Guild Wars 2

I played through a round of Fractals today, and a round of Twilight Arbor. And I swear, if I didn’t know better, I’d say they were designed by two entirely different teams of people.

Fractals is an example of dungeon design that I actually find fun and challenging in a good way. We’re expected not only to fight but also to think, and smart/efficient parties can get the job done with not too much difficulty. Some of the bosses are more easily killed (or outright can’t be killed) without some teamwork and strategy, which is a good thing. It means the dungeon is challenging, but it’s possible to avoid dying much (if at all, with good teams) and the dungeon is very rewarding in general.

TA (and all of the other major dungeons before Fractals) is a classic example of how dungeons should NOT be designed. Here we have dungeons that are loaded with cheap shots and OHKOs and various other design decisions that you can’t possibly pick up on the first run. You’re going to die and die a lot, and you’re not going to be rewarded very well for your time, either. There’s no thinking, there’s no strategy for the most part, it’s mostly “kill the baddies before they kill you, and hope they don’t OHKO you out of purely poor luck”.

And I really couldn’t fully grasp what I hated about dungeons until Fractals came along, but now I know. It’s the knowledge that my time and experience in the dungeon is not rewarded. I’ve run Fractals several times and know it pretty well, which has helped me do better in subsequent runs. But every time I run TA, I and my party die horrendously often to the exact same cheap-shot mechanics. It’s not “fun” or “challenging” to be barraged by 20 shots of 2k damage with only a split second’s time to react, it’s just a cheap shot.

Honestly, having seen what GOOD dungeon design in GW2 could look like, I feel as though the team should very seriously consider redesigning their existing dungeons from the ground up. They really aren’t well designed, and while they’re certainly tough, they’re tough in all the wrong ways for all the wrong reasons, and are rewarded much more poorly to boot.

Yes, yes, go ahead with the “maybe you just suck lol” posts, I know they’re coming. But rather than blindly defending the game’s old dungeons as “perfect” or whatnot, maybe we should take a good hard look at why they’re so under-rewarded and why people rather quickly stopped running them, even before Fractals came along. Because they’re a major selling point of the game, and yet they’re probably one of the worst designed aspects of the game right now, especially since players are expected to grind these awful things dozens of times to obtain dungeon armor or legendaries.

i agree with this, i’ve run TA, CoF, CoE, SE, AC, HoTW, and Arah although the latter i did very little of, but i love the exp modes, the thing is when fractal came along it’s just a superior dungeon in terms of mechanic and look, it put the rest to shame, i hope they do something to the old dungeon to make it fun like fractels, maybe add the scaling like fractals, lvl1 will be easy and as you go up it gets harder and harder, it’s the only way they can make the old dungeons more fun.

You’ll be glad to hear then that they discussed this in a recent interview and are currently reworking the dungeons.

I believe the reworked dungeons are coming with the January patch

Karizee.8076:

You’ll be glad to hear then that they discussed this in a recent interview and are currently reworking the dungeons.

I believe the reworked dungeons are coming with the January patch

Or February. But this is a good theory, I never thought about this. I remember reading that interview about the dungeon-remake. I also read Anet’s boast about how the next few patches are an Expansion’s worth, so there’s a chance this may mean the dungeon reworks.

Oops, my mistake. It was a blog, not an interview.

Here is the link:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/chris-whiteside-on-the-lost-shores-and-beyond/

Karizee.8076:

Oops, my mistake. It was a blog, not an interview.

Here is the link:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/chris-whiteside-on-the-lost-shores-and-beyond/

My concern with that post is that it’s incredibly vague.

And in the past, when they’ve been too vague about what they’re changing/fixing, they’ve ended up releasing stuff that either didn’t address the real problem or ended up making it worse.

I’m hoping they’re putting a great deal of thought into how they want to fix the dungeons, because this was one of their big selling points for the game originally, and it’s a shame that they’ve been such a disappointment up to now. Especially now that we’ve seen how good they COULD have been, if the team had put in the necessary time and effort before the game’s release. It’s really a shame that they’re having to spend so much time overhauling them a mere three months after the game’s release.

I do actually agree with a lot of this.

Comparing GW2’s dungeons to GW1’s story missions, I think ANet made a few mistakes with how they pitched their difficulty.

GW1 had two difficulty settings; I think they had specific names but let’s just call them “normal” and “hard”. The hard difficulty was quite difficult, requiring good coordinated teamplay to succeed (it was practically impossible with PUGs). However, the “normal” difficulty was fine with PUGs provided each individual player played pretty well.

Compare this with Twilight Arbor. I have no idea what they were thinking with some of those bosses in Story Mode. There are two problems with it.

Firstly, is it really believed you could do that dungeon with PUGs at the suggested initial level without anyone dying once? Seriously? Even on a second/third run? You don’t feel like an awesome fantasy hero running back from the checkpoint to “grind out” the enemies.

Secondly, and this is more of a “GW1 player” problem here, but the enemies are all human-sized, yet they have enormous health pools, meaning your party needs to wail on them for like 5 minutes to bring them down. I still think it looks ridiculous. It highlights one of the problems that GW2 has over GW1, that the enemies in GW1 “played by the same rules” as the players in terms of armour, levels etc (or at least they weren’t enormously different). Think about human bosses in GW1 like Galrath; he didn’t have a health pool 100x that of a player.

In my case, I think the story version of each dungeon should have been much easier, at least avoiding some of the bottlenecks, with the explorable version then being savagely difficult to reward those players who want that challenge.