Showing Posts For Kogasa Tatara.1409:
Bugged in Sorrow’s Furnace.
Actually thinking of a new tactic. Have a guy on the team strip and be totally naked, preferably with one or two Break Stuns. Or perhaps wear some really cheap level 1 – 10 armor.
You know what’s coming. Have the naked “Disable Trigger” walk up, trigger the disables, break stun, get disabled again, etc. After the repeated AoE disable land on the guy, then go in and mop up. In GW1 that’s like ordering Vekk to charge in and die horribly in order to draw out the enemy team’s initial spike damage, except this time you are doing it with a player.
Does that even work?
As said before in this thread, I think it bears repeating since the question has gone unanswered:
Were the changes that were implemented actually tested?
This. I can’t blame Robert here for not testing it – MMO game design is a crappy job where you get last minute notice and you have to rush crap out. However, if that is not the case then there’s not as much a legit excuse.
And if it’s a rush job due to time constraint, everything makes perfect sense. There was a semi-exploit where players were getting levels and money way too fast for the health of the game and it needed to be plugged. Is it a crude barricade? Yes. Is it effective in stopping the dam from crashing and taking the game with it? Yes.
What did people expect was going to happen with every ‘how can I level faster?’ or ‘how can I earn money?’ thread having posts like ‘CM, 80 in 2 days, son!’. Anet probably considered the entire story mode an exploit, and instead of mass banning people for taking advantage of it, they just destroyed it altogether.
Damage control. They need to do damage control since the contents between CM and zerging in strait+ is causing a lot of people to get to level 80 faster than they previously intended, with lower skill level then they’d intended (because you only learn so much by running in zerg groups and CM). So yeah. Did they handled it elegantly? Probably not as much as they could. Did they responded in time? Probably a bit late, but it’s about on time.
I wouldn’t say “Good job”, but they did what they could, and they are suffering the backlash from their playerbase. They had to pick between a fast salvage and calming the player base. One causes unhappy player base, the other causes a premature group of lv. 80s making the MMO’s life expentancy shorter.
In GW1, when War in Kyrta content was coming out, there was one quest where you need to escort Courier Falken from LA to… Somewhere. The reward was really, really good for how short it was. Was it challenging? A bit, but it’s worth so much (a plat or something + 5 war supplies?) that I ran it for a few days. I am a bit (well, really) ashamed to admit it, but it was really good reward and I wanted war supplies for some reason – probably an Oppressor weapon for HoM.
The point is, there’ll be times when the designers screw up, making content too easy for it’s reward. They’ll either nerf the reward, or make the content harder. I am not entirely sure how this change is done (I have my doubts still), but sometimes all you can do in a hurry is to… well… hurry up and plug a hole in the dam. You can fix it later, but you got to stop the flooding first.
… I’ll cross my fingers and hope that this is emergency plug, not a permanent fix, and they’ll revisit the issue later.
If dungeons aren’t intended to be a grind, why exactly does it take over 50 runs to get a full armor set..?
Really confusing me here.
The game designers do not want you to do the dungeon over and over again in rapid period of time. Perhaps they want you to get the full armor set in, say, over 3 months of play, playing for a few hours a week. The rapid repeating penalty is probably to discourage players from rapidly doing a dungeon over and over. However, punishment is never a good answer, and thus the backlash from the player base, who doesn’t want to be punished.
tl;dr they want you to do the dungeon casually once in a while, not 9 times per day over a few days.
a lockout timer does a better job than this “fix”
Yeah, probably, but I don’t work for ANet and it’s not like I have a portfolio piece with shipped works, else I’d totally apply for the job.
If dungeons aren’t intended to be a grind, why exactly does it take over 50 runs to get a full armor set..?
Really confusing me here.
The game designers do not want you to do the dungeon over and over again in rapid period of time. Perhaps they want you to get the full armor set in, say, over 3 months of play, playing for a few hours a week. The rapid repeating penalty is probably to discourage players from rapidly doing a dungeon over and over. However, punishment is never a good answer, and thus the backlash from the player base, who doesn’t want to be punished.
tl;dr they want you to do the dungeon casually once in a while, not 9 times per day over a few days.
Afaik all classes have some form of stability, some even have group based ones (Warrior/Guardian)
i havent seen one on thief?
Dagger Storm. (not that I use it for stability unless I am running)
Optionally you can just roll for initiative and ignore him. Or just smoke powder and invis. Or when KD’d, you can still steal… So you steal and shadowstep to another enemy so your allies at least have more time to react.
Lots of options.
This is quickly going downhill into a mess of arguments between players, one party saying it’s too hard so they kite/ignore/bug out the guys while the other party say it’s doable as long as you kill a bunch of squishy DPSes and kite the rest because the rest is a waste of time and effort to fight.
Can we not just all agree that you can’t fight them head to head and need kiting regardless? Just that one solution is to take down DPSes so that kiting becomes easier/managable.
(It still feels a bit silly to me, though. In Sorrow’s Furnance back in GW1, those guys would be using Signet of Resurrection on their allies and showing you the best trollface in game.)
Changing a number from 100 to 200 and changes the mob spawn by a bit seems like lazy design tweak to me, sorry. If the solution is made within 5 minutes or so after gauging the event, I can’t say much since all designers do it, but if the number change is a deliberate decision, then there are some attention to detail that you are not paying.
Whats easier? Thinking creatively and doing something fun that requires going back to the drawing board and developing actual content?
Or going into the ‘code’ and changing a single value?
Hmmm…GREAT DEV there…GREAT DEV.
Too expensive. If you were the one funding this, you wouldn’t pay for a redesign, you wouldn’t be giving your designers time to redesign because it’s a majorly exploitable bug. You wouldn’t be giving your designers a chance at it. They’d have to go “kitten, what should I do STAB” and make a decision and implement it.
I doubt Mr. Hrouda had time to test it precisely because of that. Unless he did, in which case I… Have nothing good to say, so I won’t say anything. It’s honestly ok, as an emergency fix. If it’s exploitable, first make it non-exploitable. You can fix it thereafter. That’s totally ok. As long as you fix it after you plug the hole.
As other people have mentioned:
Making a 100 second timer to 200 second timer doesn’t do anything. The original mob is already too hard / too annoying to fight for most groups. Making a fight that people do by avoiding twice as long just make them either avoid the fight for twice as long or find some other ways to ignore the fight (dying three times, evidently). What should’ve done was making the fight revelent (Attack NPC; if NPC dies, exploration fails.) or offers some sort of incentive for defending properly – like… If x amount of the mob is defeated at the end of timer, offer a special chest / make rest of dungeon a little easier / give some special easter egg event. Or give player a penalty such as fighting additional popups at certain locations if they fail to reach X – making them either spend the effort there or spend the effort elsewhere.
Changing a number from 100 to 200 and changes the mob spawn by a bit seems like lazy design tweak to me, sorry. If the solution is made within 5 minutes or so after gauging the event, I can’t say much since all designers do it, but if the number change is a deliberate decision, then there are some attention to detail that you are not paying.
(edited by Kogasa Tatara.1409)
(lol Shadow Form)
I completely understand where you are coming from and what you meant. You are awesome and actually spent time to spend some insight to understand my rambling. Thank you.
A thing about working with your teammates: Not to brag, since it’s actually pretty shameful, but I find that as long as I take good care of myself, and take care of my teammates while at it, I will “carry my team to victory” more often than not. I can DPS ok on my thief (Sword/Pistol + Shortbow stealth-recover-init-oriented + dual attack focus) while doing some fairly amazing saves (Shadow Refuge, Sig of Agility for 4 rolls in total). I find that if everyone have that, since you can change utility in dungeon, it’s a matter of going “Hey Guardian, you got that Consecration skill I read about on the wiki that reflects projectile?” to your teammate and generally even novices will perform fairly well.
It’s bad since it prohibits learning on their own initiative (heh…), but as long as you know all the classes or at least read about them in a few glances, you can generally ask your teammates to do certain stuff, and any dungeon would become much easier. Sure, you can’t tell your teammate to retrait to 5 venom-sharing thieves team in dungeon, but you can make sure everyone has properly utility to deal with mobs, as long as you spend the effort.
… I don’t WANT to spend the effort, of course – I want teammates that will do that automatically, even suggest it when I forget (and I am forgetful, at best) without some amatuer in their profession asking them about using certain skills. That can come later. The game isn’t difficult as long as you have just a little bit of leadership and initiative in taking it, analyze and discuss situation with your allies. (Barring recent update, CM story is so hard right now it hurts my mind. Not because it’s hard, but because there’s no room for mistakes – and there’s lots more places where you can make mistakes!).
I guess traits are less adaptable than utility skills and weapons – you can always bring a rifle with you as a warrior and leave it in your inventory, but you can’t swap out Deadly Arts for Shadow Arts on the spot as a thief. I am ok with that, though – it gives me some sense of character and reminds me what possibilities I have at hand, thus making me vigilant of what I am capable of, should situation turns out that I need a certain special something.
(btw, you are an awesome person, Flik.)
In GW1 EotN patch, there’s a book called Master Dungeon Guide (a refernce to Dungeon Master Guide, obviously – don’t be surprised if I accidentally call it Dungeon Master Guide in the following, or shorthand it DMG accidentally).
What it does is that it records what dungeons you’ve done as well as give some background information/reference when you’ve completed that dungeon. When the book is complete to a certain point, you get to hand the book in for profit.
The problem in GW1 is that the book ended up being a case of “we do dungeon 9, 11, and 17 fast-like and hand it in for minimal profit” and people grind 3 dungeons. This can be circumvened by making the book only hand-in-able when it’s filled, and you can’t get another book until it’s full and handed in.
This way it reward players immensely for doing all dungeons at least once every “rotation”. It can be for both story mode (A journal on the reformation of Destiny’s Edge and their fate) and exploration mode and their different paths (A guide to the exotic locations of Tyria, written by the player themselves, recording down what they’ve seen).
We don’t need to be punished and have contents that most of us can’t finish without crying like little baby. We need positive encouragements to do other stuffs, if that’s what you want us to do. Want us to do a variety of dungeons? Give us a reason. Please, give us Master Dungeon Guide, tweak it thusly, and reward us. Instead of punishing us for faults not of our own…
I will quote this information from GW2 wiki…:
Champion
“These creatures are often unique and slaying of them can be the sole focus of a single event. They are particularly challenging, sometimes capable of overpowering even groups of players, and can be identified by a golden frame around and swords crossed behind their target portrait. All champions have defiant. "
Now they are adding champion mobs to be roadblocks? What once was focus of entire events gets reduced to critter status, to stall the players before bosses and bosses, with the resistance leader and the golem not more unique than some random guy in a cooridor? I mean, we already have the sergent in the Norn guy’s room being champion – and I can work with that. A boss inbetween the Gate Guard and the final boss. Sure. But with so mant champions thrown in, they feel cheapened and it make the only notable things in Explorable Mode the Legendaries.
By this difficulty, all the veteran ranks in Explorable Mode should be Champion ranked, considering Explorable should be hard and end-game compared to Story Mode, which should be doable at the level thereof, or 40 at CM?… It just doesn’t feel right.
I do not think so. I’ve never seen it work… Though the idea of defiance stacks on a player makes me chuckle a little…
MMO doesn’t have to be about the “grind” in a traditional sense, in my opinion. Grind’s kinda a moot point after a certain point – why get everything else when you have everything you need and want already? The grind isn’t need. The grind’s a want, not a need. It’s something extra, something to do beside for the main game content.
But dungeoneering isn’t extra like other game’s grinds. It’s the most major part of GW2’s end game content. Without access to exploration mode dungeon as a casual player, what else can you actually do in GW2? WvW and PvP contents aside. Think about it carefully… Exploration? Hit 100% and it’s done. No more. WvW? Are you going to be grinding for the Stonemist Castle title? … There’s really little to do beside for dungeons. Aside from the reduced reward AND repetition causing reduced rewards, the problem is partially “There’s nothing else to do.”
… I would suggest everyone to chillax, enjoy a game of Keg Brawl, or RP once in a while, of course.
As a MMO game designer, a goal is to mask the grind or divert the focus away from repetition and make it a want , not a need, in order to keep players entertained after the end of the game. ANet is sorta doing it brute-forcely, forcing players to be unable to repetitively do things without suffering some penalties, but their intent is… good. I agree, they are putting the grind in places that I wouldn’t care about, and I would like to see some sort of changes as well.
Yeah, I don’t know why farming is bad – I actually agree with you, in that I don’t see a problem with farming.
Some people have less time to farm, some people have more time to farm. Some people use the excuse “I have a life” to get away from lack of skills and mistakes in MMOs, implying that farming and investment of time is somehow something bad, reinforcing the idea that farming is BAAAAD in the game developers when it isn’t, not necessarily…
By the way, some people use the exact same excuse, “I have a social life” to get away from the reality that they have bad grades in university. It’s a silly behavior…
Wellllll to be honest FoW wasn’t that hard even on HM, beside for the griffons, and the entire thing can be done while I am half-asleep with just one other guy and maybe some heroes… But that’s beside the point, since you are right – it’s only easy because it’s all established :P
I am not sayin the dungeon’s too difficult or too easy, per se. I am saying that it’s overall boring because the solution to them are all just A, B, C, or D. You want a guardian or mesmer on your party because it’ll trivilize some bosses (CM Explorable Butler mode boss only ranges, for example) and solve D. A is simple, B doesn’t have a solution (beside for perhaps player skills?), C is… perhaps their only way to make dungeons interesting?
But I want to have imaginative ways to solve a problem that dungeon represent, not “throw things until enemy die, dodge everything they have to throw at us” for 90% of the game’s content.
Interesting mechanics I’ll remember and like: Lovers, see above. Fun.
Interesting mechanics I am kinda meh about, as an example: TA Story boss fight. The boss resses the nightmare/illusions. Ress that gets interrupted by damage? So the whole mechanic still devolves into “DPS, then DPS some more”. Except you get a priority change, which in our case is our warrior pressing Ctrl + T on the Big Boss, and rest of us press T, problem solved. Not as fun.
For being a game that heavily revolved around a motto of “friendly for casual players” and “not a grindfest”, it couldn’t be farther from that after level 80.
Endgame simply isn’t fun at all; it’s nothing but a grindfest on nearly every facet.
Well, this is only a problem AND a revelent one because they are linking directly Exploration Mode for dungeons with End Game. There’s other things to do beside for grinding for more things, but nobody would really want to do keg brawls… And there’s only keg brawls. And you don’t get to build anything special in your home instances. And you don’t get to keep up with Logan or Eir and check up on them and see how they are doing once in a while, perhaps getting new quests or random events and assist them in whatever they want.
Beside for the lack of end-game contents and something to persist player’s interest (Ok, I personally am a sucker at WvW so this isn’t that true for me, but let’s pretend for a moment that isn’t the case and I don’t PvP at all.), GW2’s lack of endgame really comes down to one single reason: It’s a new game and probably needed some more polish.
This is getting a bit off-topic, though. Back on-topic: Casual players. What’s a casual player’s goal in GW2? To have fun and possibly to matter. With the end game being primarily Dungeon Exploration Mode atm, they have nothing going for them. They can’t have fun because there’s nothing for them, and they don’t matter because there’s nothing designed for them.
(Again, I disagree with my own statement – I find WvW to be entertaining enough. Even though I am bad and my server is bad. But the point stands: Take dungeon away from casual players, and they have so little going for them at end game…)
To Kogasa:
Farming is bad.
The above line is hammered and drilled into a lot of MMO game designers. They really meant well – they want the players to explore the wider universe, listen to every lores, and explore every corner and niches. Some games reward players for doing so (and indeed, GW2 reward you for that), while others punish you for not doing so.
Players want rich and glory.
The above line is hammered and drilled into most of us on a societal level – we are reward-driven creatures (and punishment-driven as well, but let’s not get into that). We work because A: We get paid, wooo! B: The lucky ones get to feel satisfaction in their work.
Farming creates riches and glories.
The above line is the root of the problem. Popular farming techniques gets spread between players fast, because everyone means well and wants to have the riches and glories, and sharing is caring, right? But for game designers, it seems like players passing the hard drug called “Not enjoying the game” around, so they try to stifle that.
So we get a conflict of interest between players and game developers. It’s simple and a very common case in MMOs. Some tackles the problem by making everything less valuable (new contents! Level 100 armor! Your level 80 legendaries are worthless now!), some tackles the problem by taking away the ways in which the players can farm and do existing contents, or otherwisely punish them for it. Some will go sideway, creating new money sinks, new activities for players to do and kill time (distract them). Most game developers do a mixture of the three methods.
GW2 is using the second mthods, but let’s be honest here – whatever they do willkitten off everyone, and if they don’t do anything the players are doing themselves a disservice. So… They are inbetween rock and hard place right now.
You don’t have to be a casual gamer to make mistakes (edited. Origional text: be a bad gamer). And you don’t need to be a bad gamer to have 4 other friends who might or might not make mistakes. Exploration mode, as they have explained,requires 5 well-trained professional gamers with exceptional coordinations.
A: I am not going to skype with some random weirdo on internet. Because it’s creepy.
B: I am not going to skype with some guy I know only on internet. Because it can jeopardize friendships or at least put doubts where they don’t exist before… or something. (I drop the f-bomb a lot in skype, but I aim to not be like that in all other cases.)
C: I am going to be skyp’ing with IRL friends, who might have really bad habit of taking over the radio or chat about non-dungeon related stuff and make the skype chat useless.
… D: My group of professional gamers, if I DO have one (I don’t) could be gunning for something like DotA/LoL/HoN tournaments where our coordinations and trainings and skills can at least garner some fames on internet (lulz) if not actual RL money. GW2 gives me armor skins. Even though it’s extremely fun and I am willing to invest the effort to get good, I can’t force 4 of my other friends to make the sacrifice. GW1 had GvG, what’s in GW2, PvP? Should we honestly equate sPvP with Dungeon in terms of glory, satisfaction, and reward? I personally don’t think so.
(edited by Kogasa Tatara.1409)
To be honest, concentration isn’t that bad – you get used to it as a gamer. When you play DotA/LoL/HoN/whatever, you don’t want to NOT pay attention to the river when you or you allies warded it just so you don’t get ganked, or NOT call missing on lanes. And you get used to dodging veils of bullets after a few months. Geek talks aside, there are other action-y MMOs. Vindictus comes to mind immediately as a … fairly subpar version of GW2. It’s got it’s boring battles, and every bit as action-oriented and require just that much concentrations… But it doesn’t require everyone on your team to be as concentrated. You screw up, it’s your head that’s rolling, people are gonna get you up and they are going to carry on.
In GW2 when you go down, it becomes that much longer to kill a boss, you want to rez your allies – but it become so much MORE of a burden as a stray aoe hit from boss suddenly go from “possibly deadly” to “guaranteed death” (double the damage, double the death!) when ressing someone, and you all know how finicky dodges can be when ressing someone…
It’s probably why my Engi never leave house without [Toss Elixir R], and my Thief never leave for party without [Shadow Refuge] …
(Actually for the spoiler boss, you can kill the popups and take the boulders and rock the boss as a melee character. The boulders also do more damage than most ranged attacks.)
But yes, melee characters feel weird in dungeon. My flamethrower engineer uses primarily elixir gun and rifle, flamethrower as a backup when we need additional DPS against things that is slow-ish or mobs upon mobs… My thief on sword/pistol though, just shadow step in, pistol whip until whenever, and if in any sort of danger shadowstep back out. I guess that doesn’t really count, though…
Edit after seeing the part about greed: Heck yeah. Shouldn’t be an anti-farm code in place. Instead there should be some sort of reward for players that do different stuff. A lot of different stuff. Like a ramping, compounding bonus for killing creatures of different type, doing different dungeons and events and things, doing underwater or abovewater contents, even playing Keg Brawl and other similar events when they are in… Motivate players with greed, not make players’ eyes grow green with promise of phat lootz, only to snatch it away 30 minutes later because you just did it. I swear, we are (I am) simple creatures! ;_;
(edited by Kogasa Tatara.1409)
I… I miss GW1 dungeons and dungeon-like missions. I mean, sure, stuff are obvious in a lot of them (Fleshreaver gonna spear ya), but there are a lot more… Variance in the fights. Before the dungeons I’d never imagine I’d have to fight Ilsundur’s Savanna Heat with rolling balls of fire trying to crush me, or deal with environmental hazard (selfnote: magma is hot) against the Great Destroyer, or that I’d be facing a Ritualist with dozens of level 24 spirits (Slaver’s Exile, of course… was it lv24 spirits?).
The bosses here? Sure, they do /special/ stuff, but you deal with their special stuff about all the same ways – you don’t need to get creative to fight against them. And yet they are artificially hard – bosses have tons of hp making fights last forever, you make one mistake you die horribly, your party make a collective mistake and the boss resets hp to full health… (at least we don’t get kicked back to outpost due to lolHM)
I guess it’s why I’ll always love the Lover’s fight. They are freaking annoying, but it really brought the team together trying to find a solution between thief’s steal/skull + warrior’s fear me and an AoE stealth. Erm, that’s before boulders, of course, after boulders we never did things the “fun” way, we just rock em’. Q_Q
I want dungeons to be fun, not “do the same motions with same strategy because it works for 90% of content”, I guess is what I am asking… And I guess I am asking if anyone else is having the same feeling?
I am one of the worst player in GW1 AND GW2, skill-wise, I am pretty sure, else I wouldn’t be having the sentiments that… GW1 dungeons were almost better in most aspects… (Beside for Dynamic Events inside dungeon – those rock and you should have more of them. A lot more. Like a table of 30 – 100 per dungeon, with higher frequency. That’d be fun and kittens and rainbows and unicorns.). Heck, they even ALWAYS have a big chest in the end that almost always give something cool and shiny, a drive to kill the boss so dead, Zhithan won’t be raising anything from the remains…
Anyways, sorry about this long, incoherent rant, my poor English, and the whole 7:42 AM in the morning thing. If my 2 cents is worth a latte, I’d buy you one for wasting your time reading this, as an apology.
That’s not even too bad – I can twitch game. (Those that know Touhou will know I used Touhou name and there’s not a lot of games more twitchy or pattern-oriented than bullet hell) I can twitch game for 20 minutes or 30, even. But dungeon isn’t designed to be 20 or 30 minutes. If your group has 1 or 2 person that’s just slightly under par, perhaps because they are your IRL friends and it’s socially awkward to ask them to “play better or kick”, that dungeon run will go from 30 minutes to an hour or so. If someone’s new to the dungeon, that’s 30 minutes to an hour again. If someone’s wearing level 50 gears while doing HotW or Arah? Yeah.
Duration of the dungeon isn’t even that bad – I just turned 25, I am totally young and energetic. Twitch gaming isn’t even that bad. But the lack of variance in a boss’s pattern…! It’s either tank n’ spank, or “Watch Iron Forgeman magma LAZORZ and don’t get hit, and pick up rock and throw it at him” for 5 minutes, or “Ok, did our engi kitten up the pull on the Lovers AGAIN? Else we have no problem it’s only 5 minutes of doing the same thing over and over”. Yeah, patterns are way too simple, there’s never anything unexpected (beside for CM story, the golem boss – missile spam x 6 waves wtf. That was the absolutely worst case and I’ve encountered it ONCE in about 30 runs, of course.). Often the boss attack pattern falls into the same few categories for solutions, as well:
A: Dodge a REALLY obvious attack move.
B: Fall down on the floor because there’s no distinct animation on the move, and get ally to pick you back up.
C: Kill some popups on the side. Maybe do some stuff with stuff they drop.
D: Range the boss while Mesmer/Guardian/Engineer with flamethrower reflect projectiles and watch boss kill himself. Optionally, thief + smoke screen with less success.
The hardest fight (and the most interesting) was the Lovers in AC Story, because you actually need to break away from the 4 patterns… or not, since you can just do a variation of C, except the popup-killing part. Just rock em’. With boulders.
Every dungeon boss fights, even Tequati and Claw of Jormag is like this. Tequati it’s “dodge the vines on the ground, ignore the fear, ignore the popup zombie boomers or dodge them, close eye and 1 unless you are on turret (in which case you aren’t dealing with Tequati as much as 20 popups trying to kill you and the occasional walls)”. Claw of Jormag is “A: Pick up a Pact Rocket. B: Autocast 1. C: Target something, preferably Claw of Jormag. Dodge anything you see coming.”
Remember those fun GW1 dungeons? Those were the days (don’t remind me those times I run HM brawler dungeon for Deldrimor/Survivor though). You get your short and sweet, two level dungeons and you get places like Frostmaw’s that’s pretty long and pretty intense. Each dungeon had some fun, unique mechanics, though there are a lot of issues with repetitions – the only thing that will really change is “Will LoD reveal a treasure at this node or not today?”. And even then most of the times those were consistent.
GW2 solved the problem with “repetitions” by adding in more variables during exploration – random bosses and events that spawns, much like when playing TRPG, your DM rolls some dices and look up some charts, and decide that the wall is going to crumble and unlease unspeakable horror onto you. But um… That’s about it.
I stopped feeling nicely bewildered as I was by rest of the game’s content when I was in dungeons. It’s not even about the difficulties or whatever that everyone else is talking about (ok, maybe a little, but I’ll freely admit that I suck, and my IRL friends are not the brightest bulbs at times. Please don’t kill me, IRL friends ;_;), it’s because it’s simply a lot more concentration that an action-y RPG game is supposed to have…
In GW2, dungeons became a lot more of a twitch game – if your internet lags for a second and you didn’t see the boss cast Magic Missile, you are gonna die. If you have your eyes off the boss for a second so you didn’t see him glow all sparkly, you are gonna die. If you dodged twice earlier and the CM story golem boss decide to use a third missile spam, you are gonna party wipe. If you are healing an ally that’s downed and unable to cancel out of rez, you are gonna both die. If your party’s thief nodded off for a second and autoran into a group of 6 silver mobs while half of your party is still rezzing? You are /gonna die/. There’s next to no room for mistakes – you might survive for two hits or so, but you are most likely gonna die. (Please, who’s going to spend the time and energy to find a retrainer to train into Vit/Tough everytime single they want to dungeon, most likely on a whim, and swap back for solo or whatever?)