Guild Wars 2

It seems to me that the one thing the majority of players do almost every day is the dragon fights and low level chest events. But almost nobody does the events in Orr that give the same reward. Why? Because the temples events in Orr often fail. Nobody wants to dedicate a half hour or more of their time to participate in an event that will most likely fail and give no reward at all. Dragon fights and low level events on the other hand never fail and as a result the areas of these event are often full to overflowing when the event is up.

It’s the same way with dungeons, if the dungeon is too difficult for the average player and pug groups often fail or struggle through taking hours to complete it, they soon won’t want to do it any more and without dungeons what is there for pve players that have finished map completion to do? The same 3 dragon events over and over? Farm for hours on end? I’m sorry to say I’m one of those that is quickly getting tired of this game, due to the simple fact that I don’t have enough dedicated friends to run dungeons with people I know, and playing pug roulette is too much of a headache to deal with in dungeons that are too difficult for the average player. The average player is not geared, may not be max level, and is either a mess of a build due to where they put their traits while leveling, or read about their build on the internet and has no idea how to play it properly… The average player also doesn’t dodge.

The last problem is finding a pug group in the first place. The LFG system in the game is a joke, and as far as I’ve seen lately, nobody even uses it anymore. It is sad that we have to go to an external sight for something that should have been built into the game from day 1. Even a server wide LFG channel in chat would be an extraordinary improvement. As it is, all you can do in game is sit in LA and spam LFG. Just having one chat channel that reaches the whole sever would make both finding a group, or getting more to fill a group so much easier and faster.

In closing I’m sad to say that I’m quickly tiring of the game as all I’ve done lately is dragon fights and farming. I played the first GW for years and enjoyed it immensely. It was designed right as far as I was concerned. The majority of the content was easy enough for anyone. The missions that were the nearest things to dungeons, could be easily done by almost any group or even solo with NPC’s filling your squad, and there was only a few, such as Underworld that were difficult at all. It was fun to play and that was what mattered.

I’d like to see some numbers on dungeons, because it seems to me that they are dying. Everyone always likes to sound like an elitist when they post on the forums but the fact is the dungeons are far too difficult for the average player at 80 let alone players at the levels the dungeons are actually supposed to be doable.

Pug groups often struggle on the easiest of dungeons, due to a lack of any support/defense, I often switch to whichever of my characters I think the group needs which is often my guardian and end up carrying the group through. For people that don’t have a constant group of friends that are always on and work together in a coordinated group, trying to run any dungeon except CoF is a nightmare and even CoF can be bad if the group has no support builds of any kind.

As sorry as I am for saying this, WoW had the right idea for their dungeons. They were easy, fast, accessible and gave sizable rewards. While in any mmo, any game for that matter, there will be those elitist that whine that it’s too easy, those players make up a very small percentage of the player base and are often blowing hot air besides. Therefore only a small percentage of the game’s content should cater to those players.
If FotM isn’t enough for those players then perhaps adding difficulty levels to the existing dungeons should be something to look into. In fact, now that I think about it, that seems like a great idea to me. make all the dungeons easy enough for average players with perhaps reduced rewards from what they give now, and add a hard mode that’s only for lvl 80s that is made to be a challenge and gives more reward. Maybe even add a small (very small) chance for random legendary precursors to drop from chests in hard mode. Hard mode was in the first game, why not bring it back, then both sides can be satisfied. But giving more of the player base content they can handle and have fun with is essential to the success of an MMO.

Really the dungeon difficulty should also depend on what level the dungeon is, after all, they should be doable by a pug group at the level that the dungeon becomes available. And while the game does scale high level players down, Everyone knows that higher level players are still far more powerful even when scaled down.

It is also a problem that most pug groups tend to just run past entire sections of the dungeon just to get to the reward at the end. The reward of doing the dungeons needs to be spread out throughout the dungeon not all in the completion; and chests that usually just have blues and greens, maybe a gold, if you’re lucky, are not sufficient rewards. You can get that farming any trash out in the world. Dungeon tokens are the main reason most people try to run dungeons, whether they want the gear or are just using them to buy gear for salvaging. So having almost all of them come from completing the dungeon encourages people to skip content. They need to be spread throughout the dungeon, not a measly 3 off of some bosses and events, but 10-20 and have only a small bonus of maybe another 20 at the end. I’ve been in groups that did 3/4 of the dungeon and then the leader quit and we all got booted and received almost no reward for an hour of our time. Also this way, longer dungeon path’s with more bosses/events will also give more reward. As for the diminishing daily reward that’s in place right now, perhaps making each boss only give the Token reward once per day would be the solution. Or perhaps make it 20 the first time 8 the second time and then 0 after that.

In my opinion all they need to do to CoF P1 is make it so you can’t run past the bridge event, put in a door that doesn’t open until that event is completed and the guards and turrets outside are killed.

It’s not just ac that’s dead, the only one I see people consistantly doing is CoF I was in LA for over an hour the other night and didn’t see one person post lfg or lfm for anything and while I know many people are using the external lfg website, the fact remains that the majority of players probably don’t know about it and just arn’t doing the dungeons.

I beleive this is for two reasons; one, because the dungeons are just too much work for too little reward. When you can just far mats for a couple hours and have someone craft just as good of gear (or craft it yourself) why waste time doing the dungeons when probably half the pug groups you get will fail and fall appart in the middle. This is also why I almost never see anyone on my server doing the events in orr except in the one farming location, it’s too much of a chore.

And two, they’re just too difficult to be fun for the average player. There are those people that like to sound like hotshots and say the game isn’t difficult enough, but the fact of the matter is, the game needs to be made for the average player, not the few that morbidly enjoy dying over and over to reach their goal.

Another major problem with the dungeon difficulty is inconsistancy. Even bosses in the same dungeon can vary so much in difficulty that it’s like hitting a wall. The main boss in CoE is an example of this. The first time I went there my group got past the first fight with him mainly on luck, then we were going along just fine, killed a couple other bosses just fine, but when we reached the second fight with him we could not win. We tried probably a dozen times before finally giving up.

Bassically if Anet wants to keep a large player base playing the pve portions of the game, then they need to revamp the difficulty levels and make the dungeons doable by the average pug group without much difficulty. This means that the dungeons need to be doable by a group of all glass canon builds, because frankly, I rarely see anyone play as a support or defensive build and I doubt players in a pug group would want to change their build just to run a dungeon. As for the rest of the game, events need to be easy enough that you rarely lose if ever. THAT is the real reason the dragon fights are so popular and the temples in orr rarely even get done; With the dragons, you never lose, but more than half the groups that attempt the temples in orr fail.

While I’m at it, here’s one more thing that’s bothering me. Giving an enemy more health, or making a boss fight go through repeating phases multiple times rarely makes a fight more difficult, what it does do though is make it a long boring grind. Yes grind, you know ANet, that thing you said you were trying to avoid in your manifesto. perhaps you should go back and watch that again because it seems to me that you’ve forgotten what you set out to do and now the game is full of grinding. Some of them (Legendaries), the longest, most time consuming grinds I’ve seen in a game, and this is coming from someone that grinded for 100+ hours doing the same quest over and over to get a specific mount in WoW.