Guild Wars 2

What a great discussion! Here are some of the points I’d like to bring up.

Story Mode

These should be soloable with AI henchmen-like party members, or at least much easily accessable with a much lower learning curve. Like in Guild Wars 1, the player can choose which henchmen they can bring with them. After all, most people who do Story Mode are probably just getting their feet wet in doing dungeons; or probably just in it for the Lore instead of the Challenge. Once they have a feel for dungeons, then they could find player-controlled party members to assist them in Explorable Modes.

Improved LFG

Whether this is going to be a full-fledged Dungeon Finder or an LFG Tool with many more features, it obviously has to be better than what we have. I think a suitable compromise is the Party Search feature that was in Guild Wars 1, but extended to work in across different zones and through different overflows. There could also be filters to restrict searches to specific dungeons so that finding a suitable party doesn’t have to feel like a chore.

Level Scaling in Fractals

The scaling used in Fractals really fractures guilds with members who may not be all on at the same time to complete them. It’s interesting but also very segregated. Instead, have guild groups or mutual friends (as opposed to random people) bring in their peers from lower levels to participate in higher levels. That way, a guild doesn’t feel torn apart because a few guildmates were left behind because they were not available for progression. That way, there’s always a feeling that a guildmate is always looking out for you.

Boss Dynamics

In the beginning, people complained that bosses were too hard. After a while, I bet you some of these same people complain that these bosses are too easy once they have learned a trick or two about them. As far as boss mechanics go, you really can’t stop people from learning. Instead, I would say make the boss more interesting. Out of all the bosses I have seen, I would say Giganticus Lupicus is the most interesting, followed by Subject Alpha, the Legendary Searing Effigy, then the Iron Forgeman (the latter is mostly because of the Lore than the boss mechanics). The Ghost Eater could be interesting if the three cannons around them were actually required for the fight.

Explorable Mode End-Bosses (and some mid-bosses) should have shifting or random dynamics. Giganticus is a great example in that there are three phases to the fight with different ways of getting through each of them. However, what if the boss was a bit more … random? What if there was a chance that Giganticus’ three phases were swapped around for each visit to Arah? As in one night, you would do 1-2-3, then next visit would be 3-1-2, and then a third time would be 2-1-3? By sticking Phase 1 in the middle or end, players would no longer utilize the accepted “safe spot” that they would use to get to the next phase; but instead expand their strategies to the very basic idea instead of the very specific.

Subject Alpha is somewhat like that but with abilities fixed to whatever path you choose. However, what if there was a random Subject Bravo or Subject Charlie that did a totally different set of abilities?

Also regarding Kohler and the Cave Troll— depending on which boss dies first should both bosses spawn within close proximity, the rest of the dungeon could either be full of Ascalonian Ghosts or smaller Troll minions. If the party becomes creative enough to skip the event, then the rest of the dungeon could have a mix of ghosts, trolls, and gravelings thus making the dungeon harder than it has to be. Then again, maybe better rewards could be given to compensate.

Trash Mobs

A lot of PUGs I have participated in have a tendency to skip anything and everything that is deemed skippable using whatever means necessary, even resorting to glitches and exploits. Most glitches revolve around using the terrain since most mobs still live in the times of Guild Wars 1 when nobody learned how to jump. So a simple suggestion would simply be to teach the mobs how to jump. That could solve a lot of things.

In addition, the mobs in dungeons should not break aggro, or should have an considerably large leash range. In this case, the key rule is: if you aggro it, you kill it!

At the same time, most if not all the mobs in the original eight dungeons have more health than they should have. The mobs in Fractals is a pretty good step in the right direction as far as the trash goes. However, should there be a Veteran or Champion in the way, give us a reason to not skip them. Perhaps they need to be killed in order to open a gate, or if we choose to skip them, the end-boss might be harder to kill and drops better loot. Or what if killing certain Champions gave the party a zone-wide Magic Find buff, which leads to my next point?

[continued]

I have only one complaint: dungeon story mode.

It’s incredibly hard to find a group for story mode!
Either there needs to be a solo option for dungeon stories (personal story instances are often done solo with the option to bring party members in, so why not story dungeons? I don’t see how it’s an exploit if the rewards are pretty meh anyway, you also do it once)

Or…

It needs to be made more appealing!
As other said before, add tokens to story dungeon for example.
Make story mode attractive again by making it worth going through with newcomers!

Lastly,
A LFG function would solve many problems! Some say it makes the game less immersive, but there are creative ways to still make it flow with the rest of the game
The LFG tool could be a magic mirror or a bulletin board in the main cities and near the dungeons. Or even more interesting: a dynamic Asuran “bulletin board” that displays LFGs a bit like airplane departure times, both seen in the world map and as a special window (like Black Lion Trading Company can be opened in a window) or as a separate chat. The format could be similar to gw2lfg.com

Ask yourself this: what kills immersion? Seeing LFG chat shouted in map chat and actually angering people by posting something different/fun/interesting?
Or an ol’ fashioned bulletin board actually meant for searching for groups, kinda like how you search for quick jobs?
LFG map chat kills immersion, bulletin boards can provide immersion!

1) Add tokens to story mode… even if it is less tokens than an exp run.

2) I’d prefer a balance of RNG and token rewards for exotic dungeon armor. Maybe increase the tokens needed for armor. But, give each end boss a chance to drop an exotic armor piece (and please make them drop more than 1/100 runs, bad RNG is bad).

3) Create interesting/fun mechanics for boss fights. FotM is a step in the right direction.

4) Please for the love of God and all that is Holy and good in this world, disable waypoints during boss fights. This is a mechanic which is great for learning a dungeon. However, it greatly cheapens a boss encounter. If you have to adjust boss difficulties as a result, fine. Just say NO to corpse zergs!

5) Have minis or other vanity items obtainable from dungeons.

6) Please add dungeon finder tool.

7) Some how reduce the player base segmentation from FotM levels. I’m all for progression in content. But it’s hard to find group for my exact level.

8) Easter eggs are great. Pop-culture references are cool. Think outside the box

Thank you for making a great game.

First thing you should do is a LFG tool. Your fixes, while appreciated, will be useless if i’m forced to sit in LA or dungeon zone trying to find group, instead of being listed in lfg tool and doing whatever I wish.

I like exploring and I like dungeons too but sitting one hour in LA trying to coerce someone into story mode takes all the fun out of the game.

Bottom line -

If I don’t feel like dungeoneering, this game is stunningly awesome and brings me much joy.

If I want to do dungeon the game becomes a chore and unpleasant test of waiting for nothing.

IMO the only 2 dungeons that are a grind are CoF and Arah, it kinda sucks that you get pretty much the same loot/ rewards as you do from 15 minute paths on other dungeons.

What is more of a grind however is trying to find a group for an old dungeon since FotM came out. Even with GW2LFG it can still take a while to get a group.

(1) Dungeon finder
(2) Dungeon finder
(3) 5-man version of Ulduar.

Not terribly original contributions, but my own input would be…

Solo-duo scaling or mode
GW1 was my favorite game ever (certainly outnumbered the rest combined in hours played!), and I do greatly miss being able to play independently – I love the open ‘living world’ of GW2, but there’s essentially zero solo PvE end-game currently and that is a real shame.
Money and rare materials are the only solo pursuits after earning the exploration/jumping achievements, which just doesn’t have the staying-power that GW1 offered.

The 5 player gating of end-game is also compounded by the absence of rare cosmetic skin drops and the restriction to 1 end-game (L80 exotic) crafted skin set, 1 karma skin set and 1 loot skin set; between the 8 dungeon sets (73% of end-game gear!) and the mystic forge grindathons, there’s a huge gulf between easily obtained and never-going-to-obtain.

To people not interested in party gaming, GW2 PvE does lack the piñata factor at the moment – open world foes aren’t desirable for anything but money and craft items that are essentially just money-made or money-saved (depending on if you want to amass them); opening dungeoneering for those who won’t/can’t form parties would greatly expand solo content without requiring any new assets.

Party finder
I’m not on the edge of my seat for this personally – though I certainly would use it (for my remaining story modes & AC explorable) – but I don’t see how dungeon content has a long-term future without it; the barriers to group forming are already formidable, and will only become more so with further new content and the inevitable introduction of other hubs.

Super-mob swarms
There’s nothing fun about some of the lethal mob swarms currently in the game, thinking especially of Caudecus’s Manor (I haven’t seen many explorable modes!) – they don’t even allow for careful pulling or tanking, only avoidance tactics or waypoint-zerging.
Also; surely can something be done about the aesthetic design – player race enemies especially – because opening a door and having 20 cloned bandit ladies pour out isn’t atmospheric and does give the impression the game is glitched…

The Fractals are much better than the regular dungeons in this regard, in my opinion.

Health measured in millions
Just to echo many other contributors: I don’t find this fun.
Granted none of the dungeon bosses has ever given me 7 days of burnout like the Karka event (presumably graduates of the more exclusive Billions O’Health School of Monsters), but ultimate bosses can still drift over the tolerance threshold even on the first encounter,

But seriously, there needs to be an easier way to find dungeon groups than standing in Lions Arch spamming LFG in chat.

Well, for starters, I would appreciate it if getting in to dungeons were ACTUALLY POSSIBLE… It takes hours trying to find a group in Lions Arch or in front of the dungeon gate shouting LFG, especially when after 2 tries you get muted for spamming. The ingame LFG tool is crap, because you can’t say what you are LFGing for, so people just ignore it. They need a new LFG UI that can be used to find groups for certain dungeons, and/or an automatch tool like the one for PVP. I would be happy with either, because then i could actually find a group and actually do a dungeon for once…

I enjoy gameplay and most of the dungeon and boss design on its own. I’d play it even if they did not have unique rewards.

The biggest hurdle for dungeon gamers today is that there are no tools to assemble groups. I know developers are strongly against adding automated group assembling tools like some other games have, and I think that is fine. But the lack of a cross realm, cross map way to find players interested in doing things with you often means you just cannot do them, or spend more time trying to find people than actually doing them.

Oh, and Fractals… the “same server” requirement here is absolutely unacceptable. It is a requirement to play only during peak hours and then to pray that your servers are popular, even as concurrency dwindles between content patches.

So, we need an LFG channel, or opt-in overflow map (think “Enter the Mists”), or bulletin board listing tool that let’s us communicate what we want to do and find others. And once we’ve found those others, we need to be allowed to play with them. The increasingly prohibitive search for players is itself the biggest problem with the reward structure of dungeons, as the reward does not scale with this absurd and constantly increasing difficulty.

Part 2, since this got mad long, yo.
If you really, really want to experience the problem with dungeons, go make a level-appropriate alt and gear him with blues and greens from the preceding 10 levels. Then run Sorrow’s Embrace story mode with a PUG. Only then will you experience the pain of endless champions without worthwhile mechanics, multi-stage bosses that take so long you can easily run back from the WP and only see their health bar go down 5%, silver trash mobs that add nothing, and a story so uninteresting and formulaic that the players in my group were actively mocking it after every cutscene. (Seriously, the story in story mode dungeons is basically terrible- “Which member of Destiny’s Edge is going to act like a petty spoiled child this time?”)

On the other hand, the fractal dungeons are a great first step towards dungeons that are actually fun to play. They make use of the cooperative nature of the party for more than just “let’s all add our damage together”. The much-maligned swamp fractal is enjoyable to work on as a team (if you get a group that aren’t going to be dicks about it when someone doesn’t run it fast enough) and the dredge powersuit boss (despite having probably too much HP considering how hard it is) is really exciting because it has the team split up and accomplish different goals, beyond just “nuke this guy”. I’d love to see more of this in future dungeon (re?)designs- bosses with unique mechanics and objectives that are more complex and interesting than just killing a billion trash mobs in a straight line. More jumping puzzles, more regular puzzles, and more fun co-op gameplay (look at other co-op games that have varied team objectives or put players into different roles/places on the map). Again, I still think there’s room for a lot of improvement, but the fact that the fractals use Veterans and not silver mobs is a great sign that you understand how boring it is to fight walking health pools.

Everyone wants a group finder. Add a group finder. gw2lfg.com is actually a pretty good workaround, but I don’t want to have to leave the game to find a group. I understand concerns about splitting the community or losing the conversational aspect that comes from LFGing, but I’ve had chatty groups by using the site and I’ve had silent groups from LFGing. Please make it easier and faster to run dungeons, since I want to be spending my limited free time playing the game and not putting up classified ads.

A final, pie-in-the-sky idea that I’d love to see added to the game: split up the current dungeons into their most interesting encounters. Make those parts fractals, and then let players choose different playlists of fractals from the portal in LA. (So I can run the AC fractal playlist and get AC tokens, or the “mixed bag” playlist and get a potpourri of different fractals and tokens). And then add a “currency” page that stores all my different currencies. Seriously.