Guild Wars 2

Renegade.6325:

Discuss what? No dungeon changes have been made.

I was under the impression that “phase 2” of dungeon changes was supposed to make dungeons more enjoyable and less grindy. Are we are still in “phase 1”? Because the changes to AC – one of the only dungeons that was in decent shape before the patch – made it even less fun and more grindy. And if this WAS your attempt at making the dungeon more fun, how is it that in a month, the only dungeon you guys could make changes to was AC?

Set up a PTR, throw all your changes to dungeons on it at once, and try listening. There are literally thousands of people who are all making the exact same suggestions to your team and giving you the same criticisms – your design philosophy seems to be “more hp, more damage, more adds, more CC” and while I don’t know if most people are unhappy with that I do know that a lot are.

Every month since November I have been checking patch notes to see when you would make good on your promises of making dungeons more fun. Every month since November I have gone away disappointed.

I don’t believe I will be wasting my time reading patch notes anymore.

I think by and large most people agree that in an ideal system waypoint zergs would be absent.

The problem is that current dungeons are so badly designed that waypoint zergs are more or less necessary for anyone other than experienced players to have any chance at completion.

Most of us aren’t unhappy about waypoint zergs going away, we’re unhappy that (once again) they made the difficulty up, fun down change first, and promised that they would lower the difficulty and increase the fun in the future.

Dungeon completionist for February, when the dungeon fixes haven’t been released yet?

Looks like I’m not getting my monthly in February…

I really believe that graveyard zergs hurt the game in theory and I agree with the developers that the change should be made. If you fail during the boss encounter you should have to start it from scratch. The timing of this change, however, couldn’t be worse.

Rez glyphs are flat-out broken, rezzing dead players is a suicide mission, and some boss fights can take 15 minutes even if you do them right. Given the current state of dungeons, this was ill-timed at best and should be removed until we see this “phase 2” (if it ever materializes).

Attic.1562:

Robert Hrouda.1327:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/robert-hrouda-on-upcoming-changes-to-dungeon-mechanics/

So… the same stuff we’ve heard before? I’m afraid I don’t get your point Robby.

Yeah. We’ve been promised this sort of thing since what…before the November patch? I thought this was going to make it in for this one, at least.

Dungeons sucked. Removing waypoint zerging is desirable, yes, but not until dungeons stop sucking. Removing waypoint zerging before fixing dungeons is just going to further turn people off of dungeons.

When we have been saying “no one wants to do dungeons, doing dungeons is a chore” for months now I am really baffled at why the fun is still somewhere on the nebulous horizon while the nerfs keep coming down.

I wonder if Anet learned anything from all the people who got frustrated with RNG in the last several holidays and will just sell the backpack directly instead of hiding it in a box

Just give mobs a chance to drop dungeon tokens based on how many bosses have been killed

Edit: And give us something to spend dungeon tokens on once we have our sets

Draven.9521:

simply put:

the game community will die if that is put. It will simply be 5 people joining you, and leaving without saying a word. If you have some some actual trouble finding people, you would actually make a human connection through the game (as Anet intends)

What world do you live in? Right now, people just post on gw2lfg and /join each other without saying anything except maybe “hi”. Or they spam in LA until someone joins, and say nothing except maybe a “hi”. Making it harder to find a group has absolutely 0 positive effect on socializing.

I’m amazed we’re getting any changes this quickly. FotM has only been causing problems for two months, while all the other dungeons have been awful since release.

My entire group d/c’d at the same time in the blizzard fractal, so at least we didn’t have to worry about trying to finish with 4…

Given that this is the only dungeon anyone was having any fun with or bothering to run at all, this should be the #1 priority for your PvE team. No ETA on a fix a month later (and if anything the bug seems to be getting worse) is absolutely unacceptable from a professional game developer.

Take a break from milking events for gem sales and start fixing the problems you’ve had since release. You’ll find your gem store sales are better when the players are happy.

Alucard.8297:

UrieltheFlameofGod.8643:

I’m not here to say dungeons must be changed. I’m offering my suggestions as to how to make them more fun. If nothing changes with dungeons, fine. I’ll just continue not doing them. My understanding, however, is that most people feel the same way I do.

To be fair, you didn’t really give any suggestions as to how to make them more fun… you merely mentioned what you don’t want to do. And it seems you neither want to skip everything and fight bosses, or skip nothing & fight bosses.

This isn’t solely aimed at you, but those kinds of hypocritical & vague statements almost give a reader the illusion that you want game designers to have some sort of arbitrary middle-ground that happens to suit your personal tastes.

When anyone voices their opinion in this discussion, and takes the time to complain about what’s wrong with a particular dungeon… they should also take the time to clearly suggest a solution that would appease them. It also would be nice to state why you are complaining about some things, despite how obvious you think the reasoning should be.

For example, I can’t really understand why an experienced player would not want to skip as much as possible in a dungeon. I can understand killing some extra things for some loot, on certain beneficial occasions, but aside from that I have no idea why anyone would complain about that. Perhaps if you think it’s too easy to skip mobs or too hard to skip mobs or suggest maybe they should have some sort of difficult mini-game that would allow you to skip most of the mobs, then the designers could have considerations to work with.

When not being clear and specific in what you want, why you don’t like something, and what you propose for a solution— how can you expect any other result than for the game designers to implement something that you don’t like?

If you go “okay I don’t want a dungeon to be tedious,” maybe anet will go “okay we’ll do something to keep it more fresh,” and they add ninjas that randomly appear and can 1-hit kill assassinate you. Then maybe you won’t like that, and you’ll complain “this is stupid now I have to be on-edge for random ninjas that don’t even give me a reward?” If, instead, you said “okay, I think to keep dungeons from being tedious, you should have random duels that force us to go 1v1 against each other for a random chest, instead of just killing more random trash mobs,” then that’s an idea people can start working with. I don’t know if anyone would agree with that, but hey, that’s something you could throw out there.

Just my 2 cents— communication between both sides is key here, not just placing all the pressure on the game design team.

Any trash pack where the dominant strategy involves leashing should be removed entirely. Bosses that tend to involve leashing need to be redesigned to not require/encourage leashing. Boss health needs to be reduced 25-50% across the board. Chests should have a 0% chance to drop blues, a 75% chance to drop at least one yellow and a 10% chance to drop an exotic. The amount of trash overall should be reduced to approximately FotM levels – twelve pulls between bosses is nothing more than padding.

Is that clear enough?

Absolute.3087:

UrieltheFlameofGod.8643:

The problem is that “evening out” dungeon paths just results in fewer people running dungeons period. I haven’t done a dungeon since before lost shores and dungeons are the only part of this game I really like. I had fractals to tide me over but the DC bug is so bad now I can’t run that either.

I’m really glad the holiday content in this patch is good. But Anet, you guys really need to get to work on dungeons. Fix fractals, cut the amount of trash in non-fractals dungeons by half (removing all the stupid 9-silver pulls would be a good start) and buff chest loot to be on par with fractals chests.

I don’t think I’ll ever understand why you guys are so stingy with loot drops. Epics dropped more often in vanilla WoW dungeons than exotics in GW2 dungeons, despite the fact that an epic dungeon drop was worth 100-200x as much as most GW2 exotics. Just give every chest 6 tokens, a 50% chance to drop a rare and a 25% chance to drop a non-precursor exotic. If you’re really intent on keeping token rates the same then cut it from the final reward and don’t allow the tokens to drop again until the next reset.

Stop complaining about trash in dungeons. if you want to skip everything and just kill bosses ask for rewarding bosses in the open world. a dungeon wasn’t build for you to skip it and do a run in 5 minutes.

I don’t want to skip everything and just kill bosses. Neither do I want to slog through seven identical trash pulls between bosses, or do content that is only possible through skipping/leashing. I don’t know of anyone who does the 3-knight + boss fight in the hard TA path without leashing the knights and fighting them one at a time. I don’t know anyone who does CM Asura and fights the pack of 7 silver mobs all at once without leashing or skipping them. Those fights are frustrating. They’re tedious. They don’t offer any reward. They’re not fun.

There’s no reason to try and defend this content because it isn’t enjoyable. Have you tried to do a dungeon in the last two months? The only content anyone is running is fractals, because fractals is more rewarding, more fun and better designed than any other dungeon. Part of that is how the trash was designed, part of that is how loot is handled, and part of that is the dungeon design overall. It’s too late to do anything about the dungeon design for other dungeons but it’s certainly not too late to rebalance the dungeons to be enjoyable and worthwhile. This has nothing to do with any concept of difficulty.

Unfortunately, the posts I’m seeing from Rob make it sound like he’s okay with the current state of dungeons (though it also seems like he’s in the minority here). I remember changes promised but I’m not convinced any more are forthcoming.

I’m not here to say dungeons must be changed. I’m offering my suggestions as to how to make them more fun. If nothing changes with dungeons, fine. I’ll just continue not doing them. My understanding, however, is that most people feel the same way I do. It seems like a waste to have all these dungeons that no one runs, because I want to run them. I just don’t want to feel like I’m punishing myself by doing them.

People have been making these same complaints since before release, and the only changes made have been adding karma to the end reward and adding MORE trash to certain dungeon paths.

Since we’ve seen two major content patches since we were promised tweaks to dungeons, I’m not holding out much hope that they’re going to be improved in the future.

The good news is fractals is pretty fun, so you can do that if they ever fix the dc bug.

The problem is that “evening out” dungeon paths just results in fewer people running dungeons period. I haven’t done a dungeon since before lost shores and dungeons are the only part of this game I really like. I had fractals to tide me over but the DC bug is so bad now I can’t run that either.

I’m really glad the holiday content in this patch is good. But Anet, you guys really need to get to work on dungeons. Fix fractals, cut the amount of trash in non-fractals dungeons by half (removing all the stupid 9-silver pulls would be a good start) and buff chest loot to be on par with fractals chests.

I don’t think I’ll ever understand why you guys are so stingy with loot drops. Epics dropped more often in vanilla WoW dungeons than exotics in GW2 dungeons, despite the fact that an epic dungeon drop was worth 100-200x as much as most GW2 exotics. Just give every chest 6 tokens, a 50% chance to drop a rare and a 25% chance to drop a non-precursor exotic. If you’re really intent on keeping token rates the same then cut it from the final reward and don’t allow the tokens to drop again until the next reset.

I think it’s odd you made a “dungeon changes discussion patch” when all the dungeon changes that we have been waiting for since before the Lost Shores patch have yet to hit live.

Non-FotM dungeons are still terrible, fotm is still fragmenting and disconnecting people.

The only changes to dungeons in this patch are 1) Mitigating the RNG on rings, which is a plus; 2) forcing players to farm low-level fractals for vials/globs since there’s no way to downgrade; and 3) adding more trash to non-fotm dungeons when currently the #1 complaint about non-fotm dungeons is that they’re tedious and full of trash.

So…1 step forward, 2 steps back…

Running FotM 10 in the winter instance, I lit one of the bonfires at the Melt the Ice Wall stage and got instantly disconnected. This was the third fractal of the run, so I have to start from scratch to have a chance at the ring…

Edit: It appears my entire group got booted, not just me.

To be honest I think almost every elementalist trait is awful so I wouldn’t worry about evasive arcana too much given that it’s one of our few traits worth taking at all

It’s super-duper frustrating when you try to cast the spell on your “2” button right as you get downed, and so waste your only escape-spell AND reduce your maximum health

First: revamp dungeon loot outside of fotm to reflect fotm loot. Bosses should drop loot with a good/decent/small chance at greens/yellows/oranges just like fotm. Chests should drop yellows/oranges/lodestones/tokens, just like fotm. In exchange, you could probably drop the karma reward for completion if you felt that was “too much” but you guys really don’t need to be so stingy with loot. Right now FotM drops the best loot AND has the best gear (Ascended) as its ‘token’ reward AND is the most fun. I guess it’s good that the most fun dungeon is the only one that’s worth doing, at least.

Second: make the dungeons more fun. Reducing the BS trash pulls would be nice. There are some trash pulls that everyone wipes on, some that everyone skips. I’ve never done a run of TA or CM that didn’t involve skipping more trash than we cleared. 7-silver-mob pack? A boss that comes with 3 instant-kill-knockdown-combo-knights? Currently the only viable strategies for these involve AI exploits (leash all but one, or skip them entirely). This is not the same as cutting all the hard trash pulls, but no one can deny that there are some serious BS trash pulls in some of these instances.

Third, slash the HP of gold/legendary NPCs in most dungeons by, like, 50%. Most of these are rinse-and-repeat but take so long people fall asleep doing them. Not fun.

There hasn’t been a single overflow server yet today, so it’s been impossible to get a group for fractals today

^ The above can be “circumvented” by doing a search for “dressing”. Ascalonian dressing will come up for me. I’m assuming the elonian wine comes up in the results for the ascalonian dressing.

I have been trying to do a search for cooking materials, and every time I search for “bottle” the trading post just starts loading indefinitely. After a bit of investigation I think the issue is related to the bottle of elonian wine. I suspect it’s because the bottle is purple-quality and there’s no code in the trading post to handle purple-quality items, so the trading post just freezes.

Given that bottles of elonian wine can (ostensibly) be bought and sold on the trading post, this is a bug that should get fixed.

I would really like to know what other farm spots were comparable…

Listing items now seems to give me a 50% chance of displaying “Error attempting to sell” in big red letters. It doesn’t seem to be related to the price, the item I’m trying to sell, or any other factor I can isolate. Might be due to TP load, but the error message is so vague as to be useless.

I don’t believe anyone can look at the current state of the game in any aspect (Dungeons, Legendaries, Fractals) and say with a straight face that the game was designed with ‘minimal grind’.

Cerise.9045:

2 weeks ago they decided to randomly give a pretty big chuck of the player population 100-400G with absolutely no effort. And they probably thought this was a really smart idea too.

2 days ago, they see people getting the same amount of money except it takes 50-100 hours of hard work actually playing the game. But this time, it’s a huge problem and the people who were doing it need to be punished and everyone else needs to be prevented from doing this.

The issue here is horrible game design. ANet puts in place systems that punish people who make small amounts of money for doing difficult content, then turns around and puts in system that gives random players many factors greater money for not even playing the game.

Holy cow was I ever confused when I saw this (not the post, the actions taken)

Worst of all is I got lag d/c’d during the final event so who knows if I could have won the lottery

I thought I read that anyone could join in at the highest-level player’s fractal to stop this ridiculous fracturing. Now instead of one extra dungeon to LFG for we have 30.

I really want to enjoy dungeons in this game. Please let me.

T6 crafting mats at 25-50 silver each, ectos at 25s, gathering materials worth less than it costs to harvest them…and the patch added a bunch of items that require huge numbers of ectos (300?) and no gathering materials at all.

Won’t be long before mithril and elder wood hit vendor price, and I’m betting ori will follow soon after.

Is this really better than the old system, where gathered materials had some value?

Strifey.7215:

As a dungeon designer I’m really disappointed that you can even defend this when trying to create challenging content for a group of 5 people.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

one of the main reasons we put the tokens in the Wondrous bag, is because of people not always being able to reach the end of the path. We want partial rewards for players, but it has to be at an amount that won’t be abused by just killing the first boss over and over. We hope that 3 will be enough, and if we find it isn’t, we’ll balance it further.
I’ll look into our champion mobs not dropping lot. They certainly should.

I’ve killed three champions since patch (outside of dungeons) and none of them dropped loot. (The undead with lots of shades…Demensor? and the two plinx-related champions). I’ve also done a full run of TA F/F and got nothing (or occasionally grays) from every champion pull along the way.

Also, they added daily pvp achievements that award paid tournament tickets this patch, so there’s an alternate route.

MF addition is terrible.

Dungeons still suffer from the same problems as before: packs that you have to skip (CM Asura’s 8-silver pack, some of the hounds in TA); packs you have to leash most-but-not-all-of to have a chance (Laurent and his knights); NPCs which have way too much health and no abilities (most dungeons); instant-kill attacks with no telegraph (pick any dungeon you like). None of these problems have been addressed and dungeons will suck until they are.

That said, the buff to loot was necessary and is welcome. So it’s not that the patch was bad per se it just ignored crucial issues.

To be honest in terms of priorities for fixing dungeons I’d say the MF change can stay until after they remove mechanics like “pull this pack, then leash all but one of the NPCs, kill it, and repeat” and “just run past this pull” from dungeons.

Just saying thanks.

A big step in the right direction.

Hopefully next patch you’ll clear out some of the BS pulls that everyone skips, like the 8-silver pack in CM Asura.

Darnis.4056:

People are going to run premades in frees, it doesn’t matter if they give tickets or not. they’re going to run them anyway.

Also if what you propose(Remove free tickets) really did hit, NO one would run paids ergo EVEN MORE Pugstomping.

Honestly, I think they should remove the ticket requirement altogether; the current system is pretty broken.

They also need to add a system so that groups of 4-5 premade never fight groups with fewer than 4-5 premade.

Every member of a group needs a tournament ticket to enter a paid tournament. There are two ways to acquire them:
1) Every member of the group spends money/gems on a ticket (expensive), or
2) Your group effortlessly destroys pugs in a free tournament (easy).

Right now, the requirement of a ticket for paid tournaments makes no sense. You guys can’t be selling any in the gem shop when people can just get them for free. If you removed them from free tournament rewards, premades could skip the (boring) step of farming a free tournament while making more money for yourselves. Or, you could remove the ticket requirement entirely. Either way, premades don’t have to “farm” free tournaments, and PuGs don’t have to get stomped by premades.

The current system doesn’t benefit anyone. SPvP is all but impossible to PuG but it’s so to farm with a premade that that isn’t fun either. I don’t understand the point of this system, other than to frustrate players. If it’s to prove that you’ve “earned” your access to paid tournaments, well…ignoring that you can just buy tickets anyway, you don’t have to work hard to “earn” this.

And yes, I’ve been on both sides of this fence. I’ve been roflstomped too many times to count by premades when I’m PuGing. But I’ve also demolished randoms when I’m on a premade. There’s no reason pugs and premades should be fighting each other at all because there’s no contest, but the current system incentivizes it too much, to the detriment of anyone looking for a fair contest.

Adding matchmaking to free tournaments is necessary…a 5-man premade should never fight a team of five randoms, especially not when the premade is all rank 30 and the randoms are rank 3-5

Errant Venture.9371:

Erm, why do you guys seem to think this is a grind-oriented game? I understand that in a subscription based game, it makes sense to have a lot of pointless grind and time-killing build in to make the players keep subscribing month after month. That sort of design technique doesn’t make sense in GW2. The design team’s greatest incentive is to make the game FUN so the player is more likely to spend more money on cosmetic items and content. Grind-based content actually works AGAINST Arenanet in a non-subsc game.

Imagine our surprise, then, to find out that the only endgame available is grinding.

The biggest problem is that the story is clearly separated into “stages” and nothing ever comes back from a previous stage. So once I helped out my friends in home city, it’s on to join an Order, and time to abandon my friends forever. Then who cares what Order I was in? Now Trahearne and I are best buds.

Feels more like Trahearne’s story than mine.

When searching for “only show available” I still get all the items that are not available…including items that can’t be available, like “Lemons in Bulk” and so forth. It clearly says 0 under # available. This doesn’t seem to be that hard of a bug to fix and it would make the TP a lot easier to navigate.

It’s pretty ridiculous to suggest that micro-manipulation is not occurring. It’s the only way to make any money in this game.

Having some dungeon paths easier and harder might make sense, but there’s no rhyme or reason to it. It’s not like every dungeon intentionally has one easy/medium/hard path so that you can grind 60/120/180 tokens per day based on how good you are.

The difficulty within a single path might fluctuate wildly – CM Asura, for example, is afk-worthy except for three of the most frustrating pulls in the game (Sure-Shot, Frost, and that pack with 8 silvers who all heal each other you HAVE to skip and leash). Seraph is afk-worthy until you find the “blow up the gate” event…then you realize you can just throw 200 barrels next to the barrel spawn point, causing the mobs to permanently run for those barrels while 1 guy handles the gate alone and you don’t fight any enemies at all.

The problem is when I’m fighting the afk-bosses in CM I’m thinking “boy, this guy doesn’t do anything and has way too much health. I’m not having fun.” When I’m running through the 8-silver pack in CM I’m thinking “this pack has to be skipped or we all die. There’s no way that’s intended, and it’s sure not fun.” As I’m dancing back and forth across the water against the billion-health, one-attack Frost, I’m thinking “I have to repeat this for ten minutes without dying once, and there’s only one mechanic. This is not fun.”

The question with precursors is “what does earning a precursor demonstrate?”. Right now, getting a precursor demonstrates that you’ve invested ‘sufficient’ time gambling in the Mystic Forge…but that was already demonstrated when you got your 77 clovers. Other things you have to do to earn the legendary are map completion, farm a single dungeon, earn badges of honor, have a lot of karma, have a lot of gold…there’s no point in changing the precursor to require any of these things. What’s missing? An honest-to-god demonstration of skill.

Either make it so the precursor is “earned” through some difficult achievements (WoW, for example, awarded mounts for completing the hard-mode achievements in high-end dungeons and raids) or maybe make it purchaseable for 600 of each dungeon token (since right now people only run one dungeon for armor set and one for legendary).

Darx.9842:

Theres a good chance you’ll see this so I’m going to say it.

Legendaries need to be less about money and more about an epic journey. An awesome difficult event or solo/group instance to obtain a precursor or gift would be alot more fun than what we got.

But it’s good to know you guys are listening and are planning to make changes.

Thank you!

This

But at least we can buy less stuff now

Strangely I’ve been noticing prices crashing on all the items I used to sell…

T5/T6 ore, logs, dust; herbs (T1-T6), gems (T1-T6) have all dropped in value so much that I’m sitting on them waiting for them to go back up…

I don’t think the loot is a big issue…chests dropping blues needs to be fixed and tokens need to be exchangeable for some sort of commodity (Ectos? lodestones?) but other than that loot is fine, you can get the best items in the game from dungeons.

The problem is that dungeons aren’t fun. Oneshots that you can’t see the telegraph for, packs that you have to skip (that pack with 9 silvers in CM Asura path???), the fact that literally every enemy in every dungeon has twice as much health as it should…those are the problems.

I’ve also never seen Glyph of Renewal work, before or after the patch “fixing” it to only work on downed players, on either downed or defeated players.

I don’t remember what attunements I’ve tried it in (not all of them…I gave up on it before that) but I believe I tried fire and air on downed players with no effect.