Guild Wars 2

Robert Hrouda said weeks ago that his team was working hard to address the overall negative perception of “not fun” and “insufficient rewards”, And the overall lack of dungeon participation. Robert also said they would communicate about the progress of such redesign.

Well, it’s several weeks later and we’ve seen no such communication yet, and no indication of when the first round of redesign will hit the live environment. So is it possible to at least list your high level redesign goals/decisions at this point? I know it can take several sprints to iterate your way from point A to point B, but it should not take more than a week or two at most to get your epics defined. Can you just give us some indication of what’s in those epics and roughly when we can expect the first changes to hit?

This post is also to remind you that just because the compliant posts have lessened somewhat, that does NOT mean the community has grown to like the current dungeon design and gotten over the learning curve. It means that most of us have been patiently in “wait and see” mode because we know this stuff can’t be changed over night.

So let me be clear: just because there are dungeon paths that are doable does not mean they are fun or enjoyable. And just because a few very vocal fanboys here shout down every person who comes here in shock to post their feedback that the dungeons are really disappointing in various regards does not mean that the more of the community is turning around their opinion of the dungeons.

I can confidently speak for my 20-ish person guild (who all love a good dungeon crawl and has long experience in coordinated group content in many many other MMOs), that we universally revile the current dungeons. Every new person who tries out their first few dungeons, are universally in shock. Listening to our voice chatter when this happens is priceless for the constant string of “what the hell is this kitten? This isn’t fun at all.”

And like so many others have said before, the truly strange thing is that the entire rest of the game design is so incredibly good. All of the outdoor PvE mechanics and design is just truly marvelous and truly fun and rewarding on so many levels. It’s just bizarre that the dungeons are by contrast so universally un-fun and unrewarding.

While i do agree Robert still have many issues to fix, like the reward system meaning something to end game, i do think he did a major step in last patch, adding karma to dungeons.

Im not a big fan of hit kill bosses like subject alpha, not saying its hard right now, cause it isnt after you play that boss a lot, but still, i think its too harsh for people starting dungeons.

After 2 changes ( tokens system and karma add) of pure win, i actually can hope for good changes in the future. Think about it op.

Loe.6351:

After 2 changes ( tokens system and karma add) of pure win, i actually can hope for good changes in the future. Think about it op.

Oh, I’m sure they’ll get it right eventually. I’m simply asking for some community dialog. They’ve been largely silent. And let’s be honest: both of the changes they’ve made so far are relatively simple and don’t affect the core problem, which are the dungeon encounters themselves. The core problem revolves around the uber-simplistic “challenge” of high boss HP pools instead of truly interesting/challenging boss mechanics. The lack of visible telegraphs for the one-shot kills, and enough time to react to the telegraphs, and by “visible” I meant truly noticeable through all the chaos and bling. And perhaps the biggest offender is the insane overkill of the trash mobs in various regards.

They are probably keeping mum because if they start talking about changes that aren’t implemented because they can’t make it work or decide to go in a different direction, people will erupt with anger over “broken” promises.

Besides, a lot of the reasons people don’t find the dungeons fun or interesting have to do with core mechanics, and taking a second look at those is intense work.

Was supposed to be for the next patch Robert, not in Halloween but the next, is this true or is still not fully tested? Cause in the first place was nearly released for Halloween but then you said “needs a bit more of testing, so I hope it ships for the 22nd update, if not for next” or so I understood.

i just hope they won’t make the dungeons easier and after playing every path of every dungeon can’t agree with the it’s-no-fun-at-all complains. in fact, the dungeons are the only reason why i’m still playing this game.
u still need a challenge in pve. the world out there is so easy, it’s clearly desinged to give you a good feeling without any effords. you are doing some events, complete some hearts, seeing all the beautiful things they designed and smile about your char killing all the mobs. than you try a dungeon the first time and baam your party wipes at the first trash mob. yes, this is a shock and i was shocked too. but believe me, it’s only because you are not using the full potential of your character and skills and never played as a real team before. it’s even not your fault, because you just never had to in that open world.
most people get frustaded here and start complaining, because they want their easy flowing gamestyle back, which they got used to. and this is the real problem, there need to be a smoother transition from open world to dungeons.

if i learned one lesson from playing dungeons with pugs and my well skilled mates: if they are too strong, you are too weak. simply as that

what i have in my mind and wanted to be in the next changes about dungeon rewards is something as a caliber of ecto or mystic coin can be obtained in the end of the run..1-4 pieces of them would be quite good,i think

+1 OP. I also agree with your usage of the word revile as I do as well :P

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Adding karma to dungeons is a start, and the loot changes is a continuation of that, which are both things we have brought up saying we are going to do. We’re working on it, and we’ll continue to be vocal about the work we’re doing in the future.

Unfortunately, reward does not equal fun.

What makes dungeons “not fun” then?
For one, bosses that are so bugged that they require luck and working around the bugs to complete. AC path 3 burrows (fight after Kohler) comes to my mind. I can stand and not move or turn and one swing will hit while the next five will miss until I move around. Thief reported that he could hit them only if not having them targetted. I know you’re aware of this but this needs to be fixed with very high priority.

Next, there’s mechanics that are not challenging but just tedious. The flowers in TA come to my mind. Keep them in bossfights but remove them from the paths between those. There’s classes that have attacks that jump from one target to the next. Those classes clear the way with ease. And then there’s classes that have to target every flower individually. Finally there’s classes that have to target every flower individually but with most weapons, that doesn’t help because in 90% of the cases, the flower you stand in front of is “obstructed”. Fighter with rifle or downed state “1” comes to my mind.

Then there’s fights that, if done correctly, are a pain because of NPC stupidity. Magg lava flieds for example. Stands in place and pretends to attack enemies half a room away while getting his feet roasted in lava. Not fun. Hardly anyone complains because almost everyone exploits it – and though I hate exploits, I can well understand why everyone does.

Why improving rewards sucks:
If you have dungeons that are not fun, noone goes there. If you have dungeons that are not fun but reap huge rewards, people go there – but as a grind they hate. It’s still not fun and you just created a game that compells people to do stuff they don’t like. They enjoy your game less and will think worse of it as a whole. Mind you, I didn’t say they are forced to go to dungeons they hate, the’re just compelled to. But that’s bad enough.

So, whyt would I like you to do?
Stop balancing increased rewards. Noone needs them. Invest your time to find out why people feel your dungeons are currently not fun and change those aspects. Trust me, the rewards are not on the list. People complain about rewards because currently, the rewards are not enough to offset the pain some of the encounters are. Don’t increase the reward, remove the pain.

@ Phooka

@ Phooka

I ran AC path 3 last night and had no issues targeting the burrows. It seems much improved. It’s also an incredibly easy path.

The Blossoms in TA are excellent as they keep players moving and prevent speed running. However, I’d advise taking a Guardian with a staff as these eat Blossoms all day long. Blossoms are also wonderful for rallying off.

I still find dungeons fun, all the ones I’ve done and I amassed over 1000 Tokens from Twilight Arbour before the Token changes…

Lewis Burnell.2493:

I ran AC path 3 last night and had no issues targeting the burrows. It seems much improved. It’s also an incredibly easy path.

I did it on sunday (three days ago) and we had huge issues. I was not the only one. As I mentioned, we even swapped classes to find out which had any chance to hit the things, at all.

Having said that we all felt that AC path 3 is basically this one fight. The rest is incredibly easy and would have to be buffed in difficulty. Still, we felt that the bugged state of the burrows-fight was well worth the two chests (the next chest for killing the four burrows is a pushover, they could just as well add the loot to the event-fight-chest).

Lewis Burnell.2493:

The Blossoms in TA are excellent as they keep players moving and prevent speed running.

You want to make “afk bio” an impossibility on half the pathways through the dungeon? Why? Preventing speed-running? Rangers with axes or elementalists with air-attunement (chain-lightning) or engineers don’t have to slow down one bit while killing flowers.

However, if you are a warrior (you guessed it, I am) and you have no such tool at your disposal, running back from a waypoint takes ages. That is good or even just OK in which way again?

Lewis Burnell.2493:

However, I’d advise taking a Guardian with a staff as these eat Blossoms all day long.

We don’t have one in our regular TA group but we have the classes mentioned above. Other classes have to be led through the blossoms by their hands like preschoolers, though. Alternatively, they can “fight” their way through, which takes them twice as long.

Lewis Burnell.2493:

Blossoms are also wonderful for rallying off.

They are, if you can hit them. On my warrior, the downed-1 ability often gets magicaly “obstructed” just like the rifle, though. While for your class, the blossoms may be a rallying-tool, I’ve given up on this weeks ago. I know it works for some, it’s been just frustrating for me so I stopped trying it and failing even though the flower was in plain sight (remember the thing about something being not fun?).

Lewis Burnell.2493:

I still find dungeons fun, all the ones I’ve done and I amassed over 1000 Tokens from Twilight Arbour before the Token changes…

Yes, I like most dungeons as well. And I’m happy for you and your class not being affected by the bugs I listed. Please understand that not everyone is in as lucky a position as you are.

shaktiboi.5194:

Loe.6351:

After 2 changes ( tokens system and karma add) of pure win, i actually can hope for good changes in the future. Think about it op.

Oh, I’m sure they’ll get it right eventually. I’m simply asking for some community dialog. They’ve been largely silent. And let’s be honest: both of the changes they’ve made so far are relatively simple and don’t affect the core problem, which are the dungeon encounters themselves. The core problem revolves around the uber-simplistic “challenge” of high boss HP pools instead of truly interesting/challenging boss mechanics. The lack of visible telegraphs for the one-shot kills, and enough time to react to the telegraphs, and by “visible” I meant truly noticeable through all the chaos and bling. And perhaps the biggest offender is the insane overkill of the trash mobs in various regards.

wow you nailed it took the words right out of my mou…er…fingers.

FYI Blossom targeting has been fixed and they have been made bigger too for ease of targeting. I used to hate those things but now they are working as intended I really like them in TA. They can be a danger if you are inexperienced but very useful if you know what you are doing and they add a bit of flavour to the dungeon which is very welcome. I think a lot of the problems with explorable dungeons is they don’t feel as polished and immersive as general PVE. More dialogue and environmental features and interesting characters to meet (including bad guys) would be great changes. Cosmetic, but don’t underestimate the value of good presentation in the having of fun.

I agree whole heartedly with the OP. I’ve completed quite a lot of dungeons (still have to try CoE) but none of them are fun to do. Especially dungeons like Arah and TA are horrendous, even if they include one interesting boss fight. HotW is okay-ish, because its doable, but also just boring (but not frustratingly so, unlike the others). AC path 3 is absurd, and even with the highest coordination I have been unable to get my guild teams to clear the burrows fast enough. We avoid that path like the plague now. It just seems extremely unfriendly towards certain class combinations. Even with everyone specced to max DPS and attacking the burrows in the most efficient order… we still failed every time. We soon realised it wasn’t a matter of strategy, and just felt disappointed.

I also think the rewards are bad. The tokens for unique armors are alright, but I miss the excitement from collecting obsidian shards and ectos in GW1. It may have been a grind, but at least there were unique drops to look forward to (And FoW and UW were also fun!).

There’s also something that hasn’t been adressed yet, and thats the constant interruptions with cutscenes. Frankly I feel that cutscenes right before or after boss fights simply take the action and excitement out of the run. It often feels like you are in the middle of an exciting movie, and then they cut to commercial. I really would prefer it if they would stick to ingame dialogue instead.

To give you an example of the above, the first time I saw the corrupted statue of Dwayna come to life and step off its pedestal was thrilling. No cutscenes, it just happened as we were standing there, and it was infinitely more exciting than cutting to a cutscene.

I agree that dungeon rewards need to be tweaked. There is just no incentive to run them outside of the token skins, dungeon master title, and low drop chance on lodestones.

However I disagree whole heartedly that the dungeons are not fun. My first CoE run took almost an hour and was probably the most fun dungeon I have run. None of us had done it before so we needed to learn the mechanics of the fights but once we caught on the encounters became quite simple.

If you are not having fun I suspect there may be something wrong with your group. I run a full clerics gear shout healing warrior build in my groups, weapon swapping and skill swapping based on the encounter. With the endurance regen buff from the warrior horn, the 6.5k on demand healing, and massive condition removal from soldier runes, there is rarely anything that the group cannot live through by dodging. Yes dodging and using line of sight are key for survival in a game that lacks true tanks and healers. Also, I can see how running a glass cannon DPS build in a dungeon would be frustrating especially if you don’t have support oriented team mates to back you up, or if you are not great at dodging. Anyone running such a build and having trouble should try a more tanky build and see the difference.

I do however have two gripes with dungeons. The first is the bugs such as the mounds that cannot be hit in AC. Stuff like this is not fun and out of players control. There are many other examples of such bugs, effort put into fixing these would be appreciated. The second gripe is with mob crowd control (CC). Many of the trash encounters have several mobs with seemingly low cooldown crowd controls like knockdowns. Groups of mobs with heavy CC can mean isnta-death for players without any way to react once you have used your endurance and defensive skills. My personal opinion is that many trash mob packs have too much CC. It is however manageable for people to rez and zerg through these groups, but that shouldn’t be the “normal” dungeon run play style.

I think they’re “Fun” … [[ TL;DR summary at bottom of post]]
And I’m not trying to be a fanboy either…. my Guild at launch had >100 players. There’s now 3 of us left b/c WvW and Dungeons completely failed their expectations. That’s over 97 people who all agreed it wasn’t Fun. ….anyhoo….

I think they’re “Fun” so long as it’s still fresh to your Team, and your team is actually able to Roll-Through each path at a good Clip. That doesn’t mean Speedclearing either, it just means killing the mobs quick enough without a whole lot of defeats along the way. We can talk about all the other things that could change in the future like animations, and overhauling mechanics …..LATER…. right now let’s focus on “Pacing”.

Several Paths in some of these dungeons definitely don’t live up to that “Fun” description for me either though. The Entirety of Arah for example. Even when you nail Lupicus on the first attempt, you still had to contend with between 30-100 “Elite” and Champion mobs that just grind the pacing & fun of the game to a Halt. …which isn’t even something we had to deal with in UW & DOA. Yeah there were some tough mobs in those Zones too but not even in the Tar Pits where you’re literally slogging through Tar, did it feel like you were Slogging through the Mobs as well. And the Bosses are even worse sometimes, especially when they’re big boring mostly immobile bosses you’re not supposed to group-Melee b/c they just spray 2-shot kills all over the place. (like Subject Alpha & those first Wurms you come to in every path of both CoE & TA Exporables)

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• TL;DR Summary: If you get any of these mobs down to 50% HP, and your whole party hasn’t wiped yet… 90% of the time, you’re NOT GOING TO WIPE for the last 50% either. So the Mobs in these Sloggier-Paths just need Better A.I., but half the HP, and then Dungeons will feel a lot faster to a lot more people. Not most people, but a lot more people than there are right now like me who are simply immune to Arbitrary time-sinks.

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PS: FoW was AMAZING for less coordinated guilds & PuGs. Yeah it was too easy for our Uber Guilds, but a super majority of average players all seemed to agree it was the best Elite Area.

phooka.4295:

Trust me, the rewards are not on the list. People complain about rewards because currently, the rewards are not enough to offset the pain some of the encounters are. Don’t increase the reward, remove the pain.

I disagree entirely. The dungeons would be fun enough to get me to run through each path of each dungeon once, given a few bug fixes (like the glaring SE issues). Dungeons won’t be fun enough to get me or anyone I know to continue to run them if there are no decent rewards to be gained from doing so.

dungeons already give out the best rewards in the game (unique items AND top level items), why waste your time focusing on increasing the rewards when the problem is that all the setups and bosses are terrible? Go take out all the stupid 1-shotting puzzles, make the enemies less brutal on the melee, remove the CC immunities and tone down the ludicrous amounts of health everything has.

Lenny.9301:

I realize this may sound like whining at a glance, but I do very much enjoy this game and would like it to be more fun and appealing to as many of my friends as possible, which is why I am criticizing it.

1. To make dungeons more rewarding for the short-term, substantially increase the chances of finding lodestones and rare or exotic gear from dungeon chests. We needed this over a month ago. Worried about hackers abusing this? Then fix that too. Stop punishing legitimate players.

2. To help parties and guilds gauge a player’s effectiveness in a dungeon, add player inspection to GW2. There is so much more that can and needs to be done towards this end, inspection is not asking for much. I want to know if our party is carrying someone in Cultural Tier 3 with a bad spec and level 65 trinkets, and I want to know when somebody is wearing magic find.

1. - Definitely a good idea
2. 2 – Kitten NO – if someone is obviously bringing the party down (always downed, doesn’t help bring up other downed players, AFK too much, doesn’t listen to direction, etc), then find a replacement. Allowing inspection just allows people to nitpick over gear – gear says absolutely nothing about a player’s experience, attitude, talent or ability to positively contribute to a group

I am personally sitting out dungeons and likely GW2 out almost entirely until the loot patch or the content patch goes in. It was fun to experience them content wise but repeating them is really not a good use of time right now.

As far as loot goes I am hoping for yellow and ecto drops. Some high level mats like Ori’s, gossamers etc should be like a fortune cookie bonus too. Perhaps exotics as rares, and runes should have a higher percentage. The SE rune was actually the most useful thing I’ve ever got out of a dungeon since I was running SE for those in the first place,

I just want, finally i hope, drop exotics on shot, doing a dungeon. At least 1, even unnamed, but exotic. EXPECIALLY from big chests , like outdoor dragons. It’s just a ridiculous waste of time, actually. People do orr DEs for karma, not surely for a chance to drop exotics, who drop one is a lottery winner.

IMO magic find is definitely an issue in dungeons. Since it doesn’t seem to affect chest drops, it’s quite redundant in dungeons. Of course the worst part is that it benefits the player himself at the expense of the other groups members. It is a big problem in small groups of five people, where each person is expected to pull their own weight.

CrazyGoNuts.9536:

dungeons already give out the best rewards in the game (unique items AND top level items), why waste your time focusing on increasing the rewards when the problem is that all the setups and bosses are terrible? Go take out all the stupid 1-shotting puzzles, make the enemies less brutal on the melee, remove the CC immunities and tone down the ludicrous amounts of health everything has.

Why the hell would you spend time struggling through dungeons to get exotics when it is much less hassle to spend a few hours grinding away in Cursed Shore and then to buy them off the TP?

They missed the mark with many of the dungeon skins, imo. It’s obvious the skin is supposed to fit the dungeon, but do you honestly want to run around in gw2 looking like you just crawled out of a Dredge mine?

However, even assuming you were 100% correct and that the dungeon rewards themselves were “the best” (dungeon skin vs. precursor weapon… which would you choose? :P), the problem with the rewards is that they don’t form part of the economy.

Unless you have a personal interest in a dungeon, you have absolutely no reason to run it. The rewards from the dungeons aren’t terribly difficult to acquire. At 180 tokens a day, a full set of armour isn’t going to take very long to get. Why would anyone run dungeons for the rewards after a few days?

In GW1, the dungeons had rewards that were part of the economy. Even if you didn’t want FoW armour, you could go to UW and farm ectos and trade it for something you did want. The dungeons in GW2 need something along those lines to serve as an incentive to run them, and this is what people really want mean they ask for better rewards for doing dungeons.

Lenny.9301:

2. To help parties and guilds gauge a player’s effectiveness in a dungeon, add player inspection to GW2. There is so much more that can and needs to be done towards this end, inspection is not asking for much. I want to know if our party is carrying someone in Cultural Tier 3 with a bad spec and level 65 trinkets, and I want to know when somebody is wearing magic find.

I wholeheartedly endorse this and would take it a step further….

We don’t have to see anyone’s armor piece by piece (not to mention COND, MF% & HEAL stats aren’t even tallied up in the current one), but I think an account-wide career-tally of how many tokens they’ve collected would help. It’d also be great if we had a peer-review option as we see in these forums where if you participated with the player long enough to complete the dungeon, you could choose to Up-Vote their “rep” one time for all 8 dungeons. (or opt out if they were “bad” at it). Like So:

ilr.9675:

Lenny.9301:

2. To help parties and guilds gauge a player’s effectiveness in a dungeon, add player inspection to GW2. There is so much more that can and needs to be done towards this end, inspection is not asking for much. I want to know if our party is carrying someone in Cultural Tier 3 with a bad spec and level 65 trinkets, and I want to know when somebody is wearing magic find.

I wholeheartedly endorse this and would take it a step further….

We don’t have to see anyone’s armor piece by piece (not to mention COND, MF% & HEAL stats aren’t even tallied up in the current one), but I think an account-wide career-tally of how many tokens they’ve collected would help. It’d also be great if we had a peer-review option as we see in these forums where if you participated with the player long enough to complete the dungeon, you could choose to Up-Vote their “rep” one time for all 8 dungeons. (or opt out if they were “bad” at it). Like So:

Thats just asking for a ton of elitism to creep in. I was in overflow when the mad king dungeon thing happenend and chat was filled with level 80 only msg for invite. o.O mk dungeon was easy and scaled. I prefer to not know its really easy to tell if your carrying someone in any of these dungeon.

I don’t understand why we have all this ‘anti-carrying’ people sentiment. When you ran a dungeon the very first time, were you not carried? Who gives a toss what frock you’re wearing? So you can do 50 damage more per second in your level 80 full exotics than the bloke standing next to you, level 35 in full greens. Congratulations, we defeated the boss half a minute faster than we otherwise would have.

The only reason you’re able to sit on your high horse and say OMG NO NOOBS IN MY PARTY PLIS is because someone was willing to take you into their party, run the dungeon with you and most of them will even stop before each boss and tell you what to expect.

Cut your elitist crap and do something nice for someone else for a change. A 60 token, 26s, 4500 karma reward in AS FAST AS POSSIBLE pales in comparison to finishing a run in an hour – with the same 60 token, 26s, 4500 karma jug – and have the level 35 new to Guild Wars 2 whisper you saying “Thank you so much, you were really helpful and that was really fun”.

I just hope, that when these changes come around, we can get away from the; “Oh let’s skip these next 10+ mobs cause I don’t want to take the time to kill them” I’m really tired of groups wanting to skip all the content because they think it’s too hard, or a waste of time.

Yeah. Account wide rep works so well when the elitist kitten comes on his newly leveled alt bashing keyboard with forehead kitten thinking he is so pro due to his wicked rep granted him by his standard dungeon group.

The word “carrying” is so misleading and wrongly used by people. We where all carried once. The first time you did the dungeon and someone done it before. Guess what.. Carried.. Right there. None of the dungeons in this game is complex enough that taking 2 – 3 minutes before a boss fight to explain it will kill you. If it does, then god help you, do not pug or take pugs ever again.

People coming from that one game with all its gearscores and raidhelpers and addons and macros got a weird view on dungeons.

On topic though I hope Anet will overhaul NPC Ai in the dungeons. There is quite a few that got npc´s with you on the run and mostly that Ai is terrible.

Adding to rewards would also be a huge bonus .
Rate the bosses you have ingame after difficulty and then add rewards accordingly. End boss should have atleast a 50% chance of rare/exotic/lodestone.
Add “dungeon pouches” that scale with the original level of your character. When opened you can find (for a level 80) t5 – t6 materials. t5 being at 80% and t6 at 20%. Ending a dungeonrun with existing rewards + a rare and 3x ori and 1x gossamer would make a way happier camper

My fix:
keep in mind this doesnt address the many mechanical problems with the instances or the fact that many instances have insanely easy tank/spank boss fights strewn about them in places. It also doesnt fix the loot, but improved loot tables that were promised should do that.
Easy Med Hard modes

Easy: easy encounters, less damage, less strain, 20 tokens a run. -5 tokens per re run down to 10min. This allows players to learn the mechanics without getting mauled and still being rewarded.

Medium: About where most dungeons are now. Awards 40 tokens -10 per re run down to 25. Allows a harder mode with better loot more karma than easy and more tokens.

Hard: Harder than most stuff is now, think like arah difficulty in everything, bosses have more abilities, there is more techinque to fights, bosses have hard hits, NOT MORE HEALTH THOUGH. 65 tokens per run -10 per run down to 45 min. More karma (the 1880 that there is now should be here, maybe 2000 if u want).

You choose your mode, then ur path, then u go. Sound good? This lets people learn dungeons with an easy mode run and then go to hard mode for rewards and challenge.

Dungeons don’t appear to be high on lists of things to do and it doesn’t appear A-Net have a solid plan for the loot just yet, (as mentioned above, they will be more vocal about it in the future) in the meanwhile I am looking forward to the new Nov 15 update for the new maps and etc.

You could give out Ledgendary Weapons at the end of a dungeon and a large number of people would say the reward isn’t worth it. Thats because its not the reward it’s the difficulty that needs adjusted.

My 2 cents.

Currently, I believe that the difficulty of the dungeons needs tweaking. Specifically, Story mode needs to be less difficult, and dungeons in general need to be less . . . utterly deadly to melee users.

I like the current loot system though. With the sole exception being that fact that the final boss of a story mode dungeon only drops a hat the first run through, and nothing else the subsequent times.

Aside from these complaints I’m quite happy with the game.

lmao i cant bealive people have probelms doing AC… i do AC 3 paths in around 40 – 50 min everyday… to hit the burrows you have to keep moving in circles around pressing button number 1.. and thats it…. i have only done CM , CoE and AC and i have fun doing them.. cant tell about arah.. i have only heard complains about it :P

As so many stated before the problem is the mechanics of the dungeon, fighting a boss with a huge HP pool is frustrating, i don’t mind the damage output of the enemies it can be avoided and i cant understand why a potential 5-10 min fun boss fight should take 15 min or more. I hate when the enemy lock on one player and constantly attack him, i had this issue in CoF story when ever i was able to leave the downed mod the boss rushed toward me (well at least it gave my teammates time to attack it). In my opinion Anet got it right in the new mini-dungeons especially in Vexa’s Lab this dungeon is brilliant. The main problem with the dungeons today is that thy are too short and Anet tried to make them feel longer with difficult fights. i don’t say that i hate dungeons some of them are fine, some bosses have cool mechanics but those are the rare once.

Please dont add any type of inspection tools thy don’t say anything about the player personality, skill and knowledge.

I prefer to understand the story mod mechanics and help guild members in what thy need (dungeons, personal story, skill chalanges and so on) then getting geared up in dungeon armor which is ugly in my opinion.
By the way i prefer to play with an unexperienced fun player then elitist veteran (one of those bailed from my group after he led us in a zerg way to the final boss, he left the party after his first death there), i don’t mind if the run will take 2 hours and don’t mind that my toon will die if i will have fun with my party.

I would be really happy if we got Lodestones after finishing a dungeon, or dungeon tokens and/or lodestones when opening boss chests through the dungeons.

My biggest complaint is how some dungeons just throw hordes of elites at you, which takes forever to slog through, even when they pose minimal threat (Read: Sorrow’s Embrace). A general reduction of the HP of elites would be nice. In general, I’d say their health should be inversely proportional to how many there are.

And of course, bosses should not be simply damage sponges. That’s stupid.

Lenny.9301:

2. To help parties and guilds gauge a player’s effectiveness in a dungeon, add player inspection to GW2. There is so much more that can and needs to be done towards this end, inspection is not asking for much. I want to know if our party is carrying someone in Cultural Tier 3 with a bad spec and level 65 trinkets, and I want to know when somebody is wearing magic find.

The worst idea to hit any MMO. There is zero need for a system like this in place for a game that promotes (and functions quite nicely) as a game anyone, no matter the profession, can play in any situation.

Yes, there are those that will only ever take traits and skills to their personal benefit when entering a dungeon, but you and I have no right to tell them they are wrong for playing the game they payed for the way they want to play it. Gear does not, and never will, equal skill. I have seen players in other MMOs, where gear does play a huge part in one’s potential, get out DPS’d and out Healed by players with terrible gear.

Two of the best decisions ArenaNet has made to the design of Guild Wars 2 is not allowing other players to view gear/traits and view/link achievements.

That’s just asking for a ton of elitism to creep in. I was in overflow when the mad king dungeon thing happenend and chat was filled with level 80 only msg for invite. o.O mk dungeon was easy and scaled. I prefer to not know its really easy to tell if your carrying someone in any of these dungeon.

The Elitism is already there with or without the added Transparency that I’m Condoning. A lot of people tend to forget that those so called “Elites” usually get carried themselves by someone who doesn’t talk nearly as much smack as they do.

Competitive players know this … and you can see it all over the place in WvW chat/boards. The little Dogs that bark the loudest are usually the ones trying to hide something. With a better system of transparency, most of them would be exposed as hypocrites. Or at the very least have Lots of Token tallies but very low Social “+1” tallies when all they do is insult Puggers and blame everyone else when their crutches fail. And that would be a wonderful “Red flag” for the rest of us who don’t want to help people like that.

But more importantly, it gives Pug leaders the information they need to plan ahead and adjust the group’s strategy ahead of time. Will the “jerks” out there use it against newer players? Sure but they’ll be just as exposed to peer review where as they have a much bigger “bullying” advantage right now without it. And just b/c GW2 populace has a higher jerk ratio right now doesn’t mean that will always be the case. It only took about a year for the jerk ratio to dwindle quite a bit in Gw1.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Adding karma to dungeons is a start, and the loot changes is a continuation of that, which are both things we have brought up saying we are going to do. We’re working on it, and we’ll continue to be vocal about the work we’re doing in the future.

What about making them at least somewhat fun? You core design right now is annoying the player, you annoy with traps (example – Twilight Arbor mushrooms), you annoy with mobs that CC as much as players (loss of control in PvE is not cool) and you annoy with mandatory grave yard rushing because tanking is almost impossible in the game and you annoy with confusing and often buggy event design (example – Ascalonian Catacombs, event where you are rushed by waves of mobs and have to pull chains to trigger traps, ugggh).

About the only FUN fight I remember is story mode Ascalonian Catacombs where you throw boulders at a ranger ghost boss that shoots arrows at you from a pillar. That was the only time I had fun in any dungeon in GW2.

Lenny.9301:

add player inspection to GW2

No thanks. This lead to gear score fiasco in WoW, was a serious plague and drawback in otherwise excellent dungeon content.

Run with people you know, if you run with a random person seeing their gear will not tell you if they know how to play.

If dungeon says “must be level 35 to enter” expectation is that a random group of level 35s have a reasonable chance to succeed and a member of such group would get a level-appropriate upgrade at the end of it.

Dungeon gear inspection is a terrible concept. What we should want is for inexperienced players to be encouraged to play together with more experienced players, not for them to be alienated based purely on statistics. Everyone has to start learning a dungeon at some point. Do we want people to be kicked from groups before they have even tried the dungeon?

Lenny.9301:

2. To help parties and guilds gauge a player’s effectiveness in a dungeon, add player inspection to GW2. There is so much more that can and needs to be done towards this end, inspection is not asking for much. I want to know if our party is carrying someone in Cultural Tier 3 with a bad spec and level 65 trinkets, and I want to know when somebody is wearing magic find.

No. Leave that garbage out of GW2. If you want that, yup you got it, go back to Wow.
Hated that elitism bullcrap, everyone yelling minimum GS, Achievements, blah blah.

Agree, GS was a pathetic trashy option who destroyed the game, let’s leave it to the fail of WoW

my god… that whole GS fiasco was an absolute joke in WoW. it turned everyone into super elitist jerks. it was born there and it can die there too

Every other MMO in the world allows you to see gear. I don’t see what the advantage is of hiding it.

Here’s the problem… “Dungeons” as they are called here, have never been done for fun, in any MMO. Forced group content, elitist mentality, end game content that most players won’t ever do, etc. I personally hope it is left out of GW2 forever.

For the most part, this type of content isn’t fun at all, and when people complain that they are “unrewarding” what they’re really saying is… “This content isn’t fun, so if you don’t bribe people to do it, they won’t”….

So please, don’t fall for the trap of making these things over rewarding so that people feel forced to do them. Making them part of the monthly is bad enough.

Try to make them easier to get into, easier to find a group. Try to make them more fun if you can. But please do not cave in to those who only want better rewards for content that a large number of players do not enjoy.

Sorry, I only skimmed this thread, and what caught my eye was Angry Loner’s post on seeing gear.

I was always interested in this myself.

Has ANet ever stated some philosophical reason for not being able to view gear of other players? Maybe it’s because my mommy always advised me against talking to strangers, but I do prefer to just bring up a menu instead of asking a person what skin that is (which may or may not even get a response).

I would definitely push harder for it in suggestions if there’s been nothing said about it, as I do want the feature.

However I generally respect game designer’s philosophical choices (for instance the separation of sPvP and PvE in this game) and wouldn’t post about it if that was the case.

Is it really so hard to ask someone what they’re wearing or bringing to the party? Inspecting others is akin to grabbing someone by the jacket and looking for designer tags. It’s elitist, insulting, and an invasion of privacy, and serves no purpose other than to give the person inspecting fuel to belittle anyone in sub-exotic gear.

Given the stat combinations, and relative availability of the various fine crafting components, someone might still be working on their equipment, and have to settle for “good enough” until they can find or make what they consider ideal. Also, who’s to say that your ideal of what stats for which profession in a role is the same as everyone else’s, or even the best? As a mesmer, I’ve found some odd setups that work wonders where a traditional setup would be rather lackluster.

If I had a really awesome weapon that no one had ever seen before, I’d prefer not to have it broadcast by some random idiot that didn’t even have the courtesy of asking first. Maybe I’d like to keep it to myself what it is, and shouldn’t that be MY choice?