Guild Wars 2

Yes. Because obvious.

Just ran fractals again and both Watery Depths and Swamp leave me feeling the same. One is a bit too cheese (instant death way too easy with durability damage) and the other is too RNG. Beyond that both could be extremely fun and well put-together if a few tweaks were made.

Watery Depths: It’s far far far too easy to die and on top of that you take armor damage every time. It’s rather ridiculous to have a party coming to the end of that run with full damaged/broken gear. And a bit broken given how easy it is to die. Also the boss at the end, the Jellyfish Beast has an absurd amount of health given the relatively low amount of damage given from the average underwater combat skills of many, if not all, professions.

Solution: don’t take durability damage on death or make it much harder to die during this particular event(s) (both the dolphin and the darkness ones) i.e. reduce the haste of the luminous plant pickups but lower the damage of the swarms lurking in the darkness. Lower the health of the final boss to be on par with much lower damage output of aquatic weapons/skills OR finally raise the damage of all aquatic weapons/skills (which may warrant its own topic).

Swamp: Wisps seem to despawn on their own randomly right after picking them up, well before the 30 second timer. Clearly a bug. Also the spawning walls seem to go down and come right back up ‘randomly’ in front of a carrier keeping them from moving anywhere and thus rendering the event nearly impossible without a massive stroke of luck. RNG is and never has been a desirable/fun dungeon mechanic.

Solution: De-randomise the wall spawning somewhat. Find out what causes the random despawns of the wisps 5-10 seconds after they are picked up and fix it =).

Possibly more later but hopefully not!

As an aside I do want to say that fractals like Cliffside (my personal favorite) and the “Uncategorised” fractal are very well done. Big hand to Anet for those. I personally haven’t had the Jade one yet but I’ve heard conflicting things about it so I will wait until there is a better experience on my end or someone else may wish to contribute.

Seconded.

The lockout is extremely ridiculous. People get tired, people have lives, people don’t always have 90 minutes+ to spend on a series of 3 fractals of varying length and difficulty. DC’s happen due to the game being unstable or internet being wonky. We shouldn’t be punished for that =/

I think there is a massive disparity between the amount of effort it takes to kill the new zone’s mobs versus the reward you get. Their health pools and damage are far too high, as well.

Even the non-veteran mobs on Southsun have veteran level HP and damage if not higher. Arah mobs are listed at level 83-85 but these are supposedly level 80 and hit like 85 vets. The vets hit like champs and the champs hit like legendary mobs. This is on a guardian WITH toughness gear, no glass cannon spec. Something is definitely off with the effort = reward of the new content.

I guess those public test realms were a bad idea after all.

Still think this is a good idea, not hard to implement and not too much to ask for, Anet. =)

Drat, I’ll go swat him upside the head.

It’s not that we “use rulesets” it’s just a very convenient means of conflict resolution or adding a bit of random chance when we do events and so on and so forth. As in any work of fiction, when two characters get into a conflict and sometimes combat is the only resolution both players want to win, most likely, but also want a way to win that will be fair to both. So a random number generator will often be used to determine whose attack succeeded and whose failed, for instance. It’s an extremely useful tool, all around.

Another use is doing some turn-based “D&D” style events for guild members where your members are in conflict with imaginary NPC’s and are using the RNG to determine the success and failure of their attacks and actions (this could also be player characters). It just depends but the possibilities for its use far outweigh the effort of implementing… five? lines of code.

Oh and there’s always roll for blame. Can’t forget that lol.

Courtesy of my roommate:

int main() { srand((unsigned)time(0)); int random_integer;
int lowest=1, highest=100; int range=(highest-lowest)1; for(int index=0; index<20; index){ random_integer = lowestint(range*rand()/(RAND_MAX + 1.0)); cout << random_integer << endl; } }

That’ll be $200.

Kidding but that’s just an example of how a simple line of code can really help out a large mass of your player base.

The trouble is getting everyone onboard for the outside program and agreeing to use it. Putting it in game makes it easily accessible and thus more acceptable to the common player.

Might I also add that a random number generator code script is TINY and extremely easy to add? There’s really no reason not to have this and a lot of us would really appreciate it.

Thankyou, Anthony. We really do appreciate it.

Because its affected dozens of people and needs to be fixed.

No idea, but some response from Anet would be GREATLY appreciated at least to let us know that we’ll get our achievement and titles since we’ve clearly done all the work for it =/

Done both PvP games multiple rounds before posting this. No dice.

Same here, 4/5. Hope I’m not gonna get cheated out of the achievement, a lot of us put in some hard work to get them all done =/

It’s not that they forgot to add them it’s that they have suddenly disappeared. They WERE there before.

Still a problem for me as well.

Good responses so far, save a few silly people ;-P

So what about it, Anet? Anything to say on this?

Well I guess if you want me to be extremely clear, then sure.

Bosses are ridiculous in Story Mode Dungeons. Abilities that can one shot a heavy armor wearing class in full exotics etc. Bad balancing in general that leaves a group running a steady stream from the nearest way point which is pretty far off (and I might add, in Explorer modes there is only one of which is really silly).

To be blunt the story mode dungeons NEED to be balanced around a group of the minimum level required to enter and assuming that that group is in full blue-quality gear. Explorer modes are fine, don’t touch them.

Rewards from dungeons need to be upped so there’s a definite gain from running them other than tokens which are a limited hook anyways. The state of the trading post’s economy might suggest either more valuable items should be rewarded or more money rewarded (upwards of a gold+ for completion) or even both to try and counteract the ridiculous amount of inflation. (Yes I’m aware the injecting more money into the economy doesn’t always fix inflation or even makes it worse but until the TP is reworked so things aren’t default posted at a copper above vendor price then the TP will always be borked.

Dungeon finder and summoning stone style rallying device should be implemented. As it stands we spend upwards of 3 silver (I know it’s not that much but it does add up) just to GET to a dungeon and then another 3 silver to return to a town (High average, of course).

I’m sure there’s more but it is late. I do post this at the risk of sounding whiney or gasp entitled but try to understand that what I really want is a fun dungeon crawling experience, to feel that I was well rewarded for my time and effort and that even if no gear I could actually use dropped that I still wasn’t walking out at a total loss. I hope that makes sense.

First to set the stage:

Fun
Noun
1. A source of enjoyment, amusement, or pleasure.
2. Enjoyment; amusement: have fun at the beach.
3. Playful, often noisy, activity.

From there we can derive that the opposite of fun is anything but those things. I propose the word “maddening”.

Fun, to me, is when I do something and I’m able to walk away with a sense of accomplishment, some cash in my bags, and maybe some loot that makes me think “wow that was sure worth my time and effort, even if I can’t use this stuff I could sell it and make a small but tidy profit.”

You know what running GW2’s story mode dungeons is like? None of that. It is an investment for which there is little to no return. Luckily for most it is a one time investment that allows them to get to the explorer mode dungeons where not only is the content generally “easier” (by way of meaning it doesn’t down your whole party and involve the strategy of graveyard zerging) but also nets you an actual reward in the form of tokens, which should be universal. Account bound was the first step but having to slog through the same dungeon day in and day out to acquire an armor set we might like is just drudgery and completely removes the desire to go back and do it after said armor set is acquired. In fact it promotes an ideal of “WHEW I got that dungeon set complete. NEVER going back there again!” (Which is not really helping out the community who still needs to run it so they can access explorer mode. You want people go back and help others? Make it worth their time and not hair-rippingly frustrating).

Bottom line is that these dungeons are generally NOT FUN. I’m not the only one who thinks so and I’m sure a PvP hero will be along shortly to tell me to L2P and stuff but the team I run with is not stupid or bad. We’re well geared out, 2 of us working on our legendaries (which btw? The price of the precursors is kitten should probably look at that, too), and train explorer mode dungeons like nothing even on bad days. When something isn’t fun in a game the appeal to do them diminishes and disappears. People decide that the PvE in the game is crap, more fun elsewhere, and leave. Your customer base shrinks and then your game ends up in the pile of “not as good as WoW” which is already a small hill of corpses.

MMO’s cannot be supported by just their PvP content alone. This is proven again and again so please, do yourself a favor Anet, and try not to make PvE a giant frustrating suckfest. We’ll appreciate it, we’ll love you for it, and we’ll continue to shove our money down your throats for it.

Also knowing the logic employed so far by you guys, this isn’t a call to make Explorer mode dungeons harder to match the difficulty of story mode. Just stop yourself right there, slap yourself in the face for even thinking it, and help make this game’s PvE more fun. Thanks.

It would be nice if story mode wasn’t significantly more difficult than explorer in more than a few instances. HotW story being the one on the top of my mind, right now. Seriously, 4 guild members, all in exotic gear bringing a lvl 76 guardian through for his first time and we are getting WRECKED in here. Seriously I’ve died so many times that even if I do get the full 26 silver which I doubt I will, it won’t really cover the cost of repairs. In fact I will lose money by doing this. Half the bosses are basically “GY ZERG UNTIL THEY ARE DEAD”. So seriously I am pretty upset right now. I’m upset by the crappy amount of balancing. I’m upset by the attitude of the devs being “Our dungeons are too hard? LEARN TO PLAY!” or “Explorer mode is easier than story mode? K! /buffs the kitten out of story mode /trollface”. I’m very irritated. Like I want to break my keyboard in half irritated.

Anet, your story mode dungeons are total BS, your balancing BS and your response to the community regarding them is BS. Take your story dungeons and shove them up your kitten*.

*I don’t advocate animal cruelty in any way.

I’m kind of curious about this as well. I’ve got a good set of MF gear and food and I’ve yet to get yellows in the last few days let alone any exotics… I’m really starting to think something is up with this… =/

U.S. Tarnished Coast server. Officer and up ranks can’t view guild vendors, can’t set queue, can’t do anything to or for the guild.

I’m gonna have to agree with Crucifer on this one. It’s a very thin line of principles and in this case the Anet development team really just fudged it hard. A customer base needs to trust a development team and a development team needs to listen to its customer base.

However in another thread they did say that they are addressing the loot issue in dungeons so I’m HOPING that they will take that seriously and understand how seriously fubar’d the current system is. I have faith that this is their chance at redeeming the previous mistake. I’ll stay tuned for that.