Guild Wars 2

Don’t bother trying to get dodge credit on attacks without long-ish windups. Better to just use them to get some distance.

Other than that, it’s just learning the timings really, sorry. If you’re just looking for dodge credit, I suggest Drakes or Moas, their frontal cones let you get several ticks at a time.

Elm.8169:

Kalas.6743:

All those snipers can down someone who is not in heavy armor with one volley, and it’s hard to tell when they are going to fire. It was one of my most hated dungeons because it always seemed that they focused me first.

But yeah, the mobs in this dungeon are terrible. Not to mention the shotgun weilding, rapid firing, knockdown happy boss and the boss with the ice flame thrower which chills anyone in an area.

It’s all about knowing the mechanics. Bandit Riflemen do double damage against moving targets. It’s not very much if you’re standing still. It also draws a huge crosshair under your feet when they’re aiming at you. You should have plenty of time to stop moving, dodgeroll, or LoS.

The shotgun boss puts both hands on the shotgun and aims at someone. You simply need to dodgeroll or back off when that happens.

Once you know what to look out for, CM is a cake.

The shotgun boss also doesn’t hit all that hard, I find. If you spread out so he can’t hit more than one person at once (aka circle him) and hammer him, chances are he’ll not be able to do enough damage to do more than down someone once or twice. Have people bring rez skills or draw him away when someone goes down, and you’re golden.

The other important bit (for all paths) is to FOCUS FIRE. A lot of the bandits have high damage, so it’s important to kill them quickly – getting one down fast is better than trying to get them all down at once.

This goes for a lot of other dungeons as well; unless your group is very AoE/control heavy, you want to get single targets down fast.

I’m… not sure what you’re trying to get at. Please provide an example, because your broken English is difficult to interpret.

No. Both for the reasons Parlour mentioned and the fact that the different modes (PvE/WvW/PvP) should be kept separate as far as actual participation. Being able to to what you want is a big point of the game, forcing WvW on people that want no part of it is an idiotic idea.

I imagine the lack of this feature is due to the ability to be in multiple guilds. Still, I can’t imagine that it would be too hard to come up with a workable solution.

ManCaptain.3154:

Engineer rifle autoattack is the most damaging direct damage ranged autoattack in the game IIRC. In general Engineer damage is pretty sweet except for a few things (elixir gun sucks).

The main problem with engineer is survivability, especially against ranged opponents. Engineer is inverse mesmer.

I have to disagree; Elixir gun is awesome, just not as a direct damage output. It’s very much a support-orientated utility, much like, say, water-attuned staff eles, but way more than just healing.

1: Dart can keep weakness up on non-champ mobs, does mediocre damage, and applies a bleed. Fire rate isn’t anything to scoff at.
2: Apply cripple to multiple enemies and/or swiftness to multiple allies without having to aim or be right next to them? Yes please.
3: STRIP ALL THE CONDITIONS!!! The poison and vulnerability stacks are awesome as well.
4: Excellent skill for putting some distance between you and your opponent. Or if they’re stationary or otherwise mostly still, the damage patch can rack up some good numbers.
5: Even with no healing power, this gives a pretty good chunk of health, AND takes off a condition from whoever it lands on. Plus it’s a light field, so more condition removal for the team, or retaliation! Plus, if you trait for it, switching to the elixir gun will drop one of these at your feet automatically!

Sylvari Engineer, no boost, really glad I have good twitch skills because you do need them.

That last jump into the clock face just wouldn’t work for the longest time though :p

I think that’s been implied, yes.

Probably just not added to whatever list of ‘unique types’ that daily uses.

And at that point, you’d still only have 1, so… eh.

I’m sorry, but you can’t please everyone. Flat out.

You are personally choosing to impose additional restrictions on yourself that are not in any way mechanically supported by the game, and that the average player isn’t going to consider fun. Then you come in and demand that Anet spend valuable time and resources so that .01% of the population can participate in the event without breaking a self-imposed rule. With all due respect, hell no. That’s not fair to everyone else.

And I agree with Luxrin, it’s the Mad King’s Realm, there’s going to be different rules in play than ‘reality’.

Anthony did mention they would probably be a build to fix some issues, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s one of them.

I’m not sure if this was mentioned, but this should be character bound except for special skins, such as special event related rewards (like the book backpack and other Halloween skins) and maybe Legendary items. Otherwise there would be a massive reduction in demand for certain items in the long run, which would play havoc with the economy. Similarly with dungeons, where there would be little point to run most of them after you get a full set on one character unless you wanted a particular stat spread not available on crafted or karma gear.

Otherwise, I love this idea, even if I might not personally partake in it all that much.

Ok, that title is a little weird, so let me explain:

If you have a BoE weapon that can be equipped to either hand (say, swords on a warrior), and you attempt to equip it to your off hand before binding it, it will equip to the main hand instead after the dialogue box. If A, B, and C are all green weapons…

A equipped to Main Hand
B to Off Hand
C unbound.

Right-click C, select equip off-hand
binding dialogue box (accept)
end up with C and B equipped instead of A and C

So, I was lamenting the fact that my engineer isn’t really interested in any of the legendaries due to the fact that he spends most of his time swapping between kits. And then my brain came up with this ridiculous idea:

The Organ Grinder is a beastly looking backpack, metal everywhere, looks like it could make mince out of a dolyack in no time at all. But in the hands of an engineer… it plays music. While using normal weapons it’s silent, but when you activate a kit it plays music with a theme depending on said kit.

Completely impractical, I’m sure, but I figure I might as well put it down :p

Godchi.9072:

Yep, it’s ridiculous receiving 1 dungeon token reward for the first time clearing a different path in a different dungeon on a different day.

Too bad it won’t be fixed soon because it’s not a priority.

Unless your ‘soon’ means within 12 hours, you’re wrong. Fix is scheduled for tonight’s patch.

Jeez, it’s like people think Anet wants to have bugs in the program they’ve been working on for years…

Tonight or tomorrow night, if I’m not mistaken. I’m pretty sure they said they were working on a fix due for the 1/10 patch, can’t remember if that means it comes out FOR Monday, or ON Monday (latter meaning it’ll be active Tuesday morning).

ref.8196:

At the moment the DR system seems to be punishing everyone, but one of the devs wrote this:

“Thank you this is excellent info. We would like dungeons to be legit hard enough to take closer to 45 mins but if we can’t accomplish that goal we can look at the speed clear times from non exploiters and easily adjust the system. The goal is that hardcore farmers don’t even see this thing but only exploiters. We will keep working towards that goal.

Jon"

So their intention is only to punish exploiters. But the thing is it’s hard for them to judge how fast people will be able to do the dungeons. They obviously underestimated it at the moment, since some paths can go down in 20 minutes (like in AC, some bits can essentially be skipped)

That and the bugs, of course.

I’m also guessing that ‘skipping’ trash mobs isn’t working as intended I wouldn’t be surprised if they add some new ‘gates’ or increase the leashes on a lot of dungeon mobs in the next update or two. That’ll make certain paths a smidge more difficult (really not looking forward to having to deal with those first few dogs in TA, or the extra vines in Up path).

Lucas Ashrock.8675:

It’s the spirit of this game Anet want, to make content accessible to everyone. Go to play WoW if you want elitism and special modes for 10 top guilds.
DR trigger repeating the content, and under 30 minutes.

Actually, Anet said several times that Explorable mode paths are supposed to be very hard, and require coordination between several good players to complete. By that standard, many of the paths are a good bit easier than they should be.

There have also been Red posts stating that DR shouldn’t trigger unless you’re under 30 minutes (or whatever the threshold is, they’ve implied it’s not exactly 30) several times in a row. And as long as you bounce between two paths, the flat many-in-a-row condition won’t be an issue either. It’s bugged right now, obviously, but that’s how it’s supposed to work.

If you run with a group that can take several camps/towers/keeps in succession, you can get a relatively large amount of gold and karma. Not to mention the large number of drops.

But yes, the DR system is malfunctioning. Once the bugs are worked out, Anet has said they want to tune both it and the dungeons so that even the speed-farmers won’t be affected, so long as they use ‘legit’ methods. It’s just a safeguard so that another CoF-level exploit doesn’t throw the economy out of whack and devalue the dungeon set(s).

The top tier of players may bump into issues every so often as they improve more and more, but Anet can adjust numbers to compensate. The average player will have absolutely nothing to worry about, so long as they don’t exploit, since I’m guessing said average player often doesn’t have time to do more than a handful of paths on a normal day anyway.

People are just jumping to the worst conclusions because Anet took the silver platter away with the CoF nerf/fix, and OMG I WANT BEST LOOKING ARMOR NOW AND YOU’RE MAKING ME GRIND FOR LONGER WAAAHHHH.

Seriously people. I know everyone feels like they should be adding more content, but it takes time to make and they have to ensure the rest of the game isn’t going to break on them in the meantime.

Please read the stickies. They are aware of the bug(s) in the system and are actively working on getting it fixed. They’re as irritated with it as we all are, I’m sure, but rushing a fix will likely lead to more problems.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Just-to-Clarify-something-on-Map-Chat-and-TOS/first#post275426

ReginaBuenaobra

Secondly, regarding the forums—our moderators do moderate not only for tone, but for constructiveness. For example “+1 or /signed” is not constructive (there is a +1 button, BTW). The moderators will infract people who are providing their feedback in a rude and disrespectful manner. If someone is complaining, but being extremely rude and not constructive, they’re getting an infraction for their tone, not the content. It’s an important distinction. If you all have questions about forum moderation, you can contact the moderators at forums@arena.net.

I really like this idea, but it’s impractical for as much restructuring/(re)programming, and certainly wouldn’t be a quick fix or change (for an expansion sure, but that’s months from now at the minimum). It also doesn’t address all possible exploit methods, but could mesh well with the DR/first run of the day system to reduce the maximum possible if people are using iffy methods.

I would decrease the max number of tokens, maybe to 120 max/40 on repeats, but keep the 5-token minimum. Of course, then people are going to complain about difficulty even more, but Anet did say explorables were supposed to be hard…

So: good idea, likely impractical in the short term but I would suggest Anet giving this a look for an expansion or sometime down the line. Shouldn’t replace DR/first of the day. Former due to possible exploits, latter because players should (in my opinion) not feel like chain-running dungeons are the only way to get money. Numbers may need tweaking, but that’s something Anet needs to do with their data.

@Krazed & others: I never said you can’t be upset, I am myself (if not to a rage inducing degree). Just stop complaining like Anet is trying to screw you over on purpose. They get it, they’re working on it, more info is better but there’s more productive stuff we can be discussing such as balancing issues rather than rehashing the ‘ragerageDRrage’.

They’ve said that (once the system is working) they can tweak the numbers so that legitimate speed clears aren’t affected. Whether that be making the easy dungeon paths harder, or simply lowering the threshold for triggering DR. They don’t want to have DR trigger even on the farmers, so long as they are doing legit runs.

JonPeters

Thank you this is excellent info. We would like dungeons to be legit hard enough to take closer to 45 mins but if we can’t accomplish that goal we can look at the speed clear times from non exploiters and easily adjust the system. The goal is that hardcore farmers don’t even see this thing but only exploiters. We will keep working towards that goal.
Jon

I was literally about to suggest you guys would do this very thing. Glad to see that I was right.

Once the bugs are fixed, my guess is it’ll be trivial to tweak the numbers for each dungeon as the farmers/speed clearers figure it out. I, for one, trust that you guys’ll make it as fair as you can

Not sure what I really expected. It always amazes me how people are able to read something once and assume it’s designed to screw them over.

@fony: Where in the heck are you getting that from? That’s so far from what the DR system would do it’s just mindless panicking.

@Everyone saying I haven’t been effected/don’t run dungeons: Nothing could be further from the truth. No, I’m not running a ton of dungeons, but that’s mostly due to real life rearing its head with midterms. And I’ve been getting reduced rewards since the system came out. It sucks, but my guild’s good enough that I usually don’t suffer more than 2-3 deaths per run of TA (usually because the worms love me) so while I may not make as much profit, I do still make some. Do I want it to work correctly? Of course. But I go in expecting that I may get hit unfairly, because there’s a known issue.

But I’d be much morekitten off if an exploit was found and suddenly the armor I’m working towards is devalued in terms of prestige because everyone farms the hell out of it. I’m willing to deal with the buggy DR (which, if it’s working right, shouldn’t affect me unless I choose to farm only one path constantly) if it keeps that from happening.

Am I happy about it? Not really. But I recognize it as a temporary setback and keep my calm. Anet has a vested interest on getting this working right, they won’t leave it broken for any longer than they have to. I’d rather them take time to test everything they can rather than rush out yet another buggy patch, which takes time to deploy and interrupts everyone’s gameplay.

Haette.2701:

Dungeon rewards drop off by 66% after your first run, why isn’t anyone outraged about that? Why should I be punished for running twice by having my tokens cut by over half? Where is the justice in the world and rabble rabble rabble rabble rabble

All this kittening is just sad. Have some friggin’ patience, the armor vendors aren’t going anywhere.

At first I was going to facepalm.

Then I loled (well, chucked, but whatever).

Insanity – repeating the same action and expecting different results.

You knew you were getting bugged rewards, and Anet has posted several times that it’s not intended. And yet you continued to do runs regardless, and say they are purposely screwing you over. Ok then…

And call what exploits? Doing something that’s obviously not working as intended to bypass or trivialize content? Yeah, that’s the definition of an exploit. Technically, you should get banned (or at least suspended) for exploiting those flaws. You agreed not to when you started playing (read the Rules of Conduct if you don’t believe me).

If you didn’t do any actual exploiting, that’s good. Just means you were hit with the DR bug like a lot of the rest of us. Which, again, is not working as intended and they’re fixing it.

Also, about the kd… did you consider watching for his animation and dodging his attack? Blocking it? Bringing a stunbreaker? Anything like that? Gotta play smart with the bosses…

Hayden.7920:

Galador Dux.6359:

The level of your gear means a lot less versus the quality of your play/builds and the stat spread on your gear.

Level 80 rares of any stat spread are pretty much dirt cheap on the TP last I checked. The difference between that and exotics isn’t a monumental difference, and certainly wouldn’t be enough to be the difference between success and failure unless he lived by the skin of his teeth. In other words, check your game before blaming your gear.

obligatory comment about explorable mode being hard

you’ve adressed what you had an answer for, but that leaves a big hole in the area of – something to show for our efforts. leaving a challenging dungeon with half of the full reward is much less of a sting than getting nothing at all just because the final boss was rediculously tough, and is an exclusive feat to players fortunate enough to have a stack of gamer friends and a good tight guild, mic’d up and ever active in the same scene. if you know of a guild on the every server who constantly organises successful dungeon runs like those which obviously justify your faith in the system, then tell me where they are. otherwise, we have to make do with PuG’s, and when coordinated right that should pay off. these incredibosses were built around a SUPER specific idea, which goes against the idea that removing the trinity created “play how you like”, I play well but apparently i need a headset and new friends. my 5 tokens per run in any case says, the system blows.

That’s just the thing. Anet always said dungeons were supposed to be raid-level difficulty, requiring a lot of coordination to do (or at least be in a position where everyone knows the mechanics really well). And, to my memory, it wasn’t ‘play how you like’ but ‘play with the person, not the class’. Yes, you may need to tweak your major traits and swap a weapon set or a utility skill or two depending on the situation. But you should never feel ‘ok, we need a guardian for this dungeon’ sort of thing. If you have 4 sufficiently skilled friends, it shouldn’t matter what profession they are.

All that aside… yes, it does kind of bite that we don’t get tokens for each boss anymore. But to be fair, it does stop the ‘run in, kill first boss, reset’ farm, which kind of goes against the point of the dungeons. I’m neutral on the issue.

Xazereth.4058:

I have almost all rare items.

Stat spread(s)? Specifically, are you stacking any Toughness, Vitality, or Healing Power?

And again, gear only amounts to so much in GW2. Gameplay means a heck of a lot more in comparison (though having some defensive stats certainly doesn’t hurt at all).

Cromx.3941:

Dude they did this on purpose its not bugged its what the programmed in. I am getting 6 silver a run for reward. Just tried CM explore Ausra path I lost 6 silver repairing, cant even finish.

The shotty guy was chain KDing me till dead….amazing game guys Anet is such a class company let me tell you. Worst gamign company ever. They did this on purpose and its still not fixed.

I lose money running dungeons, and I have been ripped off well voer a gold for this pos game. Where is that reward? Are they going to make it right? Do the right thing? heck no.

I guess I can run around the open zones and farm trash mobs right? We can do that right? Or is that an exploit too? What isnt an exploit Anet? You mean running your dungeons killing the mobs you put there and getting pre patch rewards that YOU put in the game? Was that an exploit? Or is that just your krappy programming…what lousy joke of a company.

… Yeah, I can’t tell if you’re paranoid or just riding the rage train. Or both.

If there’s one thing I can guarantee it’s that they didn’t intend the DR system to affect everyone. They’ve said it’s a bug, which by definition means it’s an unintended effect.

Also, if you’re loosing more than 36s per run (that’s the ideal reward, iirc) chances are you need to improve your game. Explorable mode is supposed to be hard, etc etc.

kKagari.6804:

Galador Dux.6359:

@kKagari (next post): All of which are reactive changes, which could come days after significant harm has come to the economy and the prestige of that armor set, much like the CoF set is now. I don’t want people to see the TA set I’m working towards and think ‘oh, he probably farmed using that exploit to get it’. The DR system can be modified if it needs to be. Peoples’ opinions take a lot longer to change.

If there was such a concern for people’s opinion then Arenanet should be extremely worried about their’s, with a string of bungled fixes and poor implementations. The solutions I briefly mentioned wouldn’t even need to be ‘reactive’ changes. Perhaps they should’ve thought about it in the first place. See, the funny thing is, IF the DR was implemented in a working state, before release, then their would be praise about Arenanet’s foresight into their game design. NOW however, it feels like a complete cop-out. “We can never be ahead of exploiters, so lets not even try”. Worse still is, why would there even be an urgency to root out these exploits in future. They have the ultimate safe guard in place already. Exploiters are likely not going to exploit anymore, but the people that happen upon an exploit by accident will be the people who suffer most, the honest gamers.

You’re hardly going to be punished if you ‘happen upon an exploit’. Anet has stated you have to make multiple sub-30 runs before DR starts taking affect (ignoring the current bugs, of course). ‘happen upon’ implies once. Players report it, players don’t use it again (or even reverse it, if possible), players suffer no ill effects.

To hit DR you would have to do it multiple times, which would constitute exploiting. Which is against the rules anyway, so I don’t care what penalties you’re getting at that point, because you should be looking at a ban.

In hindsight, yes the DR system would have been a good idea to have at launch, and yes, a bug free program would be wonderful. But it wasn’t, and it isn’t, and anyone expecting absolutely no bugs has obviously never played an MMO before, and especially not an MMO launch. Does that make it ok? Not really, but I have full confidence that they’re trying their hardest to fix it. Which is all we can realistically expect from anyone.

Skyrant Kangaroomouse.7458:

Galador Dux.6359:

@DeadlyStormZ:

• Removing the DR system comes with its own return of problems, such as the rampant farming of CoF (which, let’s be honest, the removal of which is a big reason a lot of people arekitten off)

• No QA team in existence can accurately simulate 100,000+ people simultaneously and actively causing ‘hits’ on a program that is also dealing with another 200,000+ people doing seemingly unrelated things on the same program. This is just a misunderstanding of the realities of programming. Understandable, but unrealistic.

*The rampant farming of CoF or any dungeon for that matter can be fixed by fixing the exploits and making the path in question harder. There is no need for a DR system. Fixing the exploits should be the main priority not introducing penalties.

*Part from the fact that obvious exploits have nothing to do with simulating hits there are QA tools specifically designed to simulate these amounts of usage or hits as you call it. I have worked with these tools and they give very accurate metrics and can be customized up to a sophistication that rivals any bot. Some use in game AI to simulate players, these are not new, they are standard in the IT world and are in use for a few decades.

As I mentioned above, it takes time for the exploit to be reported, verified, fixed, and patched. During that time, players will invariably be abusing that exploit, which could cause a massive influx of gold and a cheapening of the related armor set, both of which will affect far more players than those abusing the exploit. Not to mention the fix will likely be rushed to minimize said impact, which in turn means it will be more likely to introduce other bugs, and so on.

In contrast with the DR ‘safety net’, which would rapidly demolish any possible profits from the exploit, not to mention raising flags in and of itself. This not only brings attention to the bug more swiftly, but also gives the programmers more time to work out a fix before too much harm is brought to the market.

In regards to the other point, you are correct. I meant the comment more in the ‘infinite monkeys on infinite keyboards’ sense: someone, somewhere, somehow is going to figure out how to break something in the game, whether by accident or experimentation. I doubt there’s ever been an online game where something didn’t need to be fixed after release (excluding exceedingly simple stuff, of course).

The level of your gear means a lot less versus the quality of your play/builds and the stat spread on your gear.

Level 80 rares of any stat spread are pretty much dirt cheap on the TP last I checked. The difference between that and exotics isn’t a monumental difference, and certainly wouldn’t be enough to be the difference between success and failure unless he lived by the skin of his teeth. In other words, check your game before blaming your gear.

obligatory comment about explorable mode being hard

Read the stickies. It’s bugged, they’re working on it.

If you only play 2 hours a day, there’s not a chance in hell you should be hitting the DR system unless you’re exploiting. Assuming you aren’t, you shouldn’t have problems once they fix it.

@kKagari (next post): All of which are reactive changes, which could come days after significant harm has come to the economy and the prestige of that armor set, much like the CoF set is now. I don’t want people to see the TA set I’m working towards and think ‘oh, he probably farmed using that exploit to get it’. The DR system can be modified if it needs to be. Peoples’ opinions take a lot longer to change.

@kKagari: An exploit is an unseen bug or flaw in the system that allows for bypassing or trivialization of content. By definition, they literally can’t be ahead of exploiters, because it’s something nobody caught.

It’s a lot like the million monkeys on keyboards thing. If you throw enough people at something, someone is eventually going to work out something that the much smaller group at Anet missed. Fact of life, and happens with a lot of programs – why do you think tech support exists? If it always worked right, we wouldn’t need them.

@Joe Chip: Valid point, though to be honest it’s like filling a cup with a known hole in it with water then complaining it spilled on you. If you knew it was bugged, you were kind of accepting the risk on subsequent attempts that it would still not work correctly.

@DeadlyStormZ:

• Removing the DR system comes with its own return of problems, such as the rampant farming of CoF (which, let’s be honest, the removal of which is a big reason a lot of people arekitten off)

• If you’re going to argue pure efficiency, re-read my aside. You spend somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the total time just running each path once per day versus farming one (or more) paths constantly. Last I checked, less time spent is more efficient.

• No QA team in existence can accurately simulate 100,000+ people simultaneously and actively causing ‘hits’ on a program that is also dealing with another 200,000+ people doing seemingly unrelated things on the same program. This is just a misunderstanding of the realities of programming. Understandable, but unrealistic.

• I know this sounds like a cop-out, but there are other things in the game to do besides dungeons, that lead to the same quality rewards in terms of statistics (and aesthetics, depending on your preferences). If they handed every shiny piece of armor to you on a silver platter, would you honestly still be playing? Yes, there’s grind, but it’s of the ‘I feel like doing this because it sounds fun/has a reward I want’ versus the more typical ‘I need to do this so I can do that so I can do this other thing that I actually want to do’. In other words, it’s all perspective.

@Melfice: Because Programming is Hard, especially with software as complex as a real-time MMO, and there’s no amount of testing that equates to a hundred thousand people hitting it at the same time.

And a rollback would likely also eliminate several of the bug fixes that they’ve also rolled out with these patches. Do the people stuck on their storyline and wanting to continue not merit the same attention as those doing dungeons? Necromancers with a issue list a mile long?

Yes, it’s buggy. No, it’s not ok. But it’s not as simple as flipping a switch and being done with it; if it was, you bet they would have so they can get to designing new stuff. Anet’s got a good track record by me, I’m sure they’re doing everything they can.

JonPeters.5630:

Plain and simple this system is a safety net for stopping crazy farming when people find exploits that make each run super fast. We are also addressing those loopholes, but that takes time and new ones might always be discovered. If you and your group do the dungeons without skipping large sections and run different chains this system shoul(bugs aside) never impact you.

Addendum for clarity, super fast means < 30 minutes, and even then you must hit that speed multiple times in a row before you start seeing any impact.

Emphasis mine.

Seriously guys. Yes there are bugs, and there will be bugs, and there will never be a time that there are not bugs in a system this large. It’s a hard fact of programming that when you have hundreds of thousands of people interacting with the same instance of a program, things will invariably break for some reason or another. Let alone the fact that there’s probably additional content being designed by people not fixing the current bugs right now (well, maybe not right now since it’s 7 at night over there, but that’s beside the point).

From the above and other dev statements, I surmise the following is true about dungeons and dungeon rewards:

1) The ideal rewards are 60 tokens for the first run of each path on each day (determined by a universal reset time on entrance), 20 tokens on each repeat of that path on the same day, and a sum of silver and exp.

2) Dungeons are supposed to be tuned such that even the best teams find it very hard if not impossible to complete in less than 30 minutes, if done correctly (without exploits, in other words).

3) Diminishing Returns should affect the standard rewards when one or both of two conditions are true:

A: You run the same path back-to-back within the same reset period (possibly with a small allowance of runs)
B: You have several consecutive runs of less than 30 minutes, ignoring reset periods.

4) The DR mechanic is not meant to punish players, except those that choose to farm one easy path over and over in a small time period or use bugged mechanics to finish dungeons significantly faster than expected, the second of which is against the Rules of Conduct and thus, strictly speaking, should lead to a suspension or ban (Yes, it’s bugged. No, that does not give you the right to exploit it. You legally agreed not to when you started playing).

An aside: I would posit that these two actions tend to go hand-in-hand, as most ‘legit’ players will want to do each path of a dungeon at least once to get the first-run-of-the-day bonus of x3 tokens, an activity that should take a minimum of 1.5 hours, and likely longer. This is a significant time investment for most people, and any further time would be for a much lesser reward until after the reset. For reference, at 60 tokens per run, a full dungeon set could be gotten in as little as a week of only doing the three first-runs per day for a total of 20 completions, and a minimum of 10 hours. At 20/run, that increases to ~50 runs and 25 hours, assuming a blisteringly fast 30 minutes per run.

5) The DR system is unfortunately bugged, causing players to be affected even when they are playing normally. They have isolated and fixed at least one bug, and the system is undergoing internal testing currently. In other words, the system is not working as intended. Please stop acting like it is.

Are there balancing issues with the dungeons? Possibly. But that’s a different discussion altogether; the Diminishing Returns system for dungeon rewards shouldn’t impact anyone playing normally, except for maybe the very top tier of players than can clear some paths legitimately in under 30 minutes. And if that ends up being the case, I’m sure Anet will re-evaluate either the system or that path.

So if everyone can just take a deep breath and understand that Anet is working on a solution for the DR system bugs, we can stop worrying about this (though keep submitting reports!) and focus more on other issues.

Well… darn. There goes my theory.

Ah well, one less thing to worry about while waiting for them to figure out what’s really wrong, I guess.

I’ve been puzzling over what could be causing the weird DR triggers for a while now. People often have wildly different results despite the fact that, aside from profession, they all appear to have exactly the same initial conditions: haven’t run since last reset, all level 80, etc etc. But, since everyone gets different end results, there must be something differentiating them, probably something everyone is overlooking. Then my mind recalled a conversation I had earlier today where sometimes programmers use seemingly strange ways to solve a problem, which can lead to unexpected bugs or results down the line. Then it hit me:

What if the DR mechanic is mistakenly using time since last death instead of time since you entered the instance?

Please note this is merely a hypothesis, and I don’t have any proof to back it up. But it could explain why people are getting such varied results.

THIS THREAD IS NOT FOR DISCUSSION ABOUT THE REWARDS, ONLY STATISTICS! PLEASE KEEP DISCUSSION ELSEWHERE!

Ok guys, I’ve seen a lot of people throwing ideas and personal evidence around on what could be causing the issues with the DR system for dungeon rewards, but nothing gathered or in a way that’s easy for Anet to reference. So I’d figure I’d start up a list myself.

If you are getting reduced rewards, or someone in your group is, please list the following information (as much and as accurate as you have access to) so that Anet can find it:

Dungeon path completed:
Who opened the dungeon:
Date and Time of start:
Time from entrance to completion:

Tokens earned by [Member 1]:
Time since previous completion:
Tokens earned by [Member 2]:
Time since previous completion:
Tokens earned by [Member 3]:
Time since previous completion:
Tokens earned by [Member 4]:
Time since previous completion:
Tokens earned by [Member 5]:
Time since previous completion:

Time between this and next run (if applicable):

The questions are based off of what I’ve seen people suggesting as issues, as well as basic statistics. If you think there might be some other factor this list doesn’t cover, PM me and I’ll add it.

The trick is figuring out some way to fulfill the desire to make other dungeons worthwhile, while not making it so that everyone just farms the same two paths back and forth. A tough mix.

A suggestion that came up a while ago was to add in some form of a daily quest like the zeishen quests from GW1. My suggestion was that the reward would be a number of ‘special’ tokens that could either be used for special rewards that can’t be gotten with normal tokens, or traded for normal tokens of any type at a favorable ratio.

I don’t know that the random mechanic is necessary (as regards to which path, anyway) but I do like the idea of having some incentive to do dungeons other than the easiest (two) paths for the dungeon you want the armor for and mostly ignore the others (maybe do them each once to get the achievements).

There’s already something like this in GW1 with the Zeishen quests, so it’s not like it’s nothing they’ve done before. The trick is to implement it in some way that doesn’t break immersion (too much) and have the reward be enough to make it a viable alternative

Maybe 40-50 tokens that can be transferred to another type 1:1 (which trumps the 30 on first per day/20 on repeat for most dungeons) or saved and used on a special set unique to those tokens.

Auesis.7301:

It’s possible, but unnecessarily overtuned. Our party was 1 Thief (me), 2 Warriors and 2 Guardians. You need to maintain a huge DPS on the mobs from the start so that they don’t overwhelm you. The Guardians would use their mass pull skills and the Warriors would smash their bursts while I spammed Cluster Bomb over the top and nuked as many as possible. When we got 70-80% of the way through, we’d be caught in a crowd on cooldown, so I’d use the rest of my initiative to maintain evasion while the rest kited normally until the event finished. Nobody got defeated, and I got knocked down once towards the end.

This. This is analyzing your group, forming a tactic, and executing it. Not flawlessly maybe, but this is what is expected of groups.

I’m sure balance will come with time, the guy need to make a significant change to make sure it was enough. If they don’t have completion data I’d be surprised, and if it is found to be ‘overtuned’ I’m fairly certain he’ll lower it back down a bit.

Elezen.2809:

afflaq.3947:

Elezen.2809:

Well I did this dungeon some hours ago and we did kite the monster at the “defend when magg plant the bomb” and died a lot of time for each player… well it realy cost alot to repair but we did it and the chest didnt even appear….but when we finished the stage in the ritual room it give the chest then we talked with magg and it did the “plant the bomb” event again…. so we glitched the dungeon without doing the “jump accross the door glitch” but did the dungeon as they wanted us to do so honestly i dont know if we should realy kite the monster or not now … because the result of kite the monster / glitch the dungeon will be the same!
PS: Sorry in advance i know my english is bad ^^

I’ve noticed this behavior as well — If Magg dies at almost the same time that the bomb timer reaches 100% then the “event” will reset but the wall will be destroyed and you could potentially engage/start the final encounter. I would assume the proper ‘fix’ for this would be that if the event ‘resets’ some method of the wall respawning should be in place, but I’m sure that it’s something that’ll flesh itself out over time.

So if it a glitch will i get banned? o.O

Anet doesn’t ban if you accidentally happen upon a glitch/accident.

Anet bans if you purposely abuse said glitch to avoid doing the content as intended and/or gain an advantage.

So no, you’re fine. Just don’t attempt to abuse that glitch (or any glitch)

You sir, are a scholar and a gentleman.

Besides, these systems also discourage what many people have been yelling that they want anyway: grinding. If you don’t grind, these systems by definition won’t affect you (some are implying the dungeon DR system is buggy right now, but that’s another kettle of fish).

Lelouch Lamperouge.3716:

Who cares about “prestige”? I thought this game was about having fun, not about “OOOOOOOH look at that guy, he so special that he do dungeon 70 times. He SOOOOOOOO Pro and l33t!”

To some people, such as myself, the ‘challenge’ in getting that shiny armor is fun. Likewise with everything else in the game, perhaps most especially sPvP where more shiny armor is pretty much the entire point!

It’s all about doing what you enjoy most, whether that be difficult dungeons or large scale events. And each method has its own rewards you can’t get otherwise (although I would argue that WvW needs a better-looking set for badges since the ‘primary’ reward is available to everyone on the server regardless of participation, but that’s for another forum).

And for those that like everything, Legendaries!

Soulblitz.5809:

Galador Dux.6359:

Solution: get better and stop dying! Suddenly dungeons are full profit!

Ok that’s fine, I’ll just stop getting killed in three or four hits by the “trash” mobs in my full defence/healing setup as an elementalist. Thanks for the advice!

You’re sarcastic, but I never said it would be a simple change. Dungeons were never intended to be easy etc etc. Figure out what you can do to keep from getting hit, consider changing utilities/major traits to fit the situation, flipping between attunements in your case, it all requires skill and knowledge of your class and build.

Last I checked, you had a downed state you can get pulled up from fairly quickly as well. I’m sure at least one other person in the party has a way to keep the mobs controlled while the others get you up. You do communicate with your party, I hope?

Vargs.6234:

I didn’t need to grind one super difficult dungeon over and over to get an elite set in GW1, and I’ve never heard any complaints about it there.

Maybe not, but to get the FoW set you needed a whole lot of ectos, and those were either expensive or time-consuming to get. Likewise with the Tormented weapons. As the devs have stated, a lot of the same whining was being done about DoA (and presumably UW) back in the day, before people worked out builds that were able to get the job done. And even then, you needed a decent, if not high, amount of skill to get those runs done swiftly.

The difference between DoA and GW2’s dungeons is that the balance of builds and skill has shifted towards skill. And my guess is that those complaining about the changes want it to be an easy ‘run this and do that’ formula. I want to headdesk every time someone says ‘it costs me money to run a dungeon now’, because that means you’re not doing it right. You only lose money if you need to repair (or use consumables, but those are pretty cheap from the TP). And you only need to repair if you are defeated. Solution: get better and stop dying! Suddenly dungeons are full profit!

Anet’s philosophy, as I understand it, is that you shouldn’t be forced to grind through content you don’t want to do. While exotics are expensive, there are many different ways to earn them. And full rares should be enough to get through most if not all content anyway, there’s not a massive difference in stats between the two.