanted?

It is so backward, alien, and self motivated licentious thinking that of course Anet didn’t prepare for it.

Really? This argument again? I did address this above but stop being naive – speed clears weren’t invented with GW2 – neither was repeat farming, stacking and whatnot. And even if they didn’t look at other games they had their own GW1 where the community clearly showed they are going to stack and skip to get their rewards.

Did you ever do FoWSC? It was basically stacking and skipping the video game. You did a 2-3 hour elite area in about 16-20 minutes by basically doing NOTHING but stacking and skipping.

Silly devs thought players would actually play the game, and spent a tremendous amount of effort at launch to make rewards homogenized throughout all PVE content. It is an interesting if not depressing history of how this was changed throughout time:

If this was really the case, despite all MMO history before, despite their own game they developed before GW2 then yes – silly is right and an understatement.

The history of rewards in this game all reflect on a single fact: They aren’t happy with how we are playing their game.

And people are playing their game like this because of two reasons:

1.They aren’t happy with playing the game a different way – because of how terribly unrewarding it generally is – so they look for the fastest way to make some money.

2.This is an MMO – and people don’t play MMOs for the “gameplay experience” for very long – if the developers want people to keep playing they need to put in place reward systems that will keep them playing the same content way past the point where they would have generally given up and moved on.

I have around 3000 hours spent in Core Tyria – I experienced most of the game’s content and world at least 1-2-3 times over in let’s say the first 300-400 hours of gameplay. Been there – done that – what kept me going were the rewards.

No rewards – why play? Do you repeat single player games over and over and over again provided they play out the exact same way?

Why would you do the same event 3times? 5 times? 10 times? 50 times? No reward = no interest.

MMOs are games that artificially increase their life cycle by adding rewards and having people repeat content. Are you honestly surprised people weren’t doing content without the reason to do it?

Doesn’t that contradict common sense?

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Satenia.9025:

If you are going to call ignorance, you might want to start with sweeping your own floor first. That aside, I was giving two quite specific examples of how game mechanics support concepts such as stacking or skipping. However, judging by the rest of your post, there might be the need to first clarify what exactly can be considered as stacking or skipping. As far as stacking goes, I’m referring to standing on top of each others in order to maximize the effects of cleave as well as boon distribution. As far as skipping goes, I’m talking about bypassing a series of mobs through means of stealth/swiftness in order to get to the next “gate” that the dungeon path requires to be completed (skipping a gate itself is obviously neither intended or has it been in question).

As for the rest of your post, I don’t consider the oversimplification helpful to a discussion: Cluster of “trash-mobs” (begs the question why the community even named them as such) are not necessarily diverse, on the contrary, in several dungeons they are just a bunch of the same enemy types with the same basic behaviour. Thematic placement is completely irrelevant for dungeon completion, it’s just a visual thing really. But most importantly, the main reward component comes from the completion of the dungeon aka the final reward, neither implying nor suggesting that you have to complete EVERY non-gated step of the dungeon in order to qualify.

In short, there are certain “gates” in dungeons, often resulting in a (small) chest reward. Then there is the main reward component obtained by completing the dungeon. However, the tiny reward-pieces spread across “trash-mobs” are hardly relevant in this picture and there are no indications that Anet mandatory wanted you to defeat every single one of those (lack of gates). If you bother to actually do your research on this kind of content, you will come to realize that it’s these later parts that are being skipped.

I find myself having to explain this every time: The “Argument from Ignorance” is a fallacy in which someone uses the lack of information to assert a claim. This generally takes the form of “X is true, prove me wrong”, but also takes the form of “How you do you know that X isn’t true?”. I.E., how do I know that Burger King and Enron aren’t related? In your particular example, you’re asserting that skipping is intentional because the OP doesn’t have concrete, irrefutable proof that it isn’t intentional. This is troll logic at its core, because you can sustain your point by being utterly indignant and defiant instead or rational and reasonable. To break it down:

Satenia.9025:

That aside, I was giving two quite specific examples of how game mechanics support concepts such as stacking or skipping

No, you are manipulating the mechanics hoping that whomever you’re talking to is misinformed. GW2 was designed PVP first, and as such Stealth and Swiftness were made for aggro management and active evasion. They’re meant to be used in-combat, not to avoid combat.

Satenia.9025:

(skipping a gate itself is obviously neither intended or has it been in question).

You’re distracting from the point. The issue is the profound use of gates after the initial dungeon launch. Hrouda himself said the only reason why he didn’t stop skipping is because he couldn’t come up with an elegant enough solution. Of course, he was fired, then Anet tried gates, and after everyone hated gates Anet stopped trying.

Satenia.9025:

Cluster of “trash-mobs” (begs the question why the community even named them as such) are not necessarily diverse,

You’re trying to use an exception to disprove an obvious general trend. It doesn’t work like that.

Satenia.9025:

Thematic placement is completely irrelevant for dungeon completion, it’s just a visual thing really.

Its not. Encounters and combat are part of the theme. Otherwise it’d just be a movie.

Satenia.9025:

But most importantly, the main reward component comes from the completion of the dungeon aka the final reward, neither implying nor suggesting that you have to complete EVERY non-gated step of the dungeon in order to qualify.

Here you’re either lying out misinformed. Dungeon rewards were originally spread more evenly throughout the dungeon. It was intended that you would do everything, because the rewards were everywhere. The “end completion” award was made when it was discovered that all players would do is farm the first boss over and over again. To fix the problem of people not actually playing any of the dungeon at all, the end-focused rewards were added.

This is also contradicted by the heavy use of gates in later dungeons. If they devs were happy with players running past everything and still “qualifying” for a full reward, then they wouldn’t have made it impossible to run past everything in future updates.

Satenia.9025:

However, the tiny reward-pieces spread across “trash-mobs” are hardly relevant in this picture…

Except they are. Loot, placement, and experience are facts. They do not go away because you aren’t satisfied with how much they give.

Satenia.9025:

and there are no indications that Anet mandatory wanted you to defeat every single one of those (lack of gates)

Except everything in the dungeon wants you to defeat those enemies. Dungeon skipping is the equivalent to picking up a book, only reading the first line of every page, then saying “There’s no indications that the author mandatory wanted you to read every single word on those (lack of pages)”. It is so backward, alien, and self motivated licentious thinking that of course Anet didn’t prepare for it. Silly devs thought players would actually play the game, and spent a tremendous amount of effort at launch to make rewards homogenized throughout all PVE content. It is an interesting if not depressing history of how this was changed throughout time:

First: Dungeon rewards were end-loaded so players wouldn’t just grind the first boss.
Second: Dungeon rewards were set up daily and diminishing returns were put in place so players would run something other than CoF P1.
Third: Dungeon rewards were re-balanced to encourage players to run longer dungeons instead of the same short few.
Fourth: Champ Boxes were added to make killing champions more worthwhile, as players were just skipping them.
Fifth: World bosses received large daily rewards because players were just skipping them.
Sixth: Events were altered to give no experience and loot until completion, because players were purposefully failing events to grind them.
Seventh: Map wide currencies and progress were added to encourage players to do events for greater goal, instead of just grinding the few same easy events and champs.

The history of rewards in this game all reflect on a single fact: They aren’t happy with how we are playing their game.

The entire case for skipping is based solely on the exploitation of negative space. It isn’t about making a point, but cultivating an immunity to rebuttal. So long as you can be difficult enough to stave away all the common sense, you win. You have no point.

In the end skipping and stacking is still faster, and it comes down to bad game design on anet’s part if it wasn’t meant to be intentional.

I thought someone necroposted :o.

Skipping is a thing even in singleplayer games so there is no point in trying to fight it.
No idea about stacking. I thought it died like 1.5 years ago.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I find myself having to explain this every time: The “Argument from Ignorance” is a fallacy in which someone uses the lack of information to assert a claim. This generally takes the form of “X is true, prove me wrong”

Do you mean exactly like the phrase “as intended,” when you weren’t at the dungeon design meeting?

The reason everyone skips is because they have been done to death – they are 3 years old and most people do not require the experience of killing every mob any more.

As for the solution to your personal problem use LFG and advertise “LFM No skips or stacking, all welcome.”

Whether skipping is intended or not is meaningless.

We aren’t playing the game Anet intended to make; we’re playing the game Anet actually made. In the game Anet actually made it’s objectively better to skip anything that can be skipped.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I find myself having to explain this every time: The “Argument from Ignorance” is a fallacy in which someone uses the lack of information to assert a claim. This generally takes the form of “X is true, prove me wrong”, but also takes the form of “How you do you know that X isn’t true?”. I.E., how do I know that Burger King and Enron aren’t related? In your particular example, you’re asserting that skipping is intentional because the OP doesn’t have concrete, irrefutable proof that it isn’t intentional. This is troll logic at its core, because you can sustain your point by being utterly indignant and defiant instead or rational and reasonable. To break it down:

Having to repeat yourself is the logical consequence of hand-picking a few lines you choose to quote out of context in an attempt to make a point. Formatting a post is there for a reason, namely because some sentences are meant to be read together. If you truly care to discuss the topic, I suggest you try that over calling people ignorant or trolls.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

No, you are manipulating the mechanics hoping that whomever you’re talking to is misinformed. GW2 was designed PVP first, and as such Stealth and Swiftness were made for aggro management and active evasion. They’re meant to be used in-combat, not to avoid combat.

Kindly provide a source for that claim.

That said, skipping the quote-wars. Again, in favour of actually having a discussion, try reaching your audience by providing something that can be fluently read. Picking a sentence here and there to take out of context hardly helps.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Except everything in the dungeon wants you to defeat those enemies. Dungeon skipping is the equivalent to picking up a book, only reading the first line of every page, then saying “There’s no indications that the author mandatory wanted you to read every single word on those (lack of pages)”. It is so backward, alien, and self motivated licentious thinking that of course Anet didn’t prepare for it. Silly devs thought players would actually play the game, and spent a tremendous amount of effort at launch to make rewards homogenized throughout all PVE content. It is an interesting if not depressing history of how this was changed throughout time:

First: Dungeon rewards were end-loaded so players wouldn’t just grind the first boss.
Second: Dungeon rewards were set up daily and diminishing returns were put in place so players would run something other than CoF P1.
Third: Dungeon rewards were re-balanced to encourage players to run longer dungeons instead of the same short few.
Fourth: Champ Boxes were added to make killing champions more worthwhile, as players were just skipping them.
Fifth: World bosses received large daily rewards because players were just skipping them.
Sixth: Events were altered to give no experience and loot until completion, because players were purposefully failing events to grind them.
Seventh: Map wide currencies and progress were added to encourage players to do events for greater goal, instead of just grinding the few same easy events and champs.

The history of rewards in this game all reflect on a single fact: They aren’t happy with how we are playing their game.

The entire case for skipping is based solely on the exploitation of negative space. It isn’t about making a point, but cultivating an immunity to rebuttal. So long as you can be difficult enough to stave away all the common sense, you win. You have no point.

You seem to have abandoned stacking, so I assume that your issue is entirely with skipping then? It would have helped if you pointed that out from the beginning. Again, readability. As far as skipping goes, when it comes to playing a MMO, I think that repeatability of content takes an important role. How many times do you reread a book (the example you provided)? How many times do you redo a dungeon? To me personally, the difference is huge, therefore I see no room for comparison. I have mentioned this in my previous post, but for the sake of clarification, when I play a dungeon path for the first time, I may care about the scenery, I may care about the story and so on, however, when it comes to repeatability, rewards become paramount. As such, in order to efficiently complete the dungeon, I want to make the best use of the tools available to me – stealth and swiftness count amongst those.

Finally, I’m not sure what to make out of the points your provided. The first, second and third are completely irrelevant to skipping. Even if players could still grind the first boss, even if they could still rerun the same path for max rewards or even if they could stick to the short ones, they would still do so faster through skipping.

Hilariously enough, you are referring to champions in the forth point, which are mainly present at the gated encounters that cannot be skipped anyway. As far as I’m aware (and “I” did my share of dungeon running), the trash that is being skipped hardly ever includes champs. Completely moot. And lastly, since I mentioned moot, I’m not even sure why you bring the 5th, 6th and 7th points in here. They are not even dungeon-related.

As far as I see it, skipping offers the means to do dungeons efficient for those people who care(d) about that. If you personally choose to kill every single mob in the dungeon, that’s really fine with me. The great thing about instanced content is that everyone can make their own groups. Ultimately, that has been the solution to all these dungeon debates – just play with the like-minded.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Binding_Blade

So skills like this are forbidden because they stack enemies?

Stacking and skipping is the reason why I’m so glad the dungeons got abandoned.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see them revamped and be made more like fractals where stacking and skipping is not really a thing, but if I had to pick between abandoned and what they were before, I’d pick abandoned a million times.

Rushing from one boss to another as fast as possible just to kill it in 20 seconds, long before it even starts to execute it’s mechanics, is a very un-healthy game content. I don’t even know how many players it pushed away those 3 years.

Skipping game content and playing just for the rewards is only fun if you like grinding. When the whole end-game content is like that, the game becomes a farmfest. Dungeons were end-game for 3 years so you get the picture…

I think skipping could be easily addressed. Add a scout mob type that can see through stealth and has a larger than normal agro radius. By default give elite and greater mobs the same ability. Strategically place the scouts so that you will be seen. Make the chase-down distance so high that skipping will result in mobs numbers stacking to the point you insta-wipe. Improve some enemies movement speed such that most of the time you will end up engaged in combat anyways.

Tightly stacking is only good for positioning purposes. Corner stacking and pulling is a bit kittened since mobs die so quick. Spider Queen is a good example. It’s a lot faster to stand in the middle and agro the whole room minus the Queen.

Buff radii are generally high enough stacking isn’t required to attain might. Other useful benefits have an appropriate radius for those that need the effects most; protection, regen, healing for melee.

I would also like to more mob variation. For every status effect there should be a mob with an immunity to it. Allow bosses to boon strip/steal/convert. I don’t think the high toughness mobs in fractals were necessarily a bad idea. Seeing more variation in other areas of the game would be a good way to promote build diversity.

If ghosts had been immune to crit, the meta might have been very different.