Yeah graveyard zerg and some bosses having a few balance issues (or needing more varied skills at various health percentages so they are fun to fight for their large health pools) are absolutely things on our radar. Make sure to note specific locations/bosses when leaving feedback on the forums!
As for the question about PuG’s for explorable dungeons, we’ve said all along that explorable dungeons are intended for highly organized/skilled groups of players. That is absolutely the case
Are you guys addressing the lack of boss mechanics in general? A lot of bosses simply don’t have enough mechanics or none at all. Too many tank n spanks.
EDIT: Also are you guys looking at Arah explorable? Why do we get less tokens for twice, sometimes triple, the amount of time and effort? I don’t mind the length of the dungeons if we got 8 or 10 tokens per boss or something. Right now the best farming strategy is just killing the first boss then jumping over terrain to skip trash and fight the 2nd boss.
GM of Your Math Teacher [MATH] – Northern Shiverpeaks
Stop spamming LFG. Do it once, maybe twice, but after that make your OWN group. Somebody has to take initiative to make a group out of the million people spamming LFG so why not make it you?
Also if you’re 80 try going to Orr, Frostgorge, LA and the zone which the instance is in. I usually have no issues finding a group doing that.
GM of Your Math Teacher [MATH] – Northern Shiverpeaks
And yes, believe it or not, not everyone made a ton of alts. I found out the class I wanted to play in beta.
Oh so you were a beta player. Well that makes sense. I played LOTRO beta and was almost level capped about a week after it went live, because I knew where everything was and what to do.
For a person who just started playing during head start, I don’t think they’d be capped yet unless running with someone who was in beta, or just straight racing to end game.
If you have a lot of free time you could definitely be 80 right now. I agree that GW2 is more about stopping and smelling the roses, but you don’t need to power game to hit 80 quickly.
GM of Your Math Teacher [MATH] – Northern Shiverpeaks
I agree the loot needs to be reworked, but I’d recommend stacking MF in the meantime. Your chance of rares and exotics goes way up. If the rares aren’t good for you then you can use a mystic salvage kit on them and possibly get an ecto, which sells for about 20s each right now.
GM of Your Math Teacher [MATH] – Northern Shiverpeaks
It’s not impossible to kill Frost (heh). My group killed him on our second try. We had more trouble with the shotgun guy than the final boss. Kill the turrets first then focus on the boss. Dodge out of the way as soon as he starts his ice beam thing. Try to keep him snared or crippled as much as possible and just kite. Run a lot of defensive skills to mitigate the damage from the ice beam. Graveyard rush helps, too.
Frankly I’d recommend your party being all ranged. Being able to kite and stand max distance from his ice beam then dodge backwards made it pretty trivial.
GM of Your Math Teacher [MATH] – Northern Shiverpeaks
Dungeons are completely optional.
If you have trouble beating dungeons, level up more. Unlock more traits. Get better gear. Learn to play your profession better (try different weapon sets and utilities). Spec more into defensive stats.
When I did Ascalonian Catacombs the first time as a level 35 or so I thought it was friggin’ hard. Taking up my own advice I went back to the dungeon later and completed it pretty easily dying a lot less than my first time.
The moral of the story is. Don’t quit after your first try. Take a break from it if you need. Think of what went wrong.
If you got owned by red AoE circles. Try to learn to dodge faster.
If you got 1-shot. Spec more into defence / bring more defensive skills and buffs.
If you as caster get constantly grabbed by melee, bring snares, blinds and knockbacks.
If you see your teammates making dumb mistakes, don’t yell or swear at them. Be patient and explain to them what they do wrong and how to do better.
Dungeons are not necessarily “optional”. Some (all?) are meant to be end game content, which means its one of the only NEW thing to do once you get to lvl 80, other than go farm stuff.
To those saying its mean to be played with friends or guilds: what about us that don’t have/want a guild or have friends who play (or even who play but aren’t on/appropriate level)? How the heck are we supposed to do the explorable mode for the achievements (or heck, even GRIND out the tokens for the armor sets)? It needs to be completable by a casual PUG group, since not everyone is “elite” as you?
But you can complete it with a PUG, though. All my dungeon runs have been PUGs. I’ve never once had to disband a group because the content was too hard and we wiped too much.
GM of Your Math Teacher [MATH] – Northern Shiverpeaks
the people that say dungeons are fine have only done a few dungeons…they even state this. anyone that has done all the explorables and story modes i highly doubt thinks dungeons are fine as is.
I’ve done a CM explorable, a CoF explorable, all HOTW explorables, an Arah explorable and an SE explorable on top of almost every story mode (don’t think I did CoE) and I’ve found most of ‘em to be just the right difficulty. People just want to run in spec’d glass cannon and built for themselves when that’s clearly not the right way. Every group I’ve had where we’ve adapted our builds to the fight, dungeon and group we’ve succeeded. Run a lot of support spells, know when to dodge, focus on revives and call targets. Should be fine other than the odd insta gib mechanic that doesn’t have any indicator.
A lot of people that complain dungeons are too hard are, to put it frankly, not very good at the game. Like on a basic MMO level. Not trying to be an elitist jerk or anything, but that seems to be the case. People want their hand held.
That’s not to say I don’t support easier dungeons for more casual or less skilled players, but I don’t think the right approach is nerfing the content so tl;dr I agree with OP.
GM of Your Math Teacher [MATH] – Northern Shiverpeaks
What my group did was pull them all into that little hallway you come from and focus a single one. If you go back far enough all of them except the one you’re constantly damaging will reset. Kill then damage the main boss when she tries to rez. Rinse and repeat.
I dunno if it was a bug, but that’s how we did it.
GM of Your Math Teacher [MATH] – Northern Shiverpeaks
I just don’t understand how people are level 80 already, unless they are only playing 1 character and racing to the end like theirs some finish line to reach. I’ve got 6 characters that I’m leveling up currently, and my highest one is level 33. (That’s playing about 6 hours a day)
You don’t have to race or power game to hit level 80 by now. The leveling curve is flat. Frankly, it gets faster (or it was for me) the higher you get given how many events there are. At minimum it takes about 45 minutes, max 1h 30m per level.
And yes, believe it or not, not everyone made a ton of alts. I found out the class I wanted to play in beta.
GM of Your Math Teacher [MATH] – Northern Shiverpeaks
I don’t think the game needs gear grinding in a stat sense, but there really is a lack of progression at level 80, which is saddening. Arah explorable is no more difficult than any other explorable dungeon. They don’t need to necessarily implement raids, but there should be a tier system where you complete X dungeon which unlocks Y dungeon. Y dungeon would have harder trash and bosses etc.
I don’t mind my stats not going up. That isn’t too big of a deal for me. However, I feel like there should be something to work for like killing a really tough boss that takes a number of attempts. That’s what I enjoyed about raiding in WoW and would like that in this game either in the form of dungeons or raids. At the very least this should be an option for some players rather than just alienating those people.
Add all of this on top of the fact that almost all the bosses are mechanically boring and you’ve got dungeon content that isn’t all that exciting. There are 10 tank n spanks for every SE story mode final boss (forgot his name). Even then that boss is easier than most tank n spanks. Frankly GW2 could learn a thing or two from WoW’s dungeon/raid content.
That’s my 2 cents.
GM of Your Math Teacher [MATH] – Northern Shiverpeaks
. It was bugged for my group after he died.