Guild Wars 2

unseenone.1463:

Yea, I was immensely frustrated by this. I have a level 26 mesmer and I can do the first couple fights, but after that it just becomes impossible to do enough damage before time runs out.

Well I guess you get to come back next year. I love how you’re complaining about the new content when you haven’t even gotten through 20% of the main game.

That quote made by the devs about race-specific armor says all that needs to be said about this issue. They don’t consider it worth their time. Despite the fact that both Charr and Asura require half the work of the other races (since they only use one gender’s armor style), it’s still too much effort for them to be bothered with it. And for the record, the whole “lack of gender disparity” in those two races is really just a cop-out for not having to do it. There was nothing explicitly implying that female charr wouldn’t wear different styles of armor, it was just a convenient excuse not to have to model two different sets. And there sure as hell wasn’t any reason for Asura not to have female versions of armor. I remember the little story quips during their race introduction. One of the female Asura actively used her sexuality to try and seduce one of the others. So I don’t believe for a second that Asura don’t actively consider “gender” in their society; certainly not at the same level as Charr might. In fact, even if you could make a really convincing arguement for the Charr, I still wouldn’t accept it as an excuse for Asura. That’s just cutting corners. It’s a little bit of laziness, and a lot of indifference. Honestly, if they can’t even be bothered to support their own unique races, they should have never made them playable in the first place. It’s only going to get worse from here.

For christs sake, you people don’t need to have kittening everything handed to you! What’s wrong with having rewards locked behind extreme, high end content? It increases the value of said reward, and it makes those that actually manage to finish it feel more accomplished. You don’t kittening need the mini. You don’t NEED anything. God kittening forbid you miss out on one pet because you weren’t good enough to earn it. The content isn’t gated to you for any other reason besides the fact that you aren’t good enough to earn it. I know this may be foreign to some people just getting into games in the past few years, but it games used to be about the CHALLENGE. It’s not all supposed to just be busy work that you casually run through and get rewarded for. You get PLENTY of that from the main game and from all the Living Story updates up to this point? You can’t let us have this ONE thing? This one kittening mini that shows we completed something challenging and earned it? You’ve gotten everything else handed to you but this one godkitten ed thing can’t go to the higher tier of players? kitten you. You’ve been catered to enough. It’s our turn now.

atheria.2837:

If Anet had thought about it they could have used the PvP model with a few modifications for those arenas.

Not allowing us to use the PvP 1v1 with real people instead of an overpowered and unbeatable, impersonal NPC, even by a full 80 in many cases – yeah, this wasn’t well thought out or implemented in my view.

I know I’d be dead meat even for a like character 1v1 but it would be FUN

But the point was to fight AI opponent “bosses” with special abilities. I don’t know where you imagined that it’d be a pvp arena but that clearly wasn’t the purpose of this content. Not conforming to your views doesn’t constitute “not well thought out or implemented.” You clearly just thought it would be something entirely different than what it is.

lol, thank GOD they didn’t try to tune Queen’s Gauntlet for upscaled players. The game is severely lacking in endgame content and challenge for people who have maxed out their gear. It needed something like this to give players a challenge and force them to reconsider builds in classes they’ve probably been using for close to a year now. This is EXACTLY the kind of content the game needed.

The whole idea that all content needs to be catered to every type of player is what led to some really stagnant content across a lot of the Living World updates. You just can’t build something that’s supposed to be easy enough for people at level 1 (upscaled but without armor/runes or all their skills) and yet still somehow challenge maxed out players. The only solution is to offer something for each. And that’s exactly what they’ve done. The Crown Pavilion exists for low level players; they can join zergs, level quickly, or they can go to balloon towers and fight the champions there. The gauntlet is there for the higher-end players, but it’s in the same zone AND allows the other players to watch and see the content to give them something to work towards. It was an absolutely brilliant implementation (the only drawbacks are queue times, but I imagine there are ways to fix that), and something ANet should be commended for.

We need more content like this; progressive challenge for the higher end player. Unlike say… WoW, where the gear tier is constantly advancing, GW2’s is pretty set in stone and easy to achieve. The max level, full exotic player isn’t such a rare minority in this game. And after a year of playing, these people need more additions that challenge and cater to them. I don’t understand this mindset that low-level players need to be able to experience all of these updates in their entirety. The whole base game is designed around low level players, and frankly, that leveling content was some of the best stuff in this game. Finish the game first, and then there’ll be brand new content waiting for you when you’re done.

I think the general consensus is that we need more use out of adrenaline than what we currently have, and the “heal on gaining a strike of adrenaline” sounds like a good way to accomplish that.

It’s really a matter of what you’re giving up in order to gain boon hate. If you previously didn’t have 30 in Disc before, you’re going to notice the lack in overall DPS you have. The 25 point trait in Disc is pretty bad, as are the stat bonuses you get from the trait line. If you did have 30 points in Disc, you’ll have to ask yourself if the new Burst Mastery trait isn’t better for you (as a Hammer or a Longbow warrior, or both, that trait works way better than boon hate). Overall I just don’t see that trait being worth it. A lot of people on the warrior forums have been suggesting that boon hate get moved to the trait line’s passive, replacing the long running COMPLETELY USELESS burst damage increase. This is probably the best suggestion I’ve heard for it, though it’s going to be some time before any change like that happens. The devs are probably going to wait and see what people do with it, but overall I don’t see Destruction of the Empowered being used much in the future. Dogged March, however, is pretty good and will likely see itself used a lot in WvW (I would have preferred protection to regen though).

PearlGore.7419:

Depends on the build obviously. I’m not going to run a Hammer Warrior in WvW wearing Beserker Gear. And GL with high lvl Fractals or Arah EXP in beserker Gear lol.

Actually high level fractal builds are using Berserker Gear, as defensive stats diminish to being pointless at really high levels. You’d think you’d know this from visiting forums and whatnot before making a statement like that, but oh well…

No, that’s probably a good idea, but first they need to fix those jumping skills always missing when used at an elevated position from your target.

No, that’s not how our weapon system works. However, that does give me an interesting idea for traits that grant specific skill boosts/empowered skills for using specific weapon combos (You know, master of weapons and all), as opposed to the ones that just reward one weapon (GS, Hammer, Mace). However that’s an idea for another thread as this one is destined for the junk pile.

Phaeton.9582:

Ah so you’re implying that burst should be used as an opener rather than a finisher. Apologies for the misunderstanding, that post may sound jarring but I’m essentially trying to help.

My point still stands however that if you time healing surge right then adrenaline, as well as the traits that it endows are never an issue. An eviscerate when timed right on a well built burst warrior is so clutch that hesitating due to traits is a bad play.

Yes, my original post wasn’t taking into account the fact that we have several methods of instant adrenaline generation. I still think there could be more interesting ways for us to make use of our adrenaline, but it may require a redesign of more than just our burst skills.

Phaeton.9582:

VoiceOfUnreason.5976:

oZii.2864:

VoiceOfUnreason.5976:

oZii.2864:

I dont agree that there is a problem with Berserkers Power and Heightened focus I believe I even understand why they have those traits and I am newish to warrior and never rolled tanky. They are there to give those that aren’t speccing hard into Zerker/DPS and allow them to still dish out decent damage.

Actually both those traits are used in the “hard Zerker DPS” build, which also involves the Greatsword (which is the only weapon that benefits from not ever using its burst skill, or more specifically, has no need to use its burst skill). That argument doesn’t even really make sense when considering Berserker’s Power. Since it’s a percentage, it’ll benefit the full DPS builds far more than any other. However, if you looked at my suggestion for a fix, those traits are still doing the exact same thing, they’re just encouraging you to actually use your burst skill rather than saving the adrenaline.

Optimally those traits are used in the DPS build if you are going for max damage output.

Sub optimally they are still doing the samething. Giving warriors comparable damage while not necessarily speccing for dps. I understand that those traits are the optimal to take for a DPS build I am not debating that. What I am saying is that they provide builds not focused max dps but maybe some survivability, healing etc to still have good damage.

Those traits are also good to use on your burst skill as the damage increase is given upfront. So your eviscerate hits for more damage. I know GS has a burst skill not used hardly ever so it benefits it but those 2 traits benefit all weapons until you feel it is the right time to use your burst skill and it still benefits that skill.

If berserkers power is say comparable to +300 power I could as a option because of that trait shave some power off of my gear to take stats somewhere else and still pump out good damage. Heightened focus at stage 3 adrenaline is almost 25 stacks on a perception sigil for free basically. So just my opinion both of those traits are really good and provide options actually and allow you to be more flexible with your trait pts/gear if your doing something else other than all out damage build.

I’m aware of the uses of both of those traits. However if you read past the line in my post that was quoted before, I don’t talk about removing them. I talk about having them apply on use of your burst skill. The problem is that they’re passive and they promote passive play rather than use of your class mechanic. If you instead have them apply the EXACT SAME EFFECT when you use your burst skill, you’re at least letting the player actively make use of all their abilities. Again, the argument is not about the usefulness of the traits, it’s about how they’re actually applying the bonuses.

As stated by my post above they do apply to burst skills.

Those are two of our strongest offensive traits.. if you want to complain about underpowered traits then I’d start with the mh axe 10% crit damage – under 5% extra damage as a master level trait on many builds.

You misinterpreted my post entirely. Read the other person’s reply, he seemed to understand what I’m talking about.

oZii.2864:

VoiceOfUnreason.5976:

oZii.2864:

I dont agree that there is a problem with Berserkers Power and Heightened focus I believe I even understand why they have those traits and I am newish to warrior and never rolled tanky. They are there to give those that aren’t speccing hard into Zerker/DPS and allow them to still dish out decent damage.

Actually both those traits are used in the “hard Zerker DPS” build, which also involves the Greatsword (which is the only weapon that benefits from not ever using its burst skill, or more specifically, has no need to use its burst skill). That argument doesn’t even really make sense when considering Berserker’s Power. Since it’s a percentage, it’ll benefit the full DPS builds far more than any other. However, if you looked at my suggestion for a fix, those traits are still doing the exact same thing, they’re just encouraging you to actually use your burst skill rather than saving the adrenaline.

Optimally those traits are used in the DPS build if you are going for max damage output.

Sub optimally they are still doing the samething. Giving warriors comparable damage while not necessarily speccing for dps. I understand that those traits are the optimal to take for a DPS build I am not debating that. What I am saying is that they provide builds not focused max dps but maybe some survivability, healing etc to still have good damage.

Those traits are also good to use on your burst skill as the damage increase is given upfront. So your eviscerate hits for more damage. I know GS has a burst skill not used hardly ever so it benefits it but those 2 traits benefit all weapons until you feel it is the right time to use your burst skill and it still benefits that skill.

If berserkers power is say comparable to +300 power I could as a option because of that trait shave some power off of my gear to take stats somewhere else and still pump out good damage. Heightened focus at stage 3 adrenaline is almost 25 stacks on a perception sigil for free basically. So just my opinion both of those traits are really good and provide options actually and allow you to be more flexible with your trait pts/gear if your doing something else other than all out damage build.

I’m aware of the uses of both of those traits. However if you read past the line in my post that was quoted before, I don’t talk about removing them. I talk about having them apply on use of your burst skill. The problem is that they’re passive and they promote passive play rather than use of your class mechanic. If you instead have them apply the EXACT SAME EFFECT when you use your burst skill, you’re at least letting the player actively make use of all their abilities. Again, the argument is not about the usefulness of the traits, it’s about how they’re actually applying the bonuses.

oZii.2864:

I dont agree that there is a problem with Berserkers Power and Heightened focus I believe I even understand why they have those traits and I am newish to warrior and never rolled tanky. They are there to give those that aren’t speccing hard into Zerker/DPS and allow them to still dish out decent damage.

Actually both those traits are used in the “hard Zerker DPS” build, which also involves the Greatsword (which is the only weapon that benefits from not ever using its burst skill, or more specifically, has no need to use its burst skill). That argument doesn’t even really make sense when considering Berserker’s Power. Since it’s a percentage, it’ll benefit the full DPS builds far more than any other. However, if you looked at my suggestion for a fix, those traits are still doing the exact same thing, they’re just encouraging you to actually use your burst skill rather than saving the adrenaline.

I don’t think enough thought was put into warrior’s core mechanic. Pretty much every burst skill has the exact same parameters: More adrenaline = more power. Why should that be the case? Isn’t there some more interesting concepts we can use for it? Consider some of these:

Eviscerate – Same damage across all levels of adrenaline. Reduces cooldown based on adrenaline level. So basically if the total cooldown is 10, each stage of adrenaline reduces it by three. (Note that this takes effect WHEN the ability goes into cooldown. You’re not speeding the cooldown up by gaining adrenaline after the fact, you’re causing the the Stage 3 Eviscerate to put the ability on a 4 second cooldown as opposed to 10). This would create scenarios where the player could think “If I wanted to deal consistent damage, I trait for increased adrenaline gain (axes already have traits for that) so that I can do an eviscerate every 4 seconds. Or if I want to do a quick burst, I do a maxed eviscerate, then immediately eviscerate again as soon as I hit one stage of adrenaline.” That allows for higher burst, but then puts the skill on a long cooldown. Obviously those exact values are pretty crazy, and it’d probably be best to increase the base cooldown of the skill in order to make the whole cooldown reduction thing feel more useful.

Kill Shot – Greatly reduce the charge time and damage, so maybe you only need to stay still for a quarter of a second. The skill doesn’t improve based on adrenaline, but instead only ever uses 1 bar of adrenaline, and has no cooldown. So basically, if you have 3 bars of adrenaline, then you can chain off 3 kill shots back to back. Again, actual numbers would have to change to compensate, this is just from a mechanics standpoint.

Other weapons, like the Hammer and Mace, make a lot more sense to have a direct increase to power/effect. Greatsword’s burst really just needs to change. As do the two traits based around adranline, Berserker’s Power and Heightened Focus. I don’t think a build/playstyle that causes you to not make use of your class’s mechanic is a good idea. Why not switch those traits to apply those boosts when you use a burst skill? So Berserker’s Power applies a 7% damage boost for say… 10 seconds when you use a burst skill at 2 stages of adrenaline. The boosts would only stack in duration, with the higher damage version replacing the lower one if it gets applied. I would not make these actual boons, so the enemy couldn’t actually remove the effect (this would keep them in line with their current power), though it might help to have some sort of indication as to what your damage increase is at (if I’m not mistaken they’ve started doing this with some of the non-swiftness movement speed buffs).

Isslair.4908:

Crossplay.2067:

If they guaranteed a rare in every large chest, all dungeons would be run a lot more.

A nice idea, actually. Much like the world bosses change.

A daily account bound bonus chest per dungeon path would stimulate a lot of people to run some long-forgotten dungeons.

All those ideas encourage is speed running, which really isn’t a concept you should be designing dungeons around. Honestly, they should just look into having unique RNG drops in the dungeons. Weapon/Armor skins that you can’t get elsewhere, each boss has a unique loot table, and then the remaining pieces randomly drop from trash pulls. And before you ask, yes, this is in fact how WoW does it. It’s a tried and true method of keeping people replaying dungeons.

What separates GW2 from that is the fact that WoW’s items were required for progression (leading to increasing frustration when items didn’t drop and you couldn’t move on to other things until they did), whereas GW2’s would simply be cosmetic and would be sought after as end game prestige.

Stooperdale.3560:

“My experience is that Queen Spider causes more wipes than most of the end bosses. I admittedly can’t put my finger on what exactly it is.”

One of the problems is the persistent, high damage, extremely wide poison fields that the queen lays down. If player is downed in one of those fields then other players typically cannot go near enough to revive, making the encounter very punishing.

Yeah the biggest issue there is the fact that the wells linger for so long. They could probably reduce the overall duration and increase the damage, that way the player still gets punished (and possibly get downed) for staying in the well too long, but it would be more possible to revive them since they disappear quicker.

IamDuddits.1692:

Reading the posts in this and numerous similar threads complaining about the challenge of AC exp lead me to believe that the majority of the player base running it pre-patch were: A) awful at the game or looking for easy gold/exotics.

I’ve four manned it multiple times with pugs and I’ve run it with more than half the party being less than level 50 and/or first timers. Yes, we wiped multiple times on Kholer, Queen Spider, Hodg, and Lovers, but the most important part was each attempt we’d improve. This dungeon is challenging, but doable.

Also, I don’t perceive it as a bad thing that people have stopped farming AC (and yes I’m implying most of the people complaining about AC changes were just farming an easy dungeon). If the goal of an introductory dungeon is to teach new players how to handle dungeon content then I fail to see how “No Kholer, AC Exp Speedruns, lvl 80s only” accomplished this. AC is a great learning dungeon if you have enough sense to learn from your mistakes or have one experienced (patient) player that is willing to take the time to explain things.

Also, having run old AC enough times to get the full Armor Set, Gift, and two 2-Handers, I can only describe old AC as tedious and unsatisfying, but quick and easy, kind of like McDonald’s.

I also think they’ve improved the dungeon from an actual gameplay perspective (read:CHALLENGE), though I think there are some legitimate concerns. I addressed that in my big wall of text above. Most of these complaints do tend to stem from farmers/speedrunners which should not be the focus of any design. In fact, I would rather they add more methods of blocking player progress in the dungeon in order to cut down on content skipping. This would also mean that some of these “trash” pulls need to be improved to actually offer unique challenges rather than just be tedious time wasters.

Shootsfoot.9276:

While I also hate the skipping, the amount of health these trash mobs have make skipping the prudent thing to do. This, in my opinion, is an indication of poor dungeon design.

When a mob has an excessive amount of health and provides no real additional challenge to match the length of time it takes to kill, yes that’s poor design. Breeders having large health pools makes sense, as they will continuously spawn additional mobs to fight. Other variations, even as champions, should probably be toned down as they don’t really do anything different that could cause any threat between their 80% health mark and death. A specific culprit is the Stalker, who has a state where they turn transparent and invulnerable but literally do nothing while in that state. That’s just wasting time. I don’t care if it’s triggered based on one of their other attacks succeeding, if it’s not actually doing anything then it exists solely to fake out player abilities and draw out the fight. This is also really bad design.

Syn Sity.5826:

As a dungeon that i used to enjoy (actually it was the only dungeon in this game that I did actually enjoy, rather than just farming it for gold), it now just feels like a job. I haven’t done much of it, but I’ve joined a few pugs, all of which have failed miserably. It isn’t a very rewarding dungeon seeing as the rares you get with tokens aren’t level 68 plus and you don’t get any lodestones from the chests, so I know longer see any reason to do a non-rewarding dungeon that isn’t even fun at all so I’ve stopped trying altogether. I hope you’re happy Anet, because as usual, we aren’t. Now all I do is cof p1.

The reason for this is because all you want to do is grind the easiest path for the reward. Other people actually want to play the game.

Xavori.3768:

snip

There are legitimate issues in this dungeon, from a design standpoint. NPCs bugging out are bugs, and should be treated as such and reported. You don’t need to reference a bugged NPC when complaining about the design of a dungeon.

Why do you feel the need to skip Kholer? Hell, why does ANYONE feel the need to skip Kholer? Are you all that kittening bad that you can’t handle the simplest of boss mechanics? He’s not broken, he’s not bugged, he functions perfectly fine and is easily killable for anyone with half a brain (and STOP pulling him out of his arena. It was cheesy to do it before the patch and it’s just stupid and pointless to do it now)

Howling King doesn’t need to be burned down fast, you just need to properly kite gravelings. If your group really has a hard time doing it, designate a person to be solely on kiting and ignore the boss. Every class has stunbreakers, make sure they have some ready. You can kite the gravelings from an extremely long distance once you get their attentions so you can easily lead them without being in range of their leaps.

The burrows in path 3 were made easier with the revamp. We cleared this event with a bunch of level 35-40 pugs and no they weren’t all in some max dps spec. Your group needs to be on the ball and recognize when a new burrow spawns and get on it immediately. Pugs can accomplish this just fine. It also has a fixed pattern for them spawning, so if you memorize it you can help out by calling out where they’ll be. You can very easily clear this event so that little to no gravelings even spawn from the burrows.

Really, almost ALL of the issues revolving around the Howling King and burrow encounters could be solved by removing the knockdown from the gravelings. Having the basic graveling cause knockdown was a poor design decision; they’re so common and in any event that has gravelings constantly spawning, you’ll quickly get overwhelmed by enemies that keep you completely incapacitated. If you want a knockdown, make a new graveling type and make it a less common spawn. On the note of gravelings, the Stalkers need to be fixed. They burrow under the ground, come up, and (I believe it’s when they hit someone with the burrow) then go transparent and invulnerable. Except…they don’t actually DO anything in this state; they’re just wasting time. Any fight with a stalker just gets dragged on forever due to this mechanic that’s not actually adding any sort of challenge to them.

Howling King is frustrating not because of his mechanics, but because when you screw up it’s incredibly difficult/impossible to come back due to all the knockdown. The actual process of kiting the mobs through fire is a perfectly fine mechanic and the NPC functions as needed here. We actually 3-manned the boss by having a friend and I doing the damage while a pug ran around collecting and kiting the gravelings. Worked really well. I know some people don’t like the idea of not actually fighting and just devoting yourself to running around all fight, but it’s a legitimate tactic that’s carried over from raids and dungeons in other games.

Ghost Eater also works perfectly fine from a mechanic standpoint. It requires teamwork and coordination, so maybe it’s not the best choice for a pug group. I don’t see why that’s an issue at all; one path in a dungeon being more focused on structured group play isn’t a bad thing, the pugs have two other paths they can run. In fact, that’s a good standard for other explorable dungeons. Two of the paths can have simpler (but still challenging) mechanics that pugs can pick up on and run, and one path could require more coordination and be more focused on organized groups or guilds.

Colossus, honestly, is a boring mechanic. Even if the NPC functioned perfectly, he’d still be boring (Oh no, time to run for cover in this one bubble. Oh, it’s done back to normal DPS) I’d have rather had the falling rocks function more like the previous version and be constant thing that’s happening, providing an ever-present hazard during the fight. It was clear they wanted to make the NPC feel more useful so they added him as a required component to avoiding the rocks, but it was just a boring idea from a gameplay perspective.

There really are legitimate design concerns with the design of the dungeon, but they keep getting lumped in with “This is too haaaaaard” whining moments from players. Look up guides, ask other players, and practice. This dungeon can still be run and completed with a group of 35s. It can’t, however, be completed with a group of people who don’t understand and are unable to pick up on the mechanics of fights.

Scrambles.2604:

I dont have a problem with killing everything or skipping.

I just hate when the group insists on skipping, but one or two people can’t make it past the mobs without dying. So, you have a couple players sitting at the next event, while another couple players are struggling to catch up. The whole things ends up taking longer than if you just killed the mobs in the first place.

Yeah unfortunately this is an issue of other players being kitten. I’ve had groups where we said ahead of time we’re not skipping content, and four of us would go through (lets use the tunnels in AC right before the HK or CR boss) clearing each pack, while one guy just runs ahead and waits at the boss. We tell him to come back and help clear, but he just sits at the end and afks waiting for us. Once I told a guy who did that to either “Get back here and help or be kicked” and he just left. He left right before the final boss because he didn’t want to spend an extra 2 minutes clearing the packs up to them. This, ladies and gentleman, is an example of a piece of kitten human being. No amount of dungeon patching is going to stop some players from being complete kittenlords, so unfortunately in some cases you’ll just have to grin and bear it.

*Oh, this censor makes me smile…

MattyjRulz.2840:

Conner.8713:

I’ve toyed to play Arah, but every time I come to lupicus, my team gets wiped, and decides to leave. The simple way to fix this, is fixing the aoe attack, that’s does in phase 2. The aoe does simple not hit where the red circles show. It’s so frustrating, when you really want Arah gear.
Please make the developers see this.

It’s not about lupi being too challenging fyi, the whole point of this is the aoes in phase two seem unpredictable, I’ve in the past walked right out of a red circle, a foot length right out of the circle and still been hit for massive damage, I think people are too used to seeing QQ comments, and right now without reading, bashing people for their input. I do like lupi as a boss, he is challenging and that’s nice, but that’s not what this is about.

EDIT: the thread name is kinda misleading, read what the op sais

That mass aoe Lupicus does is functioning exactly as intended, it’s just misunderstood. Lupicus fires numerous shots that travel in the air or along the ground to the designated red circle landing points. However the bullets themselves have collision, so if you are standing in the path of the bullets that travel along the ground, you WILL get hit regardless of whether or not you were at its landing point. And yes, he’s also still firing his targeted attacks while doing his aoe.

Quetz.4389:

Sericenthe.5310:

And this is why I think every dungeon I’ve been in in Guild Wars 2 is crap compared to the dungeons I ran in WOW. WOW had much better dungeon design (I only played it the first year so I don’t know what happened after that) than GW2. I don’t play GW2 for dungeons and I never will. Thank God there is enough other stuff to do or this game would have been quit as fast as I quit Diablo III.

Either this is a lie or you’re not correctly remembering launch WoW dungeons… I remember running Wailing Caverns at low levels and spending four hours just to get a couple of random blue pieces that had to be rolled by everyone in the group. I also remember UBRS groups stalling because no one had the key… or running dungeons for dozens of times waiting for a lucky drop. Scholo had similar trash problems as Arah and way more boring bosses.

Yeah, WoW has done a great job on their dungeons but it took a while to get there. I just hope that Arena can put the same effort towards tweaking their dungeons.

Trash mobs take time to kill, can wipe groups, and don’t drop anything worthwhile. As long as they can be skipped players will make the choice that leads to the least headaches.

It’s a general failing of all MMO players to compare new MMOs to what WoW has. Like you said, WoW has had many years to perfect their formula and make dungeons that are fun and function perfectly with their system. TBH, I thought GW2 did a decent job on dungeons; I had some pretty good fun the first time around. They just don’t really have a whole lot of lasting power. Part of it is the content, part of it is the reward. I think the token idea came from perfectly good intentions, but the idea of unique drops in each dungeon/path works MUCH better for replayability.

DanH.5879:

A-net got trolled by the “elitists”, they wanted a harder dungeon in AC, a-net gave them. The player base got trolled and moved on to cof
The elitists want COF “buff” now. The question is: a-net listens to the few with bad ideas, or to the many ?

The question is, are the “many” as you call them actually interested in the dungeon itself, or just a way to make gold/tokens? ANet should be developing the content to be fun, not simply rewarding from a numerical standpoint. If you really wanted to just gold farm, maybe they should add more open-world methods to do that and leave dungeons for people who really want to actually play the dungeons. I think what really needs to be changed about dungeons is giving players a unique reason to be there. Gold farmers will always just migrate to the quickest method to get gold. That method really shouldn’t be dungeons. Dungeons should be more about challenging content that rewards unique items, like new skins or recipes (besides what you get from tokens).

As far as AC is concerned…honestly…they may as well just say explorable mode is for level 80s. Cause at this point they’re clearly developing the content for higher leveled/better geared players. I think that separation is fine, but what they’d need to then do is make story mode more appealing for people who are leveling. What would be a great feature is for story mode to give some kind of bonus reward for level 80s who are going into it with a bunch of lower levels (a sort of mentoring reward). Maybe scale that reward based on how many low level people are running the dungeon. So, if say…a single level 80 ran story mode with a group of 4 level 30s, they’d (the level 80 guy) get a big gold/token reward. Whereas a group of 4 level 80s and a single level 30 would reward each max level player only a slight bonus. This would encourage guild mates to run the story mode with their alts to level them, and it would help new players find dungeons by giving the “vets” (for lack of a better word) a reason to party with them.

SwickHobo.5096:

the toads decent enough, but honestly once u beat him twice he turns into a snooze fest. His tells are not subtle at all but massive signs. But compared to 75% of the bosses in the game hes closer to right then they are. Lupi>Ghost Eater>Toad>all IMO.

Why’s Ghost Eater on that list? Just cause his primary mechanic requires some coordination? TBH a proper boss with multiple distinct phases like Lupicus really trumps all the boss designs from any of the other dungeons.

As I said, you shouldn’t encourage skipping content. The only reason it feels good skipping them is because they serve no purpose. The areas that get skipped should be changed to something that actually requires gameplay, and make it something interesting. You SHOULD be preventing skipping, but you shouldn’t just half kitten it. Make sure that the new progression blockers in the dungeon are interesting and rewarding, so the players don’t feel like the dungeon was just artificially increased in duration for no reason but to drag things out.

Seeing as how they’ve now added a system preventing players from respawn-rushing bosses, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have a closer waypoint to Lupicus.

Can this thread be closed? People here don’t understand what goes into game production/localization, and the dev already explained all he needs to on this situation. No one here needs (or deserves) any further explanation.

When these dungeons get redesigned, the developers need to focus on more than just the bosses. They really need to redesign the paths to prevent trash skipping. Put up walls that block the players until they clear the mobs by it. Add more miniboss-esque champion mobs that somehow keep players from progressing foward. Use puzzle-like events to open doors. Or just create scenarios that guarantee player death if they don’t deal with the obstacles. Content skipping isn’t something that should be encouraged by design. Dungeons aren’t supposed to just be a means of getting tokens, they’re part of the game. They’re supposed to be the most challenge you get out of PVE, and being able to skip through them really isn’t living up to that idea.

Please kittening god, Lupicus is one of the few legitimate bosses in this game, don’t nerf him. Don’t even touch him. He’s perfect. He has the right amount of phases, the phases are different enough, he escalates in the middle of the fight, tapers down towards the end (but still remains a threat if players get lazy or stop paying attention), and he gives you a great feeling of accomplishment for clearing him. This is an END GAME BOSS. This is the kind of boss that challenges everything you’ve learned and challenges your group to do more than just wail around on the keyboard, to actually work together and…what’s that word…? Oh right, COMMUNICATE. Really, this boss is so good and should serve as a milestone for player skill in PVE for this game. If he gets nerfed…I really have no hope for future dungeons in this game.

Few people still run AC, and those that do only run path 1 because it’s the easiest to cheat. Honestly, the new changes to the dungeon were good all around. The fact that people have a tough time with the simplest of boss designs is truly pathetic. Making the dungeon easy again isn’t the key to getting more people playing it. You’re just pandering to those that are more interested in quick tokens rather than playing the game. What you really need to do is give players a reason to get back into dungeons with the new resources/armor/weapons. When you implement ascended armor, you NEED to put them in the existing dungeons. And you need to implement them the same way you did the original exotics in those dungeons. Each dungeon has 3 different stat combos for their armor, so players have to run different ones to get all the stats they want rather than just congregate to the easiest one.

You need to force players to LEARN, not give them easy options out. Rewarding laziness or failure is just going to hurt you in the long run. When you start adding new dungeons, these types of players will just avoid it if it’s too hard for them. If you give them a reason to go to the dungeons, something that they can’t get anywhere else (aside from WvW, to keep the two options seperate), they WILL learn to play them better.

*Oh and for god’s sake, do something about people speedrunning by simply skipping all the “trash” mobs. Those encounters can be unique and challenging on their own and skipping them is a waste. Specifically, people doing the torch event by just running through the room and grabbing torches, or that last stretch of the dungeon where players just run past everything in the tunnels before the boss. This should NOT be considered a legitimate method of dealing with this content and it sure as hell shouldn’t be encouraged. Skipping content should NEVER be encouraged.

Ooshi.8607:

I guess I didn’t receive the mail ordering me to buy some keys, pretty sure I will as I don’t think Anet would force only a portion of their players.

Btw, for everyone that was forced already to buy them, how exactly do they make you do it?

Do they threaten to delete one of your characters? Do they threaten to delete your account? Do they limit you bandwidth and make the game unplayable?

What exactly is the method that those evil doers are using to force you to buy those keys?

Force: as in, if you want these items, you are forced to gamble for them. This is obvious what I meant, you know it is, yet you decided to make a stupid post claiming outlandish things that aren’t related to what I said. You know kitten well what I meant.

If I remember correctly, during the Halloween event (or maybe Wintersday) they acknowledged the low drop rate and increased the rates from chests in a patch. But they didn’t give any refunds to people that already wasted their money. There’s always a possibility they’ll do that again, the scam seemed to work well the first time. You may want to stop wasting your money.

Adam.4103:

I just don’t understand why they didn’t do it the same way as the wintersday skins. At least you had the option to outright buy the weapon skins with gems, as well as several other methods.

Because they make more money forcing people to gamble. So long as the majority of these people don’t wise up and stop buying into the scam of Black Lion Chests, they’ll continue to use this method to drain money out of you. And who can blame them? It works. If people DID wise up, it wouldn’t work in the long term. But then again I think a lot of their business and development strategy doesn’t work in the long term.

While your lore argument does make some sense, it’s sorta contradicted by the most widely known Asura armor, Zojja’s. Her armor actually does have fancy ribbons hanging off of the ear pieces, and despite the fact that males can buy her armor as the cultural T3, I would argue that it was made feminine in appearance in order to fit her character (That armor being the only one made specifically to go on a female). Asura are actually known to be rather eccentric (Look at Snaff and how he modeled his golems after Zojja) so it actually wouldn’t be that uncommon for an Asura to want to dress up in nicer/exotic attire. Also, the whole “society being focused around practicality” is thrown around a lot, and really isn’t true. If you look at the three Asuran colleges, only one of them (Statics) is really focused on finding practical applications for research and devices. The other two are focused on theory or experimentation, and both imply (or outright state) that their work doesn’t usually have practical use.

I understand why male and female charr wear the same armor, as their body types are basically equal and there’s little to no gender discrepancy in their society (outside of flame legion), but why do the Asura share armor between both sexes? They may have similar body structure, but their dialogue and the backstory shown during their reveal month show they put just as much emphasis on each other’s gender as any of the other races (Charr excluded). It doesn’t make sense to me why they would wear the same armor.
I mean, the obvious answer is that since their body structure is so similar, ArenaNet didn’t want to spend the time/resources to make alternative armor skins for female Asura. But I mean…that’s not so much of a reason as it is an excuse for laziness. There’s no benefit for the company to go back and update existing armor skins at this point in time (same reason they’ll never go back and fix the tail issue for Charr), but moving forward, I’d want to see new armors have separate skins to help define gender with Asura.

Easily one of the best classes in dungeons, second only to Guardians who offer a lot more to the group as a whole. However their best work is done up close and if you don’t play them well that health pool isn’t gonna save you from dying quick in melee range. Their shouts and banners offer a lot of utility to the team and they can be pretty good at CC, in addition to having great overall damage. Nearly every weapon set is viable in dungeons, but as far as utility slots go…please for the love of god don’t run a full signet build into fractals, or any dungeon for that matter.

Yes please. It’s bad enough that the tail clips through so many armors in the game. AT LEAST let the armor specifically designed for the Charr not have clipping issues.

Also, theoretically you could reuse the same code/assets from the single-use skin transmutations in order to apply the ascension. You just click the item and drag the piece of armor you want into the box.

I know this has been probably talked/suggested to death, but I’d like to offer a new approach to this gear tier anyway, in hopes of getting some of this frustration off my chest in a constructive way. Please note that this is not intended to be a troll post but rather a legitimate suggestion, so please offer legitimate feedback.

My version of Ascended gear revolves around a single type of item called Gift of Ascension (I know this item exists with another purpose, but just bear with me here). There is a version of this gift for every stat combination (Knight’s, Berserker’s, Rampager’s, etc.), and there is a specific gift used for Weapons, Armor, and Jewelry. The player would use this item to upgrade a single piece of level 80 exotic gear, making it ascended with the additional stat boost attached. The new Ascended piece would be equal in strength to the existing implementation, but with the stats based on the item used, rather than a reliance on RNG to hopefully get the stat combination you want. They would keep their existing slot for runes, sigils, and gems, and add an additional slot for the infusion (if we wanted to keep that concept).

These new Gifts of Ascension would be made available in every avenue of play. Crafting professions would be able to craft their associated gifts (Weapon smiths make weapon ascensions) with similar mat combinations to runes and top-tier gems. They would also be available from Karma Vendors, likely after big events like the temples in Orr, or Claw of Jormag. You should also distribute them in ALL dungeons, using tokens to buy them. And finally, they would need to be available from WvW vendors for PvP tokens.

The reason for this new system is to negate the idea that players’ existing exotic gear suddenly becomes ‘useless’ with this new Ascended tier. Instead, you’ll be upgrading your existing gear with stat combinations of your choosing. You’ll be able to pick and choose which stat combination you want on your gift, rather than relying on the currently extremely frustrating RNG system in hopes you’ll get what you want. And crafting professions no longer feel useless, as not only is the exotic gear they make still needed, they’re also now required for crafting the Gifts of Ascension (essentially making them the only way to acquire Gifts through gold). Making them available through dungeon tokens should be obvious; we want the players to once again be spread out among all the dungeons rather than be clustered at FotM. WvW vendors are also obvious, as you need to maintain that separation between WvW players that don’t want to play the PVE content.

The great thing about this system is that you can STILL have ascended gear drops. These could be named items with the same stat distribution as normal ascended items, but with unique skins (essentially legendary armors). This gives the player additional reasons to run dungeons or special events and PvP objectives for the chance to get these incredibly rare skins, but not give them any specific advantage over others since the stats will be the same as crafted or bought ascended items.

That’s my implementation in a nutshell. If you have any constructive feedback I’d love to hear it, but PLEASE don’t turn this into another thread bashing the existing implementation as there’s plenty enough already and I don’t want this idea to drown out due to complaints.

Definitely the little charr girl in the batman costume (CANDY DAY Charr). That line she says is so adorable, and when I figured out what her costume I was just… “All my candy goes to you now!”

I see no change at all from what’s been happening the past few weeks. I can walk around Black Citadel and not see a soul, but then get close to the Serrated Blade (this is an RP server) and suddenly 15-20 will fade in 2 feet in front of me.

You should also add the fact that DR is account bound, so playing across multiple characters and doing the same events or dungeons will also cause you to hit diminishing returns.

Source: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Dungeon-DR-is-now-account-bound-never-got-it-before-today/first#post322679

DaedalusDragon.3754:

Why is any DR system necessary? Everyone is saying that without this system we would have raid lock out timers. Why? If the goal is that we have fun however we would like to (except exploiting) then why is this system here at all? All it is really doing is shining a light on the lack of endgame content that this game has. “Oh no… DR is up I guess… wanna go do some other fun endgame content…. oh wait….. what other endgame content?”

This is really what I’d like an answer to. This DR system isn’t something anyone asked for, it’s really not something anyone wants. No one wants to be punished for playing a game a certain way. If people are able to speed clear your dungeons that’s your ownkittenfault, and yet you’re here saying that we’re bad “exploiters” for doing that. If your goal is to use this to stop exploiting, a better solution would be to FIX THE EXPLOITS. If you’re doing this to buy time for you all to fix the exploits…just…stop. You’ve failed. You’ve failed to make this system work and it haskitten off every single person that it’s worked improperly on. For several patches now this system hasn’t even remotely worked and it’s continuing to prove to all you customers that you’re more interested in making sure people can’t efficiently run through your content than you are in making sure that content is fun and hassle-free (read: bug free). Events are still broken, dungeons rewards were terrible and are now broken; there are so many things keeping your players from properly enjoying the game at end-game and yet you still have the audacity to devote even a single hour, a single coder to this useless DR system while people drown your forums in complaints. Just kitten stop. It’s not working, it’ll never make any of the players happy. There will always be complaints, JUSTIFIABLE COMPLAINTS about it. Nothing good has come or will come from this system. Just stop.

For christ’s sake, could you PLEASE fix the inherent bugs in the game BEFORE you focus so heavily on implementing your diminishing returns system? Godkitten I can’t believe a developer that seemed so devoted to their game would rather waste resources in a system designed to punish players rather than making sure those players have a fun, problem-free experience.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Hey folks, I’ve been reading this thread for a bit and figured I’d come weigh in on things. I built this dungeon, and fixed the problem, so I’m going to come at you from the designer perspective on things to try and illuminate why I did what I did, and what exactly I did. It wasn’t made clear, and I apologize for that.
The main thing I am seeing, is that people are upset that I took away their super profitable low risk, fast, token grind. I did not go into this thinking everyone would be happy with my changes – I knew I would be upsetting people because I was taking away a super easy speed-run money printer.
I took it away for a few reasons – chief among them being what I feel is taking advantage of a couple bugs found in the same chain, and our leashing/aggro system. I played with groups who did this, and watched you-tube clips of what was going on. The problems I identified with the speed run aspect of this are as follows:
1. You just need 1 person to get to the magmacyte across the magma field. This will cause an invulnerable Magg to run across the entire field through mobs and progress the dungeon. Then this person teleports back.
2. Instead of fighting the enemies in a timed event at he door buster, you just circle strafe them or leash aggro them to “kill the clock” since it was only a 100 second timer on the event.
3. Final Boss encounter isn’t threatening.
So what did I do?
1. I made it so that Magg has to get to the other side of the Magma field and close to the magmacyte – not just a player. Magg not taking aggro from nearby enemies was a big reason for this issue to be resolved. By giving him aggro, and forcing you to escort him to the ending, I fixed what I considered to be a bug/exploit that I introduced through poor planning.
2. I extended the time from 100 seconds to 200 seconds at the Door Buster event. I intended for you to fight those guys, not circle strafe them and aggro leash chain them. I also added 1 additional mob to the encounter at the very middle (a bow dude) to account for you now having twice the time to defeat the waves that come in.
3. I made the fireballs hurt more. Not greatly more – they’ll do about 3-4k damage to a DPS focused player, but you should have anywhere between 15k-25k HP, so there’s a bit of wiggle room for error.

I made this path hard, because it was easy. It’s an explorable dungeon path, and they should be hard. Wearing the flame legion armor set should be a symbol of what you went through to obtain something. It should mean something. Right now it means you did 40 speedruns in 2 days.
I hope this helps a bit, but I understand you’re upset. For all it’s worth I’m sorry, and I hope we can move past this.

This may be the wrong thread to post in, given the nature of the OP. However I’d like to point out that myself and many others aren’t upset over the difficulty of the dungeon, but rather the fact that dungeons themselves don’t feel rewarding. All this challenge and effort amounts to a big chest full of vendor trash and a few tokens that will eventually buy a full set of armor once I’ve run the full thing 100+ more times. In that sense, a full set of Flame Legion armor essentially represents that I’ve done 100-not-so-speedy runs in the course of several months. Sounds like a hefty amount of profit for a subscription-based game. But since you’re not…maybe you can lay off the carrot mentality just a little bit. If the ONLY reward coming out of a dungeon is some currency you can later use to buy something, that dungeon is going to become boring quick. Try adding some unique exotics with a chance to drop from the bosses in each path, or bonuses for completing all the paths of the dungeon. SOMETHING to provide some incentive to play the same thing over and over and over and over again (Which is what we have to do). I appreciate you thinking that dungeons should be fun and challenging, but things tend to stop being fun after the 30th time you’ve repeated it.

opivm.7824:

That’s the point.

Obviously the point was to stop people from running the 30 minute dungeon. What I’m saying is that it’s the wrong mindset. Not everyone has the time, or the desire to run a 4 hour dungeon, but they love to run the 30 minute one. So why not lessen the reward of the 30 minute and increase the reward of the 4 hour? All they’ve done thus far is cripple the reward of running ANYTHING multiple times, but that doesn’t even remotely address the underlying issue. It’s more like a hotfix to prevent players from going too fast.

JonPeters.5630:

If you run the exact same chain twice in a row you will have your rewards cut. This means you can bounce back and forth between 2 different chains, even in the same dungeon without ever hitting this change. This change is made to encourage people to try different chains.

As a fellow game designer, I would’ve thought you’d know better than this. You are not encouraging a player to do one thing by punishing them for doing another. All you’re doing is punishing them. Encouragement involves providing incentives, which you’ve failed to do. I can make it really simple for you:

Each chain in an explorable dungeon should have a once-a-day bonus for completion (You already do this, which is good)
Each chain should have its own potential rare drops (Just because you have a token system doesn’t mean there can’t also be unique skins dropped from the bosses/chests themselves)
Completing all 3 chains (This one is important) once per day gains another bonus amount of tokens and money

That’s what you want, right? You want players to actually go through every path in the dungeon, at least I assumed that’s what you want. That 3rd part encourages players to run every path each day rather than picking the easiest and running it over and over again. The 2nd part ensures that even when they’ve gotten their token gear, they still might come back for the chance for those exotic drops from the bosses.

Oh and lets add a fourth, and you can even pick which method you like the best:

Each path is equal in terms of time/effort spent and reward given.

OR

Some paths may require significantly more time and effort, but offer more rewards to compensate.

I mean, it’s pretty obvious, even if you want them to play for the fun of it. If one path takes 30 minutes and one takes 4 hours, they’re gonna pick the 30 minute one. You knew this right? When you were testing dungeons (please tell me you at least closed beta tested them all), you saw that some paths took significantly longer than others. But for whatever reason you chose to make them all have the same reward. Did you not think people would pick the easiest route? I really hope this is just a lack of testing on the end game content, and you all really have a plan to get this through…but I’m significantly worried at this point, and it appears the rest of your community is as well.

When I first heard about ArenaNet’s plans for dungeon rewards in this game, it sounded really good on paper. I hated when I ran a dungeon in WoW and didn’t get any of the drops I was looking for. Having a token system to ensure I would be rewarded sounded like a great idea. After running GW2’s dungeons countless times, I’ve come to realize I was completely wrong.

There is nothing wrong with WoW’s style of reward, where a boss has specific (lets call them exotics for comparison’s sake) drops that players run the dungeons specifically for a chance to get. What’s actually wrong is the fact that said dungeon could be completed without any reward at all. In GW2’s system, every dungeon/boss is rewarding you with currency. That’s a great way to make sure every player is potentially getting something out of the experience. What’s wrong with that system is that it’s ALL you get rewarded with. I can any dungeon a million times and I will never find a weapon or armor drop that would be even remotely viable to use. It’s all just vendor trash. It’s really hard to put into words how utterly unsatisfying it is to open a giant golden chest only to find a big stack of meaningless loot that you intend to vendor at your earliest convenience. The only potentially rare drops are crafting nodes which are few and far between. The tokens are great but knowing that there’s no immediate reward, and you have to run it many more times to actually get something out of it is very unsatisfying. Both these MMOs have a good idea for rewards, but both fall short on making sure the player is always satisfied upon leaving a dungeon.

So why not combine the two? Have bosses drop a random selection of 5 or so rare weapon/armor skins. And then keep your token system the way it is. This way players are running with the chance to see an immediate reward, and they have more incentive to try different dungeons and paths for the different weapon/armor skins each unique boss may drop. But they’re also ensured a smaller reward (tokens), even if they don’t get the drop they want.