First and foremost, allow me to say that I am no newbie when it comes to gaming. Be it Comodore 64 or the latest and greatest game, I have been there and done that. With that said and established, I would like to offer a partial solution to fixing the dungeon difficulty. Mind you, this is by no means a magic bullet, just a way to help ranged survive better, or at least elementalists but this can easily go beyond their class.
I see where ArenaNet went with this. Basically, there is no healer, there is no tank, and mobs are not glued to any player in particular. This reminds me of pvp in a way. You vs the mobs, except the mobs have 50x your HP and hit you like a truck, so players are left to rely on their skill to outsmart them. This however is more difficult than it sounds sometimes.
Before we can address the solution, we must address the problem. So here are some key points, and no doubt I’ll be missing some.
- Melee get destroyed when up in the face of several mobs but do semi ok 1v1
- Ranged cannot avoid mobs chasing them and die within few hits with 1v1
- Ranged cannot outrun the mobs
– Mobs is too fast
– Mob casts freezing
#We have finite amount of cleanses and debuff is reapplied too rapidly, or instantly
– Mobs cast roots
# Not enough cleansing tools
- 1-shot hits that are virtually unavoidable
I would like to discuss the last one briefly. I was in a dungeon where a mob would shoot blue player-seeking orbs. Trouble was, even with sprint I was barely able to outrun them and once that wore off I was, well, 1-shot. Deflecting mechanics have too long of a cooldown such as projectile deflection as well which did not help things one bit. Finally if you did not have any type of speed boost, you were flat out dead.
Now for the solution(s). What I propose is something similar to what Vindictus (Mabinogi Heroes in Korea) did, where we basically have the ability to dodge these massive hits using a dodge system. Granted, GW2 has a dodge system but it’s pathetic. After 2 dodges we are left vulnerable. We did not gain any distance between the mob chasing us, and we are still probably frozen. If we had at least 6 rolls before our yellow bar expires, that would give many of us a fighting chance.
We also need CC to last longer in PvE. I mean, seriously… 2 second root? I spend 1 second casting thekittenthing and if you add latency into consideration, the spell is short of useless. At least 10 seconds. At LEAST… 10 seconds…
GW2 measures us by our skill and not by our gear. Okay. What skill is there left to deploy when everything is on a cooldown? I am not saying drop the cooldown, but give us more abilities to cleanse it. For example, elementalists, the water atonement, have the attack cleanse nearby players and lower the damage. Have water atonement be far less dps and be more cleaning / healing. Sure, that gives an elementalist a role in a dungeon similar to what healer would have, but if apply the same aoe cleanse to more weapons for other classes.
Why is our speed boost cut off in combat? Howkitten is this? The whole point of speed is to outrun our foes. This would help greatly in dungeons.
There are far more suggestions I’d like to discuss but this should be a start. Also to the trolls out there who haven’t even read a line I said and just want to spew out L2P, here’s my message for you: if you have exhausted all your cooldowns and are facing a mob that is faster than you because it roots or freezes, hits for 1/4 of your HP, and takes you over 20 seconds to kill if it were standing still like a target dummy, then I have demonstrated maximum permissible survivability as a player and it’s the game mechanics alone that prevent my triumph.
