Guild Wars 2

Male Asuran Thief in the Order of Whispers. Always went with any quest relating to asuran or order of whispers as a top priority in my paths but also did a few priory when i didn’t get to make one of those choices. Always have done every story quest solo.

Mine locked up on the third tower after clearing the beach.

The dungeons in this game are not what I would call challenging. I imagine a challenge to be something that presents a serious threat but can be overcome if you play well. Some of these fights are beat your head against the wall easy and others are impossible without the correct composition or zerging.

I like a good challenge. I like that they present the mechanics of a lot of mobs and bosses on the mob so I know what I’m getting into, but frankly it’s often not enough. For example, Lovers is a wonderfully mechanical fight. You have to separate them with boulders provided and then you have to keep them occupied at opposite ends of the room. Unfortunately that’s where the fun challenge ends and the pain begins. The elementalist does so much damage that is nigh impossible to avoid. The mesmer doesn’t present as much of a challenge but you still have to deal with keeping him away on top of all of her mechanics. Frankly it would be challenging (for story mode at least) to have you just fight her alone.

Next dungeon: CM. What a joke this was to go through. Mobs did practically zero damage, almost nothing to avoid. It was like night and day. Unfortunately this was also extremely boring because there wasn’t a challenge at all.

I skipped the 50 dungeon and did the 60 dungeon. It’s really not bad until Kudu. Kudu… the second fire golem. Why why why is this boss designed the way he is… it just makes no sense. He has two reasonably avoidable abilities: single target fireball and spinny flame attack. His third ability is not challenging… it’s not even fair. He launches 10 fireballs at random (but seemingly always at someone) in two spurts so that you have to dodge twice every time he does it and they leave behind fire circles. He does this every 5-10 seconds. The room isn’t designed for line of sight either so there are few sweet spots to hide behind and resume damaging. On top of that he gives a big middle finger to anyone using conditions by consuming them to heal.

Frankly, these dungeons need some major tuning and I have some suggestions that don’t involve going back to the holy trinity.

1. Story mode should be story mode. I came to story mode for the story and I want to see what happens. I do not want to bang my head against the wall in the “easy mode” of the dungeon. Story mode should be puggable and should not be extremely challenging. Scale the loot down to compensate, but story mode should not be as difficult as it is.

2. Damage in some places is too high and unavoidable. Fights like the Lovers and the 2nd golem of Kudu have attacks that do massive damage and do not even put red circles on the ground to warn you ahead of time. If you get hit by the initial attack, you will suffer for it and there wasn’t even a warning for you to get out. If you want to make damage that high, put the red circle out first and give me more than half a second to run out. Let’s just imagine that you do get hit by this attack. The damage should not be so great that if you still “get out of the bad” you don’t burn to death afterwards.

3. Control is fun when you get to interrupt a big attack; control is not fun when you have to spam it an entire fight to get through it alive. Daze and stun spamming is about the only thing you can do to get through some fights. It’s not a fun mechanic and it doesn’t make the fight challenging to require it. Instead of determination there should be a small window when a boss is charging an attack where daze or stun will work, but otherwise they won’t.

In closing, I think the dungeons have potential and you don’t need to have healers and tanks to make them work, but you are left with one option for pretty much every fight to make it challenging: stay out of the red.

TL;DR: Dungeons challenge isn’t well tuned. In order to fix it they need to 1) Make story mode a lot easier to ease the learning curve, 2) Give proper warning when major damage attacks are incoming and make them legitimately avoidable by a reasonably skilled player, 3) Remove the need for control spam and put in small windows during a charging attack where you can daze or stun the boss, but not at any other time.