I hadn’t played GW2 in ages and decided to check what’s new and start a new character.
Besides finding that most of the bugs I reported over one year ago are still there (even some typos – how long can it take to fix that?) and that stealth is now seriously broken in PvE, I’ve now leveled my character high enough to do dungeons.
And it seems Arena Net went to the trouble of changing them (AC, at least), but somehow managed to make them even worse.
In AC story:
- The troll is now insanely imbalanced for level 30 players (1-shot kills, attacks that go through walls and ignore stealth, etc.).
- The “punchbag” bosses that just stood there (Kasha, Adelbern, etc.) still do just that (if anything, they seem to have been nerfed; you can now stand inside their AoE for ages). They really highlight the need for a /yawn emote.
- The boulders now magically disappear every time they hit someone (they were the only thing that made the punchbag bosses fun – you know, fun, that thing people play games for?)
- Ralena and Vassar no longer run to each other at 50% (the only part of the fight that required some awareness and tactics – now you just have to keep looking at the UI to see if you have confusion, and make sure someone has a bouncing attack to kill the little ghosts)
In AC explorable:
- Half the encounters are now doable simply by stacking in some corner and casting randomly at the ground (sometimes without even seeing the enemy, due to the way the camera still gets stuck in walls). Blind spam wins the day 9 times out of 10.
- The burrows in paths 1 and 3 are still DPS races, and having an elementalist with a frost bow still means instant win (while having five mesmers still means almost guaranteed fail). No wonder LFG is full of people asking for specific classes and pure DPS builds.
- The only thing that seems to have been made more interesting was the final boss in path 2 (ghost eater / patriarch), but the new mechanics effectively make it into a DPS race as well (because players tend to just charge the three traps before pulling, and restart if the boss doesn’t die before those run out of charge); a much better design would be to have just one trap and encourage players to alternate between damaging the boss and recharging the trap.
I won’t say it’s as bad as what Blizzard did to the Deadmines in Cataclysm (because the original Deadmines were a lot more fun than any GW2 dungeon), but it’s pretty depressing to come back one year later and find that things moved backwards. Maybe the other dungeons have been improved, but I have a feeling that won’t be the case.
In addition to that, players still get booted from dungeons if the first one to enter has to leave (or gets disconnected, or decides to be a jerk), players still get almost no rewards if they leave (or get disconnected, or kicked) before the chest pop-up at the end, and players who join just before that pop-up still get the full reward (even if they don’t participate in the dungeon at all – no wonder LFG is full of people basically selling dungeon tokens).
Even assuming their in-house testing was horrible and they hadn’t spotted any of these things before release, surely they must be aware of them by now. How can it take a year and a half to fix this?
It seems Arena Net spent all this time adding temporary content (which new and returning players can’t even see) and adding a new and incredibly grindy tier of gear (which no one wanted – most people who came to GW2 from other games left those games precisely because they were tired of “stat upgrade” grinds), instead of fixing bugs and design flaws. And when they finally decide to change a dungeon, they make it worse.
How can a company get its pre-release “manifestos” so right and then get the execution so wrong? Were the guys who left to form Undead Labs the ones who had that original (inspired and inspiring) vision? Also, how hard can it be to hire someone with a clue (i.e., imagination and an understanding of fun) about dungeon design?
(edited by Factotum.2093)