Guild Wars 2

Conncept.7638:

Thank-you for repeating what everybody already knows, the devs have said this is their goal several times. Except it ISN’T POSSIBLE to get them with even a year of casual play, inflation is higher than possible gold-gain for a casual player. I know, I tried. I tried, I used all my time for almost two months to grind out gold for an expensive weapon, and in that time, I earned enough gold to buy it, except that it’s price had doubled. How do you earn anything when for every gold you earn prices rise by two?

Get the mats yourself?

Seriously. It’s possible (didn’t say easy) to just play the game and eventually get all the mats you’d need for a Legendary. You don’t HAVE to buy anything off of the TP.

Celtic Lady.3729:

Jovel.5706:

Guild Wars 2 is only grindy for the people who feel entitled to a Legendary weapon. Now we have all these babies. I mean, getting exotic armor and weapons from dungeons isn’t a grind.

Again, my experience with grind (and many other players’) has nothing to do with legendaries, exotic gear, ascended gear, or dungeons.

Mind explaining yourself rather than just saying “It has nothing to do with any of the core parts of the game at all that most players will be playing.” Because I can’t think of what grind you’re talking about if it doesn’t include legendaries, exotic gear, ascended gear, or dungeons.

To preface, I hit level 80 like a week ago. I play casually. I just got a set of rares. I have 11 Gold, only because I got lucky and found a White dye. Before that, I had 5 gold.

Anywho.

I see a lot of talk here about GW2 being super-grindy and “IT’S ROOOOEND!”. Frankly, that’s bullkittens. I used to play this game back in the day called Silk Road Online. It was literally the definition of a korean grinder MMO. Horrible translations, kittenty character classes, the works. The game essentially worked like this, in this order, from level 1:

- Grab quest.
- Quest is to kill X number of X.
- Kill X number of X.
- Turn in quest.
- Grab next quest.
- Quest is to kill X number of X.

So on and so forth. But wait! You ran out of quests you could complete at your level because the game was so badly designed. So what did you do to get up to the next quest level? Grind like a motherkittener. I spent hours, grinding just ONE level, and that was only at level 20 or so. All my friends and I would just sit there, at the temple thing, killing lions for H.O.U.R.S.

And it didn’t stop there.

We spent days, literally every day after school until night, just endlessly killing the same monsters in the same area, over and over and over. Then we’d move on to another area, and do the same exact thing.

THAT is a grinder MMO. Guild Wars 2, no matter how you look at it or how you play it, is not designed like that. You can MAKE it a grind, sure. You can sit there in Orr and just repeat the same events over and over, or killing wave after wave of risen for a chance to get an exotic or whatever. You can run the same dungeon path over and over and over and over until your head explodes.

But you don’t HAVE to. You can spread out those dungeon runs. You can diversify the things you do.

Bottom line: The game does not FORCE you to kill the same mobs over and over and over to progress.

Thanks, and I hope maybe this gives some of you a reality check.

I got a full set of 80 rares for 2-3 gold tops on the TP.

Don’t let people scare you into thinking you need exotics.

Thank Kittens!

To everyone complaining about the lack of one… Have you PLAYED WoW lately? EVERY. SINGLE. PERSON. is sitting in Ogrimarr (don’t give no kitten about spelling it right) or the Alliance capital and queuing for dungeons through the finder. Nobody is in the world. Nobody is doing anything except SITTING THERE and QUEUING.

You can do this from lvl 20-85.

I don’t want the same to happen to GW2 from 30-80.

If you complete the dungeon run with less than a certain number of repairs, your money is refunded in addition to your dungeon reward.

Incentive to stay alive? Check.

Doesn’t apply to the “die and zerg” strategy? Check.

What that number is might depend on dungeon, and I wouldn’t presume to know what that number would be. But, I do think that having a little cushion for messing up is a good thing. Being forced to cough up repair costs because you borked a dodge isn’t good game design. Give players a little bit of a net and it’ll help with the overall dungeon experience, and maybe get rid of the “Oh Dungeons are just a big money sink” notion.

From the horse’s mouth:

http://www.pcgamer.com/previews/guild-wars-2-the-kitchen-sink-post/2/

That was the original plan for dungeons. What we have now is, and I mean this quite literally, a kittenization of what we were promised. It looks like they realized this content was going to get done too quickly, so they put this artificial barrier of “Tokens” to pull out the carrot and the stick so people wouldn’t complete all the sets within a week or two.

I guess they couldn’t make the dungeons hard enough to allow for this system to flourish.

52 Engie. 31 Warrior. All other alts are lowbies.

Xlore.9234:

No. We have a group running around that apparently thinks everyone should be able to do something in an MMO. Even if they put in as little effort as possible.
Unless you want a terrible game, don’t compromise with the lazy ones that want things handed to them.
They are trying to apply the trinity to this game. Let them fail for not paying attention.

With this system, people who only ran the Explorable modes would never get dungeon armor. There’s still an exclusive tier for learning how to play better, it’s just that now they get to at least experience the content without a huge skill barrier in place.

Compromise must be reached.

Tons of people are saying “The dungeons are too hard!”, and “Everyone should be able to experience them.”.

Tons of people are also saying “The dungeons are too easy!” and “You should have to work for your rewards.”

So how about this, folks. We nerf the existing Explorable dungeons so that more people can complete them. However, take away dungeon tokens, and in exchange increase the drop rate of Rares and Exotics. Give the hardcore players a new level of challenge that are even harder than the current Explorable modes: Hard modes. Make this the only way to earn the dungeon tokens, and on top of that even more chance of getting Rares and Exotics from these runs. Maybe even add in dungeon-specific unique drops in hard modes. Think unique-looking non-legendary weapons/armors/whatevers.

Sound good?

On your #1 point, I have to disagree. My group ran AC story last night, and almost every one of us was DPS. We had 3 glass-cannon Elementalists, me as hybrid damage/toughness Engie, and only one warrior and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t Vit/Tough spec’d.

We didn’t do GREAT, but we did manage to clear the dungeon with < 3 wipes. It’s certainly not impossible.

Going to a tanking extreme is obviously not the answer.

However, it is VERY useful to run with a melee-specced character that has either Traits or gear specced for Toughness/Healing/Vitality. For instance, I run an Engineer where most of my traits atm are in Alchemy and Inventions. I have a lot of healing power, and also a lot of toughness. I can absorb more hits than your average medium-armor wearer, and heal up faster.

However, all my gear is decked out for precision and condition damage. I will eventually be able to trait some power in there as well, giving me another damage boost. With sigils and runes on armor and weapons, I’m essentially a jack of both trades, but I’m obviously not going to be as tanky as the full Vit/Tough engie, nor as DPS as the full Power/Precision/CD engie.

Still, I find that running hybrid classes is the way to go most of the time for dungeons.

Adzy.8370:

They need to find that balance in between “Grind” and just handing over a full set of exotic armor (being end-game gear). If they just hand it over then people are REALLY going to complain that its too easy and there is no end-game content and blah blah blah. I don’t mind working really hard for end-game gear.

Working hard != The Grind.

I think that’s the biggest thing to remember here.

Crucifer.2831:

Robert Hrouda.1327:

we’re very aware that our reward system is not up to par for dungeons. It is something we are actively working on right now, to try and find a solution for. I’m not going to talk about what our plans are because I don’t want us to be trapped in promises, but I will say this: We know, and are actively working on updating the system.

The system was perfectly fine pre-patch 9/17/2012….you guys screwed up big time with the current patch and you’ve been told non-stop since the change to revert it back to the way it was as NO ONE was complaining about it.

No, the system was exploitable and slowly ruining the in-game econonmy pre-patch. You could run a few dungeons in less than 15 minutes and get tons of rewards. The system was not fine, and your lack of understanding on this point is hard to fathom.

If you can speedrun dungeons, the system is not working. The only reason people are calling for a revert is because the DRs system is currently BUGGED and not performing as expected or intended.

Get informed before you mouth off.

I’m going to make this very brief.

When I first heard about dungeons, I swear hearing that when you completed an explorable dungeon run, you would get A TOKEN that could be exchanged for dungeon armor. This was because dungeons were going to be VERY DIFFICULT. Right now, the current system would never support this. Everyone would have the dungeon armor. Here’s how I think they need to overhaul the dungeon system for a real sense of satisfaction. These would be changes to the explorable dungeon modes.

• Disable armor repair costs for dungeons.
• Enable wipes to reset dungeon, or to nearest waypoint.
• Ramp up difficulty on bosses to an extreme, minor adjustments to trash mobs (They’re already tough enough).
• Boss difficulty increased with abilities, not straight damage/health buff. Make the bosses more dangerous and lethal because they are smarter, not cheaper.
• If players beat an explorable dungeon mode, they are granted a token in exchange for one piece of dungeon armor.
• Players are rewarded based on progress every time they wipe. This pales in comparison to dungeon rewards, but players are granted some kind of incentive to keep playing.

What this does is create a system where dungeons are not supposed to be farmed or cleared repeatedly, but are a significant and great challenge. The emphasis is not put on grinding it, but on beating it and being able to repeat the process maybe 1 or 2 times in the future to totally complete the set.

This might sound insane, but think about how the new system works. Each attempt is rewarded, so people will keep trying. With emphasis on very powerful bosses, the challenge comes down to working as a group and overcoming an actual challenge to gain your reward. And you are provided with a significant reward for doing so in terms of a piece of the dungeon armor.

I think this really goes back to ANet’s manifesto. They wanted the game to be challenging, and not a grind. Right now, dungeon armor is a grind. It’s a huge grind, and we all know it. But there are ways to get around this without compromising the rewards and their rarity. Ramp up the difficulty, give the player a reason to keep trying, and when the player finally conquers the challenge, they are substantially and fairly rewarded for their hard work.