Showing Posts For Cronax.8406:
I really like the idea of aleiro.8521. Right now people are pushed to repeat the same dungeon over and over again in a game that promised to be an MMO without the grind. In a system where you have a cooldown/debuff/whatever on a dungeon path to basically take away most of the rewards from that path if it’s run a second time that day and you have universal tokens, then at the very least you encourage people to run several/all of the dungeons in the game every day so they experience more of the content and it feels like far less of a grind. In such a case you don’t even have to increase the amount of tokens dropped by as much or reduce the price of the gear because you’ve already taken out the worst part of the grind. If you’re lucky you’ll even encourage people to build properly balanced groups that have a “tanky specced” character and one or two supports because even though GW2 supposedly does away with the holy trinity, the fact of the matter is that in order to complete an explorable mode you ideally do want to have people performing those 3 roles to have a smooth run. Today, this is more true in some dungeons than in others, meaning that some dungeons can have any random group of 5 succeeding where others are more strict on your group composition…
Personally, given the current state of the game, I would probably change the gear system slightly and have 2 types of tokens. I would change the gear system so that you can have one item providing you with stats and another slot for the looks of that same slot. For the tokens, one would be dungeon specific and soulbound and would be used for “vanity items” that give basic stats but have the dungeon specific look, and the other set would be account wide and would be used to purchase the specific combinations of stats that you might want. This will serve a dual purpose: people who want certain looks for their armor but can’t get the right stats on items with those looks can get their stuff with the same grind, and if you balance the amounts of tokens dropped well enough then hopefully people will actually start collecting several stat combinations so that it’s much easier to change from a ‘tank’ set to a ‘support’ or ‘dps’ set.
Separately I would say the aggro system needs to be changed a bit since from my and other peoples’ experience at the moment the mobs seem to aggro people who are casting support spells and heals and who have the lowest health pool…while this makes sense in an MMO where you have snap-aggro skills and threat management skills, in GW2 you don’t have these meaning it would make more sense if the mobs target the beefier targets first…I’ve been trying to make a tanking build for my Guardian but the only thing that has been remotely successful has me basically playing a support build with some extra defensive stats tacked on…
My current gripe with explorable modes is that the difficulty is just all over the place and that most of the actual “difficulty” comes not from well designed interesting mechanics that can be learned, but artificial inflation because of high health pools and needlessly punishing mechanics. I know about myself that I’m not an uber player in most games I play, but I am also not a scrub. I’m not the kind of guy that will understand a mechanic the very first time I see it, but if that’s the kind of player the explorable modes are meant to cater to then this game will lose a lot of players VERY fast.
I know people like to hate on WoW but although the difficulty there is too low, the base design is well done. The trash before a boss will begin teaching you the mechanics that the boss will use and the bosses have more than just a single mechanic. The mechanics are also varied rather than being the same 2-3 mechanics rehashed over and over again. Rather then using ridiculous health-pools to prolong the fights, give us “soft enrages” like the worm fight in TA explore mode seems to be attempting, where if you take too long to complete it you just get swarmed by worms.
This will also curb what we’re seeing now in terms of GY spawning and just running back.
I have no problem with the difficulty of the dungeons. But I do have a problem with the fact that the APPARENT difficulty of the dungeons is artificially inflated by giving everything huge amounts of hitpoints. No matter how challenging a fight is it’ll just become boring if it drags on too long.
This is exactly the issue I have with the dungeons at this time. Hard content is fine, in fact, I LIKE hard content, but there’s a difference between something being hard because it has interesting mechanics that you need to learn how to deal with, and the current state where the difficulty is artificially inflated by bad design. Say what you like but oneshot mechanics and needlessly large health pools are not “good design”.
I know people love to hate on WoW but when I recall the original versions of the heroic dungeons in the Burning Crusade expansion, THAT brings to mind “good design”. The fights were hard because there were interesting mechanics that you had to learn, not because you needed to pigeon-hole yourself into a certain spec with certain gear in order to even have a shot at completing the dungeon. I too regret that the difficulty was nerfed back then but I am simply baffled when I compare the design of the rest of the content in GW2 to the dungeons…when I look at how well things like Dynamic Events are done, with good scaling (on most events at least) I just do not understand how the dungeons ever made it into the game in the current state.
Please don’t misunderstand me, I am NOT asking for content to be nerfed, I’m asking for interesting mechanics that I actually CAN learn instead of having to play my character in a ranged style just to be able to see what’s going on during a boss fight…(CoE I’m looking at you here…) give me something that I can learn to do well and that will reward me appropriately for my efforts and I’ll gladly spend weeks improving my skill like I did for the heroics in WoW TBC pre-nerf …
Now, I will admit that I did not play GW1, but when I hear about having to use certain combinations of professions just to have a shot at even being able to complete the dungeon, this just SCREAMS bad design to me. Please anet, let your design philosophy for the rest of the game flow over into the dungeons, make the story mode easy enough for the casual players to complete if they get their proverbial heads out from where the sun doesn’t shine and make the explorable modes difficult by giving the bosses and trash mobs interesting mechanics that can be learned…the current mechanics are often badly telegraphed if at all and from what I’ve seen so far the same mechanics are re-used over and over again. There’s just no inspiration in it which really baffles me when I see how inspired the rest of the game is.