Guild Wars 2

hendo.1940:

Make fights harder and this is what will happen:

PUGs will find afk range safe spots.
Experienced groups will melee and do the fight properly.

Exactly. All this would do is make the content more difficult and time consuming for the average player, not enjoyable. I’m sure some of you remember when ‘Plz nerf TAFU’ was practically a meme on the forums.

Aza.2105:

My perspective is if they were to change AI, then they should increase the rewards from normal mobs and bosses to compensate for the change. If they implemented AI changes and left the rewards as they are now they no one would do them because the time vs the reward isn’t worth it.

And this is exactly why I oppose any changes. We are not likely to see any increase in rewards. Players have been complaining about sub-par and uninteresting loot long before the anti-zerk, skipping and stacking people started coming out of the woodwork.

Actually – it’s possible to improve the AI so that it’s more fun, interesting, and engaging to go against without actually increasing the difficulty.

Sartharina.3542:

Actually – it’s possible to improve the AI so that it’s more fun, interesting, and engaging to go against without actually increasing the difficulty.

Ye, just change AI = “bad” to AI = “good” in the code.

Anyways, enemies already have sufficient AI. They just don’t have sufficient skills. It doesn’t matter how smartly they use their skills if those skills do nothing.

For example I’m pretty sure if they lowered cooldowns of Subject Alpha’s skills and made him spam them randomly people would consider him more intelligent.

haviz.1340:

kokiman.2364:

Never said something about spawning endless waves of mobs.

Lots of mobs = more frequent attacks = less avoidable damage = zerkers licking flowers = right?

No make single mobs attack faster.

I just wanna remember everyone, that right after launch the dungeons were very hard, very hard. We were 5 hours in AC and had to end it.

People cried so hard about it, so they nerfed it. Now they are too easy, because what they couldnt do back then (which was mechanically outplay they bosses), is now a gap closed by the better gear. All this leads to people still being unable to use their dodge to actually dodge, or their stunbreaks to, the gods forbid, break stuns.

I remember the first Boss in TA, the worm. These aoe effects hes spilling all over the place, they made you about 5k damage if you steped on them, and you were poisoned as well. Now they are not that big of a deal. Back then you had to dodge them, or you were dead.

In AC the troll uses an AoE Attack that did a TON of damage and pulled people to him, where he did a ton of damage again. I think he still does that, but it doesnt wipe you anymore. Back than you had to dodge or reflect the projectile, otherwise you were dead.

Even then, people were unable to just use another set of skills.

Yes I think like that too. If mobs had better ai kinda like dueling players, zerker builds wouldn’t be the only option. Supporting builds would be needed.
Mobs are so easy to kill, I don’t mean their hp, you can just stack and dps them to their death. This is why I don’t do dungeons or pve in this game.

More mob mobility and skill use alone would do wonders, as would getting their attack speed/style on par with players.

Ropechef.6192:

kokiman.2364:

Make enemies hit more frequent but let them deal less damage, suddenly support becomes viable and mindless zerking is nerfed aswell.

so you want more dredeg fractals?

everything you all ask for already exists in game. and it is some of the most hated and dispised content by the majority of the player base.(…)

This pretty much sums it up, people don’t know what they want.

They complained freaking for ever for anet to give small teams of players something to do on WvW.
Anet gives them bloodlust, “What? No WXP? I’m outta here”.
Other than achievements barely anyone ever wants to do it, they much rather jump on the zerg train they say they hate so much and create countless treads about ways to prevent them.

kokiman.2364:

haviz.1340:

kokiman.2364:

Never said something about spawning endless waves of mobs.

Lots of mobs = more frequent attacks = less avoidable damage = zerkers licking flowers = right?

No make single mobs attack faster.

Number of enemies should be increased, and their HP reduced, also removing ALL IMMUNITY (smoke field shout distort the dredge’s smelling ability, so they would miss all attacks, EVEN if they are already BLIND by nature!!!)
Thus encouraging multiple smoke fields, reflects, and players with tanky gear can also deal relevant dmg. Maybe even retaliation would make sense in PvE.

We already use smoke fields and reflects, an we don’t need retaliation or tanky gear. This is just a case of people wanting THEIR gear to be desired in dungeons and want anet to make completely random changes in the vain hope of making their stats and builds wanted. The fact of the matter is, people keep asking for intelligent mobs with varied attacks. The closest you have to that are dredge, and almost nobody likes fighting them. Be careful what you wish for.

Larynx.2453:

In beta mobs would run out of AoE.

It was completely broken since the average player could exploit the mob pathing, but instead of fixing it ArenaNet just cut it completely.

Really IMO the issue with GW2 PvE is that the content is too easy. Most enemies are giant meatbags which one or two shot players (making Zerker so attractive) and have barely any mechanics. Most of the content can be soloed even.

Compare the most difficult content GW2 has to offer to something like heroic raiding in WoW. There’s a very specific demographic that ArenaNet refuses or is unable to appeal to, but it’s okay because most players want to spam 1 and complete the dungeon in 10 minutes.

and that’s exactly how it should be because most players that want to do heroic dungeon is WoW are doing heroic dungeons in WoW. Or other similar games.

GW2 has to cater to its own audience not a minority asking for wow 2.0.

The community wants rewards. If they wanted more challenge the forums would be bursting with " give us harder content " after harder content is released.

What do you see instead ? " nerf x it is too hard " or " y is not rewarding enough".

People want rewards not challenge.

Content that is challenge driven has no staying power.

Look at the new TA Aetherblade path – was it challenging? Yes – more than the average dungeon.

Did people play it? Yes for a few weeks after it was released.

Is there any reason to do it again if you’ve completed it and gotten all the achievement points? Absolutely not.

Look at what people actually play in dungeons : AC 1&3, Cof1, SE 1&3, and some other random dungeons thrown in the mix. The easy ones that give most loot for least amount of effort.

That’s what the community truly wants.

Compare how many people do and want easy and rewarding dungeons to how many people want and play high-level FOTM ( which are actually challenging ) and you’ll see my point.

maha.7902:

We already use smoke fields and reflects, an we don’t need retaliation or tanky gear. This is just a case of people wanting THEIR gear to be desired in dungeons and want anet to make completely random changes in the vain hope of making their stats and builds wanted. The fact of the matter is, people keep asking for intelligent mobs with varied attacks. The closest you have to that are dredge, and almost nobody likes fighting them. Be careful what you wish for.

Dredges are not intelligent… they are just immune to blind and have CC to interrupt your Hundred Blades.

BTW you can go in the open world and kill boars, dungeons are meant to be more than berserker-them-before-they-kill-you. Then respawn and try again if not succeeded. … haters gonna hate, but respawn should be also removed from dungeons It worked great in GW1, you couldn’t faceroll dungeons like here.

Desbreko.7906:

AoE scatter like in GW1 would completely break the game. There are tons of builds that could keep enemies from ever attacking because they’d be constantly running from AoE.

What really needs to be improved as far as AI is concerned is how enemies regain line of sight. Ranged enemies should try to maintain range while getting LoS back, and melee enemies should have some variation in their pathing so they don’t all stack up on top of each other.

Another thing that would really help is not allowing players to clip through enemies, at least in instances.

^This

As somebody in a nother chat already mentioned, they implemented enemies who walk out of AoE and due to the sheer number of AoE in this game the enmies were just running around doing nothing else.

There are enemies ingame who dodge attacks. maybe not intelligently as they are not waiting for the high damage attacks to dodge, but this already makes for a more interesting fight.
Also enemies should make more use of stuff like boon removal etc. and should not stop attacking in dungeons after some time. Skipping with invis etc. should still be possible though.

I haven’t played the last months, but I heard there have been different tries in LS to include these strategies and a lot of the community actually disliked it, as it was to difficult?!
Implementing new dungeons with harder AI and without being able to SC it as fast as old dungeons while having the same rewards makes it unattractive (see Aether Path).

If it were that easy to please the players, they would have done it already.
For me, a hardmode of current dungeons with better rewards, but harder enemies (i.e. dodoging, no los exploiting, running out of some AoE’s etc.) would be welcome.

As ANET officially dissolved their dungeon team to create LS, I don’t see this happening anytime soon. This is also the reason why dungeons are as broken as they are, because there is nobody who cares!

Aza.2105:

I hope most people realize that even after the “nerf” zerker remains relatively the same. It should illustrate to everyone that was never the problem, but the AI for mobs is. How many strategies consist of los to a corner, pull mob (can replace it with pushing mob to corner), use fgs and aoe it until it dies? I’d say a large portion of encounters are like this.

The reason why this strategy works in a vast majority of encounters is because enemy npcs do not scatter out of aoe. Why did mobs scatter from aoe in gw1 but not in gw2? Its beyond me.

If mobs scattered from aoe then a lot of different builds become more viable, mainly those that revolve around CC. Even healing would become a tad bit more valuable.

In gw1 mobs didn’t scatter from aoe at first either. They added this mechanic later and it effectively killed a lot of farm builds and/or made a lot of farms excruciating long. Who knows, they might add something like this in the future. So enjoy stacking while you can, we might have super slow dungeon runs in the future.

sMihaly.1492:

maha.7902:

We already use smoke fields and reflects, an we don’t need retaliation or tanky gear. This is just a case of people wanting THEIR gear to be desired in dungeons and want anet to make completely random changes in the vain hope of making their stats and builds wanted. The fact of the matter is, people keep asking for intelligent mobs with varied attacks. The closest you have to that are dredge, and almost nobody likes fighting them. Be careful what you wish for.

Dredges are not intelligent… they are just immune to blind and have CC to interrupt your Hundred Blades.

BTW you can go in the open world and kill boars, dungeons are meant to be more than berserker-them-before-they-kill-you. Then respawn and try again if not succeeded. … haters gonna hate, but respawn should be also removed from dungeons It worked great in GW1, you couldn’t faceroll dungeons like here.

They apply boons, CC you and have various ranged and melee attacks. And yet most people find then frustrating to fight. You have the risen in Arah and the ghosts in AC p2 who also are mobs with various mechanics that synergies with each other, like one time we got feared by a necro and then fire stormed with no stun breakers. The key thing to note is that pugs don’t like doing either dungeon, funnily enough, despite them having the interesting mob mechanics that people on this forum cry for. And for the record, who are you to determine what dungeons are meant to be like? I agree, remove respawns – but make sure to adjust rewards accordingly. But then we fall into the problem of your average player who just cluelessly stacks and presses 1 (spoiler – organised teams actually know what to do in a stack, most players don’t) won’t be able to complete content, and then the complaining will never end.

maha.7902:

… And for the record, who are you to determine what dungeons are meant to be like? …

I’m a victim of the GW2 manifesto’s “take everything you loved from GW1”. Tho i agree whith most of you points, i still think that there should be a hardcore pve content… and what else could it be if not dungeons? (no tequatl, thx)
I used to run The Deep, and Domain of Anguish in the good old times. I can’t remember people crying about it’s difficulty. If they were unable to do it, then they didn’t do it. But it was rewarding even if you failed on the half way.

Harper.4173:

Look at the new TA Aetherblade path – was it challenging? Yes – more than the average dungeon.

Did people play it? Yes for a few weeks after it was released.

Is there any reason to do it again if you’ve completed it and gotten all the achievement points? Absolutely not.

People are still doing it, for those skins only available from there. They worth 200-1200 gold.

Harper.4173:

Compare how many people do and want easy and rewarding dungeons to how many people want and play high-level FOTM ( which are actually challenging ) and you’ll see my point.

FOTM reward is broken atm, only those run fractals nowadays who don’t know about it. → https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Fractal-drops-were-broken-on-the-3-18-patch

Yeah ppl want rewards, but rewards should increase depending on difficulty… → should be fractals, but its not

sMihaly.1492:

maha.7902:

… And for the record, who are you to determine what dungeons are meant to be like? …

I’m a victim of the GW2 manifesto’s “take everything you loved from GW1”. Tho i agree whith most of you points, i still think that there should be a hardcore pve content… and what else could it be if not dungeons? (no tequatl, thx)
I used to run The Deep, and Domain of Anguish in the good old times. I can’t remember people crying about it’s difficulty. If they were unable to do it, then they didn’t do it. But it was rewarding even if you failed on the half way.

I think there should be hard content too – but look at the wurm and tequatl releases – people immediately flooded the forum with complaints that it’s too hard. Look at the marionette – the strategies had been learned but people were still failing it. Whenever faced with challenging content, people in this game will endlessly complain, and then when told what to do they ignore instructions (marionette was a massive offender for this) an fail the event for everyone else. But then when they make easy content, people complain that it’s too easy. Anet can’t win.

maha.7902:

sMihaly.1492:

maha.7902:

We already use smoke fields and reflects, an we don’t need retaliation or tanky gear. This is just a case of people wanting THEIR gear to be desired in dungeons and want anet to make completely random changes in the vain hope of making their stats and builds wanted. The fact of the matter is, people keep asking for intelligent mobs with varied attacks. The closest you have to that are dredge, and almost nobody likes fighting them. Be careful what you wish for.

Dredges are not intelligent… they are just immune to blind and have CC to interrupt your Hundred Blades.

BTW you can go in the open world and kill boars, dungeons are meant to be more than berserker-them-before-they-kill-you. Then respawn and try again if not succeeded. … haters gonna hate, but respawn should be also removed from dungeons It worked great in GW1, you couldn’t faceroll dungeons like here.

They apply boons, CC you and have various ranged and melee attacks. And yet most people find then frustrating to fight. You have the risen in Arah and the ghosts in AC p2 who also are mobs with various mechanics that synergies with each other, like one time we got feared by a necro and then fire stormed with no stun breakers. The key thing to note is that pugs don’t like doing either dungeon, funnily enough, despite them having the interesting mob mechanics that people on this forum cry for. And for the record, who are you to determine what dungeons are meant to be like? I agree, remove respawns – but make sure to adjust rewards accordingly. But then we fall into the problem of your average player who just cluelessly stacks and presses 1 (spoiler – organised teams actually know what to do in a stack, most players don’t) won’t be able to complete content, and then the complaining will never end.

It also might have something to do with Underground Facility being the longest fractal with some really annoying encounters.

Complaints about something being too challenging can safely be ignored -All that matter are attendance and bug reports. Sure, people complain about Teq/Wurm a lot, but there’s never a shortage of players bashing their heads against those walls trying to take them down.

If the encounter itself is being ignored, they can increase the rewards for it to make it more appealing – or, if something else is grossly disproportionate in its rewards, they can reduce that (Or boost its challenge). Ideally, they can make the game challenging enough to prevent farming, while making it rewarding enough that Farming’s not needed.

maha.7902:

I think there should be hard content too – but look at the wurm and tequatl releases – people immediately flooded the forum with complaints that it’s too hard. Look at the marionette – the strategies had been learned but people were still failing it. Whenever faced with challenging content, people in this game will endlessly complain, and then when told what to do they ignore instructions (marionette was a massive offender for this) an fail the event for everyone else. But then when they make easy content, people complain that it’s too easy. Anet can’t win.

Worm, Teq and the marionette disqualify themselves from being (good) hard content, as they are uncontrolled open world zerg crap. The only challenge I remember was before the actual fights – being lucky and getting on a server that is not full of completely incompetent people. Real challenge can only be created when you aren’t left at the mercy of the megaserver RNG.

Ropechef.6192:

everything you all ask for already exists in game. and it is some of the most hated and dispised content by the majority of the player base. -

No, it is despised by the farmer portion of the playerbase, who are not the majority.

I was actually playing a dungeon the night before last, a speed run where you stack and exploit and skip, because that’s all you can find a group for these days. And the final boss bugged out to where we couldn’t stack, and we had an awesome fight because of it. The only guy complaining was the one who insisted we reset the fight so we could stack, who was also the only one who went down in a real fight, the rest of us thought it was a blast, best dungeon run we’d had in months.

And what fight was this? Because it doesn’t sound like any fight in the game.

Uhm no the AI is fine in the open world, please do not change all of the mobs into a Teq. Yes Dungeons should be updated but with new content and so could the metas in the open world.

Trust me, the AI in the early games weren’t designed properly, there was this annoying notion that developers actually made mobs harder to escape just for the prospect of being harder. It made no sense , like LOTRO actually made the mobs slow you down like if you were chilled on this game until you lost aggro and that was when they actually added leashes.

I think these people who are asking for things to be harder have either never experienced the early games, or have forgotten just how stupid crazy it was at times because of the missing features that we have in today’s games. Like leashes, hardly any slow response to mobs aggro, aggro alone not being enough to slow us (they actually have to hit us now which is nice).

CptAurellian.9537:

maha.7902:

I think there should be hard content too – but look at the wurm and tequatl releases – people immediately flooded the forum with complaints that it’s too hard. Look at the marionette – the strategies had been learned but people were still failing it. Whenever faced with challenging content, people in this game will endlessly complain, and then when told what to do they ignore instructions (marionette was a massive offender for this) an fail the event for everyone else. But then when they make easy content, people complain that it’s too easy. Anet can’t win.

Worm, Teq and the marionette disqualify themselves from being (good) hard content, as they are uncontrolled open world zerg crap. The only challenge I remember was before the actual fights – being lucky and getting on a server that is not full of completely incompetent people. Real challenge can only be created when you aren’t left at the mercy of the megaserver RNG.

The ‘uncontrolled open world zerg crap’ is actually something that makes GW2 stand out and be superior to a lot of other MMOs, since they require strangers to find ways to work together, instead of coddling people with the security of structured organization, safe instances, and individual prep time. While people are struggling and whining, they’re also learning (Those that refuse to learn are GTFOing).

Stand out? Yes. But rather in an inferior way, as most randoms appear to be too dumb to get anything done.

sMihaly.1492:

Harper.4173:

Look at the new TA Aetherblade path – was it challenging? Yes – more than the average dungeon.

Did people play it? Yes for a few weeks after it was released.

Is there any reason to do it again if you’ve completed it and gotten all the achievement points? Absolutely not.

People are still doing it, for those skins only available from there. They worth 200-1200 gold.

Harper.4173:

Compare how many people do and want easy and rewarding dungeons to how many people want and play high-level FOTM ( which are actually challenging ) and you’ll see my point.

FOTM reward is broken atm, only those run fractals nowadays who don’t know about it. -> https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Fractal-drops-were-broken-on-the-3-18-patch

Yeah ppl want rewards, but rewards should increase depending on difficulty… -> should be fractals, but its not

Very few people do the new TA path.

Also – I agree with you 100% on the fractal side of things. We should see 5 gold / run for a 49 or 50.

Also better drop rates.

In any case- I got my skin from FOTM a few weeks back ( after 8-9 months of trying) so i’ve given up for a while until rewards are fixed.

well if ANET is scared of alienating the average player that likes the EZmode dungeons, then why not scale the dungeons like they do FOTM?

have “vanilla” AC with existing AI and mobs, and maybe have a harder version on the same dungeon that has more advanced AI and maybe lvl 81 mobs (of course your rewards would also be slightly higher.. to what amount would take discussion)

but anyone can select what they want to do, keeping more players happy

CptAurellian.9537:

Stand out? Yes. But rather in an inferior way, as most randoms appear to be too dumb to get anything done.

They’re learning to get better.

And this thread is making me wonder why I am patching the game up. This is the problem with GW2. Yes, the combat is not balanced correctly without the Trinity. They did not make a better alternative in GW2, they just kind of cut it out.

There is no real reason to go Control or Support in any PvE content. Just DPS away.

Not really fun….

Sartharina.3542:

More mob mobility and skill use alone would do wonders, as would getting their attack speed/style on par with players.

Imagining the AI being able to use their skills while moving and staying in range sounds challenging in and of itself.

Darkeus.2369:

Yes, the combat is not balanced correctly without the Trinity.

Wait what? The only thing “trinity” adds to the game is adding 2 more roles where 1 role – the tank, is useless without the other role – the healer.

kokiman.2364:

Darkeus.2369:

Yes, the combat is not balanced correctly without the Trinity.

Wait what? The only thing “trinity” adds to the game is adding 2 more roles where 1 role – the tank, is useless without the other role – the healer.

Actually, a tank is critical even without a healer in Trinity-based games, thanks to his superior damage mitigation and enormous HP sinks – damage that would destroy a DPS character hardly bothers him (The only Hit Point that matters is the last one!), and the party takes less damage overall as well.

Sartharina.3542:

kokiman.2364:

Darkeus.2369:

Yes, the combat is not balanced correctly without the Trinity.

Wait what? The only thing “trinity” adds to the game is adding 2 more roles where 1 role – the tank, is useless without the other role – the healer.

Actually, a tank is critical even without a healer in Trinity-based games, thanks to his superior damage mitigation and enormous HP sinks – damage that would destroy a DPS character hardly bothers him (The only Hit Point that matters is the last one!), and the party takes less damage overall as well.

there have been other superior tank systems with dual specs etc evasion, consistant self healing, and life steal components of other titles come to mind consistantly.

Also, this game’s own trait system destroys healing on it’s own because of the crazy restrictions on PVE traits. For example, the healing spec for engineers could totally use Bunker Down but it’s in the wrong line.

And finally Kokiman they can make the game trinity lite where it’s not mandatory to use the trinity but it certainly makes things more interesting when it’s used.

How about they leave all the dungeons as they are and just add a hard mode, with all te better AI and changes? That way you’re not excluding anyone, and those that want to do the harder content can.

Come to think of it, they could easily expand traits for healing builds to allow regen, self healing, toughness, life steal to all be affected by the healing score you have. Thus if you have the trait line maxed and the traits plus a high healing score you’d actually have a valid healing spec and a valid tank spec imo. Give some DPS skills the ability to misdirect enemies and poof you got yourself a trinity lite.

kokiman.2364:

No make single mobs attack faster.

The result should be the same so it shouldn’t matter. Unless you want to stunlock mobs since you cannot stunlock 10 slowly attacking mobs but you can stunlock 2 faster attacking mobs.

kokiman.2364:

Make enemies hit more frequent but let them deal less damage, suddenly support becomes viable and mindless zerking is nerfed aswell.

AoEs should stay how they are though. Too many of those would be soooo annoying.

I agree, although I’d also extend this comment to “lack of pre-defined roles isn’t the problem aka the Trinity” as well.

The issues with the AI, IMHO, are:

1) They don’t have the tools to counter players tools and tactics, while players have tools and tactics to counter the AI. For example, stacking. Mobs don’t have a tool to counter stacking, but stacking is a tactic that pretty much negates all of the mobs tools.

2) They’re built differently than players. In total, players have a minimum of 10 skills at any one time, 14 Traits, 6 runes and 4 sigils. I feel that the bosses massive healthpools and Defiant are put in to replace the fact that they’re missing most of the things available to the player.

3) It never learns. By this I mean that player’s approach to dungeons never change because the AI never learns from it’s previous encounters. Whereas a player can go “This went wrong, if I take this skill and trait instead, the fight might go easier”, AI can’t do this. They’re doomed to staying the same. This is an issue with content in pretty much every MMO ever, and it’s why content get’s easier over time, thus stale.

How to improve these issues?

1) For every tool and tactic in the game available to the player, there should be a mechanic available to the AI that a) counters and b) can be countered by a particular mechanic.

Using stacking as an example again, there should be a mechanic that counters stacking (say, a skill that deals increased damage and strips boons based on how many people it hits [2 boons for every player it hits. 5×2 = 10 boons removed]), as well as a mechanic that stacking counters (say, a skill that deals reduced damage and strips boons based on how many people it hits [2 less boons for every player it hits. 10 / 5 = 2]).

Add in multiple mechanics to a single fight that is appropriate for the level of the dungeon (2 mechanics that directly oppose each other in AC, then add 1 or 2 mechanics per dungeon) and a) it serves as a tougher tutorial for players and b) players can choose how they approach the fights; either a dedicated person for each mechanic, or each person brings a little something to the fight, thus requiring more co-ordination.

2) Build mobs as you build players appropriate for their level.

Give the level 30 boss in AC 10 skills, one minor trait, a full set of masterwork runes and sigils appropriate for them. The skills and traits that are available to the AI don’t necessarily have to be the same as that of a player. Why build them like players? This ties into my next suggestion.

3) Have the dungeon encounters ‘learn’ from player metrics.

Firstly, build a pool of mechanics for bosses.

Have each path gather metrics as to how the player’s have approached the path. How many mobs were killed? How many boons were applied? How much damage and healing was done?

The next week, have the metrics build the path differently:

• Very few mobs were killed? Remove leashing on mobs / give mobs tools to prevent running away (immobilize / Line of Warding ect).
• Boss was killed through sheer damage? Swap out the condiremoval skills that the boss had for skills that apply protection and confusion, and a trait that aids survivability.
• Players didn’t move around much? Swap out two skills for two others that a) remove boons and b) blows players away from each other. Give them sigils that have a chance to remove boons on hit.
• Players kept kiting the mob around? Swap out a skill for another that applies Immobilise.
• Players did quite a bit of healing and condition removal? Swap out a skill that does Bleeding for a skill that applies Poison.

And so on.

Morsus.5106:

AoEs should stay how they are though. Too many of those would be soooo annoying.

Nah, too many AoEs means that you cannot avoid them (because you cannot see kitten) and suddenly support becomes viable.

@TheDaiBish – that’s all nice and fine but do you really think players want to fight against that?

Do you really think it would make for an enjoyable experience for the majority of the player base?
And how much staying power does your system have?

People repeat dungeons now for the loot. How much do you think they’d repeat a hard and adaptive dungeon?

If you make it too hard for players to get what they want in game they’ll just move on to the next game.

Anet is here to keep the game alive and going not to cater to people who are confusing Guild Wars 2 with Dark Souls and Dark Souls II.

Harper.4173:

@TheDaiBish – that’s all nice and fine but do you really think players want to fight against that?

Do you really think it would make for an enjoyable experience for the majority of the player base?
And how much staying power does your system have?

People repeat dungeons now for the loot. How much do you think they’d repeat a hard and adaptive dungeon?

If you make it too hard for players to get what they want in game they’ll just move on to the next game.

Anet is here to keep the game alive and going not to cater to people who are confusing Guild Wars 2 with Dark Souls and Dark Souls II.

Firstly, there are degrees of difficulty between GW2 and Dark Souls. I don’t remember asking in my post for content that is as difficult as content in Dark Souls.

Secondly, I don’t pretend to know what the majority of players want. What I think would happen though is that players would complain for a few weeks, then adapt. Overall, I feel that adaptive dungeons wouldn’t increase the difficulty of dungeons, but have dungeons maintain a level of difficulty. This, IMHO, would also increase replayability.

Thirdly, adaptive dungeons would also get players to look at the tools in their toolset. As it is, when most content can be done with a single tactic and the same set of skills, it’s completely pointless to add new skills and traits. The whole point of horizontal progression in the form of skills is to add new tools for the player. If the content doesn’t get the player to use these tools, then progression in this form is meaningless.

Finally, I think it’s pretty sad that dungeons have devolved into nothing more than loot gauntlets, but maybe that’s just me.

I like TheDaiBish’s suggestion, especially since adaptive dungeons (More designed to be fun/varied to overcome than be intelligent and hard to beat) keep players engaged in the event better, making dungeon running feel less of a grind/farm.

One of the greatest praises of Dark Souls is not actually the challenge it provides, but the respect it gives the players in providing challenge and tools to overcome them, and freedom to explore and improvise. That said, they could easily achieve a similar result even with an ‘easier’ game that still provides player respect.

Not only is TheDaiBish’s ideas basically impossible from a resource perspective, but it would drive away a lot of casual dungeon runners – which are the kind of players ANet want to keep.

Not impossible from a resource perspective, but probably difficult. And the threat of driving away casual people unwilling to rise to a presented challenge (Even if it’s not actually harder than their current activities) didn’t stop them from implementing the Great Jungle Wurm or overhauling Teq, and sticking with their decision to do so in spite of the complaints of the difficulty – yes, people were whining, but they were also starting to rise to the challenge once they got the griping out of their system.

Wethospu.6437:

Sartharina.3542:

Actually – it’s possible to improve the AI so that it’s more fun, interesting, and engaging to go against without actually increasing the difficulty.

Ye, just change AI = “bad” to AI = “good” in the code.

Anyways, enemies already have sufficient AI. They just don’t have sufficient skills. It doesn’t matter how smartly they use their skills if those skills do nothing.

For example I’m pretty sure if they lowered cooldowns of Subject Alpha’s skills and made him spam them randomly people would consider him more intelligent.

One of Anet’s developers stated himself, in one of the CDIs if I’m not mistaken, that GW2’s AI is insufficient, but that there are other more pressing concerns about mob mechanics that need to be worked on before AI.

Not impossible from a resource perspective, but probably difficult. And the threat of driving away casual people unwilling to rise to a presented challenge (Even if it’s not actually harder than their current activities) didn’t stop them from implementing the Great Jungle Wurm or overhauling Teq, and sticking with their decision to do so in spite of the complaints of the difficulty – yes, people were whining, but they were also starting to rise to the challenge once they got the griping out of their system.

That’s because there’s people to do all the leading and work for them. If you look at TA Aetherpath, nobody wants to do it because everyone has to pull their weight and you can’t just slink back in the background letting everyone else do the work because it’s a 5-man instance.

If you force people to have to pull their weight and adapt all the time, they won’t be bothered to do the content. To offer an example – I asked a guardian to put wall of reflection and purging flames on against the Hunter and Crusher in Arah p3 – he then responded saying he’s using a shout build. People don’t want to have to adapt, they just stick their utilities on and forget about it. As much as people complain that the game is stack and press 1, the moment ANet make it any more challenging the complaining grows stronger and people just flat out don’t do the content.

As a GW1 player, I always felt the direction they took with open world and AI was going to cause some amount of problems – and it did. Although I fail to this SUPER DUPER IMPACTING STUFF that people seem to describe as being broken or not. Berserker will always have been the most optimal choice because DPS is good for PvE.

However, at the same time, how can really amp up the game? In dungeons the same enemies with better AI would be too hard (they basically equate difficulty with health sponge most of the time) – so if they tried to soften the health sponge effect and make better AI that optimized skills and strategies (somewhat similar to how GW1 handled things) they would be making foes way too easy in open world.

Now, they could split the AI between open world and dungeons but that seems like a hell of a lot of to do for such a minor problem (I’ll get into why I think it’s minor in the next paragraph). I feel like they should’ve dropped the open world design and gone with the GW1 way of doing things – sure, it wasn’t the best concept but no concept will ever be the best and will be impossible to cater to every single person that plays a game.

However, I think it’s a rather minor problem in general. Really what I feel most of these discussions boil down to is frustration because after 22 months, the game still lacks expansion-worthy content (a new zone/region/race/profession). While I wouldn’t expect these things to come every 6 months, I think every 2-2.5 years is a good marker for expansions and this game is hitting the deadline with no peep from ANet about the possibility of one.

Conncept.7638:

Wethospu.6437:

Sartharina.3542:

Actually – it’s possible to improve the AI so that it’s more fun, interesting, and engaging to go against without actually increasing the difficulty.

Ye, just change AI = “bad” to AI = “good” in the code.

Anyways, enemies already have sufficient AI. They just don’t have sufficient skills. It doesn’t matter how smartly they use their skills if those skills do nothing.

For example I’m pretty sure if they lowered cooldowns of Subject Alpha’s skills and made him spam them randomly people would consider him more intelligent.

One of Anet’s developers stated himself, in one of the CDIs if I’m not mistaken, that GW2’s AI is insufficient, but that there are other more pressing concerns about mob mechanics that need to be worked on before AI.

They have also said that there is not much they can do because of hardware limitations. Sure, AI can be improved. But >90% of enemies have skillsets which can’t be helped with better AI. Thus, improving their skillset should be the priority.