Guild Wars 2

“We’ll be doing the same with the Gw2 explorable dungeons, our own internal testing teams and alpha test groups learned to beat them using a combination of player skill, synchronous builds, strong use of cross-profession combos, use of cooking/consumable buffs (these make a huge difference!) and well formed player tactics. By comparison, after having months to play the game and the time our alpha was complete, some of our better dungeon groups felt the explorable dungeons were too easy for launch, we decided not to make them any harder given the expected player skill on launch.”

There’s absolutely no incentive to do these things. You can craft all the best items, and the skins on these Dungeon items don’t even look that good. What sense does it make to force players to craft all the best gear, THEN go to Dungeons so they can farm 1000s of tokens to buy gear that’s exactly the same as the gear they just crafted to do the Dungeons, just so they can then pay you for Fine Transmutation Stones to reskin their crafted gear?

Do you really expect people to put together hardcore dungeon groups, develop synergistic farming builds, farm consumables, etc to do Dungeons that offer no tangible rewards?

And to top it off, these dungeons aren’t even fun. The fights are not particularly well designed, the environments aren’t nearly as interesting to look at as in the outside world, mobs path weird, NPCs twitch out, and in general the only thing that makes them hard is the fact that healing skills are so terrible in this game.

Well put. Healing sukz b@lz big time.
I mean if you do not get hit anymore, yes, you get a bit of your HP back.
BUT, if you get hit, the amount of healing is just…read the first line

Hmm let me tell you why some people will do them. For fun. Yup thats right. My static and I would do these explore modes even if there were 0 reward. Why? because of the challenge. Unlike the WoW generation that has taken over the MMo industry, people used to do things without having to be bribed with loot.

The game isn’t broken. Your thinking is.

Very few people will do something that isn’t incentivized, especially if it isn’t particularly fun in the first place.

you maybe form supergroups and plan strats and consumables to run these snorefests ONCE for “fun” and thats about it

Hmm let me tell you why some people will do them. For fun. Yup thats right. My static and I would do these explore modes even if there were 0 reward. Why? because of the challenge. Unlike the WoW generation that has taken over the MMo industry, people used to do things without having to be bribed with loot.
The game isn’t broken. Your thinking is.

So your saying that killing mobs with massive health pools wich almost seem to be suited for a boss battle wave after wave just in a diffrent room of that dungeon is fun??
And to top it all of spending 40 min inside an explorable dungeon to only recieve mby around 30 to 50silver if you vendor your blue’s and green’s While you could go outside of the dungeon do DE and earn the same, cuz be honest if you just do it for FUN and dont earn any money you wont be playing long for only the FUN since you lost time and gold you could have earned doing something els and your broke becuz of the repair costs.

Dont get me wrong i have a Darksoul history and that game is hard and made me run content over and over and over again just to make some proggress and it was fun failing in that game becuz the REWARD that fuilled your continuity in to the game was equel to its difficulty wich made me keep playing

GW2 dungeons aren’t fun unless you are either pleasing a grinding addiction or enjoy staring at endless health bars. They offer zero mental challange or feature to keep you occupied while you endlessly kite the same generic mob time after time. If they made dungeons basically a loading bar that gave you loot every time it reached the end people would still enjoy it solely for the addiction value.

What was a genuinely fun challange was UW, FoW, DoA, Deep and Urgoz in GW1. They forced you to strategize. They were fluid, fast, deadly and didn’t offer second chances. It made the dungeon exciting and fun. ArenaNet had perfected the formula, all they had to add was some random factors. Instead they ruined instances altogether.

A dungeon filled with tanky trash that takes 2 minutes each to dispose and then ending it with an auto-attacking boss that has one basic skill is NOT fun, it’s just a mindless grind.

I just don’t see how they expect people to farm consumables for a dungeon (which only come from that dungeon) design a perfect group for that instance, then run it 90 times.

Where in there does the fun come in?

i agree to the point that i do them only for fun, couse nothing else left here,
but all the fun is still poisoned by the costs, you actually get easely into minus from all the repair costs than get something out of the run
the problem here is its just more frustrating than fun

I stopped playing WoW precisely because it “evolved” into a model based on feeding the players boring and grindy gameplay while “bribing” them with a chance of loot at the end.

The reason to play a game should never be what you get at the end; it should be the gameplay itself. The incentive would (should) be that the dungeons are fun.

Sadly, at this point, in GW2, most of them aren’t.

Too many 1-shot kills out of nowhere, too many creatures able to stunlock / fear / knockback players or somehow remove control of your character. Too much randomness (not helped by the headache-inducing camera that bounces around madly whenever you pass near some object).

And then the actual bosses tend to just stand there moaning and casting random AoE while you burn them down for far too long, which is also not much fun. In fact, nearly every fight in GW2 dungeons seems to go on for 30% beyond the boredom threshold.

Maybe it’s buggy code, maybe it was lack of playtesting, maybe it was just lack of imagination, but the dungeons in GW2 simply don’t live up to the open world or even to dungeons in games that were already around when GW2 started being developed.

I won’t “go back to WoW” (because it’s just depressing to see what a shell of its former self it has become – in fact, I stopped playing WoW long before GW2 came out), but it’s hard to think of a WoW dungeon that isn’t more fun than any of the ones in GW2.

- Al Zheimer

What Al Zheimer said. Took my first crack at Dungeons in this game and I have already had enough. A Billion hit points do not an encounter make. As I am a big PVE player, GW2 is pretty much dead for me. Panda time I guess…at least in that game the dungeon bosses had some strategies.

Al Zheimer.2305:

(not helped by the headache-inducing camera that bounces around madly whenever you pass near some object).

People actually play with camera shake enabled? Interesting.

I am starting to think that is the point…

Gems to gold…they want you to buy your armor, not grind dungeons. Every CoF speed run was a potential gem sale lost LOL.

At least in WoW, they don’t make dungeons harder, they just keep nerfing it until all players can have a try at farming it.

With the way things are, Anet will probably keep making dungeons harder and harder and less rewarding so people shift to PvP or end up buying their gems to trade for gold.

Deistik.7802:

People actually play with camera shake enabled? Interesting.

Who said anything about camera shake? I’m talking about the way the camera ping-pongs or gets stuck in furniture / doors / etc., especially with asura, norn and charr characters (but also with humans and sylvari, in some places).

Account.9832:

I stopped playing WoW precisely because it “evolved” into a model based on feeding the players boring and grindy gameplay while “bribing” them with a chance of loot at the end.

The reason to play a game should never be what you get at the end; it should be the gameplay itself. The incentive would (should) be that the dungeons are fun.

Sadly, at this point, in GW2, most of them aren’t.

Too many 1-shot kills out of nowhere, too many creatures able to stunlock / fear / knockback players or somehow remove control of your character. Too much randomness (not helped by the headache-inducing camera that bounces around madly whenever you pass near some object).

And then the actual bosses tend to just stand there moaning and casting random AoE while you burn them down for far too long, which is also not much fun. In fact, nearly every fight in GW2 dungeons seems to go on for 30% beyond the boredom threshold.

Maybe it’s buggy code, maybe it was lack of playtesting, maybe it was just lack of imagination, but the dungeons in GW2 simply don’t live up to the open world or even to dungeons in games that were already around when GW2 started being developed.

I won’t “go back to WoW” (because it’s just depressing to see what a shell of its former self it has become – in fact, I stopped playing WoW long before GW2 came out), but it’s hard to think of a WoW dungeon that isn’t more fun than any of the ones in GW2.

- Al Zheimer

This. this so, so much sums up how I feel about GW2’s dungeons and how I had hoped it would differ from WoW and how disappointed I am in it at the moment.

I don’t mind challenging content. BUT I don’t want to feel like I need a specific class, setup, gearset, consumables or boosters (a p2win pitfall in the making potentially) because GW2’s dev’s had teams overgeared in alpha testing doing just that and hammering dungeons….

Dude what kills it for me, is yeah you cant heal obviously. There are no ways to support one another, every healing skill is so weak as to be useless. I heal myself for like 4 k and then get wrecked for double that in one hit from a trash mob in CM.

What is the point? But really still its the one shotting, the spammy CC, getting knock downed in rapid succession. Not even beoing able to stand toe to toe at all with any enemy. I could not even use phantasms today in CM. They were killed so fast I really seriously gave up trying to even cast them. Then I became a neutered mesmer with half my DPS and survivability gone.

I dont know what internal testers that they have, but they sure do not know what fun gameplay looks like. I have played much much harder games that were much much more fun. Anet is gettting hard mixed up with annoying and unfun. When a game mechanics seems “unfair” you need to get rid of it. Not put more of it in the game to try and simulate “difficulty”.

You know what else is hard to do? Stab my eyes out with a fork….I don’t do that really…not because I am afraid of a challenge, but because it plain sucks to do. Your game, Anet, has become like stabbling a fork in my eye.

Way to go really.