I will start off saying, I agree that CoF path 2 and CM Story needed to be fixed, but I don’t agree with the way they were fixed or the analysis that went into the fix. You removed both the reward, and overtuned the difficulty, by hitting both you made those dungeons not even worth running. I think the main quote from dev Robert shows this disconnect in the analysis, “they’ll do about 3-4k damage to a DPS focused player, but you should have anywhere between 15-25k health..” You cannot be DPS focused, have that much health, and still be able to mitigate damage against a group of enemies with tons of health. You can make it a dps contest, you can make it a mititgation contest, or you can make it burst contest to see if you or the enemy can kill each other first, but putting all 3 together for just one dungeon event is insane.
If you want us to dps down mobs with skill timers that are balanced for PvP (40-60 seconds, 180 elites) you can’t make a fight drag for 200 seconds and give mobs insane damage. If you want use to try and avoid 3-4k fireballs and tons of constant damage from 4+ mobs, you can’t make us wear and use dps skills. The lowest base hp pool classes aren’t hitting 15k, and the highest pool classes aren’t hitting 25k health if you are talking about dps focused builds, it just doesn’t happen. So focus on the what you want us to do in the event, don’t just all of a sudden throw everything in there making it near impossible to do legit. If you didn’t intent people to kite mobs for 100 seconds in the first place, a simple fix would be to not have Magg open the door until the mobs were dead, not completely overtune it and make it take twice the time.
If people were exp grinding CM Story then reduce the rewards or make it a bit harder, but by doing both to a level 40 story dungeon that is supposed to introduce new players to dungeons, you destroyed any reason for casual players to take the time to get groups and learn to work together in harder content by basically throwing them off a cliff. You need to go back and look at your philosophy that has been stated as the story mode being easier for more casual people to get them to try out dungeons and then go look at CM Story again.
On top of this, you put in a diminished rewards timer. It just seems like you tried to throw everything to stop players from farming a couple of under-tuned paths in a knee-jerk reaction which completely ruined things. But you still didn’t look at overtuned paths.
By making paths harder you stop people farming them OR by putting in diminishing rewards you stop people farming them (hopefully as a short term fix) but it makes no sense to do both, and on top of it reduce the base rewards.