Guild Wars 2

This will be a wall of text. Scroll down for a TL;DR

No, I did not come here to say that Guild Wars 2 needs raids.
Although I would not be directly opposed to them, I understand Anet’s reasons for keeping them out of the game and I believe that they will not go back on their word of saying that there would be no raids when they were first promoting the game. The idea of raids and the gear treadmill that comes with it goes directly against their basic design philosophy

I also understand why people want raids in this game. Complaints are generally as follows:
“There is not enough to do at endgame”
“Guild Wars 2 is casual. It lacks hard content”

Now, the thing is, although I disagree with people’s solutions to these arguments (namely, raiding), I completely agree with the problems people are trying to address by their promotion of the idea of introducing raiding to the game. It is true that there is not enough to do at endgame (this is for players who are looking for more than an “explore the world” experience when playing an MMORPG) , and Gw2 is definitely lacking in hard content.

Therefore, instead of addressing these problems by saying the game needs raids, I would like to propose another solution to the problem.

Introduce hard 5-10 man content to the game, in which bosses have more complicated mechanics and true understanding of the game is needed. Reward players with cosmetics only, but make these items hard to get (since beating the content will be hard in itself), so that they can truly be considered “trophies” for beating content that most mortals cannot beat. I believe that people will be motivated to do this content just for the prestige and the bragging rights.

No, there does not have to be a gear treadmill to address the issues of a lack of endgame content. There does not have to be raids. There does not have to be a grind. There just has to be some sort of hard content that players can strive to beat, not through the best stats on their gear, but by true understanding of the game, strategy, and teamwork. This does not at all go against Anet’s design philosophy, and in my opinion contributes to it by promoting more types of gamers to play their game.

Fractals were an attempt to implement the ideas I have stated, but don’t serve the purpose of pure hard content since they were made to include new players to the game and are not (even at high levels) hard enough to be a significant challenge to any competent player.

This game is severely lacking in challenge and competition, something that Guild Wars 2 needs to have longevity and keep its player base from going to other mmo’s. Although this game takes a slightly different approach to mmorpg’s the fact remains, it is still an mmorpg, and so it still needs those hardcore players and those who play the game for long periods of time (rather than trusting their success to a revolving door in which players leave and new ones come in) in order to survive in a market that is constantly becoming more competitive.

TL;DR: Guild wars 2 caters too much to the casual player. It lacks hard content. Raids, nor the grinding of gear that comes with it, is not the solution to this. Introduce extremely challenging 5-10 man dungeons in which players must use understanding of the game, teamwork, and strategy and the few players that complete this are rewarded with prestige items. This will give players something to strive for and will definitely help with the longevity of the game.

The game is great. But it has the potential to become something amazing.

There will never be content in GW2 that is “hard enough” for highly-skilled players. The nature of damage mitigation (i.e., you either evaded/blocked/reflected/etc. the damage or you didn’t) ensures this. Think about the math behind the game.

The other way to build difficulty is through pressure tactics — lots of smaller attacks that cannot be mitigated, lots of conditions that overwhelm the players’ ability to either heal through them or remove them. There’s some of this in dungeons. The thing is, the math still has to allow for the encounter to be beaten. Lot’s of people trivialized the extreme difficulty of hard mode in GW1 by overwhelming the math with 3-6 heroes kitted out to protect/heal. Nothing prevents this type of play in GW2, except it would be players, not AI.

There will only be new content that needs to be figured out. They were working towards more “interesting” boss mechanics, but imo that is the best you can hope for — and those encounters are only hard until figured out.

LOL hardly, what’s lacking is an enormous amount of casual gameplay, that’s what’s really lacking.

Saying hardcore is missing from a newly adjusted to hardcore game is redundant.

I would replace the word “Hard” with “Challenging”, we don’t want things difficult for the sake of difficulty, like monster that just hit harder or have insane HP, because that doesn’t make it anymore fun. Champions are hard, but not challenging, which makes them an unfun slog of a fight, and general waste of time.

My experience with endgame content is one of disappointment.
I love leveling it this game largely because it is so casual, and I don’t feel like I am grinding. I love putting my build together and seeing my character grow, building more and more towards and ultimate goal of perfecting my build.

I build so that whatever awaits me at endgame, I will be ready.
Then I get to level 80 (3 times so far), and that something I was building towards, that challenge I was expecting to use my awesome build against, never comes.

Outside of PvP and WvW, there is nothing that remotely challenges you in this game, besides jumping puzzles, and your build and all the time you took building goes to waste. It’s an incredible let down, and endgame, at least for me, falls flat on it’s face as a result.

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And the core reason for this, is AI and the way Arenanet design boss encounters.
For some unknown reason, Arenanet build their AI and encounters as if they did NOT have an action combat system, but rather a tab targeting system from the 2000’s.

They almost exclusively use gimmicks and tricks, rather then action and movement.
Bosses rarely move, and when they do, it’s as a simple chase towards a single character, mindlessly and without reason.
They are just not utilizing their engine or mechanics in the least bit.
Oddly enough, regular enemies are more interesting the most bosses, as sometimes they charge or dodge, or actually move in interesting ways. Go figure.

Take a page from other action combat games like Monster Hunter or Dark Souls, tie attacks and movements together so they are intrinsically the same thing. If a boss moves, it’s via and attack and vice versa.
However, stay away from ‘Chasing’ movement, it’s weird and unnaturally.
But rather have attacks/movement go in starts and stops.

Like charging towards a target, and weather it hits or not, it over shoots before putting on the breaks. This would force the players to readjust, change angle, and likely move in closer or otherwise gain optimal range once again.
If tuned correctly, this can make players also have to think about timing of their attacks as well, as to not get caught in an attack.

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It’s not like they don’t get this at all, the Karka’s roll for instance is a great example of how to do this right. It would have been nice if every attack it had worked like this, but it’s a start.
You want big, huge, well telegraphed attacks that cover a lot of area, the force player to think about where they stand and move.

And you don’t have to do all this all at once for every boss encounter.
Try a test first, make a boss that only uses movement based attacks, whether it be in a dungeon, fractal, or world boss, and see how you get on.
I would expect you will find a lot of players would love it as long as you do it half way competently.

Just DON’T USE GIMMICKS.
Remember: Attacks = Movement.

In GW1, there were elite missions like the Underworld that were awesome. Difficult content not because of insane damage or hp but attacks that targeted players’ fight styles as well as challenging the meta builds and enough variety to keep multiple runs being great fun. They had nice loot, cosmetic, but nice and valuable.
I would love to see something like this brought back. I like the dungeons we have but I miss the true teamwork required to do some of the elite missions we had in gw1 (beyond just know you role, dodge, learn gimmick, etc.)
And no, you don’t need raids or gear progression, that’s a cheap way out. Make it fun and full of shiny loot and you’ll make a lot of players happy.

No, hard content is need to get hard core players to keep playing. They may be willing to sacrifice a few of them in the short term as long as the less hard core keep coming in greater numbers than they are losing.

I think it might be better to ask for content where the challenge can be adjusted from casual/easy to hardcore. In CoH, many of the Task Forces/Strike Forces could be done with restrictions/limitations put on the team. If you pulled them all off (some didn’t require it all in one run), then you got a “Master of (TF/SF)” badge.

I would have no problems with the dungeons and some new instanced missions being given adjustable difficulty, with titles given out to those that pull off the harder versions.

I agree. I miss the days when i was doing urgoz/the deep before the metas. It was challenging, long, fun and when you’ve finally completed it it felt good and most importantly reward was there. The only thing you want to do after you run is done is take a short break and go again and again and again. not a single dungeon in gw2 feels this way. Anet, add a mega dungeon with increased number of players (to 10 or 12) with significantly harder content (as it would be in fotm lev50+ but without agony of course) and ANYTHING in the game can drop there (all mats and droppable equipment) with a guaranteed random lev80 exotic at end chest (don’t bs your new dungeon with DR!!!). Of course such a dungeon would ‘kill’ all other dungeons because all others have no reward whatsoever but who cares? they’re all garbage without exceptions.

Yoh is very right, action combat needs action on both ends. Monster Hunter is the best feeling game I’ve played in a long time.

I’m getting goosebumps imagining the Shatterer acting like a Rathalos (including hunting them down accross the zone)

emikochan.8504:

Yoh is very right, action combat needs action on both ends. Monster Hunter is the best feeling game I’ve played in a long time.

I’m getting goosebumps imagining the Shatterer acting like a Rathalos (including hunting them down accross the zone)

calm down breh, the shatterer can stand still and use his attack that don’t hit anyone. That’s enough for anet. But i agree, it would be awesome if all of a sudden gw2 became more like MH or dark souls, omfg if only it was like dark souls……………………………………….

It isn’t even more hard content, they just need more content period. I really hope they add more competitive mini-games, and have a leaderboard for each one. Keg brawls and the crabby game are great, but they need more stuff like that!!

The thing is I know these developers understand mini-games, they make them as one-offs like the end-of-beta events and the holiday events/puzzle box… I really hope they add more to the game that will be permanent and feature a leaderboard, so that a competitive community arises around each one… That is what will distinguish this game more than anything else I feel…

oh and please add a casino!!! or some sort of card game… it doesn’t have to be all combat all the time..

Or they could just make fun content for everyone to enjoy.

Also having a gear stat grind will lead to stupidly overpowered tiers later on. A better approach would be to make all current gear more easily broken and permanently destroyed combined with anything higher than whites being super rare, making you actually thankful you got a blue or green item.

Alternatively, the more powerful the item tier – the faster it breaks.

Also just for hard content I guess they can add a final dungeon that could involve one of the elder dragons. Only catch is you die there your character is deleted. No downed. No revive. Not even dead. Deleted. That should satisfy those that want hard content.

Yea. Currently the hardest thing about this game is getting lucky at the mystic forge. Everything else is either a Zergfest or a kitefest.

Oh yea might as well say that it does get pretty hard getting the motivation to farm every day for level 80 rares with level 1 skins.

imho is more a balancing issue rather than content too easy….
Go play a fotm 40 with 5 rangers instead of guardians and warriors and come here telling me its too easy….

This came up within the first couple months of the game going live with some people who chimed in even insisting the game wouldn’t survive a year. The game doesn’t need to cater to hardcore players for longevity.

What it needs is to fix some of the very real problems plaguing the gameplay. Things like the ridiculous Diminishing Returns on farming, Cursed Shore becoming more broken with each attempt to reduce incentive for people to sit there and farm events, the fact that there’s little to no incentive to re-visit lower-level zones making some events in those zones nigh impossible, altering AC to be one of the most difficult dungeons a player can experience even though it’s supposed to be the FIRST one they experience, etc and etc.

What the game needs to ensure longevity rivaling the Entire Genre’s chief competition is to stop approaching the issue of balance through bass-ackwards ideas and implementation. It’s like watching ANET try to train a puppy by smacking it on the nose even though they trained its mother (GW1) with reward and attention association and saw much better outcomes for their effort than they’re seeing now.

I don’t mean to derail, but harder content will come with time (Fractals, for instance are harder than most dungeons even on their lowest tiers). I don’t know of an MMO of GW2’s scale that started with the kind of content you’re looking for without the base mechanics having been a mess in its early life.

TL;DR:

LordByron.8369:

imho is more a balancing issue rather than content too easy…

This.

IndigoSundown.5419:

There will never be content in GW2 that is “hard enough” for highly-skilled players. The nature of damage mitigation (i.e., you either evaded/blocked/reflected/etc. the damage or you didn’t) ensures this.

I agree with this.

There are, of course, many ways to increase the difficulty of content (other than just making enemies attacks stronger or more frequent), but when you add the caveat that increasing the difficulty should not result in some professions out-performing others, I think your options start falling away quickly.

emikochan.8504:

Yoh is very right, action combat needs action on both ends. Monster Hunter is the best feeling game I’ve played in a long time.

I’m getting goosebumps imagining the Shatterer acting like a Rathalos (including hunting them down accross the zone)

Kitten you for making me think about getting a Wii U , i bloody love MH

Warruz.8096:

emikochan.8504:

Yoh is very right, action combat needs action on both ends. Monster Hunter is the best feeling game I’ve played in a long time.

I’m getting goosebumps imagining the Shatterer acting like a Rathalos (including hunting them down accross the zone)

Kitten you for making me think about getting a Wii U , i bloody love MH

Fellow monster hunter fans

I just wish this game could give me the same epic feeling of fighting a Barioth, Tigerex, Narcarugua, Diablos!!! kitten i would come back to this game in a heartbeat goes back to playing MH3G xD

tigirius.9014:

LOL hardly, what’s lacking is an enormous amount of casual gameplay, that’s what’s really lacking.

Saying hardcore is missing from a newly adjusted to hardcore game is redundant.

Care to list all this hardcore content in this game? Because from where I am standing its 80% or more pure solo content with maybe 15% group content and 5% raid content.

And only the group content can even be considered hard because the few raid encounters like Shatterer just get zerged to oblivion.

The only thing that is challenging enough for skilled players, is playing against other skilled players. GW2 needs GvG.

Tosha Daydreamer.9251:

The only thing that is challenging enough for skilled players, is playing against other skilled players. GW2 needs GvG.

Agreed.

The content would be alot harder if players didn’t run by everything, use strats that befuddle the npcs, and such. You guys know what I am talking about. They are the strats that many people have to use to complete at all , or the speed runners use to farm gold. If they weren’t there, many players would not be able to complete a lot of the content and many players would complaing because the runs would take too long.

Someone already said it I think. Play the game straight up. Don’t do things like run into corners to avoid aoe. Don’t run backwards in HoW so you get pulled in the direction you want lol. You know the tricks. In a particular situation when you know the trick, don’t do that one.

No matter what content is put in, the devs will design workarounds so almost everyone can run almost everything. When you use those, you become almost everyone. It’s the choice people make or not.

I’m not saying people in this thread do this. If you don’t, then you know and people you play with know how well you play. I don’t see how the game can be programmed to know the difference though. There isn’t much in this game that supports bragging rights. In fact, just the opposite. Most achievements just take time and persistence and take little high level skill at all.

A hard mode like in gw1 would be awesome, where all zones got scaled to lvl 80, and you had to recomplete the hearts and skill challenges/vistas all over

Taerik.3405:

A hard mode like in gw1 would be awesome, where all zones got scaled to lvl 80, and you had to recomplete the hearts and skill challenges/vistas all over

Hard mode in the open world won’t ever exist in this game. It divides the playerbase too much. But in dungeons it’s certainly possible.

Vayne.8563:

Taerik.3405:

A hard mode like in gw1 would be awesome, where all zones got scaled to lvl 80, and you had to recomplete the hearts and skill challenges/vistas all over

Hard mode in the open world won’t ever exist in this game. It divides the playerbase too much. But in dungeons it’s certainly possible.

Hard content is not meant for casuals, its expected to divide the playerbase

Taerik.3405:

Vayne.8563:

Taerik.3405:

A hard mode like in gw1 would be awesome, where all zones got scaled to lvl 80, and you had to recomplete the hearts and skill challenges/vistas all over

Hard mode in the open world won’t ever exist in this game. It divides the playerbase too much. But in dungeons it’s certainly possible.

Hard content is not meant for casuals, its expected to divide the playerbase

This is what would happen if ANet released new open world content that was specifically designed for the portion of the players that wants hard content:

ANet
“Hey players, here’s some new content! It’s really hard, just like you wanted!”

Players who want hard content, probably a large fraction of players
“Yay! This is the best!”

Players who don’t want harder content, also probably a large fraction of players
“Did you seriously just spend a ton of resources and development on content that caters to about half of your players and ignore the rest? WhineFestRagequitX9000

Though, I have to agree with Vayne, probably this would be best for dungeons. Design a couple of new dungeons and include a hard mode and everyone (read: all PvE’ers) is happy.

As someone who was a hardcore raider(tank and heals primarily) in WoW for Vanilla + BC + WotLK and for about a year in Rift, I will say this: I don’t consider raids “hard content” at all. Besides the random games of simon says that get tossed into there, raids are usually 90% of the group just watching tv while spamming their rotation, and 10% doing the same thing they do in 5 man instances. The only “hard” spot is the raid leader, who is basically trying to herd cats.

So the request for hard content and the request for raids are 2 separate things entirely.

That said, I do want more hard content. Hard modes for the dungeons would be fun, as well as instances areas that can be made overly difficult just for the fun of it. No extra rewards for doing it, IMO, besides achievies.. Just for the challenge.

There is some hard content in dungeons, sadly everyone just runs by them to get to the chest. They are explorable but sadly nobody ever explores them. You can only get so much challenge from PvE due to predictable attack patterns. Just increasing the HP and attack power of mobs will just make it tedious and boring. Like someone said above, if you really want challenge, play other people since they tend to be a little unpredictable maybe these new Arenas will be the answer. GvG would also be nice.

I for one think that the difficulty GW2 is just about right. Some stuff could be made a little harder but I’m fine with the way it is. You could always try playing with cheaper gear, or without runes or trinkets or even traits. There are tons of ways you can make the game harder for yourself without affecting everyone else.

Julie Yann.5379:

There is some hard content in dungeons, sadly everyone just runs by them to get to the chest. They are explorable but sadly nobody ever explores them. You can only get so much challenge from PvE due to predictable attack patterns. Just increasing the HP and attack power of mobs will just make it tedious and boring. Like someone said above, if you really want challenge, play other people since they tend to be a little unpredictable maybe these new Arenas will be the answer. GvG would also be nice.

I for one think that the difficulty GW2 is just about right. Some stuff could be made a little harder but I’m fine with the way it is. You could always try playing with cheaper gear, or without runes or trinkets or even traits. There are tons of ways you can make the game harder for yourself without affecting everyone else.

I agree, the game does allow players to make content more difficult in a few ways. either PvP or WvW or by wearing lower level armor.

Facepunch.5710:

Taerik.3405:

Vayne.8563:

Taerik.3405:

A hard mode like in gw1 would be awesome, where all zones got scaled to lvl 80, and you had to recomplete the hearts and skill challenges/vistas all over

Hard mode in the open world won’t ever exist in this game. It divides the playerbase too much. But in dungeons it’s certainly possible.

Hard content is not meant for casuals, its expected to divide the playerbase

This is what would happen if ANet released new open world content that was specifically designed for the portion of the players that wants hard content:

ANet
“Hey players, here’s some new content! It’s really hard, just like you wanted!”

Players who want hard content, probably a large fraction of players
“Yay! This is the best!”

Players who don’t want harder content, also probably a large fraction of players
“Did you seriously just spend a ton of resources and development on content that caters to about half of your players and ignore the rest? WhineFestRagequitX9000

Though, I have to agree with Vayne, probably this would be best for dungeons. Design a couple of new dungeons and include a hard mode and everyone (read: all PvE’ers) is happy.

You left out: Players who want hard content — after figuring the new content out: This is too easy! We want hard content!

I love this post. I totally agree.

Decently Evil.9648:

TL;DR: Guild wars 2 caters too much to the casual player. It lacks hard content. Raids, nor the grinding of gear that comes with it, is not the solution to this. Introduce extremely challenging 5-10 man dungeons in which players must use understanding of the game, teamwork, and strategy and the few players that complete this are rewarded with prestige items. This will give players something to strive for and will definitely help with the longevity of the game.

STL;DR: No raids. Instead, mini-raids.

IndigoSundown.5419:

You left out: Players who want hard content — after figuring the new content out (in a day): This is too easy! We want hard content!

Fixed.

GW1 had Hard mode / Vanquishes / Elite Dungeons. I know we’ll never see a Hard Mode as the game isn’t instanced and the down-scaling prevents this. I hope we somehow see Elite Dungeons (FoW, UW, DoA, ToPK, etc) make their way into the game.

But just to be clear: raids =/= challenging, engaging content. GW1 did fine without them. I would support 8-10 player Elite Dungeons though assuming they provided enough challenge.

When people complete the “expansions worth of content” provided by the living story in a matter of hours, and temporary dungeons that we see for a week or two at a time, there needs to be changed.

I don’t think that even if they wanted to implement raids that they would turn out any different than world bosses. An AoE fest with a boss with 1 or two moves. I just can’t see the combat system ever allowing any kind of in-depth gameplay for a big group. Rarely get that out of the dungeons as it is.

I agree that there should be scaling difficulty in the game. Where that properly belongs is in dungeons. Anet stated that they were addressing the more skilled player in the design of the new Grenth and that is exactly not where to place hard mode content. Open world PvE should be designed around what you find in the open world: a wide diversity of players who are not playing from an interrupt list.

But, in instances, to the extent that they can add challenge without cheap mechanics I’d love to see some kind of difficulty scaling and preferably not agony related—there was really no need to resort to agony-gating.

I love to see elite zones in guild wars 2 like UW or FoW. Full of dynamic events, where if you miss one you lose and you are defeated. Also with important bosses with their respective rewards (unique appearance of weapons and armor).
And of course, zones for more than 5 players.

Guild Wars 1 style vanquishing wasnt trivial, not all players were able to achieve it despite the availability of the wiki, for me it was sufficiently ‘hard’ content, as you did it right or you died to every trash pull.

I dont need crazy risk like perma death
I dont need crazy gear treadmill rewards

I did enjoy all three of my legendary vanquishers, mesmer, ele, paragon. (ele was first, that was a B since enemies had so much armor lol, no one had quite figured out discord by then either)

Guild Wars 2 COULD achieve this also

1) Create hard mode toggle
2) This changes all non town instances to hard mode instances for you
3) All maps show unexplored, and must be rexplored and recompleted
4) All enemies are upscaled to level 80 and in some cases learned extra skills to attack you with (like in the lvl 1 areas)

You could feel free to try to solo what you could, and group what you cannot
This would also open the ENTIRE map to be endgame, and we wouldnt have the situations where everyone only wants to farm ORR, since any location can be farmed now.

Taerik.3405:

Guild Wars 2 COULD achieve this also

1) Create hard mode toggle
2) This changes all non town instances to hard mode instances for you
3) All maps show unexplored, and must be rexplored and recompleted
4) All enemies are upscaled to level 80 and in some cases learned extra skills to attack you with (like in the lvl 1 areas)

You could feel free to try to solo what you could, and group what you cannot
This would also open the ENTIRE map to be endgame, and we wouldnt have the situations where everyone only wants to farm ORR, since any location can be farmed now.

I was skeptical about applying that sort of thing to the entire game world (sans Towns), but now that someone’s worded it WELL I kind of like the idea. I’m still not sure if a toggle would be the best way to implement it, but so long as one can only change between the two in towns this wouldn’t be so bad. I’d be all over that like a Kitten on catnip.

Applying hard mode to the word and call it a day would be so stupid and boring end game if that’s what they’ll call it. Adding HM to current dungeon wouldn’t do much good because anet failed with all of them. Not a single dungeon out is fun. What they should do is start adding new dungeons (not mini dungeons that last crappy 15 minutes and are time limited) but real dungeons. If they’re lazy they could just rebuild urgoz/the deep/uw/fow and release one every three or four months. All of them would include HM and these would be the first gw2 zones that can be played in HM.

They should start by firing whoever made the current dragon fights.

A big culled zergball of lag vs a static object = fun times?

What they need is “interesting” content. I like the way they try and draw the server to certain areas for a few weeks at a time, but stuff that happens there can’t just be rinse and repeat. They need to matter. I’d like to see dynamic events that last hours (Maybe not continuous hours, they can be staggered in stages) and if they fail the whole server is punished, but if they succeed the server is rewarded.
They have the opportunity in this game to have actual all out wars, where say 200 on your server could invade armies. But if you lose, there is consequence, like Lion’s Arch falls and you can’t access it until you spend resource to rebuild it. But if you succeed you get massive rewards. And if you die, you’re out, can’t waypoint there anymore until the even is done. I want death to be meaningful.
Just huge scale craziness, bring it on.

Decently Evil.9648:

Introduce extremely challenging 5-10 man dungeons in which players must use understanding of the game, teamwork, and strategy and the few players that complete this are rewarded with prestige items.

Sounds like Fractals of the Mists to me.

I disagree (having only read the Tl;Dr, I got kittendropings to do man!)

All themepark content will be gobbled up in the fraction of the time it took to create.

I was hoping ANet actually wanted to be different and uhm, LEARN from this cardinal mistake in the MMO industry.
If you want true longevity you need to let the player create their own content.
Eve Online is the only current somewhat successful example of this I know of.

And yes Mr. Don´t-speedrun-UR-A-Breaking-The-Game.
THAT is player created content! Namely players deciding they can´t be “asked” to deal with boring, tedious, repetitive game mechanics.

HawkMeister.4758:

If you want true longevity you need to let the player create their own content.
Eve Online is the only current somewhat successful example of this I know of.

Everything else you said didn’t really make any sense to me, but for this I’m going to need some elaboration on what you mean. If Eve is the only current successful example of an MMO with “true longevity” then I… this is why I need elaboration. Eve is player-driven as all hell but I don’t see anything special about its level of success or longevity. (I also don’t enjoy the gameplay at all but that’s another matter entirely)

Nuka Cola.8520:

Applying hard mode to the word and call it a day would be so stupid and boring end game if that’s what they’ll call it. Adding HM to current dungeon wouldn’t do much good because anet failed with all of them. Not a single dungeon out is fun. What they should do is start adding new dungeons (not mini dungeons that last crappy 15 minutes and are time limited) but real dungeons. If they’re lazy they could just rebuild urgoz/the deep/uw/fow and release one every three or four months. All of them would include HM and these would be the first gw2 zones that can be played in HM.

Who said anything about end-game? The whole idea as it was proposed sounded more like a thing you could do if you wanted to, just like everything else the game currently has. It would probably even uplevel you if you wanted to do it prior to level 80. I can already see groups of people trying to do it naked at level 1 just cuz.

I kind of strongly disagree that the dungeons aren’t fun. I like them quite a bit. I liked AC more before the changes they made to it but the rest are still pretty great. I’m not a hardcore gamer by any means but I do appreciate being challenged and so far the dungeons in this game are offering more of that to me than other MMO offerings without resorting to the mechanics I loathe in those other MMOs (namely instant death and required-stat thresholds). Hardmodes would be great. It’d be kind of disappointing if only the hypothetical new dungeons that got released had those. It’d only serve to cause further imbalance in the content that players participate in.

The best bosses in this game are no doubt Shaman(volcanic fractal) and dredge (ice fractal). Lupi also deserves a special mention. Every other boss in this game is just too easy allowing us to face tank with no problems. Seriously anet, good job with Shaman and dredge because this is how you create challenging content, not by adding more hp.

Please shift the focus of dungeons to bosses and make trash mobs “trash”.

autoduck.2837:

The best bosses in this game are no doubt Shaman(volcanic fractal) and dredge (ice fractal). Lupi also deserves a special mention. Every other boss in this game is just too easy allowing us to face tank with no problems. Seriously anet, good job with Shaman and dredge because this is how you create challenging content, not by adding more hp.

Please shift the focus of dungeons to bosses and make trash mobs “trash”.

I’m 100% on board with them re-tuning bosses to be challenging without the HP sponge, but I rather like the difficulty of the trash as well.

No! The game is hard enough as it is already. Have you tried the new Southsun content, I get killed repeatedly and its not fun. I die in most if not all of the dungeons, stupid jumping puzzles and also in pvp all of the time! It is not fun and I am afraid that more posts like this that encourage harder content may drive me away further.

I don’t think that the game needs more hardcore content to keep the hardcore players playing.
This game needs more content to keep everyone playing.
The assumption that casual players treat games like revolving doors are just not true imo.
In my experience it is the casual crowd that does stick around because they play mostly for fun and are not so obsessed with gaining achievements, min maxing and generally beating the game.
Providing content across the board adds to longevity.
Living Story is a really cool concept that does attempt to do exactly this and it will certainly add to the longevity of GW2.

Imo what is needed is more variety in cosmetics, more DE’s, expanded story quests and generally more fun non combat things to do like the mini games, Player housing Guild housing etc

I don’t know why people have made this generalization that “casuals” do not want hard content. It makes no sense to make a game that is not challenging. ArenaNet needs to strike a balance between having content that is challenging enough for the general population and having content that is incredibly hard for the players who have the time to create builds and set up teams.

This would have been easily done if the core game design was different, but unfortunately the combat in this game is too simple and many classes will forever be imbalanced due to the fact that every class is viable for every situation.

A good example of making content that is both viable for “casual players” and “hardcore players” are world bosses in the world. Take a world boss that isn’t limited to one area, is very challenging and requires many players to take down. Players who want the challenge and the adventure, both casual and hardcore alike, will have a go at taking it down. Other players, who don’t care for dying or simply want to get something else accomplished before they get off, will instead leave that boss alone and go on about their business. This is the type of content Guild Wars 2 needs.

Unfortunately, not many of these bosses exist. Sure, world bosses spawn and it takes a dozen or two players to take them down, but there are no consequences or challenge; fights with these bosses consist of standing around, press a few buttons and after a few minutes they are sure to go down.

There simply is no challenge. You don’t need a specific group of people to take them down, because everyone does the same thing. You don’t need to meet any sort of threshold of players to take the boss down, because the boss scales to the amount of players in the area.

To make things worse, the loot in the game is simply not rewarding. For instance, all loot is based on vertical progression through rarity; the rarer the loot, the better it is. This means that much of the loot that drops will get sold to a vendor and will never be put to any use whatsoever.

I think that many game design issues need to be looked at to ensure that the game is replayable. Just my two cents, you don’t have to agree with me.