There are 8 dungeons, each of them has 1 story mode and 3 explorable modes, while the last dungeon (Arah) has 4 explorable modes. Different modes are not just some kind of mini-dungeons, they are quite complete dungeons with their own encounters, bosses, story, etc. that require considerable time to complete. That’s why I don’t think it’s fair to say that GW2 has 8 dungeons. It really has 33 dungeons, divided into 8 “themes” story- and enemy-wise, if you will.
I guess you mean the part where you have to defend an NPC and random burrower nests appear? I was in a group where we killed one nest always before the next appeared. So by damage/hp scaling, this is definitely doable.
I was talking about the one in path 1, where 3 burrows spawn at the same time and 3 more spawn as you kill them and someone needs to protect the NPC. That’s how it works and it wouldn’t work for a solo run.
You are probably talking about path 3, not sure if there is an NPC to protect though.
Here is a wiki link BTW: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ascalonian_Catacombs_(explorable)#.5BOption_1.5D_Hodgins.E2.80.99_Route
And again, I certainly believe that everything can be dumbed down to the point where anyone could do it alone. I just don’t think the effort required would be particularly well spent. That would basically turn dungeons into a kind of a Personal Story quests and we already have like 40 of them. And let’s be honest, Personal Story is not the most popular feature of GW2 out there.
Gedd
4742
I was a little dismayed about the news of them adding in a new “tier” of gear as well. There’s certainly a lot of folks who feel the same way. It sounds like they’re going to do a new blog post on the subject, but for now there’s this post (scroll down) from one of the designers explaining the intent.
If I understand the post correctly, the intent is not to add a new tier of gear every few months, but rather to fill in a gap that’s there in the current gear progression. I would hazard a guess that it was probably intended to have ascended gear from the start, but it didn’t make it in time for launch.
KevinC
4743
I know, a lot of people are mouthbreathers and just want to keep running up to Stomemist with 5 people so they can shoot at people on the walls and get obliterated for hours on end. That’s fine if all you want is deathmatch and instant gratification but as far as the WvW strategic layer, it just doesn’t work.
According to ArenaNet’s previous blogs, it seemed as though they intended Supply to be a mechanic to make it so people didn’t just travel around in an enormous zerg. You need people taking supply camps, guarding supply camps, guarding your Dolyaks and supply lines (which include Towers to control the roads), etc. This all breaks down when the maps are so small, though. A zerg only cares about supply camps for as long as it takes for the zerg to pick up supply (i.e. hit it and move on). For the defenders, there is no way of sending a small group back behind the lines to cut off their supply (not that it’d do much good, because supply lines are near meaningless to the attackers). I can stand at a supply camp and have a tower and keep within a 60-second run in either direction which completely fails at making a zerk break up into smaller groups to defend or attack the other objectives - it’s faster just to have the zerg capture a location quickly then move on to the next like a swarm of locusts. It also doesn’t help that a Zerg is the most mobile force in the game thanks to perpetual swiftness buffs when you have a large number of people.
Anyway, as far as WvW having any sort of strategic component to it, it’s pretty much a complete failure at the moment, at least from my perspective. It’s fun to run around and take a tower or two, but it gets boring to me fast these days due to what I posted above. Maybe I’m in the minority, but it would be interesting to hear what ANet’s thoughts are on the current state of WvW mechanics.
Gedd
4745
I suppose that could be it based on timestamps and such. I thought it would go a bit more into reassuring that they’re not going to be introducing a gear grind every few months, but it’s possible that’s what they were referring to.
Reldan
4746
Did they really need a tier above exotic though? I think they needed more and better cosmetic choices, not a new set of gear that is a straight-up stat improvement for people to chase.
The entire point was that I can get to 80 and get a functional set of max-stat gear with a reasonable time investment - I’m not going to look all that special but I’m not at a disadvantage when doing content. Beyond that I can pimp my armor out and do things that provide a more unique look.
This is something different, it would seem. What I read from that blog is that they are intentionally gating content behind a gear grind. If this is not the case, I would hope somebody could clarify. But as of now I don’t see this as a net positive direction.
This is what I read from it as well and I don’t like it either.
Even though people say Infusion and Agony were in GW1 as well, I still don’t see it as a good mechanic. This is content gating at its purest - they create artificial blocks and the only way to overcome them is to grind out some specific gear that will give you very specific buff that allows you to proceed further. I am puzzled at how it can be viewed as a good thing for GW2, it seems to go against everything that was told before.
The same (although to a lesser extend) applies to the new Ascended tier. I simply do not understand the reasoning. You can’t just say “we do not introduce a gear treadmill, we just introduce a new tier of gear” because new tier means exactly that - gear treadmill. You can introduce it at slow pace - a ring now, an earring next month, but you are still invalidating “old” top tier and forcing people to acquire the new one.
I am baffled. Does it mean they give up on their original fundamentals? That’s a pretty big change, hehe.
The other problem with defending is that it’s exceedingly boring if nothing is going on. Players want action. If five minutes go by and there’s no attackers, players want to leave and find the action.
Reldan
4749
I know Eric frequents here but I doubt he probably is free to discuss upcoming plans. But yeah, I was thinking the same thing that this really seems anathema to everything I understood about what they were trying to do. Does this mean that’s failed so they’re falling back into a treadmill model? It’s possible they’ve got the numbers on active users and what they’re seeing has lead them this direction.
Again, I don’t really take issue in the idea of expanding what’s in the game - that’s a good and necessary thing. I just was expecting that new stuff would effectively be sidegrades that expanded player options, not explicitly better replacements, like the TF2 model.
Gedd
4750
Given this:
For now, Infusions slots can only be found in gear of a new rarity type: Ascended.
and this:
This is just the beginning. In November, we’re only adding the first level of Infusions and Ascended Rings and Back slots, so that leaves us a lot of room to build upon these levels of Item progression in future content.
It seems that they had to introduce the new ascended tier in order to introduce infusions, because infusions are to be the carrot to do new content as it’s released. I have no idea how infusions worked in GW1, but it would seem infusions don’t bump stats, but rather provide some additional capability?
Info about the dungeon has been released as well. Sounds like fun. I wonder if the dungeon ever stops scaling, or whether it’s somehow infinite. Seems like it does go on forever based on the description.
Derbain
4751
This new dungeon type sounds interesting.
I can’t wait to try it out.
Gedd, in that text that you linked, they link another post that describes how Agony and Infusions are going to work.
Agony is basically a non-removable condition that chips away at your health increasing as you go further into the dungeon. Infusions basically provide resistance against that condition in various forms. No idea what they mean by Offensive and Defensive Infusions.
It’s content gating at its purest. Have no Infusions? This is how far you can get. Have one weak Infusion? You can get a bit further. Which will allow you to get more powerful Infusions, which will allow you to get a bit farther.
Bleh.
Besides, there is no REAL need to introduce a new tier (stat-wise) just to introduce a new type of slot. They could have created new items that have exact same stats as the current exotics without that stupid 8% increase.
As for the new dungeon. It sounds cool, except for one thing:
The dungeon will remember your progress, and will poll the party’s levels when you enter, scaling the dungeon to the highest common attained level.
I guess that means the dungeon level attained players. I hope they display that in the UI. And allow people to check other people’s dungeon level. Imagine spamming “LF3M Fractals, fractal level 5+ only” for awhile to get your group going only to find out that the game places you in lvl 3 instead because some of your PUG members lied about their level.
It remains to be seen how it works in practice. Their scaling mechanics have been at least questionable so far. The “do the dungeon until it gets so hard you can’t proceed anymore” mechanic sounds like a lot of frustration, bailing out and repair costs. I hope the dungeons are rewarding enough to cover repairs.
I don’t know. I am kind of skeptical on this new stuff but I hope ANet gets it right. So far it doesn’t look that way.
Oh and another thing. Does the “scaling the dungeon to the highest common attained level” part mean that if my friends and I have reached a certain level we can’t beat, that’s it for us? We are stuck at that level, can’t ever go back and re-do earlier levels unless we kick out one of our friends and invite some newb that has never done these dungeons?
Or unless we roll alts and do the dungeon on these new characters we don’t really care about?
Is this kind of “one time only content” their new “anti farm” strategy?
Questions, questions.
MrPerson
4754
Very true. It’s fairly clear at this point that a dungeon group that has a great run in most of an instance, but can’t clear the last boss or two, will view the run as a failure, and probably leave with a bitter taste in their mouths after either spending far too long wiping trying to make unrealistic progress and building a resentment to the game, or at each others throats after a couple wipes with people rage quitting. This mechanic seems designed to produce that result every time.
5 man dungeons aren’t viewed as serious business raiding, where well organized guilds have clear progression goals and getting a boss into a further phase, or even just having “good wipes”, can be viewed as reasonable progress. They’re going to have to be VERY careful about how they present progress to the players to avoid frustration.
Gedd
4755
No idea what they mean by Offensive and Defensive Infusions.
This is really what I was referring to when I wondered how they would work. Adding in what’s essentially a resistance to agony mechanic doesn’t sound interesting, but depending on what the other infusion types end up being, it could be. Again, I have no idea what they have in mind, but could give them something akin to what’s in the traits. For example, a direct damage ability can add a certain % as burning damage. Then again, that type of thing could be off the table since it essentially gives you a damage buff which is akin to a stat bump.
As for the dungeon, I have to imagine that there will be some UI element to let you know how far you’ve gotten, so you can coordinate.
We are stuck at that level, can’t ever go back and re-do earlier levels unless we kick out one of our friends and invite some newb that has never done these dungeons?
My guess from the description is that the scenarios presented are randomized, and that the only difference in levels are health/damage values. Obviously Agony comes into play in there as well, where it gets more powerful the further up you are.
As for the rest of it, I don’t know if they’ll let you go back to a prior difficulty level without intentionally bringing someone who hasn’t progressed as far. I’m not sure if there will be a point if there’s nothing to farm in there. If rewards are given out at each difficulty level, and they’re not things you need to collect (like a ring instead of some sort of coin or badge), then the whole point of the place ends up being how far you can get.
Hehe, except for the weirdos like me that play games and do dungeons to have fun with their friends. :)
My group often replays dungeons and not because they offer some awesome reward, they really don’t (except for the tokens and we don’t really need any of them now). It’s because we enjoy the scenery, challenges, fooling around together, to see if we can get through certain places better this time, whatever. There is some fun in completing a dungeon the second time and going “I can’t believe we had so many issues with this dungeon the last time we did it”.
Gedd
4757
And there certainly is value in repeating a different difficulty level. You can try different strategies to see what works better and build a foundation to progress to higher difficulty levels too. So we can hope there’s some way to choose an easier difficulty even if there’s no reward for it.
Gedd
4758
Some of the questions about the Fractals of the Mists dungeon are answered in Massively’s preview of the Lost Shores update. It sounds like 1) you will be able to choose to enter at a lower difficulty if desired, and 2) in addition to the usual boss loot, you’ll get fractal shards which are used as currency for a vendor who sells infusions and other items.
Awesome news. And a great preview, thanks for the link.
Can’t wait for the event, the amount of content that is coming sounds insane, the new island looks great and lack of risen is very encouraging. :)
ANet posted the patch notes: https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-November-15-2012
Everything sounds great in the patch, except for the new range on Scorpion Wire (1200). While it’s going to be awesome in dungeons (I wish it was more reliable though), I am scared of it in WvW. :)
Oh, and I don’t quite understand increasing cooldown on Mesmer’s Portal. The problem with Portal is the fact that Mesmers can port a hundred people through it, which (combined with culling, 5-person AoE limit and other stuff) creates exploitable situations. Plus Mesmers can move Siege Golems (that are supposed to be slow) very fast very far. Increasing the cooldown doesn’t really address any of these issues.
But enough negativity. It seems we’ve got a great patch and awesome new content, I can’t wait to see it.
BTW according to the patch notes, the new Fractals dungeon should be available today after 3:30 pm PST.
Reldan
4760
It just means you need 50% more Mesmers in your group and the ability becomes even less useful for any situation that isn’t explicitly attempting to exploit it.
But yeah, I’m excited to give this a go tonight.
