Guild Wars 2

This thought was triggered by a different thread about dungeons.

At the moment all of the dungeon content seems to be sitting there mostly unused and unloved. So why not add a solo mode to dungeons? Scale down the mobs and the rewards and let us wander round them however we want. That could be a thing and might go some way to appease some of the solo folks who feel a bit abandoned by HoT.

I’ve never been in any of the dungeons….

First off, I would totally do dungeons with you sometime! Secondly, most dungeons can actually be solo’d right now. It isn’t that hard as long as you know the mechanics of the bossfights and know how to skip trash. I can solo any dungeon that can be solo’d (Dungeons that don’t require 5 players to work) on my necromancer. It’s not because I am a good player, it’s because A. Reaper with Rise! is amazing in PvE and B. I know the dungeon and what to skip.

I understand what you mean though, it is really hard to solo if you’re a casual player or if you aren’t running a cheese build. And regardless of build, it takes a long time. The reward you get for soloing dungeons is just satisfaction right now.

The problem is that the dungeons would need to be reworked regarding solo difficulty. Some encounters are designed around a team of players. I’ve managed to play through some story mode dungeons solo but certain enemies can be harder than the final boss due to how they were designed. Namely bosses that spawn minions.

With some hindsight they should have designed them to be scaled depending on the number of players. Now it is just alot of work to retrofit something like that.

I can complete the first Fractal solo thanks to the Charr NPCs who divert the attention of the boss. So maybe they could make a Hero mode where for every missing player a premade NPC is created that helps out. That combined with the power creep of the new Elite Specializations, it might be easier to solo the dungeons.

Even though Dungeons are unpopular right now, it’s not too hard to find a suitable group on the LFG tool. The groups advertising story mode, especially asking not to skip cutscenes are newcomer friendly. The only problem is that some dungeons are more popular than others. Often you’ll find a group who after completing story mode will then go onto do exploration mode of the same dungeon. I’m from Australia so sometimes there isn’t the dungeon I want to play active, but that’s just nature of things. Sometimes you get lucky with the LFG tool.

Me and my fiance did 2 paths of COF, 2 paths of COE, the 3rd path of TA and several 1-10 fractals with just the 2 of us. We have both soled L1 fractal too. Obviously, some of the fractals require more than 2 people, not necessarily because of the difficulty, but because of progression issues like the pressure plate mechanism in L8, the same philosphy applies to certain paths of some dungeons.

Regular dungeons, without group progression issues as mentioned above though, soloing should be possible, if you’re on a strong character, but I don’t think the system currently allows solo for any of them. But, you can bring a buddy along enter together and have him leave to see if that works.

DoctorDing.5890:

This thought was triggered by a different thread about dungeons.

At the moment all of the dungeon content seems to be sitting there mostly unused and unloved. So why not add a solo mode to dungeons? Scale down the mobs and the rewards and let us wander round them however we want. That could be a thing and might go some way to appease some of the solo folks who feel a bit abandoned by HoT.

I’ve never been in any of the dungeons….

1. The dungeon content isn’t sitting unused; plenty of folks still run them.
2. Dungeons already have a solo mode (most of them anyhow); people already run them alone.

The only thing that changed in the last year (and longer) for dungeons: the coin reward was lowered by ~70 silver. That made it no longer the most profitable way to farm gold.

If the only issue was to get people to run them again, ANet could just increase the gold reward. If the issue is adding challenges to the game, then ANet has said it’s interested in expanding fractals (although, to date, there’s no evidence that they are actually doing this — we’ve changes to the reward mechanics, but no new fractals and nothing other than bug fixes for the existing paths).

I’ve never been a massive fan of the dungeon thing in any game but in GW2 it’s more a problem of time for me. I often have to pause or stop playing for a while so it’s rare for me to get more than about 30 or 40 minutes of uninterrupted play. It’s not very fair to impose that stuff on a group of players. But I’d be up for wandering around a dungeon on my own, exploring, killing a few mobs and pausing/quitting if necessary. NPC henchmen would work but that’s quite a bit of effort so I figured that just nerfing the mobs might be fairly simple, not that there seems to be a whole lot of spare resource hanging around at ANet Towers right now.

The other thing I wondered would whether the dungeons could be chopped up and “fractalized” in some way. I do three low-level fractals most days so I am not completely averse to pugging stuff but it has to be in small doses.

Anyhow, just offering the suggestion.

That would be wasted efforts…

If ANet ever intents on fixing the Dungeons ONCE AND FOR ALL for this game, without having to touch them ever then again anymore, as it seems that Dungeons are for ANet already a long time ago failed content that they have abandonded and plan on putting no single dime into it anymore to improve it – then the only stuff they need to do to fix this content for good is the following easy steps.

1) Remove the Dungeon PvP Reward Tracks with NO EXCEPTION.
Who wants to have Dungeon Rewards needs to have to play also Dungeons!!! Simple logic!
Thats the first thing that needs to happen to halfway revive Dungeons again to the point they were, before ANet basically 50% killed off the Dungeon Community, because it was from that point on a ton times easier to get what you need just through PVP Reward Tracks, than to actually play the Dungeons and get everything without having to set a single foot ever into a single dungeon!!

2) Completely Rework all the Dungeon Rewards.
The Rewards should all speak for themself to be so valuable, that you absolutely WANT to play the Dungeons on a certain basis, because they provide you with unique rewards, that must not be super valuable in regard of making money, when as it is Anet wants players to play Fractals for making Gold, because Fractals are harder than Dungeons on high Levels and require more preparation to survive them on high levels.
However, Dungeons need their very own good reason for why you want to keep on playign them.
The current rewards are pathetic and no reason at all to play them, because before of the changes was the gold income already the single most biggest reason to play Dungeons at all, because it was until the changes the only place in the whole game where you made on the fastest rate Gold to be at least somehow able to get fast enough Gold to be able to buy you the more valuable things from money greedy players that want to have stuff for multiple hundreds to multiple thousands of Gold just to say… The need for quick much Gold making would be alot lesser there, if anet woudl do more against some ridiculous high priced items on the TP!! Just saying …
When you even need to do multiple hundreds of times the current Fractals, just to be able to affort a single skin pof this game, then you know, that something isnt absolutely right with this game..but thats Fashion Wars 2 sadly … and personally id rather support the economy of this game by instantly removing a fix amount of gold from my account if I get therefore the skin I want, than to give that amount of money to another greedy player, which in a system, that makes only the rich players richer and the poor ones only poorer … however I get offtooic, back to Dungeon rewards.

Dungeon Rewards need to get significantly improved, newly categorized and need to provide unique things, that you can get only via playing Dungeons.
Thats enough – the clear three core pillars of how you ensure that players will play dungeons on a constant basis.

First, the new categories:

Basics: Stuff like Dungeon specific Precursor Items you need to either craft a Precursor or a valuable item with a special unique skin, Sigils, Runes, gemstones ect.
Recipes Dungeon unique Recipes for all kinds of Stuff, like new unique Stat Combos for Equipment to craft, Food, Potions, Guild Decor, Tonics and so on
Visuals Unique visual dungeon specific rewards like Finishing Moves, Gliders, Emotes, Gatherign Tools, Skill Skin Sets
Equipment 3 Dungeon Specific unique Equipment Sets for Weapons, Armors, Back Items, Aqua Breathers, one for each specific quality grade that is Exotic, Ascended & Legendary
Accessoires making Dungeons the unique only place, where you can get as rewards Legendary Accessoires!! So Rings, Earrings, Amulets.
This will be another guaranteed reason why people will want to keep on playing dungeons!!
Fun Stuff Here you find thigns like Miniatures, Toys and other things that are just for fun but unique to get only from the tokens of a specific dungeon.

Combine the rework of the Dungeon Reward System with the Mastery System!!
Add a Mastery, that will increase your Dungeon token income to decrease the Token Grind of this Game to the point, that getting a complete Exotic Equipment from playing Dungeosn will become as same as fast as like playing PvP currently

3rd and last step
Revert the changes to the sylvari dungeon, bring back its old 3rd path and make the Twilight Path stuff and instanced part you can access from OUTSIDE of the dungeon when talking there with Caithe. Why Anet destroyed a path of that dungeon just to have space for addign the Twilight path is absolutely unaccepptable… when it would have worked easily also this way without havign to remove one of the original pathes/content of the game, which maybe many players liked from all paths from the dungeon the most.

Then would be in my eyes Dungeons as content fixed and good again, without that Anet needed to change anythign at all on the poor designed path system self at all.
We get it that this part of the dungeon content most likely will never get any improvements at all, because Anet is way too much fixated and focused on other stuff liek Fractals and newly now Raids, but the very least they could do with thre April Patch or one to follow until the end of this year is to fix the dungeon system AT LEAST to the point, that they are attractive enough for all players again to be played at all!!!

Orpheal.8263:

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I appreciate all the typing but none of that is very relevant to my suggestion for a solo mode in dungeons. Perhaps copy it to a new suggestion thread?

I’m sorry, Orpheal, I started laughing starting at the bold part of your post. The same argument you have about dungeons is the same argument wvw people have regarding EOTM. you’re absolutely right though, too many shortcuts were taken in designing and reengineering parts of this game to re-enthuse older modes. The problem is, once said shortcuts were discovered, and that the rewards were better, the actual intended play modes/environments suffered drastically.

@ Doctor

If Anet ever intents to improve this Game with Solo Dungeons, then hopefuly only with completely new content. Solo Dungeons, that were from ground up designed to be that – Solo Dungeons and from a good Solo Dungeon I at least personally expect the kind of quality that we know from Console Games, like the Zelda Dungeons, or as a similar comparison, from the Darksiders Games that had a very good zelda-silmilar gameplay touch on them.

Solo Dungeons is for me new content, with that they could promote the next Expansion literally as them being part of their new features that the new expansion introduces, together with like 8 new Solo Dungeons or so to explore.

Id go then also to far to say, that with this step it would be best to rename the old Dungeons then into “Research Terrains” together with making their parts also explorable within the persistent game world and call then the new Solo Dungeons exlusively “Dungeons” as a fresh new start for them actually

I personally dont see anet evr putting into Dungeons any more efforts, in regard of changing anmd rebalancign them for some kind of extra new Solo Mode.
Thats where I say, that would be wasted efforts, when the ressources would be better spent into something that is actually “new”, like said, more like Zelda/Darksiders Style

So real complete new Solo Dungeons, that were from begin on designed for that, that no one has ever seen before and that are by gameplay and design also completely different from the current “dungeons”, full with interactive mechanics, riddles, traps, treasure chests to find, tools and challenging bosses and all the stuff you’d expect from a good designed entertaining fun dungeon of good old times

This idea appears on the forums every so often. Still a good one, and one I wish they would do.

Ardenwolfe.8590:

This idea appears on the forums every so often. Still a good one, and one I wish they would do.

Agreed.

For my preference, I’d love the difficulty to remain the same… I’m currently obsessed with trying to figure out how to solo the content. I’d just like the barriers removed that makes it impossible for only a single person to accomplish the goal… like AC Path 2 because it requires 2 people to work the guns.

~EW