Guild Wars 2

I have had a lot of fun on guild wars 2, the pvp is unique and new compared to other MMOs, the classes are all fun with flexible specs and setups, but then there are the dungeons….

I normally am the type of gamer that enjoys hard mode dungeons and instances, I like the little extra punishment, the learning experience and the feeling of getting the whole machine working together. My experiance from this game really feels like everything is almost in an alpha level of quality in the dungeon department. Fights are really not tuned at all with hp to the point of being grindy, HoTW anyone? Then you have instances like AC.

AC is an example of where ArenaNet totally dropped the ball. This dungeon is designed for new players to get a feel for GW2 and how working with a party to stack disables should work. They unforgettably do nothing to reinforce this at all. The only challenge from story mode is throwing rocks at the bosses to split them up or stun them. I will admit that the AC story now is much better (complete able with pug) than the release AC. But why would you send new player a message to come back and do explorable mode after doing the story? I have been trying to do explorable mode on my alt and every party just falls apart. It’s kinda funny though cause the response is usually this instance was just balanced by monkeys and no one really gets mad at each other they just agree to never do it again.

For AC and the starting dungeons, in my opinion, the story mode is already way too challenging for the FIRST instance of the game. With repeated runs granting less XP I don’t understand why they have such a gated difficulty. Then you have explorable mode which does not need to be anywhere near as hard as it is either.

With a lower difficulty and more obvious mechanics players will enjoy instances and gain a better understanding of how to work as a group in them. For instance the first boss on explorable AC does a grip that knocks ppl down then goes into a whirl wind. Why did they not just make this boss grip, then allow players to dodge out of the whirl wind. Keep in mind this is a level 35 instance, teaching players to dodge is one thing, but brutally punishing them is impractical.

ArenaNet will hopefully learn from their mistakes with this initial release and fix most of the content, they need to move fast though.

I don’t think explorable modes were ever meant to be pugged since the only thing you can get from them is cool looking gear with bragging rights.

Anyone can rise to the challenge if they want to, even casuals, the game isn’t going anywhere and the content won’t become trivial and pointless over time so they have until they pull the plug on servers to get better at the game and achieve whatever they wanted to achieve in game. Dungeon too difficult? Get better at the game, make some friends, communicate, the dungeon isn’t going anywhere and what you get from it isn’t becoming worthless any time.

Of course they were tested. Not even going to bother reading the post tbh. Just answering the question.

Who uploads a dungeon content and not even test it? If I was the developer of a dungeon. I would secretly play it before the launch date. Just because I want to, and because I just created a massive content on my computer that I’ve spent ages coding with a team. Someone tested it at some point and Im sure multiple times.

You are assuming.

When you look at how all over the place dungeon difficulty is, you have to wonder who tested it and how they tested it.

Not to mention a lot of encounters in dungeons are simply broken—as in not working. Ideally there are internal testers and then the patch goes to a beta test server where you can further test, but Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have a public test server. So it makes you wonder if they have an internal team for testing and if that’s enough.

Don’t get me wrong. Arena Net is an amazing company, and they released an amazingly polished game. But some of the issues that we’ve been having can be obviously spotted if they ran through it once, like some boss abilities not even working. Great companies are not immune to oversights.

The betas were weekend only deals so they had no way of testing the higher level content aka dungeons which was quite foolish of them to do because look at the dungeons now…