Guild Wars 2

Dave: I (and I believe quite a few others here) took it personally because you came here with a very clearly perceived air of superiority and condescension.

You clearly missed a point here. Air of superiority… Condescending… That is just outright offensive…
Final word as I am not going to waste more time explaining this…
A LOT has changed both in the game AND the playerbase in 18 months… You are talking about how it WAS which isn’t exactly up to date…

I think Colin Johanson said a long time ago, if they keep releasing new dungeon, it’ll just keep fracturing the player base.

I get the impression we won’t be seeing major dungeon updates with that interview.

One of the problem I see is since there is no gear tier, even if they release new dungeon, people won’t run it often. I remember running aetherblade TA dungeon a few times. And more often than not, people’ll just say they won’t run it again in the end because it take too long for the reward they receive.

laokoko.7403:

I think Colin Johanson said a long time ago, if they keep releasing new dungeon, it’ll just keep fracturing the player base.

I get the impression we won’t be seeing major dungeon updates with that interview.

One of the problem I see is since there is no gear tier, even if they release new dungeon, people won’t run it often. I remember running aetherblade TA dungeon a few times. And more often than not, people’ll just say they won’t run it again in the end because it take too long for the reward they receive.

Maybe if they release a dungeon with a reward scheme that doesn’t suck people will play it.

pzyonix.1645:

Dave: I (and I believe quite a few others here) took it personally because you came here with a very clearly perceived air of superiority and condescension.

You clearly missed a point here. Air of superiority… Condescending… That is just outright offensive…
Final word as I am not going to waste more time explaining this…
A LOT has changed both in the game AND the playerbase in 18 months… You are talking about how it WAS which isn’t exactly up to date…

I believe I worded my post correctly, take none of it back, and certainly don’t apologize for any of it. I called out for sounding condescending with an air of superiority. While this may not have been your motive, I don’t think many others here will disagree that they perceived your posts the same way.

Furthermore, I’ve been back for about three months now so your last sentence is a failed poke at my credibility. In that time I’ve caught right back up to the meta in terms of builds and strategies for most of the encounters.

You’ve said that it was your last post so I wish you well and hope you follow through on it. We don’t need more of this same warped and uninformed/condesending black and white narrative.

Kurr.4179:

then goes on the DnT forums to mock them further.

And how would you know that? >_>

Btw I love you Dave, keep up the good work.
Mind Brain Stamp of approval.

Vox Hollow.2736:

Look, I agree blaming the developers is silly.

Maybe the funds just aren’t getting to where they need to be going, Maybe the publisher sees it as a demographic conflict with Wildstar, Maybe they’ve put GW2 on the back burner in order to diversify the studio into an entirely new IP.

God only knows what’s behind a decision like this – but I can’t imagine they made it lightly or with any ill intent. At the same time, you can’t be so wrapped up in pointing fingers you go around blaming Players for it instead.

If the mode is underplayed, it’s because we had an endless procession of the same complaints at least once a week for two years that for whatever reason couldn’t be addressed. That’s all. Not that dungeon running in an MMORPG has suddenly become an odd eclectic niche activity. Not that players playing the same thing aud nauseum because the mode can’t grow with the rest of the game should feel ashamed for getting bored. Not that the dungeon community started pushing people away before they started leaving enmasse themselves. Not that folks should be perfectly happy with a PvE that isn’t making the most of the combat system and the skill curve it presents.

Just a simple allocation of resources made for reasons we can’t fathom much less judge

You’re kind of right by saying there seems to be a lack of resources made available to the devs. Going by this article. It kind of tallies up to what some of the posters have been saying.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-02-14-guild-wars-2-in-steep-decline-in-weak-q4-for-ncsoft

To para-phase:

“Ncsoft’s flagship MMO Guild Wars 2 showed a decline in sales and revenue, making ?34 billion ($32 million) in Q4, 2013. That’s down from ?119 billion ($112 million) in the prior year’s quarter, when the game launched”.

spoj.9672:

Really disappointing. I was looking forward to a Mordrem dungeon. The mobs and bosses they have used in living story would make for a very fun dungeon. They would just need to make the bosses harder and have a few more attacks. Most of the work would be just designing the dungeon map. No need for puzzles, just fill it with mordrem. Oh well, i guess anet plan to let their game slowly die out.

To be fair, one dev did post on the forum saying it takes about 6-12 mths to make a map. Add dungeon to that map and I guess it will take much longer.

CalamityO.2890:

spoj.9672:

Really disappointing. I was looking forward to a Mordrem dungeon. The mobs and bosses they have used in living story would make for a very fun dungeon. They would just need to make the bosses harder and have a few more attacks. Most of the work would be just designing the dungeon map. No need for puzzles, just fill it with mordrem. Oh well, i guess anet plan to let their game slowly die out.

To be fair, one dev did post on the forum saying it takes about 6-12 mths to make a map. Add dungeon to that map and I guess it will take much longer.

I wasnt expected the dungeon to appear at the beginning or mid season. I was hoping they were already working on one to add at the end. Its a huge let down. The mordrem theme could add a lot of fun enounters considering the mordrem mobs and bosses weve seen so far and the aesethetic could look amazing. TA is by far my favourite dungeon looks wise. Id imagine a mordrem dungeon would be very similar, but a bit more corrupted looking.

spoj.9672:

I wasnt expected the dungeon to appear at the beginning or mid season. I was hoping they were already working on one to add at the end. Its a huge let down. The mordrem theme could add a lot of fun enounters considering the mordrem mobs and bosses weve seen so far and the aesethetic could look amazing. TA is by far my favourite dungeon looks wise. Id imagine a mordrem dungeon would be very similar, but a bit more corrupted looking.

+1

I was so confident that they’d add a new dungeon in one of the new zones opening up.

I was telling friends things like “there’s no way they’d not do it.”

Sigh. Lol.

Purple Miku.7032:

spoj.9672:

I wasnt expected the dungeon to appear at the beginning or mid season. I was hoping they were already working on one to add at the end. Its a huge let down. The mordrem theme could add a lot of fun enounters considering the mordrem mobs and bosses weve seen so far and the aesethetic could look amazing. TA is by far my favourite dungeon looks wise. Id imagine a mordrem dungeon would be very similar, but a bit more corrupted looking.

+1

I was so confident that they’d add a new dungeon in one of the new zones opening up.

I was telling friends things like “there’s no way they’d not do it.”

Sigh. Lol.

Thinking there will be a new dungeons? That’s a paddlin’.

Lol @making maps in 6-12 months and dungeons taking even longer. I just wonder how 99% of the other MMOs can release new raids and dungeons every couple of months.

Don’t blame them. One and a half map after already 2 years is a great job,so far.

spoj.9672:

CalamityO.2890:

spoj.9672:

Really disappointing. I was looking forward to a Mordrem dungeon. The mobs and bosses they have used in living story would make for a very fun dungeon. They would just need to make the bosses harder and have a few more attacks. Most of the work would be just designing the dungeon map. No need for puzzles, just fill it with mordrem. Oh well, i guess anet plan to let their game slowly die out.

To be fair, one dev did post on the forum saying it takes about 6-12 mths to make a map. Add dungeon to that map and I guess it will take much longer.

I wasnt expected the dungeon to appear at the beginning or mid season. I was hoping they were already working on one to add at the end. Its a huge let down. The mordrem theme could add a lot of fun enounters considering the mordrem mobs and bosses weve seen so far and the aesethetic could look amazing. TA is by far my favourite dungeon looks wise. Id imagine a mordrem dungeon would be very similar, but a bit more corrupted looking.

I was telling people the same thing, there would be no way we’d have another dragon fight without a dungeon. Its a very sad missed opportunity, I also think a dungeon populated by Mordrem would be fun and a challenge with the different abilities and weaknesses they have. Effort was put into some being more vulnerable to conditions than direct damage, the importance of bursting down the wolves, it could have been great.

Given we had 2 dungeons and an new path in season 1, I’d say expecting a new dungeon in season 2 was understandable.
I can’t think of anyone in my guild who would have expected season 2 not to have a dungeon included.

ProtoGunner.4953:

Lol @making maps in 6-12 months and dungeons taking even longer. I just wonder how 99% of the other MMOs can release new raids and dungeons every couple of months.

It’s pretty simple Anet is filled with narrative designers, and artists instead of large number of game developers and programmers, and it is reflected by what they add to the game new skins and 1 man story driven instances with poor replayability.

ProtoGunner.4953:

Lol @making maps in 6-12 months and dungeons taking even longer. I just wonder how 99% of the other MMOs can release new raids and dungeons every couple of months.

I think the problem is 99% of the other MMOs actually focus their resource on new raids and dungeons.

GW2 however focus their resource on living story, events, and mini games. Not to mention, dungeon in GW2 is quite terrible made in the first place, so it is probably a bit hard to expand it.

laokoko, what mini games?
Are they adding new and new mini games? Is there a list?
I just know about few, empty and boring mini games.

What content in this game is ‘more advanced’? What am I missing?

I was under the impression the most challenging thing there is was trying to not fall asleep during living story.

I’m weird because I don’t mind the living story. It’s there, it’s something to do, it’s ok. But for it to take up the majority of resources and prevent development of real dungeon content is just yeh… horrid. That’s what makes me dislike the LS.

J Eberle.9312:

I’m weird because I don’t mind the living story. It’s there, it’s something to do, it’s ok. But for it to take up the majority of resources and prevent development of real dungeon content is just yeh… horrid. That’s what makes me dislike the LS.

This is how I feel about it.

I would genuinely enjoy LS as side content along with other things. It’s too small.

GW2 is the first MMO I’ve played that is this focused on solo content that’s for sure.

Jerus.4350:

GW2 is the first MMO I’ve played that is this focused on solo content that’s for sure.

It’s not solo content. LS is a one time deal, with pretty much nonexistent rewards.

This game is either casino/trading post wars 2, or you do the daily dungeon tour doing the same tired skipping and wall hugging kitten.

I mean, what kind of kittened up endgame content consists of exploiting broken game mechanics that allow AI to be trivialized?

Whatever happened to gw1’s AI spreading on AoE? What about condition spreads, boon steals, CC?

Instead what you get is sacks of HP with shoddy telegraphs and badly tuned autoattack damage.

Zenith.7301:

Jerus.4350:

GW2 is the first MMO I’ve played that is this focused on solo content that’s for sure.

It’s not solo content. LS is a one time deal, with pretty much nonexistent rewards.

This game is either casino/trading post wars 2, or you do the daily dungeon tour doing the same tired skipping and wall hugging kitten.

I mean, what kind of kittened up endgame content consists of exploiting broken game mechanics that allow AI to be trivialized?

Whatever happened to gw1’s AI spreading on AoE? What about condition spreads, boon steals, CC?

Instead what you get is sacks of HP with shoddy telegraphs and badly tuned autoattack damage.

The bolded is pretty much every game I’ve played. First you barely beat it. Then you learn to do it regularly, then you find out tricks to make it faster. Really nothing new there for me.

I do agree there could be a lot more interesting mechanics though, just that abuse of AI and what not is pretty much normal and to be expected.

As for badly tuned auto attack damage, I think that’s actually done pretty well. The idea was to make all builds viable, they did that, but with that it means that glass cannons can work, if they simply upped auto attack damages and what not then the unavoidable attacks would start to take a toll and possibly make glass cannon setups not possible and go against what they set out to do.

There are 2 things that I find a bit disappointing about the dungeons in this game. The lack of required control/support, and the way they handled conditions. Control/support is important already but it could be so much more. I look at a fight like the Robot in COE and think “man why don’t more bosses have boons and require stripping?” Defiance is IMO overused, we could benefit from some play with how that works, instead of one CC and it goes immune instead have it 5 stacks up and 5 stacks down for some bosses, so through the fight we have to manage and intelligently utilize our CCs to stop the big attacks 5 times, if we screw up we may have to knock off the defiance to get that ability back. Just throwing stuff out but still, yeah mechanics could be better, but it’s pretty normal to abuse AI, it’s what makes things fun to do more than a handful of times, it’s what allows us to get better and better rather than just doing it over and over.

/shrug late night rambling

I’m glad u see the obvious guys! dead game iz dead i don’t even bother with suggestions anymore,…

Well I think it’s nice that they’re trying to try to attempt to think about trying to achieve to venture out and endeavour listening to our feedback.

Are those friends you’d want to play with even active anymore? My flist has been incredibly depressing for months :-(

Players are leaving left and right, and ANet keeps throwing everything into LS and QoL. Building a community and keeping them aren’t priorities for the company — they just keep hyping bullkitten so new players will buy the game.

dlonie.6547:

they just keep hyping bullkitten so new players will buy the game.

Which makes sense with the income from box sales actually and gem story is fine to maintain a healthy profit too.

(warning – light living story spoilers in this response)

If the concerns are fragmenting the playerbase and/or developer resources, then I have a suggestion -

Anet should take the same approach with 5 player content that they are with living story. Instead of setting aside time to develop complex dungeon paths, give us one shorter instance (comparable to one of the current living story instances) scaled to five players with each living story update (every 2 weeks) – with a fight difficulty similar to one of the bosses in Aetherpath.

In the game’s original release, the personal story narrated the fight against Zhaitan while the 5-player dungeons told us the story of Destiny’s Edge. They could do something similar with these proposed shorter 5-player instances – let us follow Rytlock into the rift with Rox or sneak into a small inquest facility to recover Taimi’s device (or you could explore other side stories not directly related to the fight with Mordremoth).

If done properly, they wouldnt take any more developer resources than the single player instances and wouldnt “fragment” the game any more than those instances might.

It would also provide content for future fractals – just turn the most popular 2-3 five-player maps from each season into a fractal to add to the rotation.

It wouldn’t offer the same ongoing rewards that dungeons do now, but it would fix the issue of no new 5-player content. Best of all, between the single player instances, the new maps and this idea, you would be covering just about any sized group with almost every 2 week update. Win-win.

^ I suspect this is where Anet is heading. Maybe in LS pt2 there will be a 5 man story ‘dungeon’.

That’s exactly what I’m hoping for and see as a realistic possibility. I looked at the Baradin fight, and the Council fight and each of them reminded me a lot of Jade Maw. If they had been made 5 man fights they could have easily been converted to fractals after the season. Though instead they tuned them to both be solo fights…

rojak.1894:

^ I suspect this is where Anet is heading. Maybe in LS pt2 there will be a 5 man story ‘dungeon’.

I would love to see them treat the five person content similar to the single player content – with something new every two weeks.

One new challenging fight (with achievements) twice a month would be enough for many people – alongside the dungeons and fractals we have now.

Gates of Maguuma, the first release in episode 2, included five instances. I dont think anyone would complain if they used 4 instances to tell the main story and created a 5th catered to a harder 5 player experience.

lol @ fracturing the playerbase. This makes more sense when there are as many isntances as GW1. Guild wars 2 isn’t anywhere near that. You lose playerbase by not making content, like they did with living story season 1.

Sticking to open world content partially solves that problem, but there are a dozen and a half things you can’t do open world that you can do instanced. Like raid bosses. Or anything that is very difficult. The wurm already proved that.

SkylightMoon.2098:

lol @ fracturing the playerbase. This makes more sense when there are as many isntances as GW1. Guild wars 2 isn’t anywhere near that. You lose playerbase by not making content, like they did with living story season 1.

Sticking to open world content partially solves that problem, but there are a dozen and a half things you can’t do open world that you can do instanced. Like raid bosses. Or anything that is very difficult. The wurm already proved that.

wurm is a raid boss like any other game. The root problem is that difficulty is inversely related to group sizes. Here is a giant proposal against 40 man raid. His logic is pretty solid

https://forums.wildstar-online.com/forums/index.php?/topic/31112-why-40-man-raids-are-a-bad-idea/

loseridoit.2756:

SkylightMoon.2098:

lol @ fracturing the playerbase. This makes more sense when there are as many isntances as GW1. Guild wars 2 isn’t anywhere near that. You lose playerbase by not making content, like they did with living story season 1.

Sticking to open world content partially solves that problem, but there are a dozen and a half things you can’t do open world that you can do instanced. Like raid bosses. Or anything that is very difficult. The wurm already proved that.

wurm is a raid boss like any other game. The root problem is that difficulty is inversely related to group sizes. Here is a giant proposal against 40 man raid. His logic is pretty solid

https://forums.wildstar-online.com/forums/index.php?/topic/31112-why-40-man-raids-are-a-bad-idea/

Its bad for two reasons. Its open world, and it requires +100 people. When Anet made the wurm, they specifically said it was for hardcore groups, yet there are no systems in place to allow hardcore groups to just jump in with 130 people to do the fight. You have to go through all these hoops of double popping overflows to finally get one suitable, then ferry people in.

Its funny to initally remind myself that they said it was for hardcore groups when johansson said later on that ye you may not get your entire group in their but pugs can join in lol. This type of comment proves that they don’t understand what wrong with mixing open world with hardcore difficulty.

The wurm will never be pugged. Nor will anything more difficult than the wurm.

I agree with you saying that its related to how many people it uses. Ideally if fights only needed sizes of 20-30, it would increase the guild competition creating a flourishing scene, and also allowing people to complete it more frequently. The only problem is that its impossible to do with open world content. Because content scales, and somethiing requiring 20-30 people will scale incorrectly like it does for everything else in the game.

Even if it did scale correctly, thats still the problem. You are back to requiring a coordinated +100 people when you only have an organized 20-30.

Other games have tried open world raid bosses of this size. We know it doesn’t work. So Anet needs to stop being so stubborn and realize that or come up with a different solution.

SkylightMoon.2098:

Its bad for two reasons. Its open world, and it requires +100 people. When Anet made the wurm, they specifically said it was for hardcore groups, yet there are no systems in place to allow hardcore groups to just jump in with 130 people to do the fight. You have to go through all these hoops of double popping overflows to finally get one suitable, then ferry people in.

Its funny to initally remind myself that they said it was for hardcore groups when johansson said later on that ye you may not get your entire group in their but pugs can join in lol. This type of comment proves that they don’t understand what wrong with mixing open world with hardcore difficulty.

The wurm will never be pugged. Nor will anything more difficult than the wurm.

I agree with you saying that its related to how many people it uses. Ideally if fights only needed sizes of 20-30, it would increase the guild competition creating a flourishing scene, and also allowing people to complete it more frequently. The only problem is that its impossible to do with open world content. Because content scales, and somethiing requiring 20-30 people will scale incorrectly like it does for everything else in the game.

Even if it did scale correctly, thats still the problem. You are back to requiring a coordinated +100 people when you only have an organized 20-30.

Other games have tried open world raid bosses of this size. We know it doesn’t work. So Anet needs to stop being so stubborn and realize that or come up with a different solution.

even 20-30 is too much. 10 is already pushing before this game becomes a skill spam.

What I want to see in a dungeon. I want to see normal level 78 mobs. Why, I want plentiful mobs to easily killable with a range weapon and a powerful boss on the side. instead of stacking melee, I want the game to promote better positioning.

I kinda have a huge giant list of things I want in a dungeon

rojak.1894:

^ I suspect this is where Anet is heading. Maybe in LS pt2 there will be a 5 man story ‘dungeon’.

Doubt it will happen.The amount of kitteniness when people are forced to group with 4 others in order to complete something is too high for them to make that “mistake” again.

While I personally would love to see 5 man aspects in the living story in order to actually get new group based content, I don’t think it will be incorporated into the basic living story line.
Because I vividly remember the kittenstorm on the forums during season one when aspects of it weren’t solo content.
Why people expect the major pve feature of a MMO game to be solo content however is beyond me.

That aside, I think they could (and should) go the way Blayes suggested. Keep the baseline living story soloable, but add paralell 5 man content as optional side quests or similar.

The problem is, if you go that way and say “it’s optional, let’s up the difficulty”, you will again either have a lot, and I really mean A LOT, of complaints from people not being able to do everything because it is too difficult or, if they choose to make it easy, people complaining about the lack of challenging content.
Middle ground in that case will most like mean taking heat form both sides. So it’s tricky for the developement team.
I guess the best option since hardmodes seem off the table, would be to go with an moderately easy baseline instance and really hard achievements. And reward those achievements properly with titles or special skins. Maybe even make them repeatable for multiple skins of the same line for a full skinset of weapons or armor.

Edit: I am aware that actual rewards other then a sense of “I did this, yeah!” again will prompt complaints about “I wanna have that too, but too hard, wah wah”. But in that case seriously, some things simply shouldn’t be handouts. Just axxept that there will be always complaints.
Personally for example I wouldn’t expect to get all those achievements with my level of skill. But it’s something I could work towards by improving myself. If I really wanted them.

There are a lot of reasons why 40+ man raids can be bad, but it doesn’t change the one reason they are great. There is a different feeling when you do something as a large organized force. Nothing will beat my memories of playing with my old guilds in EQ doing 72 then 54 man raids.

Still when I read MMO I don’t think “ohh where there are a bunch of people and I group with 4 of them at a time”, no, I think back to my old EQ days, where we had dozens of people working together to beat events. Where it wasn’t just about personal skill but having to improve the skill of the entire force. Where once an individual mastered part of an event he’d share and teach the rest so we could all succeed.

I miss that. Though, I don’t know if I could play hardcore enough to do that anymore. it takes more than individual skill, it takes organization and building a true guild rather than just a label above your head and a private chat channel.

Maybe I just disagree with the guy in that link but to me a game that is Diablo with an open world to hang out in while you queue for stuff isn’t really an MMO. And MMO is defined by these large scale events. The idea of having to build a guild being “toxic” according to that guy is just… so wrong to me.

Jerus.4350:

Zenith.7301:

Jerus.4350:

GW2 is the first MMO I’ve played that is this focused on solo content that’s for sure.

It’s not solo content. LS is a one time deal, with pretty much nonexistent rewards.

This game is either casino/trading post wars 2, or you do the daily dungeon tour doing the same tired skipping and wall hugging kitten.

I mean, what kind of kittened up endgame content consists of exploiting broken game mechanics that allow AI to be trivialized?

Whatever happened to gw1’s AI spreading on AoE? What about condition spreads, boon steals, CC?

Instead what you get is sacks of HP with shoddy telegraphs and badly tuned autoattack damage.

The bolded is pretty much every game I’ve played. First you barely beat it. Then you learn to do it regularly, then you find out tricks to make it faster. Really nothing new there for me.

I do agree there could be a lot more interesting mechanics though, just that abuse of AI and what not is pretty much normal and to be expected.

As for badly tuned auto attack damage, I think that’s actually done pretty well. The idea was to make all builds viable, they did that, but with that it means that glass cannons can work, if they simply upped auto attack damages and what not then the unavoidable attacks would start to take a toll and possibly make glass cannon setups not possible and go against what they set out to do.

There are 2 things that I find a bit disappointing about the dungeons in this game. The lack of required control/support, and the way they handled conditions. Control/support is important already but it could be so much more. I look at a fight like the Robot in COE and think “man why don’t more bosses have boons and require stripping?” Defiance is IMO overused, we could benefit from some play with how that works, instead of one CC and it goes immune instead have it 5 stacks up and 5 stacks down for some bosses, so through the fight we have to manage and intelligently utilize our CCs to stop the big attacks 5 times, if we screw up we may have to knock off the defiance to get that ability back. Just throwing stuff out but still, yeah mechanics could be better, but it’s pretty normal to abuse AI, it’s what makes things fun to do more than a handful of times, it’s what allows us to get better and better rather than just doing it over and over.

/shrug late night rambling

Not really every game. If I’m doing heroic blackfuse in WoW or Garrosh I don’t get to ignore most of the fight mechanics. Practice and consistency may get to the point we trivialize it because we learned the encounter, but we never get to use something on the scale of GW2 wall-hugging.

Autoattack damage also heavily discriminates against non-heavies, it’s why you see so much discrimination against medium/light armor. Take mossman or hierophant on fractal 50. Their autoattacks will one shot a berk ele without aegis spam up, but will only take out half of a warrior’s hp pool. Dredge and Ascalon fractals mean if you’re not spamming blind while wall hugging, the autoattacks of 2 mobs hitting you as a non-warrior/guardian will pretty much insta-down you.

Making CC more required would only really solidify warrior/guardian/thief meta, as those are the classes with most CC to begin with while necromancer and ranger have the least CC’s and nothing would change.

But Silberfish, we did get a hardmode in the last story line. I don’t think it’d be crazy to have upped the damage on the attacks a bit, increased the health of the Dragon and adds 5X and made it known it was intended for groups. It might need more tuning than that but still, the potential is there.

Finish the whole storyline solo. Jump into the last instance for a hardmode with your friends having additional mechanics and the same mechanics being a lot more punishing. I don’t think it’s out of the question.

Zenith.7301:

Jerus.4350:

Zenith.7301:

Jerus.4350:

GW2 is the first MMO I’ve played that is this focused on solo content that’s for sure.

It’s not solo content. LS is a one time deal, with pretty much nonexistent rewards.

This game is either casino/trading post wars 2, or you do the daily dungeon tour doing the same tired skipping and wall hugging kitten.

I mean, what kind of kittened up endgame content consists of exploiting broken game mechanics that allow AI to be trivialized?

Whatever happened to gw1’s AI spreading on AoE? What about condition spreads, boon steals, CC?

Instead what you get is sacks of HP with shoddy telegraphs and badly tuned autoattack damage.

The bolded is pretty much every game I’ve played. First you barely beat it. Then you learn to do it regularly, then you find out tricks to make it faster. Really nothing new there for me.

I do agree there could be a lot more interesting mechanics though, just that abuse of AI and what not is pretty much normal and to be expected.

As for badly tuned auto attack damage, I think that’s actually done pretty well. The idea was to make all builds viable, they did that, but with that it means that glass cannons can work, if they simply upped auto attack damages and what not then the unavoidable attacks would start to take a toll and possibly make glass cannon setups not possible and go against what they set out to do.

There are 2 things that I find a bit disappointing about the dungeons in this game. The lack of required control/support, and the way they handled conditions. Control/support is important already but it could be so much more. I look at a fight like the Robot in COE and think “man why don’t more bosses have boons and require stripping?” Defiance is IMO overused, we could benefit from some play with how that works, instead of one CC and it goes immune instead have it 5 stacks up and 5 stacks down for some bosses, so through the fight we have to manage and intelligently utilize our CCs to stop the big attacks 5 times, if we screw up we may have to knock off the defiance to get that ability back. Just throwing stuff out but still, yeah mechanics could be better, but it’s pretty normal to abuse AI, it’s what makes things fun to do more than a handful of times, it’s what allows us to get better and better rather than just doing it over and over.

/shrug late night rambling

Not really every game. If I’m doing heroic blackfuse in WoW or Garrosh I don’t get to ignore most of the fight mechanics. Practice and consistency may get to the point we trivialize it because we learned the encounter, but we never get to use something on the scale of GW2 wall-hugging.

Autoattack damage also heavily discriminates against non-heavies, it’s why you see so much discrimination against medium/light armor. Take mossman or hierophant on fractal 50. Their autoattacks will one shot a berk ele without aegis spam up, but will only take out half of a warrior’s hp pool. Dredge and Ascalon fractals mean if you’re not spamming blind while wall hugging, the autoattacks of 2 mobs hitting you as a non-warrior/guardian will pretty much insta-down you.

Making CC more required would only really solidify warrior/guardian/thief meta, as those are the classes with most CC to begin with while necromancer and ranger have the least CC’s and nothing would change.

I play a heavy guard, I run around with 11.5k hp. My warrior sits at like 19k, yeah when I go warrior i can take multiple lupi kicks and keep going, when I play guard if I screw up once I’m often downed on the spot. So lets rephrase that to Warrior shall we?

Also I said CC/Support, and mentioned the Robot and boons, if boon stripping were important in a way that was doable by necros tools I think they’d be much more popular.

Also aren’t dredge not blindable? or are you talking about non dredge in dredge fractal… are there any? I’m not huge on fractals so maybe I’m just confused here.

@ Jerus
I’m not saying that I dislike the idea of a hardmode. Quite contrary. But they stated in that inverview that hardmodes is not what they want to do atm.
I know the summit fight has a sort of hardmode option for one of the achievements. And yes, that idea could simply be taken just a few steps further to make it challenging 5 man content.
But I don’t expect them to do it at the moment, again based on that interview. I would like it. And I would like to be pleasantly suprised because I was wrong. But i don’t see it happening currently.

People werent happy with Flame & Frost’s Molten Facility and Aetherblade Retreat? It wasnt optional and was part of the story. Sure some ppl did not like the group content. But they made it to Fractals. And I’d personally prefer LS2 having similiar 5 man content than short instances like Scarlet’s Playhouse or the ones we have now, it didnt keep me interested enough to replay for the ‘hard mode’ achievements because it’s really bland. Some LS1 open world fights werent so bad either like the Marionette and Battle for LA.

Jerus.4350:

I play a heavy guard, I run around with 11.5k hp. My warrior sits at like 19k, yeah when I go warrior i can take multiple lupi kicks and keep going, when I play guard if I screw up once I’m often downed on the spot. So lets rephrase that to Warrior shall we?

Also I said CC/Support, and mentioned the Robot and boons, if boon stripping were important in a way that was doable by necros tools I think they’d be much more popular.

Also aren’t dredge not blindable? or are you talking about non dredge in dredge fractal… are there any? I’m not huge on fractals so maybe I’m just confused here.

dedgre are immune to blind

However, necros still wont be needed for boon strip. Mesmer already has enough boon strip with their null field, phantasm disencanter and sword auto to keep boons on a boss to zero.

@ rojak
Yes, a lot of people complained about them not being able to solo all parts and that they weren’t optional was basically the main problem.
Alongside the complaints about the molten duo being too difficult and both aetherblade bosses being to difficult. Some of that may have been due to the fact that they were only temporary and this might be alleviated with the new living story system.

In addition, we saw multiple complaints about the last step of the dragon’s reach part 1 and 2 being too difficult. And let’s face it those fights aren’t that difficult – they aren’t too easy, but still not overwhelmingly difficult – and are trivialised if you go in with a group instead of going solo.
People obviously didn’t even consider “hey, let’s do that as a group if i have trouble soloing it”. And people complained about the difficulty even though those are permanent addition that can be attempted as often as you want until you get them done.

Of course there is always the option that those complaining are simply more vocal than those who like it. As is usually the case. But it is still something you have to consider as feedback.

It comes down to development resources and the dev comments about not wanting to fracture the playerbase.

If incorporating something like Flame and Frost or Aetherblade Retreat is more than they can handle or want (due to the fear of fracturing) with the current system, I would opt for a compromise – which is where the idea of smaller engaging 5-player encounters released more often comes from.

Keep in mind that Scarlett’s Playhouse and the final instance in the Tower of Nightmares were scalable from 1-5.

What Im talking about would be closer to the Mai Trin fractal in terms of length and complexity – a bit of trash/story and a single challenging encounter. After a few months, we would get the equivalent of a dungeon without the wait.

As for rewards, I dont see a need to offer anything unique. This suggestion is more about wanting the experience and the challenge more than anything else.

Alternatively, they could offer a one-time achievement reward for finishing all of the 5-player instances in a season – a title or a skin that looked like a reward from the main story with a different color, possibly.

There was a lot of complaints regarding Aetherblade Retreat because it was supposedly way too hard. I don’t know if Molten got it too because I didn’t pay any attention back then.

Battle for LA was, like a big chunk of LS1, a huge farm and Marionette was a great way to show how low the playerbase general level actually was.

Blaeys.3102:

[…]

As for rewards, I dont see a need to offer anything unique. This suggestion is more about wanting the experience and the challenge more than anything else.

Alternatively, they could offer a one-time achievement reward for finishing all of the 5-player instances in a season – a title or a skin that looked like a reward from the main story with a different color, possibly.

While the sense of achievement for having mastered something difficult will probably be enough for those who simply look for a chellenge, I think additional rewards might be a good idea to get more people to try it aside from the completionists and those looking for challenging content.

Of course, as I said, that is a two-sided sword because it will also invite complaints about something being too difficult – see liadri.

With that in mind, you are probably right, a one time achievement would be better and the idea of a repeatable for multiple rewards might be going too far.
Although that would be a step into the direction aof skill based prestige skins. Something quite a few people seem to be fond of.

I’ve always thought they were pushing for the Season 2 Achievements, to be their new “dungeons”. It’s a concept that could work, but the rewards would need to be worth it. Instead, the rewards are awful. They could’ve added the new ambrite skins in them instead of RNG chests.

RedStar.4218:

There was a lot of complaints regarding Aetherblade Retreat because it was supposedly way too hard. I don’t know if Molten got it too because I didn’t pay any attention back then.

Battle for LA was, like a big chunk of LS1, a huge farm and Marionette was a great way to show how low the playerbase general level actually was.

It wasn’t way too hard. It was just badly designed with more imbalanced mobs and yet more mechanisms that favored warriors/guardians.

Silberfisch.3046:

Blaeys.3102:

[…]

As for rewards, I dont see a need to offer anything unique. This suggestion is more about wanting the experience and the challenge more than anything else.

Alternatively, they could offer a one-time achievement reward for finishing all of the 5-player instances in a season – a title or a skin that looked like a reward from the main story with a different color, possibly.

While the sense of achievement for having mastered something difficult will probably be enough for those who simply look for a chellenge, I think additional rewards might be a good idea to get more people to try it aside from the completionists and those looking for challenging content.

Of course, as I said, that is a two-sided sword because it will also invite complaints about something being too difficult – see liadri.

With that in mind, you are probably right, a one time achievement would be better and the idea of a repeatable for multiple rewards might be going too far.
Although that would be a step into the direction aof skill based prestige skins. Something quite a few people seem to be fond of.

Another post confusing “difficult” with badly designed.

Liadri was a dps race that one shot ranger pets. That’s kitten mechanics, period.

On my warrior i could bull’s rush, aoe fear the adds and finish liadri in one single knockdown with 100b>whirlwind.

On my thief all you needed was to spec into acrobatics and caltrops on dodge+ weakness/cripple removal on dodge and it was easymode infinite dodges.

Guardian was also fairly doable.

Classes like ranger/ele/necro had it far more difficult because of again, gimmicky mechanics and a really terrible camera view.