Guild Wars 2

This is NOT a flame topic. This is an honest question that I think will hardly be answered by ArenaNet.

I would just like to know what was the original intention with the Dungeons, on this game. More specifically their explorable modes. Were they supposed to take around 3 hours to complete all paths, or each path? Were they meant as something more casual, a quicker run, 30 minutes each path?

The reason I ask is those many skipping exploits the dungeons have. I haven’t got one pug group yet whose members were willing to kill the mobs along the way (at least those RIGHT were we are supposed to go). But I can understand why. Killing a trash mob can take time. Not to mention those undying Champions on the way that really take time to kill, almost as much time as a boss.

If I could give an opinion here about what players find fun on dungeons are the boss fights. They require some coordination. Sometimes their objectives are “mini-game-like” in nature where you have to do more than just smash buttons towards your target. This is awesome. If those boss fights were connected by some trash mobs like those just before the energy ball that does damage mini-game on the Arah Explorable (which I think are fair enough in difficulty and time it takes to kill them, and the mini game can be FUN), the dungeons would be better explored.

But there is a huge time gap between those bosses. Did ArenaNet intended that? If you did, do you developers play this game with random players or just between yourselves? Why wouldn’t you fix the terrible skipping exploits on the dungeons?

I think they should just make mobs not leash, have slightly reduced hp and higher condition damage. Would fix a lot of issues with dungeons imo.

The mobs will still get skipped. There will just be a requirment for a thief or mesmer in every group now for the mass invis to drop agro.

Sinergy.6374:

The mobs will still get skipped. There will just be a requirment for a thief or mesmer in every group now for the mass invis to drop agro.

Unfortunately no. Stealth does not drop aggro anymore – was changed in patch before this last one.

They’re redesigning the dungeons to make it harder to skip content. I know they did it in AC. They’ll get to the rest of them too. Which might not be a very popular move with dungeon runners.

Of course, I never “run” a dungeon, I just play them. I tend not to skip mobs, and I tend not to use exploits. I take longer to finish my dungeons, but I’m happy with that. That’s why I don’t usually pug and only play with my guild.

Ah must have missed that patch note. My bad.

I did like 30 cof1 runs and now I am 15 gold richer at least

Please note that I agree that killing the trash takes time and the loot is not always good. Although a lot of people don’t see greens and blues as crafting materials, I think ANet could also help with the coins. This is what made me ask that question in the first place. Is in ANet’s plans that we take time on the dungeons? Or should it be more casual? If it should be more casual (or quicker), then they must really do something about the HP on the mobs.

The only thing I think is wrong is skipping content so much.

Rash.6514:

Please note that I agree that killing the trash takes time and the loot is not always good. Although a lot of people don’t see greens and blues as crafting materials, I think ANet could also help with the coins. This is what made me ask that question in the first place. Is in ANet’s plans that we take time on the dungeons? Or should it be more casual? If it should be more casual (or quicker), then they must really do something about the HP on the mobs.

The only thing I think is wrong is skipping content so much.

That’s not the only thing. Why are people compelled to skip content that much? Answer that and you will find the mysteries of the universe.

Flamenco.3894:

Rash.6514:

Please note that I agree that killing the trash takes time and the loot is not always good. Although a lot of people don’t see greens and blues as crafting materials, I think ANet could also help with the coins. This is what made me ask that question in the first place. Is in ANet’s plans that we take time on the dungeons? Or should it be more casual? If it should be more casual (or quicker), then they must really do something about the HP on the mobs.

The only thing I think is wrong is skipping content so much.

That’s not the only thing. Why are people compelled to skip content that much? Answer that and you will find the answers behind mysteries of the universe.

Elissa.3620:

Sinergy.6374:

The mobs will still get skipped. There will just be a requirment for a thief or mesmer in every group now for the mass invis to drop agro.

Unfortunately no. Stealth does not drop aggro anymore – was changed in patch before this last one.

It still does most the time, patch notes aside.

Mob skipping has existed since GW1. Anet has even said that it’s a viable strategy if you can master it and choose to do so. Of course, one should learn the dungeon layout the first few times or skipping is not going to be effective. If one is skipping, it’s usually because one understands the dungeon layout and the dungeon rewards are needed in repetition.

Anet does play with random players. In fact, some of the PuGs you play with may be Anet devs hiding their tags (Rob is one that does this; he said this in one of his posts).

If Anet doesn’t answer this post, it’s probably because this topic has been debated to death several times already.

The verdict is this:
If you don’t want to skip, find other like-minded players that agree and make a group. Skipping is not an exploit and is an accepted choice, especially because you need to invest time to repeat for rewards. The keyword here is choice. Don’t force other players to play your way because by now we should understand where both sides are coming from.

One of the big threads on skipping (includes a posting by Rob H): https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Will-the-new-update-stop-skipping/page/1#post1205684

To answer the OP’s question: the dungeons were originally designed with a twofold purpose. One, to provide challenging content that required coordinated teams of skilled players. Two, dungeons were designed as part of the endgame. Theoretically, players could “gradually” earn tokens to gain endgame armor to use with their existing stats or transformed onto other armor with preferred stats to get a distinctive look.

Two things happened. One, the player version of “gradually” was shorter than ANet expected. Two, the major rewards (tokens and coin) are tied to boss kills. Repeating content over and over and over, etc. is not something players prefer to do just for fun. Hence, some groups are doing dungeons solely for the rewards.

If you want a serious answer, search the forums for the keyword skipping. Time/Risk vs Rewards for trash mob at the current state is not worthwhile.

Skipping is not an exploit.

If you are adamant against skipping, join or create a party with the requirements that no mob are skipped.

I like dungeons in general, except I don’t really like the teamwork aspects of it. I think dungeons should require more skills fusions in term of having everyone work side by side without being bored of each other (ie. the only time of a dungeon when there’s skill interaction with another player is when we need revives on our team). I think dungeons are meant to be a fun group event that really allows players to interact at several different levels… but it turns out there’s not quite as many types of interactions as people had expected, that’s probably my biggest ideological disappointment about dungeons.

Flamenco.3894:

Rash.6514:

Please note that I agree that killing the trash takes time and the loot is not always good. Although a lot of people don’t see greens and blues as crafting materials, I think ANet could also help with the coins. This is what made me ask that question in the first place. Is in ANet’s plans that we take time on the dungeons? Or should it be more casual? If it should be more casual (or quicker), then they must really do something about the HP on the mobs.

The only thing I think is wrong is skipping content so much.

That’s not the only thing. Why are people compelled to skip content that much? Answer that and you will find the mysteries of the universe.

I think the really simple answer is that whether I skip or don’t skip, I still get 60 tokens, 26 silver and 177600whatever experience at the end. Now should I skip and save 20 minutes to get the same outcome as if I don’t skip – well, most people would prefer to skip, unless not skipping means that people keep dying (which happens quite often in places like TA).

However if there was an incentive to not skip – for example the mobs along the way have a good drop rate, or can drop like 2 tokens or something, then definitely you’d see more people opting to kill things.

I think it is funny how people want them to take away leashing as a determent from skipping. This will just allow people to pull mobs into areas where players can get an advantage over the enemy. Imagine TA where you can pull the hounds out away from the Volatile Blossoms or CoE where you can pull the golems away from the lazers far enough that everyone could just teleport to the waypoint next to the lazer hallway. There is a very good reason for why they have leashing.

Elissa.3620:

Sinergy.6374:

The mobs will still get skipped. There will just be a requirment for a thief or mesmer in every group now for the mass invis to drop agro.

Unfortunately no. Stealth does not drop aggro anymore – was changed in patch before this last one.

Actually, I know that a lot of thieves (myself included) were happy to see the loss of aggro drop in stealth. It was a real pain in the kitten to be mauling an enemy, get low on health, stealth to gain a little thinking time and get a bit of health back, only to see our enemies walk off with fully recharged health.

Skipping, in the purest form, is not an exploit. However, using terrain glitches, like the infamous “mountain path” in CM or the “boat path” in Arah p2 are exploits. Honestly, after playing so many MMOs where the monsters have a tendency to chase players until the end of time, I find it somewhat interesting that ArenaNet decided to opt to have the monsters behave more or less like the monsters in the outside world, except with a somewhat bigger health pool.

I think instead of the Silver mobs we have now, how about increasing the density and making them a mix of Normal and Veteran mobs? I thought the trash in Fractals was a good step in the right direction when it comes to designing those. Those kinds of mobs die faster and would only be complete silliness just to skip them. If I remember back in GW1 during the Elite Missions, there were no “Elite” monsters, just a large density of monsters with average HP. I’d like that more than a few monsters with ridiculous amounts of HP.

Also: Make those trash mobs actually rewarding!

Perhaps they could drop dungeon-exclusive skins, crafting recipes, mini-pets, additional dungeon tokens, or cores/lodestones. In Fractals, perhaps these trash mobs could also drop Fractal weapon skins. Want to keep the RNG aspect of the Fractal weapons but make it less annoying? That would be what would bring me back to Fractals!

Another thing that could be added would be a Vanquisher-like element to the dungeon. For those who played GW1, Vanquishing meant that you had to go around the entirety of the explorable area and kill everything! Vanquishing a zone often awarded additional gold, experience points, and (sometimes) faction points. Earning more money is always nice. Perhaps the rewards could be better than just doing the mega-boss events out in the open world. Traditionally speaking, running a dungeon should award you with a good amount of coin and valuable loot, compared to roaming out in the open world. I know that running some of the dungeons in Eye of the North felt somewhat rewarding as well as Vanquishing. Skipping mobs in dungeons just doesn’t have that same feel when I get rewarded with the tokens at the very end.

Whoa, wait a second, you guys need to read it better. I never said skipping is exploiting. I said using exploits to skip content is bad. If there is a path “designed” to skip, then that is a choice.

Which comes to my original question, what were the dungeons intended for? To give us a choice? I agree that killing all the mobs takes a LONG time. I said that too. ANet could also solve it by putting daily limits on which you could get tokens, so it wouldn’t matter if you skip or not. But even with daily caps, I think a 3 hour run for 1 path is abusive as well, this game has other content I want to enjoy.

GW1 wasn’t even designed with dungeons in mind. They were introduced on Eye of The North. As far as missions went, you could skip some stuff by choice without using exploits. I didn’t like the reward system of the GW1 missions (one, two or three swords), but I did like how they were designed. I think (and that is just my humble opinion), if ANet designed the GW2 dungeons with the same timing and difficulty as the GW1 missions, it would be perfect.

Rash.6514:

Whoa, wait a second, you guys need to read it better. I never said skipping is exploiting. I said using exploits to skip content is bad. If there is a path “designed” to skip, then that is a choice.

Which comes to my original question, what were the dungeons intended for? To give us a choice? I agree that killing all the mobs takes a LONG time. I said that too. ANet could also solve it by putting daily limits on which you could get tokens, so it wouldn’t matter if you skip or not. But even with daily caps, I think a 3 hour run for 1 path is abusive as well, this game has other content I want to enjoy.

GW1 wasn’t even designed with dungeons in mind. They were introduced on Eye of The North. As far as missions went, you could skip some stuff by choice without using exploits. I didn’t like the reward system of the GW1 missions (one, two or three swords), but I did like how they were designed. I think (and that is just my humble opinion), if ANet designed the GW2 dungeons with the same timing and difficulty as the GW1 missions, it would be perfect.

To be fair one could possibly infer that you meant that normal skipping could be an exploit too based on the wording. There are rather zealous players out there that believe that skipping of the normal nature IS an exploit. But at least we are in some agreement here.

Currently the DR in place in dungeons act as a soft cap for completion rewards. I gather that you want to maximize tangible rewards but at the same time you want to experience other not-as-profitable content too. So you need to weigh out what is more important to you – Profitability or Experience? Farmers will gravitate towards the most profitable path in the game (which in current context is CoF 1 but it could potentially mean any other profitable paths in the future). You could still do any other dungeons that interest you. But the moment you start putting rewards into the picture, you need to make a decision.

But I do choose. While some players want to get the tokens as fast as possible, I can wait. I like enjoying things one small step at a time. I will eventually get my full gear set of a dungeon and I am not in a hurry. And the game allows me to do it while allowing others to farm as much as possible. This is perfect, I agree that ANet got that right.

Rash.6514:

But I do choose. While some players want to get the tokens as fast as possible, I can wait. I like enjoying things one small step at a time. I will eventually get my full gear set of a dungeon and I am not in a hurry. And the game allows me to do it while allowing others to farm as much as possible. This is perfect, I agree that ANet got that right.

In that case, a 3 hour path is still abusive to you?

Rash.6514:

But even with daily caps, I think a 3 hour run for 1 path is abusive as well, this game has other content I want to enjoy.

Yes, bad wording maybe, but you are inferring distinct things. I simply cannot afford 3 hours in the game (and I am pretty sure there are others who can’t either). There were times when I had so ask many sorries for the group but I had to leave before the end. A complete waste of time for all of us.

When I say I don’t mind how long it takes, I mean I may not be running dungeons every day and I would get my gear in 2 months, more or less. But aiming dungeons at a really long experience (like World of Warcraft raids, if you know what they were), then it simply means too much, I would have to skip that content completely. Now that I quoted the forbidden game, I would like to add that even Blizzard itself aimed to lower the time it takes to run a raid. People today just don’t have time to stay in the game for hours anymore.

Personally, I’d be much more willing to kill alot of the trash stuff if there was a chance that they’d drop anything useful… even more dungeon tokens would get me to kill them. But since basically nothing drops more tokens at all… then we’re kinda just wasting time beating on these infinite-seeming health pools whilst taking a bunch of armor damage and whatnot that is going to cost us in the long run.

Plus, as someone with less time to game than the average person, I don’t have time to waste killing tons and tons of mobs in dungeons, or I will never get anywhere… which would be sad. I like the idea of having dungeon sets at some point. I still haven’t even completed a whole armor set at this point.

Hopefully that will change soon… but yeah, any sort of change to make the mobs drop actual tokens would make me get more on that bandwagon in a hurry.