Guild Wars 2

I just ran my first GW2 dungeon the other night (AC story mode) and I have to say I was a little surprised at the difficulty/harshness of it, since I had heard story mode was easy. I consider myself a veteran mmo player, (8+ years in a variety of games) and I certainly don’t mind a good challenge, but it was still surprising. About half of the difficulty in my opinion has to do with camera issues – fighting in some of the many smaller rooms or narrow corridors with all of the spell effects can make it next to impossible to see what is going on, resulting in confusion and easy deaths.

The remainder of the surprise was how difficult it was to kill trash mobs, which seemed to take forever to down. Bosses were mostly killed by repeated death-zerg. It felt like I didn’t have time to do anything since I was spending all of my time constantly running/dodging/trying not to die – very fast paced chaos. My group was composed of 5 people: Me (lvl 31), few lvl 32-36ish and a lvl 80 – all of whom had done this dungeon many times before except me. (I had thought that the lvl 80 in our group was automatically nerfed to be level appropriate for the dungeon, but after reading this forum I am getting the impression that game feature hasn’t been implemented yet. If not, then the dungeon was even harder than I realized.)

Although we cleared the place, our group seemed to have a pretty difficult time, and I switched to being an almost full-time healer for most of the run. I was very surprised when, at one point, one of the party members said “Wow either they nerfed this place to hell or we have a great group.” The others agreed. Since I had assumed I was probably in a crappy group, this comment made me really wonder what a bad group run might be like.

When we finished, I asked if the normal/exp version of the dungeon was easier or harder, and everyone said it was A LOT harder.

By the end, I wasn’t looking to go back into any dungeons again anytime soon. I assume I will get used to the faster-paced chaos of it, but for the first dungeon in the game (on “story mode” it felt like an awful amount of work.