Guild Wars 2

First off great game, pve level’s 1-79 awesome, second to none. With that being said the Dungeons Exp modes leave something to be desired.

The most annoying thing about Dungeons is the bosses/champions health levels. Many of the fights are easy with few mechanics and know you will kill the boss by 85% health but have another 5+ boring minutes of hacking away till he actually dies. I’d like to see more deadly, less tanky bosses with better mechanics. Boss should hit hard and punish you for your mistakes, however if you know the dance and do it well it should not take you 7 minutes plus on some bosses to kill it. Champions are even worse often just straight i hit hard attackers and it takes the whole party beating them in a corner for 5 mins just to kill them. THAT’S REALLY BORING! Sure they should have more health sometimes so your forced to leave them last but not take five minutes after the silver mobs are dead.

Next Big thing is boss mechanics or lack of. Some bosses are well designed, many of the story modes were challenging and fun. Like SE finally boss was good, even the golem dude was fun even though he was like 4 bosses in 1. TA final boss was good. TA exp first giant wurm boss was good adds and aoe to watch for. Cof story last boss was pretty fun, too easy but fun, AC exp with the gravling horde is a great boss probably best I’ve done. But then there are the Exp mode bosses I just finished all of HoW explorable and was wow’d how boring the entire 3 routes were. Every boss was easy, had tons of health, and next to zero mechanics. Ice troll hits hard, mage on steps aoe’s and attacks you shouldnt die here, butcher totems respawn to quick and is a slow kill, frozen oakhearts kites fest with millions of Hp, twice lol. The under water bosses even worse no way you should lose but its going to take forever.

The next thing that I think was a bad choice was tokens. Tokens are just grind fests, that encourage players to find the easiest of the 3-4 routes and grind that to death. This would be made ok, if all the paths were even difficulty and time. This is far from the truth as CoF is a glaring example being able to be done in 15 mins. HotW butcher another good example as it is much easier than the others. I think specific drops from each boss would make players do different routes to collect their gear, tokens could be kept as well for other things. Even if bosses only dropped rares or a token for one rare that could be upgraded later by current tokens to exotic.

My suggestion is for future content make it hard not artificially extended due to hp bars that take forever to drop. People want to see bosses that are memorable and fun. Many boss rooms are too cramped and lacking mechanics. make them big where its not just the boss but sometimes the environment you have to watch for. I would like to see boss that die in 3-5 minutes or wipe your group by then because the group failed the mechanics. And please please lower champions health there’s nothing more boring than the champions that do nothing and just have huge health bars. Anet, you have the best game I’ve played with the exception of the pve EM modes, if you could fix these the game would be amazing.

Here is a copy paste of what I have already said in a number of other threads.

Dungeons need a complete rework. They need BIG changes and they would need to be balanced around my following suggestions.

1. If you die in a dungeon (not downed) then you cannot respawn.
2. If you die in a dungeon (not downed) you have a 60 second respawn timer.

For option 2: If a complete party is killed (aka wiped) then you fail that dungeon and must re-attempt it from the very start.

A problem with option 2 would be that if a player is downed during a fight, other players can just flee until the player is revived so they can reattempt the next part of the dungeon. That would be okay as long as the monsters aggro duration is increased (often you can just run away 10 metres and they stop chasing).

Why these suggestions will work? Because right now the dungeons are SUPPOSED to be challenging instances that require TEAMWORK, SKILL and GEAR. Right now players are just spamming auto attacks at trash mobs with super high hit-points or trash mobs with 1-shot kill mechanics which just AREN’T fun (I often alt-tab during prolonged fights where there is no real threat). Players are allowed infinite chances to continue dungeons even after multiple wipes (the only challenge is not to die so much). This allows players to attempt dungeons way beyond their skill, equipment and teamwork.

Or the opposite where players are getting 1-shotted, avoiding whole content altogether (running past mobs, sometimes even naked so gear doesn’t get damaged), farming the first 2 bosses of a dungeons for tokens rather than completing it, or complaining because the dungeon is way too hard or long (imbalance).

Of course if either of these suggestions are implemented then Dungeons will have to be reworked:

• by removing 1-shot kill mechanics,
• tweaking the number of trash mob packs,
• balancing hit-points and DPS of bosses/mobs.

But personally I believe to make Dungeons more challenging and UNIQUE from non-instanced PvE content is giving those elite/boss packs unique skills such as AOE crowd-control (fears, slows, chills, stuns), AOE damage-over-time (bleeds, burns) and other unique abilities such as knockdowns, frenzy, move-speed buffs, debuffs, knockbacks, invulnerability (super short duration, aka Wraithlord Hunter in Arah). With the amount of different unique abilities you can give to enemy monsters and how they can mix and match will result in endless dungeon mechanics and gameplay.

In regards to the paragraph above, my favorite boss would have to be the Asura golem at the start of Caudecus Manor. Even though his rockets are 1 shot kill (and have super fast projectile speed), the first time I faced him was awesome! Why? Because he has a number of different skills which players actually have to be skilled to fight him (not sure if players can still sit on ledge to avoid rockets still), such as the rockets, whirling flames and the blitz-pull (league of legends reference).

TL;DR Give proper death penalty in dungeons (at least Explore mode, I could understand keeping Story-Mode softcore), and kitten off the packs of trash mobs and give small packs of mob and elite/bosses more Unique Abilities and skills/passives rather than give us a Veteran or Champion trash mob.

Token System Suggestion in Spoiler

For people complaining about Dungeon GRINDING
Grinding for Dungeon tokens is completely 100% optional because the stats on the Dungeon Exotic gear are not the best you can acquire. In fact if you want the best stats you should be looking at crafting your own gear, or buy it off the Trading Post (I understand that gold is harder to get now but these are your options). But here is the deal, if you want to look like every single level 80, then don't run dungeons... On the other hand, if you want to look like intimidating and awesome, then get the Dungeon Exotic Gear of your choice. And for the more casual players who don't have hours on end to spend farming tokens, there is the Rare set of dungeon gear you can also acquire however all Rare dungeon armor sets will have the same appearance, but they still look nice and the stats aren't that bad either.