Guild Wars 2

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i second this. all you have to do in all honesty is get good at the game…..ur not good if other people r far better than u. either way jsut have fun and keep trying man. games arent suppose to be easy or they become too…blah

Rising Dusk.2408:

I would be happy to bring your entire guild and all of your friends in any combination of your choosing, with me being the fifth member, and I guarantee that you will not fail a single dungeon run of any dungeon in the game assuming you can and will listen to my advice.

Dungeon content may be harder than other content, but currently it is a breeze and, on the contrary to your point, there is no truly difficult content for people like me. I would be happy to show you if you don’t believe me or think I’m trolling you or something. Seriously, contact me.

Perhaps they are not hard, but most dungeons take +1h if not +2h. A dungeon can be hard and only take 30 minutes (once you learn the boss).

I run every dungeon in the game, bar high-level fractals (depends on what we roll), in 30 minutes or less. The only extra time required would be for me typing explanations for bosses if they need one. Like I said before, I’d be happy to show anyone who doesn’t believe it. This has nothing to do with my personal ego or whatever; I just want to convey the best way I can (by showing) that this game does not need to be made easier, players just need to be willing to listen, research, and learn.

shaktiboi.5194:

Money is too tight and the economy is too expensive. I’ve invested more than 1000 total hours in the game and have 5 level 80 characters. I’ve -never- had more than 20 gold in reserve at any one time. I have no hope whatsoever of ever attaining a legendary weapon for any one character. The costs are just way too far out of reach. Outfitting a single character in full exo gear is just stupid expensive and I’ve always resorted to grinding slowly for yellows, breaking them down with BL Salvage kits for ectos, and regularly scouring Orr and FG for ori and ancient wood. It’s slow and time consuming. Ultimately, it has made it -impossible- for me to experiment with different builds and gearing combinations. I’ve had to make a decision every time: will this character be focused on WvW or on dungeons? I couldn’t try the same class in both environments because I couldn’t acquire the two sets of gear necessary to do so.

After more than 1000 hours of playtime, you should have several millions of karma which is sufficient for severals sets of full exotic equipment. Also making money really isn’t hard, although you don’t really need it anyway for anything else but a legendary.

to OP:

Pretty much agree with you. Also, another thing that I reckon they should make note of is that this game almost is catered to play less and less or at least at more of a casual level (DR limitations, rewarded quite abit for simply doing dailies, dragon chest spawn limits etc)

Though, the only thing i’d say about Robert Hrouda is the fact that he correlates “difficulty” with “fun”, when fun is heavily subjective in relation to difficulty and higher difficulty does not always lead to more fun.

Yes, I was one of those people who scoffed when I read the patch notes “made the encounters more fun”

Where I think dungeons fail is when a strategy to get past halls/areas filled with trash mobs with champion level health/power is to run past them and hope for the best.

i think, some solo dungeons would introduce a fair amount of active players.

Nerfing Every class, but not adding anything back for compensation. (Could be different in a couple days.)

jaka.9635:

i think, some solo dungeons would introduce a fair amount of active players.

I agree, or even have scaling dungeons, which has been suggested before. For some reason which I don’t quite understand, people find that idea offensive.

All I want from Guild Wars 2 is a way to efficiently make gold.

I’ve actually found the dungeons easy none of them are really challenging other than giganticus but after the first time I fought him and learned his attacks he was a breeze. Dungeons aren’t difficult the mobs just have absurd amounts of health and most bosses can be beaten if you know how to dodge. I’m actually hoping they introduce challenging content and not trivial

Comment and Rebuttal

1. I agree that easy/hard mode would be a good thing. Both those who think dungeons are too easy and those who think they’re too hard should be catered to. Why? Dungeons make up a great deal of the what’s-there-to-do-at-endgame content. Giving more people more to do is never a bad thing in MMO’s.

That said, “blaming” Robert for the difficulty of dungeons is unfair. Programmers do not make fundamental design decisions alone. If management did not concur with dungeon direction, the dungeons would be different. Colin Johanson has said that he considers explorables “hard mode” and story “easy mode.” The problem with that is that explorables were designed to be repeatable, endgame content. Story mode was not. Once you’ve seen the story the game provides no incentives to return. So, there’s an “easy mode” that few are going to bother repeating.

2. I’ve put in ~1300 hours and also have 5 80’s. With the exception of a few jewelry pieces, they are all in exotics. I also am in the process of putting together a second armor set for my necro (soldier’s). I don’t know what the difference is between you and me, but I find it’s easier to get BiS gear in GW2 than in any other game I’ve played. And second builds? Getting a DPS set for my priest in WoW took months. In fact, getting the healing set took months, and by the time I had it all it was time for an upgrade.

3. There was a need for large-group content in GW2. Everything else in the game was doable in groups of 5 or less. I have no problem with that. However, the PR release prior to guild missions created unrealistic expectations, and this is not the first time they’ve put their feet in their virtual mouth. It also looks like this issue will be fixed soon.

shaktiboi.5194:

1. Your dungeon content has no “middle ground” difficulty level for less skilled players. Some of you will flame this post and say that the dungeon content is “too easy” even now, but I’ve got 20 people from my longtime casual guild who will beg to differ. A guild that did fine even on the middle tier of The Secret World (“elite” difficulty) and in other games struggled -greatly- with the overall difficulty of all GW2 dungeon content. Fractals were a bit better (easier) in the lower sub-10 difficulty levels, but the time investment to finish all three + jade maw to get any substantial reward is too heavy to accomodate the realities of gameplay windows for casual gamers. I’ll say it plainly and frankly: I know he means well, but Robert Hrouda should not be influencing or guiding your dungeon design in any way, because he does not understand the needs or capability of the typical “casual” gamer. Every one of my 20-member casual guild universally hates the standard dungeon design here: the stupid, senseless way they’re made difficult (and too much so), and the terrible “all or nothing” reward design. I’ve never heard good things from my large PvP guild either. Not -one- compliment for the dungeon design here out of the nearly 500 people I know who have played this game. Robert: Are you listening? Do better next time.

Look, some of the dungeons are hard, yes. But none of them are actually that difficult. Almost every single one of them simply requires you to run them a few times to learn them. Once you’ve learned them, they are easy. I just did path 1 and 2 of Citadel of Flame on my brand new 80 mesmer. She has all BLUES for gear. We ripped through the dungeon with no problem and I didn’t go into a downed state even once. Why? Because I know the dungeon.

Every dungeons seems ludicrously hard and maybe even impossible until you learn it. Once you do, you’ll wonder why others are having so much trouble.

2. Money is too tight and the economy is too expensive. I’ve invested more than 1000 total hours in the game and have 5 level 80 characters. I’ve -never- had more than 20 gold in reserve at any one time. I have no hope whatsoever of ever attaining a legendary weapon for any one character. The costs are just way too far out of reach. Outfitting a single character in full exo gear is just stupid expensive and I’ve always resorted to grinding slowly for yellows, breaking them down with BL Salvage kits for ectos, and regularly scouring Orr and FG for ori and ancient wood. It’s slow and time consuming. Ultimately, it has made it -impossible- for me to experiment with different builds and gearing combinations. I’ve had to make a decision every time: will this character be focused on WvW or on dungeons? I couldn’t try the same class in both environments because I couldn’t acquire the two sets of gear necessary to do so.

If you do dungeons, this problem is instantly fixed. You will make a couple gold just from clearing a couple paths of a dungeon.

3. Your “guild challenge” content completely excludes small casual guilds from the process. The unlock costs are incredibly and urealistically high for a smaller casual guild. After 6 months of spending our influence on very little (overall), we couldn’t even afford the very first unlock when you rolled that content out. That was the final nail in the coffin for my small guild. We didn’t enjoy your dungeon content as a group activity, and we were holding on only to see if the “guild challenge” content would keep us engaged. Nope: you left us out in the cold.

Can’t argue with this one. The guild missions are a joke. Not a single guild I have any desire to be a part of can field the amount of players to do them.

To the OP as far as dungeons go, I like them, it’s the particle effects and tight spots I could do without. If I could better tell, as I can in open world, when to “get out of dodge” and move for the bigger attacks then fine, but with the particle effects blocking a fair bit of the tells it becomes hard to determine when to dodge. Combine this with narrow corridors, bosses and trash being able to hide behind walls and other terrain, it becomes a nightmare and one shot kills become the norm on one error. I know adding a dodge indicator would never be included other than the red circles, but could we at least get a way to turn off ALL particle effects and have red circles appear every time a major get out of the way attack is about to happen.

For example with Kholer, if I cannot see the arm raised for his chain pull how the kitten am I to move out of the way?

edit: clarity

Sowin.5187:

jaka.9635:

i think, some solo dungeons would introduce a fair amount of active players.

I agree, or even have scaling dungeons, which has been suggested before. For some reason which I don’t quite understand, people find that idea offensive.

You know the Grenth event chain in Orr ? Try to do it solo. Then you’ll see the necessary changes to make it doable by a majority of players. Then you’ll realize that creating solo dungeons mode of currently existing dungeons would consist in more work than simply tweaking numbers.

In my humble opinion it is not that dungeons are too hard, it is the scaling of the dungeons that seems to be off. For the February monthly, 5 of us, all family members, ran a few of the dungeons, most for the first time. All were level 80 and all were equipped with exotic gear. We found the lower level dungeons much more difficult then the higher level ones. The experiance was such that none of us really care to do dungeon runs. I think the problem arises because the scaling of the dungeons for level 80’s takes into account that those level 80’s COULD be outfitted with ascended gear which makes things more difficult for those in exotic or rares. Scale it to that point and those in ascended complain the dungeons are too easy.

shaktiboi.5194:

Just some simple feedback to Anet; not looking to trollbait or debate folks who reply here. And FWIW, I’m a “fanboy” and think GW2 has been truly one of the best MMOs since the genre began. I’ve been playing them for that long and have played or beta-tested most of them. And I have 5 level 80 chars here in GW2 with three of them fully-tricked out in exotics or better. And I have participated heavily in all end game content, especially WvW. (Well, I never bothered with SPvP; not my thing.)

GW2 had the potential to keep me, my spouse, my longtime casual “family and friends” guild of 9 years, and my longer-time -very large and successful- hardcore PvP guild of 13 years still actively playing even now, past the 5-6 month mark where most of us have finally hit the saturation point. Even in the face of all the new 2013 MMOs that are about to come out (I’m beta testing no less than 3 different ones this weekend.)

But your endgame content frankly fails on three very simple accounts:

1. Your dungeon content has no “middle ground” difficulty level for less skilled players. Some of you will flame this post and say that the dungeon content is “too easy” even now, but I’ve got 20 people from my longtime casual guild who will beg to differ. A guild that did fine even on the middle tier of The Secret World (“elite” difficulty) and in other games struggled -greatly- with the overall difficulty of all GW2 dungeon content. Fractals were a bit better (easier) in the lower sub-10 difficulty levels, but the time investment to finish all three + jade maw to get any substantial reward is too heavy to accomodate the realities of gameplay windows for casual gamers. I’ll say it plainly and frankly: I know he means well, but Robert Hrouda should not be influencing or guiding your dungeon design in any way, because he does not understand the needs or capability of the typical “casual” gamer. Every one of my 20-member casual guild universally hates the standard dungeon design here: the stupid, senseless way they’re made difficult (and too much so), and the terrible “all or nothing” reward design. I’ve never heard good things from my large PvP guild either. Not -one- compliment for the dungeon design here out of the nearly 500 people I know who have played this game. Robert: Are you listening? Do better next time.

2. Money is too tight and the economy is too expensive. I’ve invested more than 1000 total hours in the game and have 5 level 80 characters. I’ve -never- had more than 20 gold in reserve at any one time. I have no hope whatsoever of ever attaining a legendary weapon for any one character. The costs are just way too far out of reach. Outfitting a single character in full exo gear is just stupid expensive and I’ve always resorted to grinding slowly for yellows, breaking them down with BL Salvage kits for ectos, and regularly scouring Orr and FG for ori and ancient wood. It’s slow and time consuming. Ultimately, it has made it -impossible- for me to experiment with different builds and gearing combinations. I’ve had to make a decision every time: will this character be focused on WvW or on dungeons? I couldn’t try the same class in both environments because I couldn’t acquire the two sets of gear necessary to do so.

3. Your “guild challenge” content completely excludes small casual guilds from the process. The unlock costs are incredibly and urealistically high for a smaller casual guild. After 6 months of spending our influence on very little (overall), we couldn’t even afford the very first unlock when you rolled that content out. That was the final nail in the coffin for my small guild. We didn’t enjoy your dungeon content as a group activity, and we were holding on only to see if the “guild challenge” content would keep us engaged. Nope: you left us out in the cold.

Anyway, I’m trying to keep this feedback relatively short. At this point you’ve lost my entire casual guild and my hardcore PvP guild. There are a few of us who still log in a few times a week to mess around and check whether the Daily that day will be fast and easy, but that’s about it. Most of us are already looking for the next game. I suppose you could say “hey, keeping you around for 5-6 months is pretty good for an MMO these days”. And that would be totally true. GW2 is a really strong game. The real point of this post is that if your end-game design were more casual-friendly in the three aspects listed above, you would have kept us engaged for much longer than that.

Dungeons are not very hard.. It’s all about placing your traits right and using the right skills. If you’re running a party with lots of boon support from everyone and a positive mind, then no task is too challenging in this game.

Chipster.6713:

Dungeons are not very hard.. It’s all about placing your traits right and using the right skills. If you’re running a party with lots of boon support from everyone and a positive mind, then no task is too challenging in this game.

Once again, what you’re saying is “Dungeons are easy once you’ve memorized what exactly to do in each run.” That may be fun for you, getting repeatedly killed until you’ve memorized what to do and when, but it’s aggressively unfun to a lot of us out there. I’d rather run across a champ in the open world, they’re much more fun to figure out solo and you don’t have an entire party that’s depending on you to not die or they’re down a fifth of their strength. Oh also you can res right away when you’re dead, so you can go right back to the battle, not stare at other people having fun while you lay there dead(or worse yet making someone stop having their fun to res you).

Different strokes for different folks. Like when people tried to convince me that memorizing the hardest level of Guitar Hero was fun…if that’s fun for you, go for it, but to me it’s just memorization and that’s just not fun in my opinion. Fortunately the rewards for doing dungeons are pretty lame so nobody’s forced to run them.

I’m with you OP. When i started my guild had 200 people ready on release, and 100 more to join. Out of those 300+ people, 20 are maybe active and playing today. Others just got bored, hacked, frustrated or just moved on.

I am glad to see they are taking steps to the right direction on certain places, but it just takes a very long time to implement solutions. What i want to know is why do we have 2 non boss champions surrounded by a dozen of silver mobs, blocking our progress? Solution? Not kill them – but go through them hoping you don’t die / skipping. All of the dungeons would be much more fun for everyone if you could just kill those mobs, get some loot, and move to the boss.

Unless you memorize exactly what to do in each dungeon on each path, you won’t complete it fast enough. Only this makes a difference between a 20-30 min dungeon run to a 2 hour run. Take for instance, AC path 3 with the graveling burrows. I was in a group that knew EXACTLY where they spawned, and that went smooth, and i was in a group that didn’t, and it was a complete nightmare.

I avoid dungeons when i can, but when i want the skins from them, i have to do them, which is ok. But i am not enjoying them one bit. As soon as i get the skin i want, i am out of there, unless i need tokens for another alt.

Agree 100% with 2 and 3 (there are other flaws that are driving people away, but I’ll stay in topic here).

Don’t fully agree with 1… most people are just WAY too accustomed to the trinity, so they can’t (and/or don’t want to) understand how this game works. I don’t think they’re hard, but they can be VERY annoying due to some stupidly obtuse mechanics.
Apart from that, I understand that not everyone has the same skill level, so I concede that another difficulty level (exactly like TSW… speaking of which, “elite” difficulty it’s very easy anyway) would be nice for a different audience.

rizzo.1079:

Chipster.6713:

Dungeons are not very hard.. It’s all about placing your traits right and using the right skills. If you’re running a party with lots of boon support from everyone and a positive mind, then no task is too challenging in this game.

Once again, what you’re saying is “Dungeons are easy once you’ve memorized what exactly to do in each run.” That may be fun for you, getting repeatedly killed until you’ve memorized what to do and when, but it’s aggressively unfun to a lot of us out there. I’d rather run across a champ in the open world, they’re much more fun to figure out solo and you don’t have an entire party that’s depending on you to not die or they’re down a fifth of their strength. Oh also you can res right away when you’re dead, so you can go right back to the battle, not stare at other people having fun while you lay there dead(or worse yet making someone stop having their fun to res you).

Different strokes for different folks. Like when people tried to convince me that memorizing the hardest level of Guitar Hero was fun…if that’s fun for you, go for it, but to me it’s just memorization and that’s just not fun in my opinion. Fortunately the rewards for doing dungeons are pretty lame so nobody’s forced to run them.

I’m with him. I detest speed runs. They quickly turn into a gold/hour metric. Sorry we won’t do that path because the other 2 have quicker short cuts. It’s no longer about the challenge or the story or the environment. It gets turned into a rail shooter between chest drops.

Another problem, cost of entry is high. Form a team and if you are the new guy who don’t know the proper “path”, want to watch the cut scenes, get that POI, you’ll get booted and have it broadcasted to all who are forming teams at the entrance not to team with you. I couldn’t do a dungeon until I joined an understanding guild and still sometimes they forget that I haven’t run this path already 100 times.

I love how this thread turned into people defending the shoddily designed dungeons, fractals, WvW mechanics, and class bugs rather than actually reading the OP.

The game is fundamentally broken unless you hardly ever play or play 24/7. There is no reason to casually play this game 2 hours a day at max level because you can’t accomplish anything noteworthy. The difficulty slides between laughably easy to stupid hard just going to the next heart/dungeon/ what have you depending on what monster you are fighting.

Basically this game has a hardcore legendary weapon grind for people with infinite free time, or enough content that Johnny playing twice a week will never finish or catch up. Meanwhile 90% of the rest of the players in the middle ground are screwed.

I think I have managed to actually put a dungeon group together twice, and we even almost finished one once!

Perhaps we see in this thread just how wide the variety of experiences is in this game facing the same content.

I myself have a much harder time “learning” (figuring out) dungeon mechanics than some people on this thread. My guild mates will tell you that there are encounter mechanics I just don’t see through the blur on my screen, and certainly not in 2 runs, even 2 successful runs.

But it also seems like there are people on this thread who have an even harder time “learning” mechanics than I do.

This, perhaps, is the key to the feedback we need to give ArenaNet: the dungeon/fractal encounter mechanics are not inclusive, because they are too easy for a segment of players, just right for another segment, and far too hard to learn for many players.

On another axis, we have the people who do the encounter to learn at one end, and who simply wait until they are trained by someone who knows it at the other. The latter group does not need learnable content, just a social structure that gives them a coach/trainer.

This is a wide range of customers…to be satisfied with content focused on just one point on each of those two axes.

I agree with everything you said, and so would most of my guild members. A lot of them are disappointed they cannot do things like dungeons because they are simply too hard. I would really like to see Anet lower the difficulty of current exp dungeons (to something along the lines of how hard fractals pre 10 are, it would be so much more fun!) and give the super players their hardcore/nightmare mode dungeons.

Completely agree with points one and three, and can see where you’re coming from on point two, although I still believe the difficulty of attaining gold isn’t all that huge.

Guild Missions are a disaster. Dungeons are not a disaster, but they could have been more forward thinking with them. They could have applied scaling to them as well, which would have allowed people to run them with reduced difficulty, but also for reduced rewards. But ANet wanted to be able to appeal to the raider types who absolutely thrive on being able to put themselves up on pedestals so they can turn their nose up at the heathen masses, without even tilting their heads. To some extend, ANet succeeded at this, but as it is with every raid ever created, once players learned the dance steps, their dungeons were put on farm mode.

Other players who might not be so quick with their fingers or aren’t looking for a tough run, don’t have many options. Grouping with superior players can easily result in a quick kick and grouping with other less-than-average players makes completing the dungeon unlikely.

But instead of implementing scaling to make sure that everyone has a shot at seeing all of the content, dungeons were tuned towards the upper levels of the skill scale. Which makes some folks quite happy (<psst> and I mean those raider arses again), because they want to be able to keep some people out of their exclusive little club.

And scaling instances is HARDLY a new concept. They’ve had that in DDO for ages, where you can select the level of difficulty you want to experience before jumping in. It’s simple stuff IF you want to make sure that all your players are getting the experience that suits them. If you don’t give a kitten and only care about the skilled people, you design for them alone.

Guild missions have been handled in largely the same way. They were designed to exclude large swathes of the player population, which makes those where aren’t left out, feel a little more special about themselves. Again, hooking it to a proper scaling mechanic would have prevented ALL of this garbage, but ANet has decided that some content should be exclusive to some players.

It’s very backward thinking and we should expect more from ANet, but I’ve been following this game for years (literally) and have finally come to realize that these devs aren’t the coolest kids in the class anymore. That’s personally why I’m not all that active anymore. What started off as a dream game has been ground down with bad decisions and inhibiting mechanics that just suck the life right out of it. I still enjoy the beauty of the world. In fact, I LOVE the world of Tyria. I just don’t enjoy playing in it very much anymore.

Sowin.5187:

jaka.9635:

i think, some solo dungeons would introduce a fair amount of active players.

I agree, or even have scaling dungeons, which has been suggested before. For some reason which I don’t quite understand, people find that idea offensive.

I was actually a bit shocked when I found out “story mode” didn’t scale. I’d taken it as a given – I mean why give it such a friendly name, if it’s still just aimed at the elitist wannabe hardcore crowd? Especially considering they made it non-optional for completion of the personal story.

Call me anti-social, but I just won’t tolerate LFG content.

Why active players are leaving the game:

- DR

- Lack of endgame content

Rising Dusk.2408:

I run every dungeon in the game, bar high-level fractals (depends on what we roll), in 30 minutes or less. The only extra time required would be for me typing explanations for bosses if they need one. Like I said before, I’d be happy to show anyone who doesn’t believe it. This has nothing to do with my personal ego or whatever; I just want to convey the best way I can (by showing) that this game does not need to be made easier, players just need to be willing to listen, research, and learn.

I’m not saying it’s very difficult to learn. It can be done, especially with a group that’s used to working together.

What I am saying is that it’s either boring (one or two mechanics that are easily dealt with) or frustrating (insanely large health pool that makes the fight take 10 minutes more than it should – you just have to be repetitive with your timed dodges or whatever for 10 minutes).

Neither of those is fun. Merely learning the mechanics and then being able to finish is very, very cookie-cutter (cough WoW cough).

Personally, I want to see a bit more intelligence in dungeon bosses, not just a couple mechanics added to a giant health pool. Yawn.

Edit: on a side note, I’m noticing that GW2 is dropping like a bomb on Xfire and Google.

Wake up, ArenaNet. People have been trying to tell you stuff for a very, very long time.

While I don’t think dungeons are “Too hard” I certainly don’t have a problem with more variety in difficulty between what’s available, adding a tier of difficulty below explorable with some reward (but maybe less than exp mode) and so on.

JaironKalach.4938:

Started reading this with my crash-helmet on, expecting another one of “those” posts. Instead, ended up with +1. I’m still enjoying the game, and expect to for a long while, but… all of your points resonate to some extent. I do wish that you hadn’t, even calmly, trashed Robert Hrouda. In the end, it makes it personal and detracts from the thrust of your point, which I believe is:

Your dungeon content has no “middle ground” difficulty level for less skilled players.

Your point was made eloquently and bringing him in didn’t add anything to it.

Yeah it did, based on the forum posts Robert Hrouda is the problem with the dungeon design because he has little idea of balance.

I think I can safely say that MMO content is not meant for you and your guild mates.

1. Dungeon content is EASY compared to any other MMO I have played. Fractals is finished on average 45 minutes including jade maw in which I get on average 3-4 rares a run. On the contrary, if they actually made these dungeons even easier, I would probably take it as a joke. In all honesty, they are already borderline way too easy.

2. Gold in this game is quite easily obtained. I am positive you are not using the TP if you cannot amass 20 gold. I can do 20 gold in 2 days if I actually tried (without farming the entire day with no sleep).

3. They are aware of the smaller guilds problem they induced last patch. That is why the next patch in the coming few days is going to introduce training missions which help small guilds amass a lot of influence to climb this wall for guild missions.

morrolan.9608:

Yeah it did, based on the forum posts Robert Hrouda is the problem with the dungeon design because he has little idea of balance.

No, he’s not. Robert is basing dungeon design on decisions made by ANet management long ago. The problem is not Robert’s designs. He has done what management asked for, and to some extent what the dungeon community has asked for. If you want to sling blame, sling blame at ANet’s decision that dungeons are designed for coordinated teams of skilled players, not everyman.

Tinboy.7954:

I think I can safely say that MMO content is not meant for you and your guild mates.

1. Dungeon content is EASY compared to any other MMO I have played. Fractals is finished on average 45 minutes including jade maw in which I get on average 3-4 rares a run. On the contrary, if they actually made these dungeons even easier, I would probably take it as a joke. In all honesty, they are already borderline way too easy.

2. Gold in this game is quite easily obtained. I am positive you are not using the TP if you cannot amass 20 gold. I can do 20 gold in 2 days if I actually tried (without farming the entire day with no sleep).

3. They are aware of the smaller guilds problem they induced last patch. That is why the next patch in the coming few days is going to introduce training missions which help small guilds amass a lot of influence to climb this wall for guild missions.

Your first point, about fractals being way too easy, is nonsense. It is an end game dungeon that scales up in difficulty. From you saying that you can easily complete a fractals run including the maw in an easy 45 minutes, tells me that you have not been past scale 10 yet, otherwise you can call you and your teammates the gods of gw2, or you simply get 3 quick and easy fractals every time. The difficulty grows as the scales go up higher, making this viable for both hardcore and casual players. Just stick with what difficulty suits you best. I myself have reached up to scale 41, and it’s becoming pretty painfull up there I can tell you, and I’m not really a casual player.

Your 2nd point, gold is indeed fairly easy to get a hold of. 10g on a day of casual playing is fairly easy to reach if you play actively indeed. However, 10g is nothing. This gets you 2 pieces of exotic armor, 1 superior divinity rune. I could go on. I agree to the OP that the gold gain in a casual style of gameplay is too slow to keep up with the skyrocketing economy.
You can ofcourse farm CoF1 all day every day and make an easy 50g a day, but that is not how this game is intended to work.
The main issue with making gold in this game in my oppinion is that everything that makes money, has several downsides.
- For example Fractals and other dungeons require 4 other players, and you basically rely on their availability (If you prefer running with friends/guildies only) and the capability of those players for 80%.
- World bosses only appear on set times, and you can only do them once a day anymore.
- World completion is a 1-time thing, this can’t be done for making good money forever.
- Guild Missions have a weekly limitation.
- Event farming in Cursed Shore is the absolute most boring grind in existence, and this is not how Arenanet wanted us to make money at all.
- Playing the T kitten omething not everyone can do, especially with the 15% tax its not very viable.
- WvWvW doesn’t make a fair ammount of money at all.
- SPvP doesn’t make any money at all (Besides the occasional Dye)

This could be solved by adding more soloable, instanced content, to let players play whenever they want, without having to wait for an event to pop up, without having to gather a couple extra players who you will then rely on for a good part, and just let people play and make money on their own. There are several ways in wich these issues could be dealt with.
An idea that pops up to me is a soloable variant to Fractals, exept with a more consistent flow of money rather than hoping for good drops.
Also WvWvW is on the list to get a complete redo on the rewards system, so I’m curious to see what that’s going to be like. Hope it will be worth doing for the money

For one thing, getting one shot while you requiring to hit the enemy 100 times is not a display of effective difficulty. It’s just annoying.

Tinboy.7954:

I think I can safely say that MMO content is not meant for you and your guild mates.

So you’re the arbiter of who content is “meant for”? Nice.

Sorry, but the only actual info about # of players I’ve ever heard said the # of active players has been rising or staying stable of late.

I have been playing online for many years, more years probably then many here have been alive and it has always been the same with regards to end game content/dungeons. A certain portion of the population will run these dungeons over and over again and post on how they did it in 15 minutes. The next group has to better that so they will finish in 10 minutes and then state on how “easy” that dugeon is to beat for players of their “skill level”.

So the game developer makes that dungeon more difficult but forgets about the majority of their population that does not run them over and over again. Yet it is not about skill level at all, it is all about knowledge. Take the JP in the Wv3 borderland for an example. The first time I did it it took me upwards of 2 hours. Now I can run both halves of the keys and get to the chest in under 10 minutes. Is that skill? Not in the least. I am no more skillful with the keyboard then I was a year ago, or 10 years ago. However I do have the knowledge of which path to take, where to jump from, where to jump to, etc.

So we have people who can speed run a dungeon in 10 minutes and claim it is all skill when skill does not factor in at all. It is just knowledge of where the mobs are, which ones you have to attack, which ones you can bypass and so forth. If that dungeon was randomized each and every time do you think any of these skillful people could run it in 10 minutes? I am willing to bet they would not for they would once again lack the knowledge required.

So the developers make the dungeons more difficult but those players that regularily run them will eventually learn the knowledge to be able to run them in 10 minutes again. They do not become more skillful, just more knowledgeable. That however leaves the casual players at a great disadvantage. They do not have the knowledge of which mobs to kill, which to skip, where to hide, where to jump and most do not have the luxury of time to gain that knowledge.

So where does it all end? With a small group of “elites” telling others that an mmo is not meant for them yet those same elites would cry foul if the dungeon was random each and every time forcing them to utilize skills versus knowledge.

Honestly, dungeons aren’t as hard or as easy as either sides are making them sound. Yes, you do need to learn them, so if an entire guild doesn’t know how, it wouldn’t hurt to bring in someone who knows what theiy’re doing for your first run.

But even if you have someone who knows what they are doing, there are still circumstances that can make a run take longer, no matter how experienced you or your party is. There are still circumstances where you will die, or maybe even wipe. Sure, as you become more familiar, the chances of that happening are a whole lot less, but it is still possible. Which is how it should be.

The guild I’m in, we are all pretty skilled. If we spam AC, by the fourth time, we rarely make mistakes. But if we do other dungeons other than AC for a few days and go back to AC, we might or might not wipe against Spider Queen the first 2 times, next time a few of us might die. Generally after that, we do fine.

TLDR; they are possible with practice, but even then dying and wiping is still possible. Making them a little easier wouldn’t hurt. Especially for PuG runs.

Reasons IMO:

1. Bad class imbalance. Balance of spvp and pve should b separate.

2. Condition damage is a useless stat in the state it’s in.

3. All content is a dps Zerg berserker gear only zergfest.

4. Boring combat system with supposedly bugged traits in some classes.

5. Wvw is totally pointless. You pay for repairs but are mostly getting a grey item toenail as loot or a few copper. The server that has the most players in the map always wins.

6. The dungeons are absolutely pointless and the bosses can 1 shot you and since the game uses a really bad combat system it makes the dungeons even more unfun. Sorry trinity is a much better system. Trinity is actually using a team of players where all members are important. Once you learned how to run past the trash in dungeons you could farm them and get tokens and almost always bad loot from them. Dungeon rewards are horrible.

7. No dungeon finder. Yes there is Lfg but it’s not ideal and every mmo should have the same features that other more successful game has on release.

8. The cash shop is horrible and there is nothing in it most players want. If the gems are what bring in the game’s revenue put the BEST and coolest cosmetic items in the shop. If players don’t like that then they should pay a sub. Sorry nothing in life is free.

9. The game’s rewards are horrible and make the replay of the content pointless. Why level an alt for no rewards (games combat system is bad so the cause it’s fun excuse doesn’t fix that for most players).

10. DR and the worst RNG. This game is basically a casino without slot machines or blackjack tables.

11. Until recently there was no reason to be in a guild and now the only reason is to do the guild missions and join a big guild. Anet offered nothing for small guilds. Main reason why my guild left the game.

12. The game community and forums are moderated very strictly but when many threads ask questions they mostly go unanswered.

13. Nerfs nerfs nerfs nerfs to loot and classes while buffing content.

14. Anet doesn’t use it’s own forum as the first place for news about the game.

15. End game is non existent and you can try to get a precursor for a legendary but the legendary requires gifts and those gifts require farming and grinding but they nerfed all the world drops so badly that by the time you might get something besides a porous bone you’ve been tagged by DR.

And the list goes on and on.

rizzo.1079:

Once again, what you’re saying is “Dungeons are easy once you’ve memorized what exactly to do in each run.” That may be fun for you, getting repeatedly killed until you’ve memorized what to do and when, but it’s aggressively unfun to a lot of us out there. I’d rather run across a champ in the open world, they’re much more fun to figure out solo and you don’t have an entire party that’s depending on you to not die or they’re down a fifth of their strength.

I really don’t understand your point.

Everything is a matter of how fast you can learn, with memorizing encounters being logical.

You can try to memorize every thing in the dungeon (through videos for example) and still fail because you lack the ability to dodge, because you don’t know what to do when problems arise, because you are too dependent on your team or because you don’t know how to use your profession.

When you are killing a champion by yourself in the open world, isn’t it sort of the same ? You don’t go head first. You observe the pattern and once you know them the real fight begins.
Dungeons are the same thing but a lot of players don’t bother with the learning part and jump head first.

And if a party fails because one person fails, they are in no position to completely blame that player.

-1…
While it is true that some dungeon paths are challenging, most of them are moderatily or even very easy. Like someone in this thread said before, probably about 95% of the people in-game can do all these easy paths without much effort, and appearantly your guild mates belong to the bottom 5%.
About money.. don’t expect to have alot of spare cash around when you level so many alts and want to give them all full exotic gear etc. Ofcourse having alot of alts is your choice, but expect there to be some consequences. For me, 10 to 20 gold a day by just playing the game, doing some world bosses and dungeons is very easy, and doesn’t even take that much time.
As for the guild missions, these were, like someone already said before, implemented to give large guilds something to do together. An activity meant for more than 5 people, like dungeons. (Check the last news btw, theyre implementing something for smaller guilds aswell, so that should solve part of your problem with it).
Afterall, some things take a bit of practice, which is how things should be. Think about it, if every dungeon would be so easy that you wouldn’t have to think about anything, varying from positioning to which skills you use, (which is already the case in some dungeon paths imo) wouldn’t that be very boring?

I think the real problem here is twofold:

1) ArenaNet have their idea of how people should play, and they punish other playstyles. So what winds up happening is this game isn’t for casuals, it isn’t for hardcores, it isn’t for farmers, it isn’t for raiders, it’s not really for anyone except those who like to poke around the world, generally at random, and have no particular goals.

2) ArenaNet have some brilliant ideas, but can’t execute anything properly. I haven’t seen any update since launch that didn’t seem poorly thought through, segregated the community, and upset large portions of the playerbase. They always seem to break something every time they fix something else, too.

These two things are what have driven away every person I know that has given up on GW2. Most of them sadly and reluctantly.

Chuo.4238:

I think the real problem here is twofold:

1) ArenaNet have their idea of how people should play, and they punish other playstyles. So what winds up happening is this game isn’t for casuals, it isn’t for hardcores, it isn’t for farmers, it isn’t for raiders, it’s not really for anyone except those who like to poke around the world, generally at random, and have no particular goals.

2) ArenaNet have some brilliant ideas, but can’t execute anything properly. I haven’t seen any update since launch that didn’t seem poorly thought through, segregated the community, and upset large portions of the playerbase. They always seem to break something every time they fix something else, too.

These two things are what have driven away every person I know that has given up on GW2. Most of them sadly and reluctantly.

The road to kitten is paved with good intentions.

Until they open a public test server along with a forum so that we, the players, can give our feedback it will remain so. Having in house testers albeit a good idea in practice, fails in execution simply for the reason of not biting the hand that feeds you. If, however these testers are not paid, then they must be pressured to see things get out the door as it were, and as such overlook things that many diverse players would not.

Either way they don’t see things the same way the players do apparently or the “one way to get ascended rings” fiasco would not have happened nor would of many others.

@Chuo – very good points. It’s much nicer on paper; implementation/integration is very tough.
I saw a post mentioning a Dungeon that was randomized: position, attacks, etc.
I think this is a good basis to start from but the AI is what is lacking.
Adding in a giant health pool or insta-kill attacks is how most MMO’s make up for a lack in AI.
There is a combat log and a boss could be programmed to access that log in order to vary it’s attacks. If everyone is damaging it via ranged attacks, it could use a counter and the players would have to switch to melee or a combination of both. They already have agro programmed in various ways, it’s not a stretch to think they couldn’t design at least the boss AI in a similar fashion. Force the players to think their way through not rush or dps it.
The loss of the trinity took away roles and was replaced with skills which are under-utilized.
Make bosses barely phased by normal damage unless it’s coupled with a particular condition damage. Have a boss that is particularly susceptible to ranger pets, to poison, to bleeding, to fire, confusion, minions, clones, engi kits, etc. Reward players for out-thinking the bosses.
If a group of zerker warriors want to beat that boss down for 30minutes they can. Yet if a necro, ranger, engi, goes up against the boss and its susceptible to just one of them; it takes 5minutes while the rest of the team is using ranged, melee, buffing, debuffing etc.

It’s easier to zerk/dps your way through than to come up with a strategy. It’s also allowable to zerk your way through and skip the trash.

A dungeon that takes over an hour to complete is not necessarily challenging or fun or even hard. It may just be a tedious bore-fest.
A 20minute dungeon that has you sweating and cursing and finally sighing in relief with your heart still racing<—-that’s a challenge.

Robert’s problem is that he doesn’t understand congruity. If the dungeons should all be very hard, then you need to get a good reward; 180 tokens for a full clear when you need over 2k to get armor and a couple weapons does not provide any incentive. It’s far easier to just farm money and craft them or buy crafted. If they should be hard, then let the player pick 1 item from the vendor after completing all 3 paths (not 1 path 3 times, all 3 paths) – for example, path 1 gives token A, 2 gives B, 3 gives C, and if you trade in ABC you get 1 item.

I am tremendously disappointed in Robert’s grasp of pve content and the players’ perspective; I would strongly prefer to see him replaced if this game wants to go further.

1. Dungeons are all easy once you learn their mechanics. I don’t want them furtherly dumbed down.
2. Money is actually quite plentiful, I get min 5-7g/day without doing much at all.
3. I have a side-guild with just 8 people and they managed to unlock it so whole point is void.
Plus they will add guild missions for super lazy super casuals next patch.

The problem is, they are focusing on the lower middle to lower class of players.. aka casuals & very casuals. Which honestly, these are the players what will find fun & enjoyment with just emotes, running around maps & doing dailies.. so why can’t there be a higher spectrum of game play? Casual players already have their area of play, what about the non-casuals whose attention goes beyond 5minutes attack a gate in wvw & running around attacking NPCs..

Where is the character progression after 80? Where is the depth? I wanna use a shield but I can’t cuz it just blows ;-( Nobody needs me for groups because anyone can replace you. Nobody ever says.. hey nice healing, or hey great tanking or… wow you did rly good.. There is no pat on the back, it’s just tunnel vision and no sense of responsibility, little to no teamwork. I have 2 options as guardian, half kitten dps with boons or half kitten support with terrible dps. Makes me sad :-\

I’m sorry, but I have to strongly disagree with your point about dungeon difficulty. Explorable dungeons were always designed to be the game’s challenging content. I would argue that they’re still too easy to fit that role.

If you don’t think dungeons are easy enough for you or your ‘casual gamer’ friends, or you think they take too much time, that’s fair enough, but don’t attempt to force your opinion on everyone else by inferring that the majority share your belief.

Also, there is another dungeon difficulty already. Story mode. The only issue is that there are no incentives to rerun story modes. As far as I’m concerned, the best solution to this would be to add a unique reward to story modes (a different type of token that can be turned in for fun consumables or something).

If you don’t like dungeons, don’t do them. There are plenty of overly-easy content types already. Most of the entire open world is extremely easy. Not all of the game’s content has to be accessible to that type of player. Attempting to make all content cater to that type of player only serves to alienate the other end of the spectrum.

I don’t care what you or your friends do/want to do, as long as it doesn’t do anything to infringe or intrude on what I personally enjoy in the game – overcoming challenges with friends. I don’t want dungeons to become ‘spending 30 minutes working towards a foregone conclusion of victory’ instead.

Anet insists on wanting to make content harder without actually making it feel rewarding. The hardest pve in the game for instance (high level fotm) gives you absolutely nothing for your efforts.

The only feasible ways of making gold are TP (which is not what the majority wants to do) and CoF1 which will most likely be made more difficult without a boost to rewards, as usual.

To enjoy this game, you’d have to have been there from the start, have geared characters and actually enjoy WvW. -Everything- else is complete kitten and is completely unsatisfying.

Lasur Arkinshade.4107:

I’m sorry, but I have to strongly disagree with your point about dungeon difficulty. Explorable dungeons were always designed to be the game’s challenging content. I would argue that they’re still too easy to fit that role.

If you don’t think dungeons are easy enough for you or your ‘casual gamer’ friends, or you think they take too much time, that’s fair enough, but don’t attempt to force your opinion on everyone else by inferring that the majority share your belief.

Also, there is another dungeon difficulty already. Story mode. The only issue is that there are no incentives to rerun story modes. As far as I’m concerned, the best solution to this would be to add a unique reward to story modes (a different type of token that can be turned in for fun consumables or something).

If you don’t like dungeons, don’t do them. There are plenty of overly-easy content types already. Most of the entire open world is extremely easy. Not all of the game’s content has to be accessible to that type of player. Attempting to make all content cater to that type of player only serves to alienate the other end of the spectrum.

I don’t care what you or your friends do/want to do, as long as it doesn’t do anything to infringe or intrude on what I personally enjoy in the game – overcoming challenges with friends. I don’t want dungeons to become ‘spending 30 minutes working towards a foregone conclusion of victory’ instead.

What they need to do is Story Mode > Explorable Mode > Explorable Hard Mode

Like AC.. a lv.35 dungeon that got ramped up way too much for the average low level gamer. It was fine the way it was before “update”. What they could have done was added hard mode to dungeons.
FoTM 1-9 is a waste, a false gated mode forcing you to run the dungeon 9 times before u get anything is such a bust, IMO.

Hard mode should be more challenging and offer skins & rewards equivalent, possible titles maybe. This way the other explorable mode dungeons could be kept a decent difficulty as challenge to more casual players and hard mode for the more experienced/challenge seeking players. Creating a 1-size fits all model of a game is terrible.

Btw all hard mode dungeons would be Lv.80 versions.