Let me preface by saying that I would likely fall heavily into the category of Casual player. I (and my partner, we tend to duo everything) took our time getting to 80. We putzed around and eventually got there and didn’t bother with doing the dungeons as we leveled up; we wanted to see the story first. We don’t put a huge amount of time into the game, maybe a couple hours a night (certainly not enough to be considered hardcore).
We’re now working our way through the dungeons to experience the story modes there, and haven’t done any of the Explorables yet so everything I’m about to post relates to Story Mode only.
We did our first Story Mode attempt at Ascalon Catacombs before the patch changed the res-rushing and locked down waypoints while a member was in combat. We were a PUG group, and I think only one person in the group knew what they were doing from past experience. It was new to all of us. We did pretty well most of the way through the dungeon, and there wasn’t much res-rushing to be had until we got to the Aderlbern fight. The ranged players stayed up the whole while but me and the other couple of melee’rs were running back from the side waypoint as trying to res anyone that Addie knocked down with his spam-casted AEs of doom was suicide. We actually managed to do the Lovers fight successfully without res-rushing. It took a couple tries to get a strategy that worked for us but we did it.
Then we did Caudecous’ Manor. There was a bit more res-rushing in this one but on the whole we did pretty good. Again a PUG group, though sadly I don’t really remember much in the way of specifics of where we had trouble or not.
Then the patch came in and… I felt no burden because of it.
My next dungeon run was actually without my partner and I was using a Ranger alt (I main a Warrior) and I was roughly level 35 when I decided to try AC more ‘level appropriate.’ I didn’t die once and we never wiped. There wasn’t an encounter we didn’t survive, and I wasn’t the only one near level range for the dungeon. The Lovers fight was ridiculously easy; they didn’t even teleport back to each other at 50%. We just burned them to the floor and went on our way. Same with Adelbern. His AE hit a lot less frequently and was much softer. So no deaths there either.
Recently we did both Twilight Arbour and Sorrow’s Embrace together, and as always in a PUG.
TA was admittedly tough, especially for me when we got to the necro boss with his evil spiders of doom. This fight gave us the most troubles, but it only took three attempts to get it down (and the realization that being in melee or not constantly moving was a bad idea).
Sorrow’s Embrace was actually a bit easier though we did run into some spots were we fell on our faces but each time that happened it was entirely because of our own silliness (like rushing into the Dredge gathering after clearing the cannons and trying to take all of the groups on at once… But it was incredibly fun trying!).
All in all though, what I’ve seen from the Story Mode runs of these dungeons before and after the patch is that after the patch players are playing smarter (with the exception of our Leeroy Jenkins moment in Moleville, but that was totally worth it). They heal each other more often, ressing as soon as someone drops if able.
The waypoint change, and the Daily update encouraging people to Dodge seemed to have done a net value to the skill of people in the game.
So I think this is an excellent change, coming from the viewpoint of a casual player going through Story Modes (the only parts of the dungeons one could really consider necessary).
I’ll reserve judgement on the Explore modes when I get to doing them, but then again I kinda feel that those modes are more supposed to be hard trials of skill and co-ordination and that they’re not at all necessary to advance. They’re there to say “Lookit what I can do, and the nifty costume I’m wearing to provide I did it.”