quote from omgwtflolbbl.7142 since quote button isn’t showing up
“There’s a difference in what we percieve to be a good degree or type of difficulty as well. If the mechanics are good and challenging, great. If something is “hard” because it has a billion HP, that’s not good.”
I read you state similar in another thread that i was going to post in until i checked later that day to see it gone and wholly agree with this statement.
So far my dungeon experience has been a bit limited as i haven’t had too much time thanks to having classes ramp up, but from what i have done (AC story and explorable paths 2 & 3, CoF story. and several attempts of TA story; would like to do more but didn’t realize when I’ve had time that i didn’t need to have finished story to do explorable) The dungeons felt more tedious and frustrating than actually hard. This was mostly due to the combination of enemies having such giant health pools while at the same time being able to consistently dealing high percentages of dmg to myself or party members on a failed dodge.
Based on what I’ve dealt with, the dungeon experience just isn’t very interesting as it usually boils down to beat on the sack of health while trying to avoid getting 2, 3, or 4 shotted. Very few of the bosses that I’ve seen have very interesting mechanics. To me its the well thought out mechanics that make the dungeon experience fun as they are things to learn in order to surpass the fight in addition to just playing your class effectively. In my opinion it is also the mechanics that make a boss “challenging” rather than the idea of them being bloated sacks of health.
If they took the time to possibly redesign the dungeon model with the idea of creating more interesting encounters via mechanics and making the difficulty based on that rather than high hp and damage numbers I think you would find a lot less controversy surrounding the actual difficulty of the dungeons as its a difficulty that actually would lessen noticeably as people start learning how to handle the mechanics which would usually have a more concrete way of being tackled comparative to just raw numbers.
In terms of this I feel like you could take certain other games such as Dark Souls as an example of this. During my time playing Dark Souls i got to experience the challenge of its in my opinion well done boss fights. This might not be the best game to pull examples from, but the majority of the bosses in Dark Souls could seem outright impossible to some players much like how it seems part of the community sees the dungeons now. But usually these bosses had some key feature/mechanic that observant players could find that eventually through trial and error could be used to make the boss much easier or just more manageable. Right now it seems that few of the fights have a manageable mechanic that is easily picked up on and overcome, based on what i have been reading of the arguments of the crowd asking for difficulty decrease.
Overall the difficulty is about what i expected from a new MMO to differentiate themselves from the crowd in the dungeon scene, unfortunately i believe they created artificial difficulty through sheer numbers which can turn an otherwise possibly fun experience into a frustrating mess.
My main point i guess is to suggest that the difficulty be maintained but be created through the use of mechanics for both bosses and trash mobs rather than rely on numbers for difficulty.