After reading all the posts from this topic and from my limited personal experience ingame (only did AC story mode so far) I’ve concluded a few things:
1. Story mode should be easier a bit. Its a more casual and “controled” version of every dungeon. By controled I mean, we have a lore related reason to go there, with npcs to support us. It could be more forgiving to the players, specially the lower ones.
2. Rewards: For story modes, they are like quests, and the quest reward, coupled with the eventual chest should be enough, IF they make them a bit easier, like I suggested above. For exploration modes, if they do take as long as I see people saying all around, they DEFINITELY should improve the rewards.
Now, I agree with someone who said that every single dungeon in a game, should follow a very simple concept: they should all be dificult, fun and rewarding. Also, the dificult should have a very clear and linear curve progressing towards the most dificult (and rewarding) experiences being the most high level ones in the game.
Right now I believe the dungeon content is not clearly following this concept. Story modes should be doable for pugs with non optimal builds but exploration ones shouldn’t. Also, the game should give the players some visual notification that the content they are about to see is harder than what they are used to on the open world. I know it’s a common sense for most of us, but “hard” in GW2 really means hard. Players could be made aware of it beforehand, to avoid frustration.
On my AC experience, I didn’t found most of the boss fights very fun. It was interesting that what we call “trash mobs” were 10x harder than the bosses themselves. And it was not because of any obscure combat mechanics, but just because of the raw damage and unavoidable almost instakills they are capable of doing (ranger traps from AC ghosts for example, specially when 2 of them decide to cast it on the same player, which happens frequently).
My suggestion: drop their damage a bit. Why non bosses should be that strong, at all? I think it would even be a lot funier if they were weaker individually but we had to deal with a more diverse group with more mobs at once.
About their hp polls, I never grasped the concept behind giving any mob without any clear visual indication that they are REALLY strong with thousands of hps A giant, a dragon and any overly sized monster should have thousands of hps. A normal sized npc like many others we encounter elsewhere should not… Better to give them special abilities to make them tougher, like the mesmer ghost that can reflect projectiles. Make them quicker, make them have SKILLS that give them mitigation, not just and simply a gargantuan hp pool.
All in all, this game is fantastic. I would love dungeons to remain hard, but less unforgiving. Also the zerging should definitely go, somehow. Make it so that we can only ress inside a dungeon after everyone else died or someone come and ress you.