Just wanted to get my own experience with Dungeons out there, so far I’ve completed every story mode dungeon up to Sorrow’s Embrace and I’ve done Caudecus Manor on explorable as well. I always go with my two friends/guildies and then pick up two others to come with us and some parts of a Dungeon are amazing whereas other parts I feel like aren’t challenging so much as they are just utter slaughter.
I pay attention to mob behaviors, my friends and I were always maxed on gear sense we helped each other with crafting, and we are pretty good for being a half pug/going in with a casual attitude. We are good enough so that I can safely say that those elite mobs aren’t a problem for us, so its not like pugs don’t stand a chance either, its the bosses that usually get to me.
At the end of the day when I’m fighting an enemy who has a lot of health (which is okay because he is a boss) and attacks that can insta-kill you all I have at my disposal is 1 heal, 2 dodges, and kiting it doesn’t work out very well and people just end up getting anti-climatically wiped. By the time I use the 1 heal and 2 dodges I have 20-40 seconds to wait while the boss is out there unleashing relentlesskittenand the movement speed slow down in combat mode makes it so that I will eventually be caught by those attacks. It’s not like we don’t have any skill otherwise we wouldn’t have it this far either, like I know some people have trouble with the TA 2nd boss who summons spiders, we just ran circles from the spiders while ranging him till he died and that’s an example of a boss that you can learn to defeat, but then theres bosses like the lieutenant in Ascalon explorable who are so overpowered that they can insta down you, somehow pull you into him even though both me and my friends noticed that the evaded sign comes up when we dodge that attack.
The perfect example is from my latest completion of Sorrow’s Embrace. There’s a boss fight with an Asuran named Kudu who will fight you till 1/2 health before going invulnerable and then you have to fight 3 of his golems 1 at a time before he comes back down. Each golem has a special property like fire, poison, etc. I knew it was going to be drawn out fight because thats like a 4 part boss fight, but the golems did so much damage it was ridiculous, especially the fire golem who constantly fired barrages of fire missiles that pepper everyone and then if you do engage him he goes into a spinny mode while spraying fire everywhere which you could dodge of course, but then he would just fill your face with more missiles again. We ended up doing the horrible zerg method and throwing ourselves at it 2 – 3 at a time while the other 2 – 3 were running back from a waypoint.
That was so hard and long that I thought it was the final boss of the dungeon, but there was more afterwards and the actual final boss was the forgemaster, the giant robot cyborg that was apart of a elite quest in Sorrows Furnace in the first guild wars I think (which was really cool). I was like omg we just finished Kudu, don’t tell me this is gonna be harder. The thing is huge so it was intimidating, but then we figured out that you could dodge his lasers by hiding behind sheet metal, and when he reached for a chain he pours lava onto the sheet metal spots so that was your cue to move out. We also figured out to use the boulders over our ranged because they did tremendous amounts of damage to him, about less than 10 throws and the was dead, and the fight was over in like 10 minutes.
My point there is why was there such an impossible boss before the final boss who turned out to be a very easy enemy to defeat and even if it was an easy boss to defeat, he was so fun because he had a learning curve to him. Its these gimmicks in the Dungeons that make it so fun to me, the forge master being one, another being the spike room in Caudecus Manor explorable were we figured out we had to throw pillows ahead of us and jump on them or get shanked to death by needles.
I feel like there is a serious imbalance with some of the bosses. Like with Kudu and the Forgemaster what were they thinking when they said lets make Kudu and his golems hard by boosting their health, damage, and damage mechanics to almost unbeatable and then let something like the Forgemaster who had literally a joke amount of health, slide. Its two extremes and there’s no middle ground in my opinion, Kudu is a boss along with many many others that could be scaled down a bit, whereas the Forgemaster is a rare boss that I feel like could use a good buff ( I liked the terminator reference when he died).
My only other problem with dungeons are those awful defense events like the ones in Ascalon explorable where skelk burrows come up and then the bug where 2/3 or all of my hits miss when fighting a structure like a burrow.
