Guild Wars 2

Then i am at a loss as to how people manage to do dungeons when the trash mobs glance your way and do 3/4 of your life bar in damage. I know people keep saying " dodge " but most of these attacks don’t have a red ring, have no or little animation time, give almost no reaction time, and trash a player instantly. I know some are saying " use buffs" and " use debuffs" but even with protection buff still losing half my life to attacks cant or give no time to react to.

So to all those can do dungeons peachy congrats… to other 75% of the player base… we are still struggling to understand wtf we are doing wrong. Even if you spec for vit/toughness not going to matter STILL going to get killed in 1-3 hits…and ability to avoid that damage is almost impossible for most of us. So kudos to those can do this kitten…but frankly…

for me it comes down to…

time invested
rewards
effort involved
group unity

and at the end of the day if its taking me longer then 1-2 hours to do a single dungeon, if effort put in is not worth the rewards at end of the dungeon. If i am coming out of it with less then i walked in with. If effort put forth is more frustraiting then " fun" then why should i do it?

Maybe issue is that it comes down to a preference, and enjoyability that varies between people. Some people LOVE difficulty and punching holes through a game with multible runs and tries. But i know that for myself i don’t have the time or the will to do that, and i certainly don’t find it " fun " to instantly die because a mob happend to aggro me.

So what i think we are seeing here is hardcore gamers vs everyone else. The majority of players are either struggling to do this content, or not seeing the point in doing it. I fall into the inbetween category. I don’t see the point, and i don’t feel rewards make it worth the time invested when you exit a dungeon with less cash then you entered with. Rewards require me to do same darn place over and over…and even story mode seems impossibly difficult. On top of it i just dont like instant kill mechanics…just doesnt feel right to me, having attacks just drop a player on every single attack or on most attacks… this just feels cheesey…

Maybe this game isnt for me… but personally as good as the game is i just hate way dungeons play right now.

Lokai.7850:

Then i am at a loss as to how people manage to do dungeons when <snip> ….
So to all those can do dungeons peachy congrats… to other 75% of the player base… we are still struggling to understand wtf we are doing wrong.

We had someone here explain why the dungeons are hard, but not too hard. He liked that. Then he continued to tell us about how his guild struggled on Heroic Ragnaros in Cataclysms. Pre-nerf. Heroic Ragnaros is hard. Pre-nerf it was really hard. Hard in the sense that only 37 guilds killed him in 25-man mode, and 21 guilds did it in 10-man mode. World wide.

That means out of 10 million WoW-players, only about 1000-1500 had beaten that fight. About 0.01% of the players. That’s the type of players who come here and tell us the dungeons are fine.

And the sad thing is, the developers of the dungeons think that’s OK.

I honestly think the priorities of patches are wrong. instead of nerfing, really should be fixing first, then everything else comes after.
Make the game not fun and unplayable (as it has been all day, ie TP down), isn’t the way to run a mmo.
This is how swtor failed, and keep going down this path the result will be the same.

Well said Lokai.7850 I have a lot of the same feelings…

The very first instance is revealed at 25 and the mobs inside are +30. At 30 we only have 10 Trait points. The assumption here is the instance, in story mode of course as the players going in are level 30, is designed for level 30 players and most likely new to Guild Wars 2 and most likely are speced for solo questing.

Unless of course my assumption is wrong, and game designer did not bother attuning content to the relevant player base doing that content.

In any case ANet has 2 choices:

1) Blizzard: Even though Blizzard believed firmly in the choice it made when the player base did not accept it -for example hybrid tax and more specifically Shadow Priest design- Blizzard made a blue post stating nothing is wrong with Shadow BUT since the community does not like the design they will change it AND THEY DID.

2) BioWare way: completely brush off anything and everything from the community and even go as far as saying the problem is in the low skilled players and see your player base shrink by the day until WoW players make fun of yet another fail MMO.

I think 95% of the people who say the dungeons are ‘a bit hard but doable’ are BSing to try and look big. Seriously, they are trying to say that the dungeons aren’t difficult? I die with 2 hits as a warrior, 2 hits!

In the Manor dungeon we got to a room where there was an ambush and there must have been 20 enemies!! Not low level, easy to kill ones but allkittenhard ones that individually kill you in a couple of hits!!

Either ppl have some magic armour and weapons or they are BSing us…

Well, they’re doable, but the cheap mechanics makes it un fun and bad.

I agree with the OP immensely. I play online games to enjoy the content with friends. We have found that the amount of frustration and lack of reward for doing dungeons now has made most of us unwilling to even do story modes. We honestly get more out of our time by doing other things in the game at the moment. This is a shame, because we really wanted to run dungeons.

I remember the video back in the day where one of the devs said something like, “You can all play the same class and still play together.”

Clearly that isn’t the case.

Dungeons suck right now… either you abuse some mechanic and farm it, or its not worth the effort
Also, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with glass-cannon builds. Not as an elementalist anyway. You know why? Pretty much our only way of survival is to “NEVER GET HIT”… if you get hit by the big attacks, even if it didn’t down you, you’re probably stacked with a ton of various dots anyway so you’re as good as dead. My friend and I came to this conclusion and just went all out DPS. It works perfectly fine for us for the storymodes/explorables we’ve done and has gotten us through dungeons without dying (though downed is a different matter). This however, does not in anyway mean its easy… or FUN to do.. why? Because we spend most of our time running around in circles dodging for like 5 minutes for every encounter… and this would be true ANYWAY even if we went vit/toughness… the dungeon mechanics are horrible with the plain ramped up for damage/HP and non-clearly telegraphed attacks, especially with smaller-sized enemies that get covered in particle effects. I don’t mind hard dungeons if there’s mechanics to the fights. Right now almost all the fights are just playing run-and-spank… you can call it cc, you can call it blinding/stunning whatever, but at the end of the day you’re still just doing the same thing over and over again. Also.. WHY THE HECK ARE TRASH MOBS HARDER THAN BOSSES?… geez, most of the time I fear the 3+ groups of silver trash mobs than bosses in the dungeons… at least with most bosses they have telegraphed attacks.. not random zerg aggro on random targets with aoes spamed every which way randomly the way trash mobs do… don’t even get me started on some of the chain knock downs you get stuck in sometimes if you dodge the wrong way or some enemies just happened to spawn right on top or behind you….

On your #1 point, I have to disagree. My group ran AC story last night, and almost every one of us was DPS. We had 3 glass-cannon Elementalists, me as hybrid damage/toughness Engie, and only one warrior and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t Vit/Tough spec’d.

We didn’t do GREAT, but we did manage to clear the dungeon with < 3 wipes. It’s certainly not impossible.

As a matter of fact, i went again in AC story with the fifth different group. Again in my leveling spec, again without any toughness/vitality equipment. We wiped two times, mostly because we had 2 guildies who were 29 and wanted to try the dungeon.

I think that the problem most people have with trashes (i honestly believe Bosses are way much easier than the trash groups) is they don’t focus fire the ranged casters (especially the necromancers and rangers are nasty) and AoE all the time.

Most of the tough pulls (the group of three trash) went as follow. I went first, they proceeded to focus fire me (they DO THAT), and i survive because i have multiple Aegis, Blind them AoE and renew Aegis at the first pull. Then, mayhem explodes, with the mobs deaggroing off me and going after the group. This is the crucial time, if we manage to kill one of them we’re safe, else we have to burn lots of defensive CD to merely stay alive (or stay downed!).

In a trash group, i don’t do damage, i always blind blind blind and Aegis Aegis Aegis. While that takes away a DPS, in the long run it is safer than going full-dps hoping for the best. We Combo Area Blindness all the time to reduce damage.

Mobs still two shot us, but rarely i have been hit two times in a row thanks to Aegis and Blindness and the other buffs. These kind of tactics will let you have an enjoyable time in dungeons.

And i have not finished Hard mode Cataclysm. No, i am not in the 0,01% of the WoW population that finished the content in one month.

I am in the part of the population that likes to play with friends, even if that means going to Yog HM with a 384 ilevel tank, three priest, and six 384 ilvl DPS.

So, don’t be so kittened up by the difficulty of the dungeon. When Cataclysm went up, our group honestly thought that the Instance were nigh-impossible to finish without dying… i laugh at those times… a dedicated group of players always manage to discover THEIR way to step over obstacles, so it will happen even here in GW2, given time to learn how things works.