Guild Wars 2

I’ve pretty much stopped playing GW2, most people I know have quit. The way Dungeons and Fractals have been handled is a large part of this.

1) Bugs don’t get fixed fast enough. There aren’t that many dungeons and there are even fewer good dungeons. Every time a path gets bugged that is one less dungeon we can do to add variety to our runs. Things being left in such a sorry state for over a month while we wait on a big dungeon patch is unacceptable. Especially when that patch fails to address all the issues and the next patch could be over a month down the road.

2) Dungeon rewards are horrifically imbalanced. Arah takes considerably more time and effort to do, but you still get a mere 60 tokens. The more challenging dungeons need to offer bigger rewards.

3) The failure of fractals is another huge problem. Taken individually the fractal dungeons are interesting. However, fractals as a whole are terrible due to the lack of reconnects, the character bound progress system, and being limited to the least progressed player. You have had 3 weeks now to fix things with fractals, we’ve seen nothing. Why should we have any faith that we will see fixed in a reasonable time frame? Reconnects should have seriously been at the top of the list and got an emergency patch. It is that big of a problem.

Ultimately, the way GW2’s end game has been handled has permanently damaged A.net’s reputation for many players. GW2 sold based on the reputation of GW1. Much of that reputation is now burned and must be reearned.

Sorrow’s Embrace path 1 is left broken with multiple infinitely spawning mobs. How is this an acceptable patch? We are lucky to get one dungeon patch a month and you fail to address long standing issues.

In fact, dungeon bugs seem to be getting introduced faster than they are getting patched with the long patch cycle and incomplete patches.

Venirto.4208:

AC is not only the easiest but also the most rewarding dungeon atm, something is clearly wrong here…

Yes, something is wrong, the rewards for the other dungeons suck. They tried the nerfing rewards thing when they moved all the tokens to the end. You know what happened? People started skipping bosses. You know who I don’t skip anymore, Kohler. You know why, he gives 10 silver + 3 silver from his bag.

You know what would make other dungeons more appealing, rewards proportional to their challenge and the time it takes to complete them. Arah should give 60+40 tokens per path and 50 silver at the end. CoE should give more for the time it takes to complete, especially for path 2 and 3.

The other dungeons should be rewarding, they are not. The solution is to make them rewarding (and fix the bugs that have been left in for months) it is that simple.

shaktiboi.5194:

Ritualist.5380:

I’ll probably be flamed for this, but it must be said Imo. The problem is skipping mobs, but not in an appropriate manner. There are groups in AC exp that even skip Kholer (not sure why you’d wanna do that to begin with).

You do a dungeon the first time for exploration, fun, achievement. If you do it again after that, your only reason is farming for tokens and 26s. If you can clear an explorable path in 15-30 minutes and gain 60 tokens, why on earth would you consciously double that time (and potentially increased repair costs) for so little gain? Especially when Kohler is such a terrible fight with bad mechanics to begin with? There’s challenging; and then there’s cheap. Kohler is cheap: not challenging. I’m not going to rehash why, because that argument has been done to death already by the player base.

So why bother with trash mobs and terrible, unfun minibosses like Kohler for a mere 3 extra tokens and “up to” 4s? Not worth the time. In that same amount of time, you could have cleared a different exp path for another 60 tokens and 26s.

It’s that simple.

Kohler gives 10 silver now, plus a bag. He’s worth doing. Most people don’t realize he drops 10 silver in addition to the bag.

The problem with pub groups is they want to skip too much stuff because they are bad. They ending up slowing themselves down in many cases, especially if a player dies at a later point. If you have good players killing stuff is fairly quick.

Hexgame.4802:

Instead of nerfing, they should buff other dungeons…

This is what they should do. The problem isn’t that AC is rewarding. It is that the AC dev is the only dev doing his job. All the other dungeons still have bosses that fail to drop a bag of gems or money. AC is rewarding to do, other dungeons are not.

For example in CoE you fight subject alpha 3 times. He takes quite some time to kill. Two of those times you get absolutely nothing for it.

This is such an easy solution, make story mode give tokens as if it were a 4th explorable path. Heck, story mode is harder and longer than most of the paths people do.

Actually the graveling burrows were finally fixed. It took about 2.5 months but they finally fixed them. Melee can actually hit them while standing still.

However, there are so many problem with dungeons right now. Currently 5 paths are genuinely bugged. CoE 1, SE 1/2, and Arah 1/2. Three of these bugs are flat out run enders. SE can be powered through, although it isn’t worth your time.

Other paths vary from poorly designed to very poorly designed. A big part of the reason people shouted no end game was because so many of the dungeons were broken and so many people end up just repeating AC as a result over and over.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Zenyatoo.4059:

The jellyfish has several neat attacks, but the way we damage it is still just normal damage the whole time. You could perhaps make the electric lamp things around the arena hurt the jellyfish too/give it a buff that makes it take more damage. Now players are rewarded for kiting in 3 dimensions, as well as risk/reward of standing inside the electricity.

Spoiler alert: They do! It’s just a bit difficult to perceive, but if you leash the jelly into it, it actually takes some pretty severe damage. It also hurts the spawned jellies.

That aside, my boss designs are an area that I would do well to improve upon.

The ideal underwater boss is one that doesn’t exist. A braindead easy underwater boss is the second best thing. Remember some classes have just awful underwater abilities, the targeting and LoS is not very good underwater, and underwater combat in general is just plain terrible. If I am in an underwater dungeon I want to get through it as quickly and easily as possible so I can get back to the parts of GW2 that are fun.

If you really want to improve you boss design, I would recommend brushing up on your Zelda. That series always has incredible boss design. Dark Souls has some good attack based bosses too, but the game is too hard for some.

Azelroth.6801:

Yes they’re working on a fix for this. Not sure when it’ll be ready but it’s happening and in the works.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/lostshores/Disconnected-in-Fractals/first#post774124

Remember Sorrows Embrace? They are working on a fix for that too, it has a been a good month since they broke it. “Working on a fix” simply isn’t good enough with A.net’s track record. A full month of getting DCed from fractals isn’t acceptable.

They need put a huge priority on getting reconnects for fractals implemented.

Progression is character bound and not account bound, which is very annoying.

You shouldn’t be wasting utility skills on Racials. Guardians have amazing utility skills. The sole consideration should be racial elite. Having access to a decent summon makes taking out veterans faster and easier while you level.

Hounds of Balthazar on human is probably the best, but all races except Norn have a decent summon elite.

That fact that this dungeon is still broken is really unacceptable. The dungeon team needs to get their crap together. There needs to be a rule that if they can’t play through the dungeon they can’t release it. It is very clear a lot of these problems leak through because A.net is too lazy to properly test them.

There is already code in place so that falling to your death does not cause armor damage if you are out of combat. Extend that code to dungeon hazards. Removing armor is tedious.

If you complete dungeons quickly, you will still get hammered with DR. It is punishment for being good at the game.

The simple truth is that DR based on completion speed is not needed in dungeons. The DR based on completions already protects against exploits as a dungeon rapidly becomes worthless if you repeat it.

I know the DR based on completion speed is someone’s pet, but it has to go. It only serves to punish good players who can clear dungeons rapidly.

The thug’s mass stability should absolutely be removed. Try using wall of reflection. It helps quite a bit in CM if used intelligently. It still reflects projectiles.

1. When a player reaches 80, they usually have at least full yellow gear that is either level 80 or 78. You cannot expect the same gear quality from someone who is leveling. This makes the average level 80 scaled down more effective than the average leveler scaled down if you remove the skill factor.

Also, don’t forget an 80 will have planned, proper gear. A leveling character should not be expected to put a lot of effort into gear that will be outdated in less than 5 dungeon runs. Thus they probably just have a mish-mash of level appropriate gear, while the 80 will have a set designed emphasize specific stats.

Absolutely massive difference. No widescreen should ever run without this command off.

I don’t think it ever went away completely. Probably someone at A.net insisted they keep it and they just made it harder to trigger. The problem is good groups can still trigger it quite easily. A skilled group can clear a number of dungeons is roughly 15 minutes each.

It would be nice if A.net stopped punishing players for being good. Farming is being controlled by the fact that second runs give fewer tokens and third runs even fewer.

Overlord Falcor.6014:

This dungeon hasn’t been touched by an update in the last 24 hours as far as I am tracking. My guild ran it last night just fine at about 2 am Eastern Time. We’re actually getting ready to do all the CM paths again, I’ll report back once we do that specific path.

Alright, just finished paths 1 + 2. The barrels aren’t bugged just gotta do it right to get it done. But we did notice some other wonky things going on with the enemys and their damage and conditions. Maybe it was a fluke but there were several times where I would be hit by one enemy and have a stack of 25 bleed. I’ve never seen that before.

Barrels absolutely are glitchy, they have been forever. You will clearly see 5 barrels down, but it fails to register before one is stolen.

Full cleared CM explorable last night on the 10/22 patch. Unless the 10/23 screwed it up, it hasn’t changed much. The big changes are the two skips were fixed. Only change that is really needed is the 5 barrels need cleaned up on the Seraph path. Often times all 5 barrels are down, but it doesn’t register in time.

Story mode may very well be bugged to unplayability, didn’t go through that.

Svarty.8019:

I don’t mean to be rude, but Robert Hrouda addresses all of your points in the post you quoted. oO

The problem is that if they do something as simple as adding tokens to chests, it won’t completely work. You have the bonus bosses who don’t drop chests. You have bosses in crucible and CM that don’t give chests. A hard rule where every boss class enemy drops 5 silver would go a long way.

Gurubu.1693:

Or they could just improve the dungeons themselves. Handing people misc rewards won’t make them want to go through a pain sessions of certain paths.

Certain paths are so incredibly screwed up, that yes, this won’t work. However, this will help a ton with dungeons were certain paths a bit longer and harder, but still doable.

Plunder.8195:

Should this maybe also include the story mode?

Story mode seems to be intended more as a “do it once then that’s it” kind of thing. Plus the story modes are long and horrifically imbalanced (some are easy, some are harder than explorable.) Maybe a general do X story modes weekly?

Robert Hrouda.1327:

It’s not an exploit to skip Kholer. He’s a bonus boss that unlocks a central waypoint, drops loot, and also gives a chest.

People skip him because:
A) He’s hard if you don’t know what you are doing, and don’t communicate enough.
2) Our changes to our token rewards moved the tokens out of his unlocked chest, so people don’t feel they have to fight him to maximize gains
III) Our dropped loot is abysmal, so you’re not finding anything of value.

Solutions:
A) He’s supposed to be hard, it’s explorable mode. We should aspire all our bosses across all difficulties to be of similar difficulty.
2 and III) We are currently re-working and changing our loot for dungeons. I had previously hoped that it would be in for the next patch, but it requires a lot of tuning and testing, so it might take another patch.

Use AC as a template. People love AC because every champion mob gives 5 silver and the final boss gives 15 silver along side the end of the dungeon reward. Remove the silver bonuses from these mobs and have every boss drop 5 silver instead.

Then the “bonus” bonuses need to have a significant reward. As it stands each bonus boss is really more of a penalty boss. They get in the way and slow your run down. If they gave karma, money, and tokens people would be more encouraged to do them.

We all know that players are like water, they will flow through the path of least resistance. As of now there is little encouragement for players to try the more difficult paths of dungeons. They are less rewarding and more time consuming. In fact the only reason to do the longer paths is so players do not get penalized with DR for being good and clearing the other paths too quickly.

A quick and easy solution would be to add weekly quests. Once per week, if you complete all 3 paths of a dungeon, you are rewarded in a manner similar to the daily. Completing all 3 paths could grant you an extra 300 tokens, some XP, some gold, and an item or two. Since it is limited to once per week this would encourage players to work a few full clears into their rotations. The clears for more difficult dungeons could have increased rewards.

Anzo.3526:

well maybe if you explained what the problem is you might get a response.

Just look at the linked screenshot, it is pretty obvious what the problem is.

Bumping, any ideas on how to resolve this. Anyone else run into this?

This is what my pet bar looks like: http://i.imgur.com/I6ZJc.jpg

I have tried multiple UI sizes, I have updated my graphics card drivers, it still persists. How do I fix this?

Immobilize is arguably the most powerful condition in the game right now. While immobilized you cannot turn, making it easy for players to get behind your attack arc. It is effectively an easily stacked stun. On top of this immobilize is easily stacked, particularly by thieves. 5-10 seconds of chained immobilize isn’t exactly difficult to get. Immobilize is arguably better than stun right now.

Adding Immobilize to the list of things blocked by stability and broken by stun break would likely improve the balance of the game greatly. Currently you can only remove it via condition removal. Many of which are severely lacking when it comes to removing key conditions. It can then be immediately reapplied.

Simply put, why isn’t immobilize covered by stun break and stability. It is nearly as good as stun when you do not factor in stun break. When you factor that immobilize has much fewer effective counters it is significantly better than stun. This simple change would likely have a significant effect on the game.

Just stop for a second and think. If a team lands a good immobilize, how likely are you to die? If they land a good stun how likely are you to die?