who the hell are dungeons tuned for?

No wonder no one does dungeons any more in this game. Trying to do Twilight Arbor on my Warrior cause I like the skins from there and Im setting new records for being downed. I dont even die this much doing Fractals. Hell in just this run, that isnt even over yet, I have died more than I died all week doing daily fractals. I got downed on pretty much every trash pack. Need to run back? Thats nice the poison flowers of death have respawned so now you are dead again. The first spider boss puts up red circles that I didnt even have time to react to before I was downed. So far wiped 4 times on last boss and half the group left so I proly not even gonna finish the thing. Also so far dont have any drops from here so can someone please tell me who came up with the genius idea to use ultra murder mode on a dungeon that doesnt even guarantee you get anything from doing it?

First of all, you're guaranteed 120 dungeon tokens per path per account per day upon completion of the the Explorable Dungeon Path. Each dungeon also has specific mechanics that you may have to deal with, and are tuned for players approximately at its minimal requirement, e..g 45 for Twilight Arbor: Twilight Council paths. This also mean your characters are scaled down from level 80 when entering these dungeons, which also means attributes are severely reduced in most cases.

From your rant, it simply sounds like you're wandering into the dungeon cocky and blind. If you take the dungeon's mechanics and mobs for granted, while also being unfamiliar with how to handle them, don't be surprised that a level 45 dungeon can, and will, offer significant resistance.

so if dungeons are tuned just fine then why does no one do them anymore? Im all for a challenge but this is ridiculous. Actually they are leveling dungeons because they do scale you down. If I want a challenge I will do T4 fractals or raids. This is a dungeon meant for level 55 players so why is it this ridiculous?

There have been many debates on why people don't run dungeons anymore, and each person has their own reasons. While you can still profit by repeating the Dungeon Frequenter achievement for 5g and 100 tokens, which can then be turned into equipment that can be salvaged for their inscriptions (e.g. Rabid, Soldier, etc.), many will decide that there are easier, more straightforward means of making gold (e.g. Istan, Silverwastes).

You mentioned challenge and referred to T4 Fractals and raids, which you claim to be able to complete without issue (most likely due to lots of practice and/or guidance), yet have trouble with a level 55 vanilla dungeon. That makes me wonder how you define "challenge."

@Dabrixmgp.4758 said:so if dungeons are tuned just fine then why does no one do them anymore? Im all for a challenge but this is ridiculous. Actually they are leveling dungeons because they do scale you down. If I want a challenge I will do T4 fractals or raids. This is a dungeon meant for level 55 players so why is it this ridiculous?

Answer is easy... When they removed support for dungeons they broke their rewards.You get ~15g easily in 30 minutes of T4 fractals, while you need 8 dungeon paths for the 5 gold reward. So people won't do those as often.

That you consider them harder, that's more telling of how bad you are as a player than how bad dungeons are themselves. I've 3-4 manned that particular dungeon recently with ease (needed the tokens, didn't want to wait for a PUG).

Dungeons are, in general, super easy, and yes, if you're doing it like Rambo, thinking you're all that great because you do T4 fractals, TA especially, will be punishing.

Dungeons were designed for vanilla specs, which means they're rather faceroll nowadays if you know what to do. The latter part is the problem though - ever since dungeons were abandoned design-wise, there's not so many people around who actually know what to do. That lack of knowledge combined with quite a bunch of bad (or non-existing) tells for deadly attacks, bugs and vastly different boss difficulty profiles makes dungeons seem more difficult than they are. Fractals, on the other hand, are something most people will at least have some routine for, so they appear rather easy.

You're supposed to kill the poison flowers. They have like 1 HP. You can rally off them too.

@ReaverKane.7598 said:

@Dabrixmgp.4758 said:

so if dungeons are tuned just fine then why does no one do them anymore?

Im all for a challenge but this is ridiculous. Actually they are leveling dungeons because they do scale you down. If I want a challenge I will do T4 fractals or raids. This is a dungeon meant for level 55 players so why is it this ridiculous?

This is not entirely true. You put 15g fractal reward comparison while counting all drops, matrixes, doing CMs and selling mats. For dungeons you just say 5g from the achievements. This is false comparison. After they boosted token reward for dungeons, the overall reward from dungeons went up back to almost what it was before gold nerf.

@CptAurellian.9537 said:Dungeons were designed for vanilla specs, which means they're rather faceroll nowadays if you know what to do. The latter part is the problem though - ever since dungeons were abandoned design-wise, there's not so many people around who actually know what to do. That lack of knowledge combined with quite a bunch of bad (or non-existing) tells for deadly attacks, bugs and vastly different boss difficulty profiles makes dungeons seem more difficult than they are. Fractals, on the other hand, are something most people will at least have some routine for, so they appear rather easy.

It's worth mentioning that OP provides valid concern. These are leveling dungeons - even explorable paths. They are expected to be easy for leveling characters, meanwhile a full 80 party can wipe if they miss single dodge. This is misleading for new players, which are playing dungeons these days mostly (in comparison to old times when dungeon runs were considered endgame).

@Dabrixmgp.4758 said:Im all for a challenge . . .

Clearly you are not.

It's quite a shame that the reduction of dungeon desirability among the experienced dungeon players has caused such a slow (if I dare say, halt) of knowledge being passed down to newer players. Back when I was new to dungeons there was at least one experienced person in the party to show us the ropes and I eventually learned many tricks that I would eventually be able to lead a less experienced team through myself relatively quickly. If this post is anything to go by, it's quite sad to see this knowledge not being passed on, with only parties of newbies being created getting facerolled by the dungeons due to the absence of a mentor. But as above posts have mentioned the rewards are relatively bad such that even if there was a "mentor" in the party, unless they were feeling extra charitable, they may not choose to stay due to the lackluster reward to effort ratio. And this is another reason why many people don't run dungeons - you don't know who you're going to get. Most of the experienced players just want to speedclear it, and with the reduction of dungeon desirability the chance that you'll find other experienced players is low (except on maybe a dungeon daily day), and many just don't want to even roll that dice. The rewards need to be adjusted somehow if it is to be desirable again. Even when a dungeon daily is on rotation you hardly find anyone running them, and that's saying something.

That spider boss follows a predictable script so it’s pretty easy to avoid it’s attack. You could probably do it blindfolded as I think the entire sequence could be set to a timer.

Fun fact if you stand in his poison spray and dont remove the poison you do more damage to boss.

pre HoT builds/power level.

@"Kheldorn.5123" said:This is not entirely true. You put 15g fractal reward comparison while counting all drops, matrixes, doing CMs and selling mats.Actually that's just the trash drops from fractal encryption boxes alone that give you ~10-15g per full run (3xt4+3 recommended). Drops from mobs, dailies, CM, mats sold etc are on top of that.

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@"Kheldorn.5123" said:This is not entirely true. You put 15g fractal reward comparison while counting all drops, matrixes, doing CMs and selling mats.Actually that's just the fractal encryption boxes alone that give you ~10-15g per full run (3xt4+3 recommended). Drops from mobs, dailies, CM etc are on top of that.

From my experience vendor trash from boxes gives me about 7-8g and I get 12-15 only after selling stuff.

Dungeon rewards are better now than they were before HoT launched (which was when the rewards were nerfed). They take a different form in that to get "better" rewards, you need to do 8 unique paths and make use of the tokens obtained, i.e. less comes in raw gold, more in tokens. There are several posts on the forums & Reddit that document the amounts.

However, the rewards for doing other things is also better. Silverwastes & Istan can be 'farmed' more efficiently, and you can throw in a few other metas for variety.

So primarily what's changed is that, back in days of yore, Dungeons were the only way to make gold consistently versus today when there are all sorts of ways. I can't imagine anyone who did a dozen CoF paths per day in 2013 ever wanting to return to that dungeon, unless it had stellar rewards.

Separately, dungeons are tuned for pre-HoT builds. As @Ojimaru.8970 said, they are even doable in level-appropriate rare gear (or sometimes even masterwork), although there's no reason to put that to the test. If the OP is having trouble, then I'm sure the usual reason applies: it's about learning the mechanics and executing on them; build is far less important. The OP probably knows that holds true for fractals; they just need to remind themself that it's also true in dungeons.

Once the OP reads up on the mechanics (or watches some of the solo videos out there), I'm sure they won't have any trouble... at least, if we take them at their word about being up for a challenge.

I can solo TA path up on my ele and thief no problem. You just don't know what you're doing yet so you're getting rekt

@"Kheldorn.5123" said:

@ReaverKane.7598 said:

@Dabrixmgp.4758 said:

so if dungeons are tuned just fine then why does no one do them anymore?

Im all for a challenge but this is ridiculous. Actually they are leveling dungeons because they do scale you down. If I want a challenge I will do T4 fractals or raids. This is a dungeon meant for level 55 players so why is it this ridiculous?

No, i'm just comparing what you get from selling the junk in encryption boxes (which is the gold reward in fractals) to the gold reward in dungeons.If i took into account infusions, materials, exotics and ascended mats, it would vary too much, like when you get an elonian leather, that's 8-10g there.

@"Kheldorn.5123" said:

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@"Kheldorn.5123" said:This is not entirely true. You put 15g fractal reward comparison while counting all drops, matrixes, doing CMs and selling mats.Actually that's just the fractal encryption boxes alone that give you ~10-15g per full run (3xt4+3 recommended). Drops from mobs, dailies, CM etc are on top of that.

When running old dungeons, blinds and reflects are king. If you can keep a blinding field up, the enemies can chewed up.

@Dabrixmgp.4758 said:so if dungeons are tuned just fine then why does no one do them anymore? Im all for a challenge but this is ridiculous. Actually they are leveling dungeons because they do scale you down. If I want a challenge I will do T4 fractals or raids. This is a dungeon meant for level 55 players so why is it this ridiculous?

You can kill the flowers with 1 attack or two with range weapon. Back in the days, guardians is the preferred class for staff #1 mows down all the flowers infront. The dungeon is level 40-45 but I do encounter players 45+ with lv35 ish equipments and if I recall, we don't get much accessories equipment below 80. Most party will try to skip as much as possible, which can be hard for new players. (They kinda expect others are experienced)

@Dabrixmgp.4758 said:so if dungeons are tuned just fine then why does no one do them anymore? Im all for a challenge but this is ridiculous. Actually they are leveling dungeons because they do scale you down. If I want a challenge I will do T4 fractals or raids. This is a dungeon meant for level 55 players so why is it this ridiculous?

Dungeons have been completed by players for over 5 years now. You're lack of success has nothing to do with how the dungeons are 'tuned'.

To me the solution to make dungeons popular again seems so painfully obvious that I don’t understand why Anet haven’t done it already:

Add a new Ascended tier of dungeon arms and armour - at a higher cost in tokens, naturally.

Boom, people would want to do dungeons again.

It is an interesting idea. But it's hard for me imagine how new players/core game (free account players) will be able to survive tho. If the dungeons are tuned to HoT or PoF mechanics, some core classes might not be able to handle. I do agree some of the dungeons can be polished, but I don't think there will be much change, to me at least. The core game mechanics are too different to create any challenging content aside adding more hp/ dmg.

You can completely annihilate most bosses with just 2 competent players. They are way undertuned right now. The reason why you have problems is probably because most of the T4 fractals outside of 99, 100 and oasis don't require any dodges or special profession abilities like blinds or reflects to complete.Dungeon bosses still have 1 hit kills and really high damage auto attacks.Most dungeon bosses don't have huge orange circles you can walk out within 3sec. You have to watch animations most of the time. The spider boss for example has 2 attacks. A poison spray with low damage and unblockable aoe fields that do dmg on impact and when passing through a player. She also takes additional dmg for a few sec from targets that got hit by her poison spray.Best way to deal with her if you have a low dps grp is:1 Wait for first attack. Animations are similar but not the same. If you don't know them just stay at like 600 range.Is it poison spray? Stay in it for 1-2 ticksIs it aoe barrage? Dodge towards spider so you dodge the aoe and the projectiles. Care, projectiles are slow moving so dont dodge too early.Next attack will be the spray and just do step 2 after it.2 Break her and do as much damage as possible.

She alternates between her 2 attacks, so its easy to know what she is doing.And strategies like that exist for every dungeon boss. Or you ignore all of this and just get 2+ dps players and kill bosses in ~2sec.