Guild Wars 2

First, a little back story: I started playing at headstart, and am still loving the game. However, I made a mistake early on that I fear there is no way to recover from; I decided not to run dungeons right away, mostly because it was my understanding (gleaned from posts here and on Reddit) that dungeons were pretty buggy at the beginning, and that balance and difficulty adjustments were on the way.

Now that the initial hubbub has died down, I decided to try and do the story modes for all the dungeons. I wanted to do this not so much for rewards, but to get a little more insight into the world of Tyria. Many ANet employees (including the lovely & talented Ree Soesbee) poured their hearts and souls into giving us great lore and stories to explore, and I would like to experience as much of it as possible.

Which brings me to the problem at hand: Because you only get rewards from the first running of a story mode (a decision that I agree with, btw; story mode shouldn’t be for farming), it has become nearly impossible to scrounge together a group to do them. Check out gw2lfg.com, and select a random story mode if you don’t believe me. On the rare occasion that I have time to spam lfg over & over again for hours to scrape together a group, there has, without fail, been at least one person who has run the dungeon before, and who insists on skipping cutscenes, then running ahead and dying because some of us would actually like to experience the STORY. This person invariably either just quits the group, or starts demanding that people skip cutscenes because he “doesn’t have time”. I feel obligated to mention that he’s not the one who just spent 2-3 hours trying to get a group together, only to have it all fall apart.

Unfortunately, even if we do get the whizbang cross-server LFG tool that the players have been demanding, it will not solve this problem. As a matter of fact, it will likely only make it worse.

So what to do? One idea I’ve seen tossed around occasionally is the return of Henchmen. This idea gets poo-pooed pretty quickly most of the time, but most of the arguments I have seen against it would be assuaged by limiting their use to story modes, which aren’t really farmable.

Henchies would effectively allow behind-the-curve players, who either avoided dungeons as I did or simply didn’t start playing at launch (we’re bound to see a bump in new players after x-mas, for instance) to really get into the meat of the Destiny’s Edge storyline. Without the supporting story offered up in Storymodes, Logan, Caithe, Rytlock, Zojja, and Eir really just come across as petulant, whiny children (OK, maybe not Caithe. She seems like she’s got a good head on her.. uhm.. stem?) who can’t get along. Heck, without storymodes (or having read Edge of Destiny), it would be virtually impossible to determine why we should even care that they can’t get along.

As far as who the henchmen would be, the personal story provides NPC after NPC whose use seems to just, well, end. It’s especially sad for Charr characters who invest quite a bit of time in the early levels rebuilding their warband, only to basically abandon every one of them at level 30 when they choose an order. To my knowledge, characters of every race cobble together a ragtag bunch of adventurers in the first 30 levels, but it seems more poignant for Charr (Poor Dinky!). These NPC’s go and live in your home instance, but they do absolutely nothing other than serve as set dressing. Let’s dust them off and put them to use!

tl;dr: Storymodes could be made more-or-less soloable with the addition of henchmen, thereby eliminating the need to spam LFG to get people to run something with next to no rewards. This would open a large section of the game (and lore) to players who might otherwise be unable to spend the time to get a group together. The lore of this game, for me at least, is a reward in itself. It would be really nice to be able to experience the story behind the dungeons without having to resort to a titanic cat-herding exercise just to get started.

not a bad idea as im one of those people that has never done a dungeon. Not that i didn’t want to, I did try one when i hit 30. The story mode is the ‘easy’ mode. Well i tried it and it was so facemelting and rage inducing i walked out naked without finishing it. After that i just didn’t want to do them. I now have 3 lvl 80’s and when a guild mate wanted to do his lvl 30 story mode we got a party together and had the same experience. He said that he’ll not be doing a dungeon again along with the other members of the party.

So Anet wants people to play there dungeons? Well they failed.

Anet staff put there hearts and souls into the dungeons? Well after trying to do them I suspect that they have no souls.

My guild has a designated story-mode session on the calendar, with the goal of having a time and place where people can group up to see that content, that they otherwise might miss out on.

Check in your guild — I bet you’ll find like-minded people. With scarcely run things, you need to plan them to make them happen.

I really want dungeons to scale to the amount of people in the group. Sometimes I just want to accomplish something by myself, sometimes a duo approach is really nice, sometimes a group of people is fun.
I don’t like feeling forced into finding groups of people, this is the main thing I was excited about from gw1 to gw2, the idea that you’d be able to do everything by yourself, but could do it in a group if you wanted.
The general reaction to this is “don’t do dungeons then gtfo.” But I feel that is unfair. I would like to play through dungeons, but I would like to go at my own pace.
I must’ve spent so much time in gw1 getting entriely stressed out due to trying to get a group of people together to achieve something, someone wants to rush, someone is too slow, someone has never done it before, someone thinks they know everything, there’s that guy that calls every noobs and then leaves for no apparent reason other than he’s a jerk, that other person that repeatedly goes afk, the person with the cat that constantly sits on their keyboard, someone disconnects, someone else has connection issues, it’s your first attempt, you’ve done something wrong and everyone else is yelling at you…….. it goes on….

Also my lifestyle has changed now that I can’t spend hours looking for groups. I’m pretty sure many other players feel the same as I do.

Make dungeons scale to the number of players.

Thousand times yes… This same problem plagued LotRo for years and finally they decided to scale the dungeons for their version of story mode. The solution is preatty simple to be honest. Just give the player a special buff so he do the job of 5 players himself.

I would love to check the story mode of dungeons but I don’t want be pressed to hit SKIP TO END just because other people in the group don’t want to watch the cute scene…

Scaling to the number of players is also a good idea. It solves the aforementioned problems, and would likely require a lot less coding on ANet’s part than henchies would.

I’m good with any solution to the problem, as long as it’s addressed. (Though I would like to play with Dinky again)

I’ve had problems finding groups to run story mode. For the last 1 month or so. Ever since FOTM came up, its just gotten worse.
I used to get lucky on the weekends but now, not so lucky to get a group going. I’ve pretty much given up running dungeons on story mode. So far I’ve done CM, HoTW, AC, TA and now I’m stuck cause I can’t get to do CoF, CE and Arah in storymode.

I’m hoping for a cross server lfg tool. Cause it seems there are plenty of people who want to do these, but that they are just spread across servers and timezones.

That rush attitude is part of the reason I do not do dungeons.

The lore is fabulous, I just youtube it.

Yes ..even if its just the story mode sections as these are now becoming impossible to do even with a guild – no ones interested

Actually, I think this might just have something to do with the difficulty as well. I haven’t done many dungeons, but the ones I did always had a storymode which was more frustrating, difficult and time-consuming than the explorable mode (or at least the latter’s simplest path).
I like the difficulty and timeframe of explorable mode, but I’d love for storymode to be alittle easier, actually. If it wasn’t so frustrating and time-consuming (that is, more fun), maybe it would be easier to scrunge together a group…

And while I have a very nice guild which will help me do some storymode every once ein a while, it’s a small guild, so it is kinda difficult to get enough people to do a dungeon at all :/

I think that the dungeons are quite good and have personally not hit the rage barrier, even at lower levels when beating the story modes for the first time.

My experience is though that people seem to forget that you have to function as a team in order to make life more straight forward and instead run around with no plan or coordination. Its all the more difficult to emphasise given the lack of the complimentary holy-trinity but the various classes do still elude to a team playstyle.

Its an unfortunate side-effect of the majority of the meta game being solo-focused.

If you remember to aggro small groups, not attempt to sprint through, and give attention to what team-buffs and heals your classes have etc, then they really arent all that tough to get through during story mode. The hardest part (as rightly pointed out by many here) is getting a like-minded group to play through with…

Could not agree more with idea to make story mode dungeons possible to complete alone or with a group of npc’s. I’m tired of looking CoE team for 3-4 weeks already…

yes. either npcs for story mode option or lfg dungeon finder tool are NEEDED. i don’t like progressing too far past my level without doing the appropriate dungeon, so that way i keep up with the story. i’m kind of stuck at 50 now and stopped playing as much because i can’t find a group for TA. ugh. i feel like my progression is halted.

I’m surprised nobody has linked this yet https://www.gw2lfg.com/ although predominantly used for fractal groups at the moment there are people on there looking for story and explorable modes of other dungeons. Means you can draw a party from beyond your own server.

Lexy.3912:

I’m surprised nobody has linked this yet https://www.gw2lfg.com/ although predominantly used for fractal groups at the moment there are people on there looking for story and explorable modes of other dungeons. Means you can draw a party from beyond your own server.

That is because OP has already said that he/she has already used it, but could not find a group.

I bet if you added a consumable item as the reward at the end for people who already completed story mode where it increases the MF and token yield of doing the dungeon in explore mode path by say 50% (for up to 5 hours), people would probably jump in.

Wonderful, that usefull website is now giving me security warnings.

Wagnard.4027:

Thousand times yes… This same problem plagued LotRo for years and finally they decided to scale the dungeons for their version of story mode. The solution is preatty simple to be honest. Just give the player a special buff so he do the job of 5 players himself.

I would love to check the story mode of dungeons but I don’t want be pressed to hit SKIP TO END just because other people in the group don’t want to watch the cute scene…

You don’t know what you’re asking. Something like this kills the grouping, even if like the OP suggested only for story.
Once you implement it for story, people WILL ask for the same thing for explorer & if they cave in for this, they will most likely do it for that too.

Even if that doesn’t happen it destroys any hope of ever doing a story mode dungeon with 4-5 ever again simply because even the people that like doing it now won’t search for a group, because solo’ing is fast & easy anyways.

That might not seem bad for you, but really, it is. I’ve seen it happen in Lotro, gw, etc.
It basically kills of a very nice part of the community that won’t ever come back. In the end it does a lot more damage then good.

There are only a couple of instances, you don’t have to do story mode for all of them within a week, ask around in LA whenever you log in for 10 minutes or so, if you can’t find anyone, do something else & try another time. It won’t run off & you will find people for it eventually, especially once people get alts to run through them.

About that one player that would rush & demand you to rush through it, well, I’m sorry but you’re better off without him/her anyway, story or explorer if you’re a bit slower you won’t enjoy it with them & they won’t enjoy it with you. Ask friends to help, guildies, if they are a little bit nice they will help you, perhaps not the same day, but later that week perhaps, post on your fora, ask around in different maps, I don’t know, but you’ll get it done & have a lot of fun when you take your time for it.

(& if you really need a 5th, because someone just ditched you or it’s impossible to find one, you can send me a tell & I will try to help whenever I have the time. I enjoy the stories & dungeons, even without a huge reward. )

Really, I wish Anet will give a consolation prize. A reward of 1 black lion key for completing a story dungeon which is only redeemable 1 month or two after the character earned the last black lion key. Black Lion key is one possiblies for reward

Shinarika.5642:

Even if that doesn’t happen it destroys any hope of ever doing a story mode dungeon with 4-5 ever again simply because even the people that like doing it now won’t search for a group, because solo’ing is fast & easy anyways.

You are making the big assumption that there is something to save to start. There isn’t.

I’d like to be given the option to run story mode with less than a full group. It is very tedious trying to do story mode paths when the majority of PuGing players seem to have already done them or have no interest in them as long as they can tag onto others that have already done them.

With all the scaling this game has it boggles me why they didn’t scale dungeons for 2, 3, 4 people. Even the rewards could be scaled. So weird that I’m forced to group with strangers.

Goldberg, www.gw2lfg.com

It is virtually impossible to do story mode these days.

As poor as it is to need a third party site to fill this requirement (no offense to the gw2lfg people, it’s a good site) there is a nice alternate use for it. Stats! :P

Here’s what I’m seeing as of this posting:
NA Servers – 188 entries, 73 are non fractal, and of those only 10 are story mode runs
EU Servers – 47 entries, 13 are non fractal, and of those only 2 are story mode runs

Maybe we should keep posting the stats so that arenanet gets the idea that Story Mode needs to be made more rewarding than explorable – just limit it so that a character can only “lead” a party through story mode once.

That means a team of 5 can run storymode 5 times with each member swapping in as the lead cinematic person. After that they need to find someone else to lead them in.

I definitely agree with OP and am in exactly the same situation. I love the idea of story mode dungeons scaling to the number of players.

I made a thread about that in the suggestions subforum if anyone would like to reply or upvote to let Anet know we would like to see this implemented:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Please-scale-story-mode-dungeons/first#post939791