Guild Wars 2

Robert Hrouda.1327:

It’s a good story mode dungeon. I’ve pugged it once and played with guildies, and I had a good time of it. I’m glad to hear the MF dungeon is getting some love – the folks who worked on it put a lot of effort into it, and there’s some really neat stuff in there for players to enjoy

I have a question for you Robert. Some of us noticed that NPCs in the living story dungeon have a better AI or something which makes them stand out amongst the other NPCs. Do you consider using this in future dungeons too? Personally I liked it and would love to see AI become even better as time goes by. Perhaps there will be a time when NPCs can replace holes in your group-setup.

Joseph Skyrim.2470:

Alright so here’s my experience with the dungeon tonight (spoilers to follow):

-snip-

it’s actually possible to jump over the shockwaves, I’m not sure if it’s possible with the fire-shockwave too, since it has a limited range I tried to stay away as far away as possible from the boss and run away even farther when the firewaves emerges.

this guide might be useful for you:
http://dulfy.net/2013/04/30/gw2-molten-weapon-facilities-dungeon-guide/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=gw2-molten-weapon-facilities-dungeon-guide
thanks to Dulfy, as always

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

Rox saved our behinds in the boss fight. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Is this true? Wow I’m exited that Anet works on their NPC-AI, I wonder if they still go on and improve it even more… perhaps to the point where dungeon-scaling could work down to 1 player because there are Heroes (NPCs) in your group, like in GW1.

RuneCrimson.7380:

It was less then three minutes it was more like 30 seconds. and when it glows on my end it looks like the body of what I killed either way I watched someone walk up and then it stopped glowing and then in three minutes the body disappeared so yeah I know what I saw but it matters little cause no one seems to want to listen.

yeah because what you say doesn’t fit together. Mobs disappear much faster than 3minutes, they do so in a few seconds. I don’t believe you, sorry. I don’t know a single person in this game (and I know a lot) who ever claimed that his loot was stolen.

ThiBash.5634:

A very good idea but…it may be slightly too long for a fractal. Some part of it will probably have to be shortened.

BUT I WOULD STILL LIKE TO SEE THAT HAPPEN!

In general, it seems like turning the temporary content dungeons into fractals (even if they’d have a very small chance to happen) would be a great idea. Just imagine fighting Mad King Thorn as a fractal boss once every 100 runs or so. Would be epic.

I agree, this would be awesome. I also agree that this dungeon isn’t designed to be a fractal since devs. claimed it would take about 45 min to finish it… fractals should take much less time (15min if I remember correctly).

I wonder if it’s a good idea to add new fractals in the existing fractal-group, since the more fractals are in there, the less it’s likely to experience your favourite fractal.

They could make a second fractal-group with another 9 fractals. Progress of rank would be across all fractals of course.

RuneCrimson.7380:

I wished I could have taken a pic of the person that took my loot that time and the exp that was halfed but it would not do it. So I have no proof that it happens here too. I have watched a creature I killed glowing where I should be able to get something and someone walk up and take it and it stop glowing…like you say I should only see what is mine on my side so that means that guy took my loot. But since the capture picture does not cap that kinda thing I will never be able to prove that a MMO is a MMO no matter where we go.

nobody took your loot, loot disappears after 3 minutes when not picked up + you don’t get loot every time you kill a creature… it’s random luck.

(+ creatures don’t “glow”, not sure what you’re talking about here. They leave loot behind which glows)

RuneCrimson.7380:

sighs If you say so….Not going to take a chance seems to many people are trying to take from noobs that have been used before. Thanks for the info. Do not think I will take the chance on it and level up doing alot on my own. Keeping up how I been doing…all MMO’s are the same parties and guilds take and make it hard for lower levels to level up. And the people like to tell them what everyone has told me just to make it hard for them. Anyway I am done have a good day/night.

You are actually very wrong here. Party-members (and every person outside of your party) can’t see the loot you are getting from killing mobs, it’s phased out for them. It’s yours and party-members just help you to get if faster by killing the mob faster. It works that way inside of dungeons and outside in the world. From time to time you even meet people who link their loot in the chat and give you the opportunity to trade with them, not everyone can wear everything.

There is no way to take loot away from anyone in this game. Sorry for your bad experiences in other games.

@RuneCrimson: you don’t share your loot at all, everyone in GW2 has his own lootdrop from every mob. In dungeons they live easily long enough for each groupmember to tag them.

SweetPotato.7456:

my 2 cents

Guild Wars 2 has this [Scale according to crowd size “thing”] (i don’t know whats its called) so why not use it for dungeons as well?

Don’t have to limit dungeon to 5 persons make it 1 – X numbers.

It’s not that easy, it isn’t just a numbers game. It gets quite complex when you think of all the rezzing of downed players is part of the battle-design.

but how do you create a dungeon which is soloable + needs the participants to do complex maneuvers as a group?

The only thing I could think of: include easy-mode where Braham and Rox are gods and ignore each enemy attack while destroying the enemies. I don’t think this is an option for normal mode though, a lot of time went into designing those encounters to be challenging.

Drift.9614:

This is very disapointing. My (very small) guild only plays together for 2 hours every week, and there’s absolutely no way we’ll ever get this done, especially after tonight’s wipe-fest. The champion ooze and his friends at the end of the very first tunnel must have wiped us about 10 times before we managed to get them down, and the rest of the dungeon that we managed to see was even more ridiculous in terms of how powerfull the mobs were compared to anything found in the open world. This is disapointing for us as we had managed to do all the living story content leading up to this in the short play times we have, only to find out it was for nothing. It’s doubly disapointing for me personnally as I’m the one who convinced them that we should be doing this content instead of our usual hearts/events/exploration nights.

I really hope that the devs don’t think this is “casual friendly” content, and if the end of our personnal stories is on the same level there’s a good chance we’ll just drop them before we waste any more of our precious time, same for all the other dungeons, we’ll just skip them.

That being said, we’re not going anywhere for now, there’s enough open-world content to keep a small guild like us going for a while, the down-side being that we’ll be playing in a static world, knowing now that all future “living stories” will probably end in an impossible (for us) dungeon, we won’t bother with them. But at some point in the future we’ll run out of hearts and that’ll be it. Maybe by then we’ll have unlocked guild missions, who knows…

I’d like to finish with a suggestion, so that this isn’t just selfish criticism, and since I still love this game: add a “casual mode” or some sort of difficulty selector to Story-mode dungeons, easier versions that give lesser (or no) rewards, but would allow smaller guilds, or even groups of less than 5, to be a part of the story of this world, wether our personnal stories or the evolving living story. You could have the achievements needed for the living story unlocks be attainable from regular or casual versions, while the regular permanent dungeons would continue to operate as before, with the added casual version not giving any achievements, aside from the last one in regards to the personnal story. You probably have a million other things to work on, but there it is…

P.S.: my ranger thanks you for the quiver skin (or he will soon when I buy it for him).

I think there is a big misconception: Casual player (which I am too) doesn’t equal a bad player. I feel offended when you say: do something for the casual and make content easier. I love that the dungeon is harder than open world stuff (which imho is much too easy because doing autoattack isn’t really that fun to me) and wished that there are more challenges in the non-instanced areas of the game too, to prepare everyone for dungeon-difficulty.

Your suggestion is good, the team did it in SAB already: the easy-mode cloud. It could be done very easily: give Rox and Braham unlimited health and let them hit very very hard. It’s that easy, don’t care for balance, just make the npcs gods and lock away the rewards for the group running this. The reward for them is experiencing the story. Even if players die constantly, the heroes clear out the area and revive the players afterwards. Meanwhile the downed players can watch the epic battle. In this mode it doesn’t matter how many players are in the group, you can go in with 1 friend and experience the story. Or even alone.

I don’t agree that you should get the story-achievement for that though, since achievements shouldn’t work like that. I hate that you get an achievement for everything nowadays: log in —> achievement; get lv.10 --> achievement. Achievements should show off accomplishment of managing difficult barriers in the game imho. Something to work for, not something that falls from the sky.

The fact that the dungeon is only available for a short time is also devestating for bad players. They can’t take the time they need to become better in this dungeon. Drift here can try it two times (he plays together with his group 2h / Week) and then it’s gone. Meh.

MatthewMedina.5419:

With all due respect, balancing content like a story instance is completely different than balancing an enhanced jumping puzzle like Super Adventure Box, so for us it just wasn’t feasible to consider doing an “easy” and “hard” mode in this particular case.

Instead we focused our time and energy into making a really unique, polished and hopefully memorable encounter that enables any group of five to complete in roughly an hour. I understand that there are players who will simply object philosophically to this direction, and wish that all the content we create to be solo-friendly, but our company has always been focused around building an online world that encourages our players to play our game together.

For those of you who have taken the plunge and shut down one of the Molten Facilities, thank you so much for giving it a try and giving us your feedback. Hope to see you on the front lines!

I’m one of the people who were against story content to be done in a dungeon. I did the dungeon with my friends a few hours ago and we loved it. I thought that players could be substituted by decent npcs but the boss-battles need you to do complex evasive maneuvers… I don’t think the AI in the game is even close to resembling a human player. It’s quite different to the gameplay which was used in GW1, healers targetted npcs and players and this made up for the bad movement-AI.

Someone said, that the previous Braham/Rox-missions were difficult when done alone, but that’s not true imho. It was just defeating strong waves on your own, that’s it. No need for any strategy.

The boss encounters were fun, I can’t imagine that any npc-AI can handle this. It would probably be awesome if there were an AI that could do this… then we would have a similar feeling to GW1 where solo-players could enjoy the content too, without the need to group with random people who hate cutscenes and rush forward leaving you and your full backbag behind.

Thanks to the team responsible for this nice dungeon, I can’t wait to see what’s next. I’d love to see Anet taking the risk and trying more new things with dungeons. IS there a solution to make dungeons more solofriendly but without exclusion of human players… (Imho in the open world there is already a solution to this, you don’t have to group, don’t have to rush along etc.)

(offtopic: I think the reason why people tend to rush through dungeons is because these are farmspots. Is it really a good design to reward rushing players? Why not reward players who like to explore dungeons? Give them a better reward than those rushing players and perhaps people would slow down a bit)

even though I have no time I had to try the dungeon… it’s one of the best in the game yet. I’d say on par with AC story. What I don’t get: is this correct that not the dungeon-team but the holiday-team is responsible for this? O_o

a lot of discussion going on in these forums -.- mod, you’re welcome to delete it since no one seems to care

DarksunG.9537:

ColinJohanson.2394:

Edited to add: This is a great place to throw out your ideas of what you’d like to see any of them do encounter wise to make them more exciting.

Hey Colin!
I know your programmers & animators are gonna hate hearing this but there is no way around this:
The Dragons need to dynamically walk around, attack specific groups of people, have fully animated turning & directional movement & have environmentally important, not scripted, varied tactics. I know you don’t have an animated turning system & only things like the Karkas really are big & walk around, but it has to change. There is no short cut.

Every other option boils down to it being extremely obvious that the dragon is a glorified turret. (sometimes a turret that can’t even rotate) It HAS TO WALK AROUND. And the current “spin in place” animation doesn’t cut it. A lot of us were saying this before & during beta: look at Tera BAMs. They have the proper animation, movement, targeting & attacks, they just lack the interesting mechanics of raid bosses.

I would prefer that they also effect/can attack the whole zone, but just moving & attacking things DYNAMICALLY not in a script, is the main problem. Also, there should be MULTIPLE outcomes to fighting the dragons. several win types & several loss types.

Currently the animation & models are cool, but they are absolutely NOT fun to fight.

as much as I would LOVE to see this happening, I heard one of the developers in an earlier interview speaking of the fact that the engine can’t support those big bosses to be mobile. I guess they would have to rework the complete engine to make this happen… which we’ll probably see in GW3 at the earliest.

Think of it, there are a lot of ways to make those bosses still interesting encounters.
e.g. Heigan the Unclean http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuVX8x5dq3g

Multiple Outcomes would be great.

I thought about a system where players who aren’t members of big guilds or mostly play on their own can “create” events for other players. The fundamentals are very similar to the guild missions: you unlock a certain activity in a new interface – this lets you start a certain event in a zone – you can do it on your own & other people can join (scaling event).

advantages:
-) there is some progression for solo-players
-) not everyone unlocks the same events because of different tree-paths. (it could look like a tree and choosing one path closes the other path / makes the other path cost 2x more to unlock)
-) it caters to your preferances (you like jumping puzzles – unlock the explorer line)

how to unlock:
A lot of players have tons of karma and no idea what to do with it. It’s somethig that has to be earned by yourself, so I’d say: unlock new tiers in this line through karma. Make each new activity expensive to unlock and pay a much smaller amount to replay those activities.

examples:

battle-line
-) horde mode challenge – unlock this challenge in a oger-village. Defeat a certain amount of waves of ogers + a few veteran-bosses at the end without dying.
-) world-boss challenge – this is a tricky one – you can spawn this challenge only in a time-window after a standard-worldboss-event is finished in that area. (e.g. 15-45min after the battle for everyone). The world boss appears again, but this time the area gets surrounded by an impassable flamewall. All players inside this huge circle can participate. The world boss scales down to min. 5 players – and is freaking hard.
…

explorer-line
-) unlock a timer challenge at one of the many jumping-puzzles in the game. Only you and your party-members count. Who can do it in a certain given time from start to finish? Do it only once for each member of your group / alone.
-) find books of lore hidden in the world. When this challenge is unlocked, each read book gets unlocked in an interface. This is not timed. You can share your unlocks with other people in your group – but sharing is limited to 2 per week.
…

zookeeper-line
-) click on each of the juvenile creatures in the game. This is not timed. Rangers do this to get a new pet, you do this only for the challenge to find the creatures.
-) (hardmode version: find specific rare spawned creatures and defeat those)
-) battle of the beasts challenge – unlock this in front of a veteran beast. You get transformed into the same beast (with 5 unique skills) and have to defeat it before it kills you. The veteran becomes invulnerable to attacks from other people while you are alive.

rewards:
-) unlock a hard-mode version of the challenge

battle line
-) (complete every challenge) rewards you with a new skill-slot which is only for environmental weapons. Enviromental weapons don’t get destroyed by usage, instead they stay in this slot forever, until you equip another enviromental weapon.
-) (complete hard mode of each battle-line challenge): each picked up enviromental weapon unlocks this weapon permanent. From now on you can switch between each of the unlocked weapons out of combat.

explorer line
-) (complete every challenge) you can set 3 permanent waypoints as Golden-Waypoint. From now on you don’t have to pay to teleport to those points. Watch out: it costs you 10.000 karma to reset the GWPs, so choose carefully.
-) (complete hard mode of each explorer line) from now on you can summon 4 people to your location. Cooldown: 1 hour. Everyone summoned (+yourself) gets 2 free WP-travels when using the summoning-stone.

zookeeper line
-) (complete every challenge) from now on you can find white and green minis in the open world in hidden locations. You can’t sell those, they are bind on pickup.
-) (complete hard mode of each zookeeper line) from now on you have a beastiary in your home-instance. You can show off all your found minis here. + extra bonus: from now on you can run with 2 minis at the same time.

so these are just examples how to bring in some progression by using the guild-mission fundamentals. What do you think? Sorry for the wall of text.

somewhere on those 13 pages there is a developer post… but where?

I think this would be the best way to make the world feel empty. All the design decisions tend to fill the open world with more people. In your vision people would be in their instances and the world would feel empty. Guild Missions is the way to do what you suggested the right way imho. There have to be some rules though.

e.g. make a guild mission where a giant boss spawns on a map. You can only hurt the beast with charged weapons (weapons every guild member can take out of a box before the event starts).
-) the guild has a kind of instanced battle (because normal attacks from non-guildies can’t hurt the beast)
-) spawn a lot of support events where everyone can participate, so non guild members contribute in a meaningful manner without trivializing the encounter.

so it seems those missions happen quite frequently… I must be doing something wrong then

where do those missions happen?

I love the idea of guild missions, even though my guild is to small to experience one started from ourselves. Personally I haven’t seen a single one guild misson happening on my server and I wonder if it’s because I’m a night-player or if most people have the same experience.

So do you see a lot of guild missions happening while playing in the world – doing events etc. ?

I’d like to add a little suggestion to make guild missions shine out more

-) add announcement-boards to cities where guilds can announce guild missions. (Where? When? Name of the Guild)
-) as an incentive to do this, make it possible to support the guild by clicking on the announcement-board and donate a random amount of ingame-gold.
-) as an incentive for random people to click on the board/guild mission announcement make it so that those people (not from the guild) get twice the rewards from participating in that mission. They have to donate at least 3 silver though. If the guild misson isn’t happening they get their money back.
-) people can rate a guild (1 to 5 stars) – so it’s easier to find reliable guilds

loseridoit.2756:

It is impossible to make an encounter unpredictable unless the boss is able to adapt. You are advocating for an AI

nah all you need is a bit of randomness. King Toads attacks are kind of unpredictable because his attacks hit on random sides and you can’t stand in one spot and do autoattack. I love the fact that you have to be aware at his eyes, so you have to observe his clearly visible behaviour in order to know where he hits next.

if the boss had more different attacks (only add 2 for example) and put those together with the existing attack on a random loop, the battle would be even better and far away from boring.

I’m quite confident that Anet gets the dragonencounters right since they already have shown that it IS possible in GW2. (Karka Queen, King Toad)

I did the Shatterer a few hours ago and this time I tried NOT to exploit the fact that you can stand in a safe-zone on his left. I engaged him head-on and was surprised how many adds there were. I managed to dodge the minion-attacks but then I was hit by some strange attack from the Shatterer I believe. My Mesmer is quite squishy so I was instantly downed.

So there are situations (at least in the Shatterer-encounter) which are kind of difficult, but that’s not the difficult I was looking for. Don’t get me wrong, it was challenging, but what I’m missing in this encounters is some kind of tension. To see that something is going horribly wrong for the group, to feel that there is still a chance. It’s kind of hard to describe. I guess the main thing missing is really the fail-state of these events to bring that tension.

I guess. The Karka-event had no fail state, am I right. Nontheless there was a tension there. These Attacks from the beast, rolling over a whole group of players and downing them instantly… and the waypoints far far away… there were moments when only few people were standing. I think this creates a nice feeling. The battle was heavily scripted and went through half of a zone… that’s what I call epic.

How sick would it be if players would have to run through canyons in order to reach the area of the final battle. On the way the Shatterer attacks people from the air with heavy aoe. Certain events would create small safe-zones between the crumbling canyon for people to gather and ressurect fallen allies. The Shatterer would be still in the air attacking the canyon when the first few players arrive in the battle-arena. But this arena is full of hazardous plants (much more than there are at the moment) and these are slowly spreading – kind of like Zerg creep tumors from Starcraft2. The area should be cleared before the Shatterer lands in order to make the battle more managable. And now the real battle begins.

So some scripted events like the Karka-event which act as a kind of anti-zerg mechanic because waypoints are contested and a lot of people die on the way.

One may dream, I’m realistic and don’t think the existing encounters run through such fundamental changes. They probably spawn more enemies and work a bit on the scaling & culling… Hmm. I wonder how much work they can invest in those encounters. I fear not too much.

I guess this is Anets take on keeping people logging in each month. Temporary stuff. I don’t like this in a certain aspect… I like the storytelling idea but why can’t this dungeon be revisited in the fractals or from a storyteller like in GW1?

darkace.8925:

ColinJohanson.2394:

This is a great place to throw out your ideas of what you’d like to see any of them do encounter wise to make them more exciting.

Here’s my proposal (it applies specifically to the dragon fights):
– Make the dragons too tough to be harmed by player attacks.
– Make them vulnerable to NPC-operated artillery.
– Spread the artillery out in three or so emplacements.
– Have waves of enemies assault each emplacement throughout the fight.
– Have the number and size of waves scale with more players.
– Add veterans and champions as more players participate.
– This forces players to spread out to defend the artillery long enough to win.

Lag and culling could be a problem, but at least the players would be engaged and (theoretically) forced to utilize some measure of teamwork.

If I want to fight waves, I go to one of the hundred dynamic events in any zone. When I’m confronting a dragon, I want to fight the dragon itself. Imho.

Vick.6805:

Shatterer - Remember the end-of-beta event where players got corrupted? This guy should be able to do that, and players should have a mechanic for curing the corruption. Corrupted players would lose control and their avatars would attack other players until cured. It’s important that the player avatars are AI-controlled while corrupted, so that this does not become PvP, but, make it an actual war! If a player is corrupted for the majority of the fight, they still need credit for the event succeeding, btw. It would be very frustrating if being corrupted cost you any chance at rewards.

I just wanted to write that the developers stated they don’t want to make PvP mechanics in PvE, but you have a great solution to this. I love that idea. I would add something though: make the corrupted players invulnerable. This would make sure that the other players heal the corrupted ones, and won’t accidentally kill them.

the thing that irritates me most: why does an encounter which isn’t fun at all make it to the live game? Do developers who tested this boring battles really think that it is fun??

what happened to “when it’s ready” or what does ready actually mean?

the design should really be in a way so that people have to use their skills, not only hit 1 all the time.

-) the Shatterer starts attacking with his paws. Hitting really hard. Players have to get 25stacks of cripple on the leg in order to stop this attack and make the leg vulnerable again.
-) have peope use stealth / aoe-stealth skills to avoid certain boss-attacks which 1-hit you.
-) some attacks have to be interrupted (25x interrupt to finally interrupt the attack) – scale the number of interrupts to the number of people participating
-) a bloated creeper (Tequatl’s minions) loses/bleeds some kind of power-serum when he is stacked with 25 bleeds – people need to stand in this colored trace in order to hit very hard. Direct attacks on the boss do little damage. (if you kill the creeper too fast, he’ll explode and you have to wait for the next one to get a power-trace; meanwhile the boss gets enraged and hits much harder).

Edit: in order to get the info, add famous NPCs to the battles. E.g. Rytlock is with the melee crowd near the leg and shouts: “Now!! Cripple him!”
e.g.2 Caithe is the first to put a stealth-field down and shouts: “We have to vanish NOW!!”

etc.

digiowl.9620:

Rare is 40% above white, exotic 60%. Never mind that even downscaled you are 2 levels higher than the general level of the area. Meaning that you are running with stats up to 2.5 times the ones running with whatever they can buy or find as drops in that area.

Yeah, and this is a big problem imho.

I love encounters which are all about movement. WoW did a perfect job regarding this, Anet should really take a look at other mmos. I’m not sure they do, if I remember correctly one of the devs stated in an interview, that they aren’t looking at other mmos but focus on GW2 only. I think this is a kind of close-minded way to do this.

-) people have to hide behind an obstacle (e.g. the crystals in the Shatterer-battle) to be safe from a 1-hit breath-attack.
-) different parts of the ground are burning in a specific order and people constantly have to move, otherwise the fire 1-hits you. (e.g. similar to the toad-boss in SAB – it was awesome!!)
-) do not use too much adds, it’s just worsening FPS. Instead keep the focus an new attack-patterns of the boss itself. I don’t want to fight waves again, I’m doing this constantly in events.
-) look at the karka-battle; so much good things can be found there. Waypoints far away, devestating attacks which wipe out whole groups, a lot of phases, destructable boss-surface,… too bad I experienced the encounter with about 1-5fps

digiowl.9620:

Problem is that this punish the newbies in white and blue that show up at the starter zone events.

Those aren’t (shouldn’t) be that much weaker than 80s since the high level players get scaled down to the zone-level. If a lv.15 player and a downscaled lv.80 player were closer together in strength, defense…
1.) the developers would have a much easier job to balance those encounters
2.) player who want a challenge get a challenge
3.) no more overpowered players who complain about the easy bosses
4.) no more overpowered players who one-shot everything (80s are too strong, events are all about tag-races because mobs die too fast)
5.) boss-battles would last much longer and would feel more epic
6.) if difficult enough those boss-events finally have a according risk-reward mechanic and rewards could become better.

so basically: make the difference between a lv.80 and a lv.15player much smaller so that we get better loot & a better experience

MeveM.7913:

Biggest problem with the mega boss events is the same as all other events, they’re based 100% on damage done to the NPC. In normal dynamic events you’re not fighting the event, you’re fighting your fellow players in a game of tag. Dynamic event s is currently all about tagging NPC’s and getting the most possible loot, it doesn’t matter if you support other players, it’s currently a punishment to do any form of team play.

-snip-

I don’t think it’s a good idea to require a group for more loot – it’s gw2s strenght that you don’t need grouping to play with other players. I agree about the tagging though, it’s a race against other players.

spontaneous idea: you also get the loot from mobs which died to someone, who gained one of your boons / was revived by you. This way supporting others would make sense.

I think bosses should have their own rules to conditions/boons so that supporting is required. Example: The Shatterer uses bleed attacks which do 3x more damage BUT they can be removed by a simple light-field. Or he has one attack which targetets all of the players (important: 5sec. telegraph) but you can avoid it by going into stealth. So thieves, mesmers etc will have an important function to throw down their stealth-fields. Anet: support the supporters.

offtopic: please add aoe-looting (a big bag with all the loot in the area opens and you can decide to take all / leave certain things behind, +add filters)

a suggestion I posted a while ago:

What I think about Boss-Fights with big crowds of people: make content in those battles for everyone. The idea would be that the pro-players play alongside not-experienced players at the same time. Each of those groups has a different task to fulfil in order to kill the boss.

for example the possible content for a dragon-fight:

-) very easy: an explosion destroyed the supply-tanks and ammunition for the heavy weaponry is spread all over the battleground. Return those to the mortars.

-) easy: use the mortars and shoot the boss + defending the mortars from enemies

-) medium: …

-) hard: …

-) very hard: get up close. This part is pretty unvorgiving. People have to learn the animation-patterns of the boss in order to survive the attacks. Otherwise they die. It won’t be possible to get close and survive without having REALLY good movement.

now this sounds not new, but that’s not all. The new thing would be: the boss can only die when each of those steps is done with success. I’d describe it this way: the Boss has a health bar for each of those steps.

-) very-easy healthbar

-) easy healthbar

-) medium healthbar

-) hard healthbar

-) very hard healthbar – for the pro-players

so 5 seperate healthbars

This means: a Boss can’t be defeated only the easy-way (shooting mortars in this example). The easy-crowd does no damage anymore, when their bar is empty. Instead it regenerates slowly. The really good team which goes toe-to-toe with the dragon has to be successful too. The way it is now there is not really a very hard way, you can stand next to the dragon and nothing happens most of the time. I stood in front of the Shatterer and he ignored me. The closer you are to a dragon, the more dangerous it should be. Take the champions in the open world. Each of those is more dangerous than a dragon currently. This shouldn’t be imho.

more advanced bosses would additionaly have the players to bring all health-bars to 25% in the same minute, else certain health-bars would regenerate.

So people can choose which health bar they want to drain. They can try the close combat route – if that’s too hard and they constantly get killed, they can help in those easier routes. The unexperienced players would cheer for the elite-group. And the pro-players would need the less experienced players too, so that the battle wouldn’t last forever.

The more you participate on a specific loot-bar, the more loot you’d get. Not better loot, but more of it. Doing the hardest part with gold would also be a good choice for cosmetic rewards (like a piece of armor made of dragonscales for example). So in the end every player would get exotics, the easy-route 1, the hard-route 2, the very hard route 2+cosmetic.

actually: why is the medal-system like this

You hit any mob during the event 1 times = bronze
You hit any mob during the event 2 times = silver
You hit any mob during the event 3 times = gold

…at least it feels that way. A game where you can’t be bad is not a good game. Such game might cater to the people who farm stuff 24/7 and they will be angry if anything hinders der farming-rate, but… this can’t be good for the game

I honestly believe that farming stuff (as it is implemented at the moment) is bad for the game because a lot of people find it more important to get their legendary than to have fun encounters.

Draygo.9473:

8) disable close waypoint

yes please! It’s like graveyard-rushes in dungeons at the moment. It was a problem there and Anet fixed it. It is a problem here too. The boss can’t win, because we can’t die.

first of all: the bossfights are a complete lagfest. Just saying. 1-5 fps destroys any chance to survive a cool mechanic. There is no more culling in WvW which is great, but I have the feeling that fps went down quite a bit – and I’m now playing with lowest models. Highest visibility because I play without nameplates. I hate those red letters. Perhaps it’s my own fault then.

So without culling in PvE I’m pretty sure fps will go down even more… so I’d say: fix this first. You need a fluent experience in order to have people dodging attacks.

I think the most important part: Make the battle unforgiving hard and able to be failed. Events do fail and it’s not that bad when they do… they sometimes have decent follow-up events. Those bosses need this too. There needs to be some tension, and players should feel that something is going horribly wrong. I loved the last Karka-Event… that battle was so intense and epic, learn from it. Without the massive lag that battle would be unforgotten in my book. (it actually is unforgotten, but for other reasons).

Pifil.5193:

MatthewMedina.5419:

I understand the concerns about jumping into a 5-man instance if you’re more accustomed to solo play – in fact as a player I typically share those feelings, so rest assured that such concerns have been and continue to be addressed firsthand by our team!

How exactly they are addressing those concerns when they introduce another 5-man instance to end a story arc remains to be seen but you can be sure it’s not by introducing a dungeon that will require “teamwork” to complete.

actually this is a good question

I’d suggest to make the cutscenes only skippable, if everyone in the group skips it. And do not show who doesn’t hit the skip-button.

The only guarantee people wait for each other in pugs.

Stooperdale.3560:

The enemies do pose threats but you might find that other members of your group are playing well enough to counter them while you are doing very little apart from dps.

I would think so too, but I know the people who I’m playing dungeons with. I’d say we’re on an equal level.

BrunoBRS.5178:

throwing this dungeon away after flame and frost is over just because it doesn’t connect with the current story anymore would be like closing off all dungeons after a couple players killed zhaitan, or not letting players do dungeons out of order.

Exactly, it’s not logical to remove this new dungeon. A lot of players probably will never see it, because they hate pugs (bad experience) and won’t be able to group up in a certain limited period of time. I did my first Honor of the Waves – run long after release and loved it. Just because I ran out of things to do and wanted to try new things.

And why do we still have access to all the other dungeons then? Are those part of the dead nonchanging world then? We defeated Zhaitan, he is still there waiting for me… fortunately, haven’t done the dungeon so far, but I intend do do it when time comes.

why is the fun content from the holiday-team always temporary?? They implemented things which were superior to the content available… and took it away again. And now it’s not even a holiday…

Why is it important to remove that dungeon? Couldn’t it be placed in the fractals instead? Fractals is for reliving history, isn’t it? Man, what a disappointment.

well first there was content for the casual-solo player, they got interested. Now there will be a 5-man dungeon which isn’t something they learned to love in the living story… I get the negative feedback. Wouldn’t it make more sense to make a solo-able dungeon (with npc heroes) for the solo-players who liked the way so far to end the story and then create a dungeon which has the same theme (Flame and Frost) but without the story.

Or why isn’t it just scaling down to the number of players? it worked great in the latest updates with story and SAB. NPC-Heroes could take care for stuff where a group is needed…

I mean: go with a pug and people aren’t waiting for you to finish your cutscene. They start running into the next mobgroup and players who enjoy story get left behind and looked down to.

great, just when I’m writing my bachelor-thesis(((

Strifey.7215:

If the only thing you’ve done is CoF then you have a bad representation.

There are plenty of trash mobs that require some tactics, although basic. Try CM, Arah, and 30+ fractals.

I’ve done the old AC, old Caudecus’s Manor, new Twilight Arbor (Story), old Sorrows Embrace, Citadel of Flame, Honor of Waves and Fractals. I’m not sure which encounters they reworked lately, has anyone an idea?

I’m low rank on fractals, it’s not fun for me to do those dungeons over and over again… there are no dynamic events in there to keep it varied (they told us in an earlier blogpost that there are dynamic events… I’ve counted less than 5 in all dungeons combined, not sure though; correct me if I’m wrong please!)

I’ll have to admit that I haven’t played AC for a while now, I heard that it was improved. I did the Flame Legion dungen a few days ago and was surprised of how arcade it felt. There was no need for certain tactics against trash groups, just beat everything that moves down.

I felt that dungeons aren’t as hard as they should be, especially explorable paths. It may be that it’s because I’m 80 and those dungeons should be played on the targetted level, but aren’t they supposed to scale appropriately? Does full exotic equal easy-mode?

I miss the nut which can be cracked, if you know what you do. Like trashmobs who need to be kited to a fire to make them vulnerable – else they kill you quickly. Or trashmobs who are pure glasscanons – huge damage but when you knock them down, they get stunned for 10 seconds. So new rules in dungeons to make them more interesting.

I feel that mobs feel too much the same, no strenghs, no weaknesses. Just DPS with few skills which do nothing else but damage.

Then the aggro-mechanic. I like how enemies have different aggro-behaviour. It’s nice that some mobs tend to target players who wear light armor etc., but I’t hard to build strategies before an encounter if you have no idea what those mobs do. Some kind of beastiary would be nice, where you can find out about the mobs weaknesses/target-behaviour.

A userfriendly way would be like this: a small ui-element shows all enemy-types in 3000 range. Click on it and you get the bestiary-entry. Make those bestiary-entries collectables – e.g. you have to find 5 pieces of dredge-stuff (rare spawns in dredge territory) in order to unlock this entry. Unlock all dredge-entries to get a dredge-mini. etc.

example:
Dredge Rifleman
-) common attacks: he aims at the target for a headshot – it takes quite a while for him. While the attack charges, a protection boon keeps him safe from most damage. (a small sonic device sends out the protection aura). Headshots do massive damage.

-) strategy entry 1: The dredge-Rifleman is a creature full of hatred against magic-wielders. As he has problems with vision he targets every light-armor wearer who could be a magicwielder.
-) strategy entry 2: the best way to deal with the protection-boon is to use a knock-back. It destroys the sonic device.
-) strategy entry 3: the charged shot is deadly vs. light armor but does little damage against heavy armor. Make sure to keep your light-armor wearers behind heavy-armored ones.

Now you need situations where you have to be strategic. E.g. a group of rifleman waiting behind the corner. Send heavy-armor wearers first and hide light armor wearers behind them. etc.

sirflamesword.3896:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

and how does GvG work in a game without dedicated healers?

About 1000x better than conquest ever will.

this makes no sense since most of the abilities are area-related and perfect for defending zones.

and how does GvG work in a game without dedicated healers?

Malediktus.9250:

There is enough faceroll solo content ouside of instances.

I’m not talking about faceroll content. Are you of the opinion that it is impossible to design interesting challenging content for one player?

Malediktus.9250:

No. Play a solo game if you want to solo stuff. We dont need to trivialize content further. Most parts of the dungeons are already soloable if you are decent.

who are you to talk like this for all players? I know a lot of people who prefer playing alone from time to time, IN their favourite mmo. It doesn’t have to be trivial if it’s designed intelligently. Of course, it shouldn’t replace a dungeon.

probably because it has a bigger variety of events?!