On the topic of CM. I’ll start by saying I"m a toughness/vitality guardian with lvl appropriate toughness/vitality gear.. with some healing thrown in. I use a mace/focus for the healing and defensive abilities i get there.. and for a little more damage i carry around a greatsword. That being said, CM is more of a slaughter house and less of a “dungeon”. Even with my defensive abilities (blocks, blinds, heals, etc.) the damage you take is rediculous. If i remember correctly, now don’t quote me on this, but wasn’t arena net wanting to avoid the trinity of tank, dps, healer? How can a non tank go into the instance and survive past some of the initial damage, let alone sustain it for even past a few seconds? As most seem to get one-hit or two-hit if their lucky.
Aside from just the damage, lets talk about the massive amount of crowd control abilities that get spammed by mobs in CM. The knock back, the fears, the stuns… it’s what i consider to be the equivalent of being able to take my gladiator and throw them in the mince cycle of my blender. Even with several defensivie abilities that could initially block some of them they’re spammed so much by the npc(s) that it pretty much makes those skills null and void. For example, the fear from the dogs. every 10 seconds or so… and you’re not only dealing with one, but rather, two dogs in each pack (if not more). and then you have the bombers, and the knockbacks from the snipers/ranged npc’s.
Now don’t get me wrong. I can understand them wanting to avoid dungeon speed runs so you can’t farm exp. and gold. And that’s fine. So nerf the experience and money gains and leave the dungeons as they are. Why make them rediculously hard while nerfing experience at the same time. Then what’s the point, really, of having a dungeon? Noone will want to do much of any of them past the initial run. The repair costs alone on a pug group will more than likely (based on this last run I just did) cost more than what you made in the dungeon (@ 2 silver….)
Seriously, I find no fun in running CM as a dungeon in story mode.. let alone exploration mode. I doubt many other people do either. I hope they make some sort of fix soon because I really enjoy running instances with pugs or guildies as i’m sure most other people do to. And as a casual player I would hate to have to do “detailed research” just to run a dugneon with a few friends.
As far as going in at the level it’s desinged for. It’s not like you can go in before that level and even having level 50 gear with appropriate stats helping out, it’s still a brutal place to go into