who the hell are dungeons tuned for?

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

@Oglaf.1074 said: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:Because they don't want to do any work at all on dungeons, including figuring out how to balance a new set of rewards. Dungeons have perfectly fine rewards and people do them a fair bit now. They aren't as popular now because there's competition for people's time.

[Henry.5713]

You basically expected to walk into dungeons like you walk into the personal story. Dungeons were never intended to be that. They were the repeatable and supposedly challenging instant content of their time. Still, I won't deny that the story modes can be a bit of a newbie trap sometimes. Something that might have gotten toned down slightly, and has been done so in some cases, if they had continued to work on dungeons. That said, dungeons are content which is in fact quite easy as it was not designed to be ran with all of the power creep that happened over the years.

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:

@Oglaf.1074 said: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:Because they don't want to do any work at all on dungeons, including figuring out how to balance a new set of rewards. Dungeons have perfectly fine rewards and people do them a fair bit now. They aren't as popular now because there's competition for people's time.

Oglaf has a point here. There is a huge difference in the quality of the rewards given. Fractals, the most obvious comparison, rewards you with SO much more than just gold while gold is thrown at you everywhere these days. Updating the rewards only would be quite an easy solution to put new life back into dungeons even if it would be more of a band-aid than anything else. The real solution requires a lot of work as it would come down to rebalancing and even reworking dungeons to meet the standards of quality content we expect to see in 2018. Rather unlike, I'd say.

[GrubySzymek.1362]

@ReaverKane.7598 said:

@"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?

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.

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.

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.

From my experience vendor trash from boxes gives me about 7-8g and I get 12-15 only after selling stuff.You're not that well experienced then.

Pretty sad to see an intelligent person like you using arguments of "because I said so" :)

[Eramonster.2718]

Dungeons can be lower levels content tho. Fractals is after all 80s content and there are tiers. Can't compare a T4 with ascalon, TA or any lower dungeons to have the same reward....I believe T2-T3 fractal offers the same amt as dungeon tho. Considering the reward base on fractal itself (excluding the T4 dailies is argueable). Plus need to be easily accessible for low level core game only players (without specialization with incomplete limited skill).

Try or imagine core game lvling characters with blue and greens, incomplete traits trying to kill ascalon Champion Troll is painful enough. The game has far evolved to for the core game to have the same mechanics implemented.

[Astralporing.1957]

@"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.

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

That's weird. I don't think encryption boxes are affected by MF, so i can't see a reason for such disparity. For me, 8g is a really, really low result.

[ProtoGunner.4953]

TA is very easy. You get downed fast, true, but usually you kill enemies off in seconds, so it doesn't matter. I did them more or less regularly with some guildies/friends and we do the 2 paths in like 20-30mins, I usually go down 2-3 times then. You skip most nightmare court parts and run through it.

[Fallesafe.5932]

@Dabrixmgp.4758 said: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?

I've been pugging T4 fractals for over half a year on a glass character. And I'm usually (~70% of the time) the last one to go down or /gg when my groups wipe. But, I got absolutely demolished in Twilight Arbor. It was embarrassing! And I had to chalk it up to the fact that I cared intensely about learning fractal mechanics, and spent a lot of time studying/practicing. But I just ran into that dungeon swinging like a fool.

What I'm saying is... stop underestimating your opponent. :) The fact that it's a level 50-something dungeon doesn't make any difference because of scaling. Fire up those youtube videos and learn what you're doing.

[Sojourner.4621]

@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.

This is it exactly. You know the fractals and the fractals are easy because you've now done them hundreds of times and know the mechanics and trouble areas. The dungeons, you can skip a lot of the trash mobs, and some of them are specifically there to HURT and PUNISH you for running past them unprepared (The nightmare hounds can and will one shot you if you don't evade while moving past them, for instance). It is all about knowing the mechanics of the path you're trying to run... for the record, I am not a great player but because I know the path well, I with my RP partner have two-manned both of the non-aether paths recently, using a Reaper and a Soulbeast (Trying to get nightmare runes). We're players from back when dungeons were relevant, and as such remember the strategies for doing them, which makes them fairly routine and simple... with a 5 man group for which the dungeons were actually intended, it's a face-roll with the current power creep levels. There are very few dungeon paths that can't be solo'd or duo'd and those are just because they require a certain number of people to stand in certain places.

[Despond.2174]

Out of all the dungeons, only 1 path which is in TA is long/hard to pug. The rest is a joke and I've never had any issues even with sub 80s. Of course if you pick the hardest one it will be difficult, but choose the easier 2 paths for TA if you're hunting currency and do only the difficult one ONCE for the AP.

Dungeon difficulty is designed for sub 80s, core specs. I would put all non-TA--path 3 I think it is?--around a T1-1.5 fractal difficulty. You don't even need close to a full group, I remember my reaper practically soloing everything. My point is the tuning for 95% of the paths are fine.

But yes, I still have nightmare about that TA path where it took my group 2 hours, the ooze part is the biggest culprit.

[ReaverKane.7598]

@"Kheldorn.5123" said:

@ReaverKane.7598 said:

@"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?

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.

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.

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.

From my experience vendor trash from boxes gives me about 7-8g and I get 12-15 only after selling stuff.You're not that well experienced then.

Pretty sad to see an intelligent person like you using arguments of "because I said so" :)

I'm not the one saying because i said so...It's a fact that if you do all T4 + recomendeds you'll get ~15g or more, just from encryptions.> @Eramonster.2718 said:

Dungeons can be lower levels content tho. Fractals is after all 80s content and there are tiers. Can't compare a T4 with ascalon, TA or any lower dungeons to have the same reward....I believe T2-T3 fractal offers the same amt as dungeon tho. Considering the reward base on fractal itself (excluding the T4 dailies is argueable). Plus need to be easily accessible for low level core game only players (without specialization with incomplete limited skill).

Try or imagine core game lvling characters with blue and greens, incomplete traits trying to kill ascalon Champion Troll is painful enough. The game has far evolved to for the core game to have the same mechanics implemented.

First time i did AC story i was ~lvl 35. Everyone else was below 80, because basically, there were no lvl 80 characters yet.First time i completed explorable paths i think i was 65-80 and it was tough, it took comparable effort to my first raid clear.

Which is actually nice... Instanced group content is supposed to be somewhat engaging. Not trivial.

[thrag.9740]

Tips for twilight arbor (not aether blade path):

Thief is a hard carry. TA is why I first geared up my thief (btw thief is also the carry class for arah and caudecus manor). A core thief that knows what it is doing, can carry almost any group through TA. It's probably a lost art form now. I learned how to do it from more experienced thieves that I watched. If you can join a group that knows the old ways, you should record it for yourself lol.

• Make sure all players know how to blast, ping your smoke fields, and run right past everything in stealth. If your warrior is too stupid to warhorn 4 swiftness then trait to have untargeted steal give group swiftness.
• spider boss run pistol - pistol. Melee isn't worth it if your carrying a bad group.
• Pistol 5 blind field makes all trash mobs irrelevant. For trash run sword-pistol for the cleave (dagger doesn't cleave)
  -short bow arrows bounce = your solution to poison flowers
• I forget where it is, but there is this one spot where you fight these 3 slyvari after a long run past the puppies, I think one of them is a knight. You need to pistol 4 that guy and stop his first attack, or blind him. If he gets it off, good chance the group wipes.
• final boss run dagger dagger, its fun and your literally always behind the boss. Also bring that shadow wall that blocks projectiles and blinds the vets.
• RUN POTION OF SCARLET ARMY SLAYING

I'm sure all this advice is super outdated (I finished my dungeoneer before HOT), but I'm also sure that a core thief can make that whole dungeon trivial (except for aetherblade path).

[JustDemons.4358]

have run a lot of dungeons the last half year.... dungeons can be the hardest content in the gw2 or complete faceroll. it depends on your group. u need at least 3 good players with max gear to faceroll it. the problem these days is there a re a lot of new people who are not 80 and/or have not even exotic gear. then dungeons will be a nightmare. also dungeons are way different from playstyle... u need to learn certain mechanics, stacking points and skipping areas and not to mention to avoid stuff that buggs out the dungeon xD.

and FYI if u get dedicated about dungeons and even have friends u can still make ~15g/h converting/selling everything to gold. the reality tho is that u have to do them with pugs and you gold mostlikley will be around 10g/h.

[Jahroots.6791]

The problem in dungeons is that almost all of the dedicated folks who took time out to share basic knowledge and tactics to newcomers moved on to fractals and raids, and the ones left can't really be arsed to teach anyone as it's usually easy enough to carry (I've been guilty of this).

The real trouble occurs when the entire group is needed. For example, pugs these days are often clueless about the braziers in CoF and the consoles in CoE. Experienced groups are rare, but it's truly a joy to blaze through a path in minutes without so much as a single downed player.

[Ultimatepwr.9562]

A lot of people are talking about dungeons being undertuned. I don't agree, not because dungeons aren't super easy, but because dungeons are just super bad.Boring mechanics, bosses that have way too much health, vanillaitis to the max(The tendancy of earlier gw2 stuff to have really bad tells that both don't explain what is happening and just flat out don't show correct info/ are not tied to actual damage), Trash that somehow do both more damage and less mechanics then bosses, skips that, while cool, have just taken over everything. And that is not even mentioning how broken stealth is, and how annoying it is that they aren't balanced with eachother.

They should nerf arah and aetherpath to be at the level of the others, and then dungeons will be a good, and easy, way to make gold.

[Vinceman.4572]

@Ultimatepwr.9562 said:They should nerf arah and aetherpath to be at the level of the others, and then dungeons will be a good, and easy, way to make gold.

What? Nice joke. They are both easy.

[Deeyra.1476]

@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?

Nobody does them anymore because the rewards are poop. Simple as that.

[Buran.3796]

Twilight Arbor is pretty much the only dungeon that can be hard (outside some paths of Arah) due the clouds of poison gas from flowers that keep rising (a mechanic absent in most of dungeons, in which once you level a stance enemies no longer keep spamming). Most of the other dungeons can be facerrolled over the keyboard with the current power creeping after two expansions. If you want the skins so bad a good alternative can be to complete dungeon tracks in both PvP and WvW; you get 3 weapon skins and 1 armor piece for each track you complete.

[GrubySzymek.1362]

@Deeyra.1476 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?

Nobody does them anymore because the rewards are poop. Simple as that.

Rewards are close to the same they were before liquid gold nerf.

[Offair.2563]

There are some 1 shot mechanics in dungeons to promote downstate i guess. If you think this path is bad you should do arah p2.

[zealex.9410]

@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?

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.

U get 30gold in fractals once while u can spam dungeons and get more gold long term.

[Astralporing.1957]

@"Kheldorn.5123" said:

@Deeyra.1476 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?

Nobody does them anymore because the rewards are poop. Simple as that.

Rewards are close to the same they were before liquid gold nerf.It's in relation to other content. Before, dungeons offered the best rewards of all instanced content. Now they offer the worst. At the same time, the quality of farms elsewhere also improved. If you add to it lack of endgame gear in dungeons, then yes, rewardwise they are not worth running.

[GrubySzymek.1362]

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@"Kheldorn.5123" said:

@Deeyra.1476 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?

Nobody does them anymore because the rewards are poop. Simple as that.

Rewards are close to the same they were before liquid gold nerf.It's in relation to other content. Before, dungeons offered the best rewards of all instanced content. Now they offer the worst. At the same time, the quality of farms elsewhere also improved. If you add to it lack of endgame gear in dungeons, then yes, rewardwise they are not worth running.

Yes, but dungeons didn't really change. They are the same. It was arbitrary decision to give fractals better rewards. But if you have at least 2 other friends and no time or desire to grind ascended gear, you can still farm dungeons these days.

[Dadnir.5038]

@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 one do them anymore because we've done them way to much already ;) . Veteran players are most likely fed up with them.

All in all, dungeons are just a matter of whether or not you know the mechanisms. For most dungeons path, you'll just breeze throught trash mobs by stacking swiftness and stealth, then unload all your damage as fast as possible on the bosses.

For TA, in particular, stealth is very usefull to skip those flowers, while bosses, if you know how to do them, aren't really what we can call a challenge.

So if you want a tip, take a thief with you, it will allow you to trivialize most of the dungeon paths.

[ReaverKane.7598]

@"Kheldorn.5123" said:

@Deeyra.1476 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?

Nobody does them anymore because the rewards are poop. Simple as that.

Rewards are close to the same they were before liquid gold nerf.

Not even close... Unless you do the 8 paths to get the 5 gold and 150 tokens, you can't even compare. In average the first run in a dungeon used to yield 1.76g (1.5g+the regular 26s, with Arah going as high as 3.26g per run, and CoF only giving 1.26g), now you get 61 silver for your first run in average. that's 1.15g less. I wouldn't call it close.Sure you get 20 more tokens per run, but those are not very profitable now a days barring very specific conditions.

Lets be fair and compare 8 paths...Lets assume you're doing the most profitable paths (Arah (4)+AC (3)+CM (1)) for both systems:

New system: Liquid Gold from the final reward:Arah = 4.52 g (3 paths give 1g daily plus 26s per path, the Forgotten path only awards 50s daily plus the 26s regular)AC = 2.26 g (each path awards 50s daily plus 26s)CM = 0.61g (each path awards 35s daily plus 26s).8 paths = 7.39gAchievement Gold: 5gTotal = 12.39g

Tokens: 100 from each path, so 800 + 150 from achievement. Total tokens 950.

Old system:Liquid gold from the final reward:Arah = 11.54g (3 paths gave 3g daily reward plus 26s per path, the Forgotten path awarded 1.5g daily plus the 26s)AC = 5.43g (each path awarded 1.55g daily plus 26s)CM = 1.76g (each path awarded 1.5g plus 26s)Total = 18.73gTokens: 80 from each path, so 640 tokens.

In total you'd get 6.34 more gold from dungeons than nowadays, but 310 less tokens.Can those 310 tokens make up for 6.34g? Not likely, unless you had the luck of dropping recipes for the more in-demand dungeon accessories, which is highly conditional.

[GrubySzymek.1362]

@ReaverKane.7598 said:

@"Kheldorn.5123" said:

@Deeyra.1476 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?

Nobody does them anymore because the rewards are poop. Simple as that.

Rewards are close to the same they were before liquid gold nerf.

Not even close... Unless you do the 8 paths to get the 5 gold and 150 tokens, you can't even compare. In average the first run in a dungeon used to yield 1.76g (1.5g+the regular 26s, with Arah going as high as 3.26g per run, and CoF only giving 1.26g), now you get 61 silver for your first run in average. that's 1.15g less. I wouldn't call it close.Sure you get 20 more tokens per run, but those are not very profitable now a days barring very specific conditions.

Lets be fair and compare 8 paths...Lets assume you're doing the most profitable paths (Arah (4)+AC (3)+CM (1)) for both systems:

New system:

Liquid Gold from the final reward:Arah = 4.52 g (3 paths give 1g daily plus 26s per path, the Forgotten path only awards 50s daily plus the 26s regular)AC = 2.26 g (each path awards 50s daily plus 26s)CM = 0.61g (each path awards 35s daily plus 26s).8 paths = 7.39gAchievement Gold: 5gTotal = 12.39g

Tokens: 100 from each path, so 800 + 150 from achievement. Total tokens 950.

Old system:

Liquid gold from the final reward:Arah = 11.54g (3 paths gave 3g daily reward plus 26s per path, the Forgotten path awarded 1.5g daily plus the 26s)AC = 5.43g (each path awarded 1.55g daily plus 26s)CM = 1.76g (each path awarded 1.5g plus 26s)Total = 18.73gTokens: 80 from each path, so 640 tokens.

In total you'd get 6.34 more gold from dungeons than nowadays, but 310 less tokens.Can those 310 tokens make up for 6.34g? Not likely, unless you had the luck of dropping recipes for the more in-demand dungeon accessories, which is highly conditional.

I take drops and tokens into account. There were solid numbers proving that current rewards are up to par with old ones but I don't feel like looking for 2 year old posts.