Guild Wars 2

Dear Robert..

No, you should have implemented BOTH first. While we rarely used res rushing as an option, I don’t feel you should have implemented it until you had implemented both changes first. I am sorry, but putting out half a fix that punishes and does not resolve balance issues is just making people angry. No amount of spin doctoring can improve that. BALANCE is important and right now the balance system is so out of whack it is ridiculous. Making dungeons fun and doable should be your FIRST priority. Adding more misery should be your second. From what I have seen the Magg update, the lack of consideration for areas where a fallen player takes 100X the damage they are able to heal, the thought of revamping things so that the entire fight doesn’t contain a floor filled with circles that one shot most characters may have been a step in the right direction when it comes to alleviating the need to Res-rushing.

As I said before it really feels like you aren’t looking at the bigger picture. If people are res-rushing there is probably a balance issue that YOUR team need to address. Please step aside from your thought that everything is easy and it is all up to the players and that everything should be solved by making it harder. I do agree that Rez rushing needed to end. I also believe that it was up to you as the designer to be a good designer and implement both phases simultaneously. There is no amount of excuses you can give that will make this justifiable. You needed to be the one to step aside and think of WHY everyone is. Maybe drop the damage or take a look at the areas that were being rez rushed to redesign them. Instead you added a bunch of things to make it harder including that GOD awful Magg update, without checking balance. Not everyone is a damage build and maybe you should start looking to play in groups that aren’t all guardians. I implore you to really look at the reason people were rez rushing. Hint its not just because we are all lazy or want easy mode.

After my 4th job I have become to loathe Traehearne. I am sorry, I am tired of him. He has a dull personality and after doing the stupid light into Darkness and having it glitch out when I finished just makes me hate him even more. I feel like the flexibility of this personal story stagnated and I have seen the same things too many kitten times and Traehearne is useless in every fight he is in. Yet he gets the credit. I don’t understand what the writers were thinking.

Here is something to consider:
If a BULK of a strategy is to Res-rush, it may be time to re-evaluate their difficulty. Going in and stopping Res-rushing and not considering that maybe things need to toned down is not the way to go. I would seriously encourage Devs to do their dungeons in all modes with a wide variety of jobs and builds and see what can be done to make them playable for everyone.

“They’re removing Rez-rushing with all it’s flaws and tweaking the encounters so that the benefits that the mechanic used to provide won’t be necessary!”

Yes but the implemented the PAIN before doing the tweaks. Phase 1 and 2 SHOULD NOT have been separate!

Personally I found this patch unnecessary and loathsome. The biggest problem is I saw was the Res rushing was gone, but the dungeon balancing was not there. Instead of making Dungeons enjoyable, it has become something onerous and unfun. The rewards are subpar for the amount of arduous effort that is put into completing them. Our group also had difficulties with Citadel of Flame Magg protection (and yes I am sure someone will tag this and call us wussies for having difficulty so that some troll can feel superior in the awesome knowledge that he is leet at this game). We had to redo our build into a damage AOE zerg build, which is what I thought Anet was trying to avoid. Well you made it perfectly clear that you don’t want diverse builds you want to bully us into heavy damage because that is the only way to clear a game.

With this update you could have rebalanced the dungeons to be group friendly and doable. You could have made it rewarding again. You could have made it fun! Instead it really feels like the developer’s egos got in the way and instead of making them enjoyable, got pissy people were having fun in them and decided the best recourse was to make them ridiculously hard. Basic game design is to make your players happy and feel challenged without being disillusioned. Any good GM can make encounters flexible to the players. A Bad GM just makes players get frustrated and quit.

If you really want, why not add tiers to the Dungeons? Story mode, Explorer mode, Hard mode and Ludicrous mode. The players that want a super challenge can do ludicrous mode and get higher rewards. Players that just want the token system or the achievements you have set up can go to Explorer.

You really need to rethink your checks and balance system. Hitting things with the nerf bat or making things stupidly hard isn’t always the natural fix. I understand you can’t please all your players, but think about pleasing the majority of your players. The majority is unhappy. Try and fix things. The rez-rush was not a fix that was needed. This won’t bring players together, it will frustrate them and cause cliques and all the things Guild Wars 2 is against.

You can still fix dungeons, please consider re-tweaking them to be fun, instead of miserable. Don’t make them only for the elitest.