I’m going to get flamed for saying so, but when ANet did away with the trinity of tank, healer, dps, it made for a dull dungeon experience. Without tanks to soak up damage, and healers to keep everyone’s health bars topped off, dungeons are basically just zerg content. To keep a “level” playing field, that any profession can play in, they designed dungeons so every profession can withstand the damage mobs dish out, and gave us a dodge mechanic (which I love, btw) to avoid the big stuff.
So, how to keep dungeons from just being massive dps-fest facerolls? Give mobs and bosses knockdowns and snares, and (with bosses at least) huge dps-spike one-shot attacks which will kill you regardless of how defensive you are. In some areas, they included traps to slow things down as well.
What this does is:
1) Encourage people to skip trash mobs. They don’t drop anything worthwhile, and are really just annoying bottlenecks.
2) Encourage people to go full berserker and dps things down as fast as possible. If you dodge/avoid the big spikey attacks, then go back to dps-ing, the mob/boss dies faster, and does fewer big spikey attacks. DPS is king in this game.
3) Encourage people to find the dungeon paths that can be completed the fastest, and run them over and over. It’s simple risk vs. reward behavior.
4) Once people learn the mechanics of a particular boss or dungeon path, it gets repetitive (for example: when the boss does xyz, wait 1 second, then dodge, then go back to dps-ing). When content gets repetitive, people look for the fastest repetitive content to do for their rewards (loot, money, etc.), and skip the rest.
Attempts to make content “harder” have really just made content more annoying. If we look at the changes made to AC a few patches back, it’s not really a “harder” dungeon, it just has more annoying mechanics that slow parties down. As a consequence, fewer people run AC now than they used to.
Making dungeons take longer to complete, with more “tripwire” (roots, snares, knockbacks, knockdowns, etc.) type content in them is not a very good solution, because people tend to avoid that kind of content.
In my opinion, dungeons in this game need a massive overhaul. Mobs and bosses need to be made more “interesting”, and “smarter” — not just frustrating and annoying. Some of the paths take way too long to complete, and many players don’t have the time or inclination to run them, given the rewards. Some are too short, and thus get exploited. But the saddest thing? Many dungeon paths in this game just get ignored or avoided.
