Guild Wars 2

Hello dear devs.

Since flame and frost was announced I thought we would see a lot more improvements to Dungeons and I was waiting for the so called “reestructuring” of them; a glimpse of fresh and challenging new moments.
It was sad to see that we barely had fixes and just a crazy Ascalonian Catacombs was given back.

Time is running and I think the day of this revamp is getting near, so before unnecessary changes are taken, I would like to be heard.
I want to point that I’m not a designer, nor a programer, nor an expert on development of videogames. But I think I have some good points to add to your work.

What do we have now?

Right now we have two different types of dungeons: gold spots and ghost spots. There is absolutly no interest on doing anything else than Citadel Of Flame for it’s incredibly easy way to acumulate gold. Everything else people do for cosmetic gear and once they get it, they won’t ever come back. Yes, I’m generalizing based on what i heard and saw on 3 different guilds i’ve been before.

What could be the future?

I wont go too specific here ’cause I see that dungeons as a whole are suffering from the same basic issues.

What I expect from a dungeon? When I get in there I want to be in a whole new level of PvE. I don’t want to just burst all my cooldowns and end fine. I want moments to think, to coordinate, to be pushed out of my confort zone and sometimes just swing my sword. This is the kind of thing I see a lot on Fractals and I expect to be implemented on all the vanilla dungeons.

But at the same time I can’t forget a new player perspective. For them, dungeons are incredibly scary and so close to impossible they simply give up to try anything before they reach the cap lvl. Every new player who joined those guilds I’ve been complained about that. And it’s curious when I hear your streams on Twitch Tv and you point a lot on how careful the changes have to be so new player don’t get so confused with a ton of mechanics and informations being thrown at them at the same time. What happened with that caution when Ascalon was revamped?

My point here is, the first four dungeons of the game they should be an introduction to what will wait for me on the higher levels. Each should addres very singular mechanics so the new player get used to timing and coordinating and start to realize how different battles will recquire different skills, different weapons and different playstyles.
With that, at the moment this new player reaches level 80 he/she will have a couple of armor pieces from dungeons, a couple from karma and a couple from craft/TP and he/she will be ready for this step ahead of difficulty and will be a much better player.

Before I go ahead to the higher levels dungeons, I’d like to point that along with the singular mechanics the difficulty we have now should be decreased on these first dungeons, specially on the very first one, aka Ascalon. We should also see a progression through the paths dealing with normal, veteran, elit, champion and legendary mobs depending on how close we are to end it.
In addition, this decreased difficult would directly impact on rewards. An easier dungeon would justify a lot of greens and sometimes yellows from the chests and a decrease on how much experience, gold and tokens I get from it.

Now that our new player is no longer new and got some good equipments through all his progression to level 80, what dungeons must become for him/her? The player now has a lot of utility skills, if not all, has a few weapons and is aware of how tricky bosses can be.

From CoF to Arah, dungeons should be an acid test. They woul recquire a lot of playerskill and team work in order to be completed.
Traps for the unwary, small puzzles to solve (such as the lasers on CoE), a reason to kill all those elit mobs spread along the paths (t5/t6 materials) and legendary bosses who deservers that denomination. Legendary classifiation is the highest in the game, so don’t be so trivial to give it to every boss. They should come with different phases of reaction, sometimes with accumulative phases. They are there to remember us how easily we can die when taking the wrong decisions.

Of course that higher dungeons with a higher difculty woul apply on better reawards. But not only that. I know that as much as you try, gold farmers will always look for the most profitable path and keep repeting it forever, but bringin all those different paths a bit closer woul not close the player base who wants gold to a singular dungeon.

For last, but not least, we have some unique skins spreaded arround tyria. If you want a certain skin you must complete a specific world boss in order to have a chance to drop that equipment. Bring more of this to dungeons. Give to each dungeon tons of unique skins and people will have a reason to come back.

Wow, I’m sorry for extending so much, but there is a lot to talk and I’ll surely post on further topics, on the proper suggetions subforum.

If you reached this far, thank you for reading, and please, share your thoughts