Guild Wars 2

Here’s what I think are the main problems with dungeons:
— AC is the first one: it’s a very rough newbie instance, something akin to pre-buff CM would’ve been better as the starter, short and sweet while giving people a heads-up on what they need to start thinking about. Currently it just destroys a lot of folks who would otherwise start on the group-play learning curve.
—Exploration modes give no warning. They’re built to be very hard, I get that, but let people know that before they go in. A group of 35s walking into AC explore expecting it to be similar are gonna get cheesed (it’s like getting creamed but it goes on longer). I even like the low level requirements, it lets me go with guildies when we’re in the right mood for it without waiting for folks to hit 80, but they need a heads-up.
—Waypoints. I haven’t seen past TA, but while AC story has good waypoints neither CM, TA, or CM explore do. Learning through death would be less painful if it didn’t include a 5-minute run. You can put the waypoints closer than that and still discourage boss zerging.

There’s no way to generate a random number in-game.

I always play windowed and have been crashing.

What gets me is the difficulty whiplash. Compare the story modes of the first two dungeons.

AC: ghosts, including ones who pop out of the ground for surprise. Mostly ranged, almost entirely with access to strong AoE and knockback. Tight spaces. Final boss… not sure how you’re supposed to do it as a melee, since he one or two-shots with his attacks and aggro is partially proximity-based.

CM: Generally open areas. Mostly melee enemies. No boss will gib you with a look.

So let’s see the player experiences in these dungeons. In CM the first boss is the only real threat (which I think is a shame, I like the ranger and elementalist in AC) but it’s a control thing rather than a “you got to close for half a second” thing. If you get aggro from someone you know because they turn and run at you, giving you time to evade. There’s room to avoid the enemies and pick your direction of attack.

In AC most guys are ranged so your first hint of aggro will not be enemy movement but rather enemy rotation (much harder to spot), and then they hit you. Spike traps land without warning and hit with a bleed, so if you don’t immediately have a cleanse/heal you wind up walking dead even if you survived the hit. Necros have a large poison AoE, and tend to be in spawns in particularly narrow rooms. It’s hard to dodge out of the red circle if it’s actually three of them lined up in a hallway, and then you get feared right back into it. Half the guys have a knockback, so if you do need to get close (or happen to do so while evading) you’re going to be punted right back into the red. Every pull needs to be handled with precision because there’s no middle-ground between full health and death. And then there’s the last boss’s hits and the fact that the Lovers start their fight dropping a large duststorm right on the closest guy, doing massive damage if they don’t dodge the instant things start.

There’s a major difference in the difficulty of these two dungeons, and the easy one comes second. CM is a great intro to dungeons; it’s short, forgiving, and can get you used to party combat and tactics. Too bad it isn’t the intro dungeon.