Guild Wars 2

@Dee Jay, do you just go from thread to thread and post negative comments? I’ve just read 5 random threads and always you’re there spouting hate on whatever subject.

Bobobejumbo.4951:

There was so much more important kitten for them to fix, like things that don’t work right. But no, lets shuffle the skill order around, that seems like a good use of time!

As has been pointed out several times, the button placement for all professions in the game follows a logic – arranged by cool down duration – so they have rightly arranged it to reflect the changes.

Agreed, OP. I feel the same way. I think in some ways I’m both casual and hardcore, in that I like to enjoy it all — open PvE, Dungeons, and WvW — and I’m still loving it.

Seriously man, do a little reading on the forums before posting something like this. Saying “Arenanet you dont care ybout all those ppl using exploits in dungeons?” is pretty ridiculous if you just took a slight glance over some of the other posts in this forum.

arabeth.2361:

I like that in the time I took to post three more people replied with essentially the same response: skip crafting.

I don’t know though, I haven’t skipped crafting at all, I’ve leveled up 4 professions on two characters. I think it’s pretty tough to keep say both weaponsmithing and armorcrafting current without buying some off of the TP, but definitely going one of them and cooking, for example, can be just fine.

exphryl.3857:

It’s the easiest way to get that type of Lodestone sadly…

Which means more Gold for the player and better upgrades eventually. Jormag offers terrible rewards for how risky the dragon is compared to other events.

There isn’t enough open areas for players to farm those or Tier 6 mats in general which is an issue.

I don’t know, I got 2 rare weapons and a rare sigil yesterday, from this event. It’s random loot, like everything else. I guess if you have bad luck on a drop, then yes, random numbers can of course give you terrible loot sometimes.

I’ve leveled up two characters, and did much better financially on my second. I think the big difference on the second time through was learning to vendor ALL blues and not salvage them like I did most of the first time. This made a big difference for my income. I also gather a lot as I go along, do events, and explore some (which sometimes nets chests in those little mini caves around the world). Overall I’ve always had enough money to pay for books with purely those activities, and occasionally buying gear off the TP.

omgwtflolbbl.7142:

Hawken.7932:

Quote from Colin Johanson:
“I’ll point out ironically, when we first turned on DoA back in Gw1 the posts you’re seeing in this forum from a few folks about difficulty were the exact same comments everyone had about DoA. It was “impossible, mobs were just tuned to do insane damage and have huge HP, there was no tactics to defeat DoA”, etc. I went back and read through the original DoA launch feedback and it was literally identical to the comments folks on the forums are leaving now.
We made the choice back then to stick with the difficulty, and give people time to learn how to play the dungeon better and overcome it. A few months later, people viewed it as the most fun thing in the game and totally reasonable without us changing anything.

We’ll be doing the same with the Gw2 explorable dungeons, our own internal testing teams and alpha test groups learned to beat them using a combination of player skill, synchronous builds, strong use of cross-profession combos, use of cooking/consumable buffs (these make a huge difference!) and well formed player tactics. By comparison, after having months to play the game and the time our alpha was complete, some of our better dungeon groups felt the explorable dungeons were too easy for launch, we decided not to make them any harder given the expected player skill on launch.
We’re actively monitoring every dungeon and working on balancing issues we encounter appropriately. We’ll be keeping an eye on bosses we think don’t have enough varied mechanics to warrant their large health pools and updating them over time to make them more varied/interesting fights. We’ll be monitoring, and continually tweaking/adding to dungeon rewards over time and of course balancing where we see the need. And of course, we’ll be looking at adding more dungeons as well!

All of that being said, the game is VERY new for most of our players, and I can absolutely promise with more knowledge of the game and advanced player skill, the explorable dungeons can all be overcome by being skilled groups. We’ve seen many groups do it just fine in our internal alpha test once they had time to learn how to play the game well. Just like Domain of Anguish in Gw1, it takes time and practice to learn how to overcome stuff as hard as our explorable mode dungeons, and that’s exactly the kind of players they are designed for.
If DoA was any indication, a couple months from now, many of you will likely be posting saying most of the dungeons are too easy and you need better challenges.”

That quote means absolutely nothing to me.

To me, dungeons aren’t hard and challenging. They aren’t really fun, either. They’re tedious. They’re made artificially longer and “difficult” by having enormous health pools. Many of the bosses are simple and easy, but take a long time to burn down. Some bosses you can basically AFK on. That shouldn’t be happening.

Well I copied in the quote to clarify their position on the dungeon difficulty.

As for fun factor, that’s a matter of taste I suppose. I both pug them and do them with guildies and have fun every single time I do one, so it’s not a universal opinion that they are not fun.

Quote from Colin Johanson:
“I’ll point out ironically, when we first turned on DoA back in Gw1 the posts you’re seeing in this forum from a few folks about difficulty were the exact same comments everyone had about DoA. It was “impossible, mobs were just tuned to do insane damage and have huge HP, there was no tactics to defeat DoA”, etc. I went back and read through the original DoA launch feedback and it was literally identical to the comments folks on the forums are leaving now.
We made the choice back then to stick with the difficulty, and give people time to learn how to play the dungeon better and overcome it. A few months later, people viewed it as the most fun thing in the game and totally reasonable without us changing anything.

We’ll be doing the same with the Gw2 explorable dungeons, our own internal testing teams and alpha test groups learned to beat them using a combination of player skill, synchronous builds, strong use of cross-profession combos, use of cooking/consumable buffs (these make a huge difference!) and well formed player tactics. By comparison, after having months to play the game and the time our alpha was complete, some of our better dungeon groups felt the explorable dungeons were too easy for launch, we decided not to make them any harder given the expected player skill on launch.
We’re actively monitoring every dungeon and working on balancing issues we encounter appropriately. We’ll be keeping an eye on bosses we think don’t have enough varied mechanics to warrant their large health pools and updating them over time to make them more varied/interesting fights. We’ll be monitoring, and continually tweaking/adding to dungeon rewards over time and of course balancing where we see the need. And of course, we’ll be looking at adding more dungeons as well!

All of that being said, the game is VERY new for most of our players, and I can absolutely promise with more knowledge of the game and advanced player skill, the explorable dungeons can all be overcome by being skilled groups. We’ve seen many groups do it just fine in our internal alpha test once they had time to learn how to play the game well. Just like Domain of Anguish in Gw1, it takes time and practice to learn how to overcome stuff as hard as our explorable mode dungeons, and that’s exactly the kind of players they are designed for.
If DoA was any indication, a couple months from now, many of you will likely be posting saying most of the dungeons are too easy and you need better challenges.”

Personally I feel all that’s needed is an addition to the existing Looking for Group list. If you had a drop down box next to your name which you could set to the name of the dungeon, that would be enough to get people using it, I’d imagine. Right now, no-one does.

I thought Colin’s post on this related discussion was pretty telling on their point of view regarding difficulty. In case people missed it, I’ll add below:

(about halfway down the post)
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Do-NOT-nerf-please/first

If you’re too lazy to go to the link, this was it:

Quote from Colin Johanson:
“I’ll point out ironically, when we first turned on DoA back in Gw1 the posts you’re seeing in this forum from a few folks about difficulty were the exact same comments everyone had about DoA. It was “impossible, mobs were just tuned to do insane damage and have huge HP, there was no tactics to defeat DoA”, etc. I went back and read through the original DoA launch feedback and it was literally identical to the comments folks on the forums are leaving now.
We made the choice back then to stick with the difficulty, and give people time to learn how to play the dungeon better and overcome it. A few months later, people viewed it as the most fun thing in the game and totally reasonable without us changing anything.
We’ll be doing the same with the Gw2 explorable dungeons, our own internal testing teams and alpha test groups learned to beat them using a combination of player skill, synchronous builds, strong use of cross-profession combos, use of cooking/consumable buffs (these make a huge difference!) and well formed player tactics. By comparison, after having months to play the game and the time our alpha was complete, some of our better dungeon groups felt the explorable dungeons were too easy for launch, we decided not to make them any harder given the expected player skill on launch.
We’re actively monitoring every dungeon and working on balancing issues we encounter appropriately. We’ll be keeping an eye on bosses we think don’t have enough varied mechanics to warrant their large health pools and updating them over time to make them more varied/interesting fights. We’ll be monitoring, and continually tweaking/adding to dungeon rewards over time and of course balancing where we see the need. And of course, we’ll be looking at adding more dungeons as well!
All of that being said, the game is VERY new for most of our players, and I can absolutely promise with more knowledge of the game and advanced player skill, the explorable dungeons can all be overcome by being skilled groups. We’ve seen many groups do it just fine in our internal alpha test once they had time to learn how to play the game well. Just like Domain of Anguish in Gw1, it takes time and practice to learn how to overcome stuff as hard as our explorable mode dungeons, and that’s exactly the kind of players they are designed for.
If DoA was any indication, a couple months from now, many of you will likely be posting saying most of the dungeons are too easy and you need better challenges.”

Evil.9061:

Hawken.7932:

@Kietay: Why would they explain it? Why do you feel that you’re entitled to know the exact algorithm that goes into their loot tables?

Played many MMOs? Met many MMO gamers? They kind of like to know these things.

You’re curious as to why that poster feels entitled, i’m curious as to why you care? It wasn’t the coefficient of lot drop percentage they asked for.

Oh yes, indeed I have. I’ve played most of the major ones over the last 9 years.

This is what theorycrafting within the MMO community is called. People take pleasure in extracting as much information from available data as possible to try and estimate what’s going on behind the scenes.

As for Arenanet giving up the equations for their loot system, I wouldn’t hold your breath. Any data like that is just going to help people who would exploit the game to maximize their gains in the shortest period of time.

@Kietay: Why would they explain it? Why do you feel that you’re entitled to know the exact algorithm that goes into their loot tables?

Yeah I have to agree with the OP, it’s not that I don’t see a point to those cities, it’s just that it’s such a pain to go through the load screens to get to the Grove, for example. I use the Mysts method usually and it’s just too much loading to get all the way home.

Would be nice if there was just a portal to all home cities from the mysts.

I don’t really think of buying “full sets of karma gear”, but I think it’s a nice goal to go for 1 or two of the better karma items from the Orr vendors.

I don’t know what MegaBUD is talking about above, I still buy salvage and harvesting stuff with karma, as well as cooking ingredients.

Yeah agreed, I wouldn’t rush, but definitely crafting can help quite a bit. Especially cooking… even though it’s been made more difficult it’s still very do-able if you have collected on your main as you went along.

Razamis.1062:

• End Game means having meaningful character progression continue once you are level capped. **

Its that simple. This may or may not be done through raids, but it most certainly cannot take the GW2 route and just stop progression all together at 80, that is a fatal mistake that has already cost them a lot of players.

You don’t need anyone else’s definition because this is the correct one.

I would agree, that End Game means continued character progression. In past games, I have always raided and this, combined with say grinding “faction” reputation and such things, has more or less been what there was.

I was super skeptical of the GW2 endgame, but for myself I find it’s quite satisfying at the moment. I find there certainly is a gear progression for now, and that’s great. I’m only partially kitted out with exotics and will work away at that over time. The most interesting thing about GW2 for me at the moment, at 80, is the fact that I haven’t explored the entire world yet. This is huge, as in WoW, AoC, and Rift by this time I had eaten up all that content and was disappointed. So much more to do in GW2 still.

To be fair, HellHound, I think it’s at least partly gear and partly builds. I’ve felt a huge difference in survivability between different build types in dungeons. That and balancing the stats on your gear with the stats that you lack from your build is important.

Did you consider replacing them…? I mean, there would have a been a lineup of people wanting to get into a quick Arah for just the last boss to get the tokens…

Plague.5329:

Guardian. It’s probably not even close. Other professions might have one or two things about them that make them very annoying, but Guardians have the most versatility in the game combined with some of the most interesting skills in the game.

Take a look at ANet’s twitch videos. What class are they always playing? Guardians. Who do you think gets the most attention and love from them? When someone in chat asks them to play another profession, there’s always a reluctant sigh followed by “Well, I don’t know it very well…” It’s obvious what class is daddy’s favorite.

I don’t know though, it’s a matter of taste. I wouldn’t say my guardian is more fun than my thief particularly, but there IS more variety in the guardian class and that’s key. Warrior was also awesome like this, with so many weapon combinations. Thief could easily rival guardian, in my experience, if they just added a couple other weapon options to mix it up now and then.

I’ve loved both my thief and guardian. I think the thief could use a little more weapon variation, but still a very different and interesting class to play.

Warrior I played in beta and loved that.

I really would love to love ranger — generally I like that type of fantasy archetype, but there’s just something lacking in the need to swap pets all the time in combat. I don’t think it’s a very elegant solution for pet survivability.

Overall I’m pretty happy with all of the classes I’ve tried — they’re all pretty interesting in their own ways.

It’s pretty hilarious seeing people saying this sort of thing. Takes me about 5 minutes to get into an explore mode pug at night (I do about 2-3 per night). Always running into people out exploring or doing events. My guild is adding members… and keeping it’s numbers.

> “Karma and all items associated with it are untradable. It cannot influence the market.”

All things influence the market.

A simple example: If you aquire an exotic piece of armor via karma by power grinding for a couple days, then you will not buy the crafted exotic off of the TP. If 100,000 people do the same, the price of crafted exotics will bottom out on the TP. The crafting ingredients which supply the production of those will be in less demand because people see less profit in crafting as a whole, so those too drop, and so on.

The flow of karma, like all currencies in the game, directly affects everything else.

Fiontar.4695:

There was never, ever supposed to be an “End Game Gear Grind” for this game. Ever. They need to go back to that.

The game doesn’t need it. I hit the level cap on my main at the 135 hour mark and now have almost 245 hours on that character. I still only have 63% map completion. I still haven’t done any dungeons. I’ve only barely touched WvW and sPvP. I play the game like I would play a massive, extended Skyrim and craft or buy the next piece of Exotic Gear when ever I can afford it.

I’m two accessories short of full exotics. I’ll probably eventually outfit myself with an alternate set to support a different build type. I’ve ignored the really grindy exotics. They are just pointlessly grindy and the grind isn’t necessary to provide hundreds of hours of enjoyable play for a character that has reached the level cap.

The original design worked. There is no need for an End Game Gear Grind, which has just created a market for illicit gold sellers, attracted botters and resulted in DR, which will just further increase the demand for illicit gold!

Botters will just adjust their botting to game the DR system. They can much better afford to have 24 accounts that each run an hour a day, circumventing the DR entirely and also making identifying them as botters pretty close to impossible, than a normal player can afford to deal with the very negative repercussions of a restrictive DR system.

DR will kill the game. It’s really the only thing that can kill the game. that and other bad game design decisions that abandon the original design concept and fall back on things like an “End Game Gear Grind”, which actually isn’t even needed!

I’m sorry, but I find this just the most ignorant comment. Just removing gear as an incentive system is no solution at all. Gearing your character, whether it be cosmetic or stat based is a fundamental part of an RPG or MMO in general and completely removing it would pretty well alienate a huge part of the potential player base. Not to mention almost all of the item systems and economy in the game have been completely designed around it and those would fall apart if there was no end-game gear “grind” as you call it.

Anet has done a great job of giving players incentive to do a number of things in the PvE part of the game — karma based events, exploration, dungeons, etc. — and the rules of their game state that if you keep repeating the same events over and over you will receive diminishing returns on your rewards. This both combats botting and is a system put in place to encourage players to play in more areas of the world, which in turn spreads the player base out to participate in events at multiple level ranges, and generally makes the game work better as a whole.

Obviously it does not sit well with is the crowd that only likes to zerg around a single zone to both maximize their profits and rewards in the shortest period of time.

The big question that I have for these people — what is the rush? What are you going to do once you have all of your gear. Oh I know, you’re going to come back to the forums and start complaining about having nothing to do.

About ranged/melee in this thread: I’ve been focusing on TA explore modes lately, as I’m first interested in getting the nightmare set. I’ve been exclusively pugging it, and actually have had some really nice groups with people and overall have had a great time doing all paths.

With these groups, I’ve experienced a pretty wide range of group compositions. A lot of times, it feels like there will be one person who steps forward (without saying anything) and takes up a sort of “tank” like role. Often a warrior/guardian, but once a mesmer which I thought was pretty interesting. I’d say the majority of the time this has been melee person, though I’ve also been in all-ranged groups.

My main observation from this has been that the playstyle varies a bit between the more melee and more ranged setups, but in each case the dungeon was pretty balanced for those wildly varying compositions. We never hit a place where it was like “this is impossible without being all ranged/melee”, which I thought was pretty cool.

While I agree with the whole “there is not trinity” mantra, and love it, I would say that my experience in explorable dungeons suggests there certainly is a point in building a “tanky” setup. Often explorables go much easier if someone steps forward to soak a lot of the damage and hold most of the aggro. It’s pretty viable if a warrior/guardian knows how to play it. Almost all of the best runs I’ve had have been this way. I don’t think it necessarily detracts from Anet’s design philosophy because I’ve also done several runs of TA exp lately, for example, and in the absence of those types of tanky players, people have just adapted and played the dungeon in a different way (and it was fun for th variation).

It’s funny, it really must vary between servers — maybe they cluster in low population servers to avoid being reported? On our server, I have seen then a total of three times since pre-launch.

Lumines.3916:

Not only what you said is true, but it’s plain for the eye to see that the DR system in place is simply TOO harsh that it’s affecting people not trying to farm karma, but trying to progress in a chain.

I got hit with DR just trying to cleanse the Cathedral of Silence because the event failed and had to do it again.

I’d argue that example is a bug, or at least it should just be addressed as a bug. I agree that when things like that happen it’s annoying, but the DR system is alright overall. I can at least understand why it’s there and play around it without any real issues — that’s been my experience so far. In dungeons, I have NO problem with it, because the end result is that when I look for pugs, people are willing to run any path, and that’s a good thing. It’s pretty annoying to be stuck to one path just because the herd decides it’s the easiest way to tokens.

I’ve tested magic find on simple drops like mining nodes, for example, and it clearly gives better results there. As others have said, I assumed it did not help with the forge though.

I know a lot of this conversation is related to WvW or PvP, but I’ve also found the skill quite useful in dungeons in the past. But 3 seconds now… not so much any more. It’s just not worth the time it takes to cast, imho. It was previously one of the more useful crowd control abilities for helping the group in trash fights.

thefounder.2074:

Korrt.3809:

Hopefully they take another inch off the top of these dungeons so i can see all of your elitist rage quit posts. =)

this player is what will emerge as Arenanet’s thermometer. they will increasingly listen to these voices who think the “vast majority” of players find it too hard. and we other players are just “elitists”. gone is the belief that in a game, even one advertised as skill based with less gear advantage, should ever require teamwork or even a modest amount of communication or planning. already players… ALOT of players pug farm these Exp mode dungeons without saying a SINGLE word to each other. without caring even in the slightest what build’s the other players are, without caring what boons or conditions are on them. and combos are just pretty colors that accidentally pop up. rinse, repeat, profit. hence the nerf to speed farming. its already too easy.

players like this poster are the norm now.. the loud majority. when they cry ’youre just elitists" or “hardcore players need to get a life” theyre actually saying “whether i am casual or not, i demand a game where interaction with other players is completely unnecessary and teamwork and skillbased gameplay are just promotional phrases meant to differentiate us from WoW”

Well said.

miya.5160:

By balance, I think people—or at least I—mean that dungeons should be more consistent in their difficulty. Encounters shouldn’t be all over the place. Hard trash pull, then an easy boss. A hard boss that takes a lot of coordination, then a boss that requires no effort to kill.

If you wanted to defend the design, you could call the system quirky to keep you on your toes, but I don’t see rhyme or reason to their balancing. It just looks like they didn’t.

I can understand what you mean, Miya, though i think in practice (and maybe this is just a personal preference perhaps), varying the difficulty of the bosses is nice in a way. It gives you a bit of variation, and sometimes that feeling of “this is the easy boss, a bit of a gift from the devs before the real one arrives later”. You could call it imbalance I guess, but I think the dungeons would be boring in a way if all bosses were consistently hard/easy.

Sentinel VX.1392:

I’m talking about the difficulty part so you can ignore the genre. The only problem here is how they execute a fun and challenging game. While explorable dungeon reward you with token that you can use to buy armor, the amount of time required to complete and the difficulty of some paths in explorable dungeon are non-sense. Why do you think people are doing speed run on a same path at CoF? because they find it the easiest and fastest one to do not because it’s fun beside there are tons of way to exploit the bugs in it. After Anet implemented DR system people are now “forced” to do all the dungeon path if you want to get full reward. I don’t mind this system as long all paths are balanced out in difficulty and amount of time that is needed to complete it. The problem is some dungeon paths are easier and faster than the other and some of them are more boring as well. I’m only hoping they can balance all the paths so they are equally enjoyable and fun to do not dumbing down the difficulty because people whining about it.

I don’t think they want to, or should, balance out all paths of a dungeon. Those paths are different difficulty for a reason (in my opinion). People keep asking for easy-medium-hard modes, but honestly they are already there. Some of the paths are easy, some are quite difficult, and that’s great. If you want to improve your game, then you can get better at your class and attack all paths, otherwise you can settle for the amount of tokens that you can comfortably get at your skill level.

This is very far from scientific, but I’ve gamed on both my Macbook Pro and my iMac for many years, also using a fan control program (though I use one called HDD Fan Control).

It usually is hovering at about 3600-3800 and I think that’s always been adequate, but I suppose it depends on how warm it is where you live. Those temperatures keep it below 56 degrees celsius, which I believe is fine.

Iron Wolf.5973:

Traits and skills aside, Im not a player who dead sets myself into Power/Crit/ Whatever else I have pts for so that Im a glass cannon in a group of glass cannons. My traits are generally designed to support party play.

My utilities are swapped to meet the sitation before pulls. People I play with also tend to do this. While I agree there are some players who lock themselves into one idea, and that does cause problems, it is not the only problem.

I still believe that there is a disparity in the difficulty. A lot of people struggle with teh dungeons because of frustrations with the design, while others breeze through them. Bad pug can result in that, but its not the only thing. Put it this way. IF the you are a talented player and you are getting through dungeons and enjoying htem for their difficulty, but most of the player base is not, then either the dungeons are to difficult for the average level of the player base, or you are really just that good.

If you are, Id encourage you to share your thoughts, ideas, and pointers to help those of us who are having more difficult times in dungeons so that we too can learn from your experiances and become better players. Merely stating that you enjoy the dungeons and you dont know why everyone is having a hard time isnt helping anyone. Not ANET, or the frustrated players who want to play this content and also excel at it.

Also, my biggest problem is just that the dungeons personally are kind of boring. Mob grinding to me are not as exciting as the events in the world or in some of the dungeons. But thats just me personally.

Got to throw in the obligatory smiley now, cause Im not trying ot sound like a hardass, or anything. I just want those who are enjoying the current dungeon design to share their thoughts and so forth on how to approach dungeons and beat them. : )

I guess that I have just the opposite experience — I find dungeons quite exciting because the are so demanding on my class. I love that they demand not just one setup of my support skills, as you say, but often require switching them up between pulls.

The biggest problem that I have come up against in pugs (when I do get a bad pug), is when I am grouped up with people who want to rush forward into groups of trash without approaching each set strategically. This is when it falls apart. Trash takes some coordination and you really do need to make use of the crowd control options at your disposal — blocking passages, blocking projectiles, healing bubbles, combo fields, purging conditions off you and your party, immobilizing targets, focus firing on individual targets as a group, etc.

On the whole though, I would contest that most people are having problems with dungeons. That hasn’t been my experience in-game at all. If I take my pug experiences as an indication, unless I have been extraordinarily lucky with the groups I’ve met up with, on the whole people seem to really enjoy them and I have cleared the dungeon on almost every run.

Yeah, don’t agree as usual. I’ve been focusing on TA Explore mode the last few days, exclusively playing in pugs. In 4 different pugs in the last 24 hours, I’ve cleared TA Explore 4 times, changing the path each time. I agree, it is difficult, and there are things in that dungeon which I can imagine would frustrate you if you had a bad pug, but the only path which is really difficult is the forward/forward path, and even that one we cleared with some perseverance.

I am a primarily PvE’r and the thing in the game which I am MOST excited about now are the dungeons. Please don’t speak for me, OP, with your posts. I now see people running dungeons all the time on our server, so I guess that the changes to the tokens were enough to motivate people – though personally I feel they give out too many tokens per run. I hope the difficulty is maintained, though little tweaks and balances here and there would of course be great (the second to last boss in forward/forward is a rough one).

I don’t agree with you, OP, but I’ve said enough on other threads about it.

There’s a nice review-in-progress series on MMORPG.COM right now. Their latest part is on dungeons, and I think it’s a fair overview of what they’re all about.

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/473/feature/6756/Review-in-Progress-Dungeons.html/page/1

Nice post, and offer, Inci.

I have a retina macbook pro (the lower end one) and I get about 30-45 depending on the area. That is with these settings:

- Resolution: 2048×1280
- Animation: High
- Anti-alias: None
- Environment: High
- LOD Distance: High
- Reflections: None
- Textures: Medium
- Render Sampling: Native
- Shadows: Low
- Shaders: Medium
- Post-processing: None

Then none of the bottom options ticked.

I’d say overall it’s not too bad. Maybe a bit disappointing, but playable. The only real issue that I have is that it’s a kittenoppy when turning the camera around rapidly. Would be nice if that issue could be resolved.

Fabsm.5897:

Let me make a little paragon with WoW.

All these arguments about the explorable dungeon being too difficult.. they’re meant for organized people. Think about normal raids in WoW (not LFR, the normal ones).

The LFR raids are the “Story Mode”, the normal raids are the “Explorable”.

In the end, people will learn and start PUGging the normal raids (the explorable) as in WoW, but at the start of any expansion, PUGging a normal raid was something of a very stupid idea.

Now, what i see in the comments, is we want LFR-difficulty dungeons (i.e.: PUGgable even from a beginner group that only pew pew without any strategy). Are you already tired of the difficulty after only a month? That would be akin to asking for a raid nerf in WoW when people enter them in green-blue equipment (in wow).

Too soon, people, too soon. You can’t expect an expansion in one month, and the fact that someone has already farmed their equipment because of glitches or exploiting should be something frowned upon, not a desiderable thing.

So, i really hope ArenaNet fixes the obvious bugs (people getting less than other in the same circumstances), but hoping to decrease difficulty when more than 80% of the population hasn’t finished content…

… is Blizzard style. But this isn’t WoW, so, take the hint, MoP is out, you can go back in the rollercoaster if you want. You will find easy, puggable dungeons and raids, and an environment that doesn’t require strategy nor tactics, only equipment and pew pew.

I will watch your corpses floating in the river. (ancient Chinese proverb )

I totally agree. I think the biggest problem is people’s perceptions of these explorable dungeons being “dungeons” in the traditional sense, and not raids. I think Anet actually made a mistake not calling them 5-man raids, because that’s exactly what they are in both content and difficulty. It’s like people starting off in a new WoW or Rift expansion and jumping right in and trying to pug raids, lol. That and a totally new group dynamic… it’s really no wonder people are having problems.

@Michael Fejervary: okay, fair enough Michael. You don’t find the dungeons fun, but many, many people DO find them fun. Fun is a subjective experience. I believe the dungeons are great fun.

I’ve run dungeons in Everquest, Guild Wars 1, WoW, Age of Conan, Rift, Swtor, and now Guild Wars 2. I’ve raided in most of those games as well, from an entry level up to more hardcore difficulties. After all of that, I find Guild Wars 2 dungeons to be fun and challenging, with the interesting twist of traps and slightly more exploration. They’re great.

So, perhaps I lack the mental faculty to understand why you don’t like them, but I respect the fact that you don’t. Still, we are writing on a public forum and I reserve the right to disagree with your opinion and express my own.

There have obviously been a lot of different threads, both knocking the dungeons and praising them. I personally like the dungeons a lot, though I come from a raiding background in other games and this content — as I see it — was very much aimed at “me” when it was produced.

The more that I think about it, the more that I think Anet made quite a mistake not calling the Explore modes of the dungeons 5-man raids. I think a big part of how some people have reacted to the difficulty comes from an expectation of what a “dungeon” is, in terms of content and difficulty, and that expectation (fairly enough) comes from what they are like in other games.

Coming from 10-20 man raids in both WoW and Rift, these dungeons are closer to the difficulty of 10-mans in Rift, although a fair amount easier. The difficulty of trash in GW2 dungeons is just standard stuff for most raids I’ve experienced, but if you came in expecting WoW or Rift style dungeon trash, you’d be in for a shock, and obviously many have been.

As for the point that some have made on them not being accessible to casuals — well I think that you have to think of the content as quite well presented for all different kinds of groups. WvWvW is intended for those who like open world style pvp. sPvP is meant for those who like match-style, more intense pvp. tPvP even a notch up from that… or sideways. Open world PvE is meant for both casuals and hardcore PvE players alike, and Explorables are for the Raiding crowd. In my opinion, they’ve done a great job at trying to produce content for a pretty wide range of tastes.

The only thing which is a little up in the air, in my mind, are the story-modes, which perhaps are a little bit over the top for the casual player — not sure. Some say they’re too difficult, some say not. I think if they made them too easy, they wouldn’t properly bridge some people to the Explorables, but I guess that’s a matter of opinion.

nerva.7940:

i always saw PVE as a bonus to spvp, upcoming tournaments, and WvW. PVE is the sugar coating, yet it’s arguably the best on the market (maybe not the most plentiful). now we have all these disgruntled mmo’ers coming in, trying to chase their carrots, and complaining on the forums about difficult content, lack of rewards, etc.

GW2 has enough of a fan base to keep it going for a long time. no sense in pretending it’s all doom and gloom because a few raiders and powergamers are shedding their whiny tears. while theyre probably more than welcome to enjoy this game, GW2 wasnt really made for them.

Fair points, I think. I’m not into sPvP as much, but most of my guild is loving both the dungeons and WvW and don’t really have big issues with either. You’re right though, I think there’s a ton to do. My background is mostly raiding in other games, and the dungeons are satisfying that niche for now, and then a mix of the world events, exploring and WvW will fill the rest.

DeadlyStormZ.2370:

People are complaining because it can be fixed by simply removing the DR system, a rediculous system to punish every players.

People are complaining because people don’t think running dungeon efficiently (even you run it in a normal way) should be punished. However, the devs choose to refuse listening to the community and insist what they are doing.

People are complaining because Anet don’t have a decent QA team to test stuff before it is released again, again and in the future.

People are complaining because the devs said they didn’t want us to grind anything but they designed something you must grind it to get it.

So you’s prefer a 24 hour lockout so that you can run an explorable dungeon once, like most mmo’s do? I mean I’m not terribly in love with the whole DR system, as I feel it’s not a very elegant solution to the problem, but it’s quite obviously more rewarding than a lockout.

It’s an indication of the diminishing returns kicking in, no?

@robot: I seriously don’t understand why you are here or why you play this game? All you do is go from thread to thread, complaining about every single topic which is being discussed. Go get some fresh air, dude.

Yeah I’d have to agree. I have no real issues with the diminishing rewards system — I can understand why it’s there — but I would rather have some grey junk item worth 1c be looted from a corpse, called “Ruined (insert name of thing I might have gotten otherwise)” than have that message pop up Either that or nothing at all.

Agreed. It’s unbelievable the amount of complaining over this. No matter what they do, even if it’s diminishing your rewards by 50% each run (which it’s not)… ANY such system is still way, way more rewarding than a 24 lockout which most games have.

robot.9134:

Hawken.7932:

@robot: lol, and yet my guild of 200+ people disagree with you, and are loving every minute of it on the whole.

yea how many of those 200 have not rerolled at all and play just their main?

Obvious fanboy is obvious. I’m sure you speak 100% for over 200 people. Such bs. 200+ people that “love every minute” ? lol move on

Not that it matters. I know large guilds that have left and gone back to other MMO’s, or just shelved the game temporarily. So whats your point? There are different opinions but don’t act like the problems aren’t real.

I judge the consensus of the guild based on the guild chat, which is pretty positive on the whole. I also note how few people have left, as you say, to other MMOs. Attendance has been strong and hasn’t really dropped much that I could notice.

Maybe you see problems — I see a great game with a few minor issues which are, in my experience playing MMOs over the past 8 years, pretty normal.

@robot: lol, and yet my guild of 200+ people disagree with you, and are loving every minute of it on the whole.