A while back I talked about how infuriatingly stupid the faction heroes are in Guild Wars 2. I was referring to the story missions, but looking back I realize their really offensive behavior isn’t in the personal quest line, it’s in the dungeons. Their erratic and obnoxious behavior is a side-effect of an overarching problem that plagues Guild Wars 2, which is that the dungeons are awful.
The conventional wisdom is that the dungeons are “too hard”. I hate to say that without qualifiers, because the game is in such an extreme state of flux. Three weeks ago the Ascalonian Catacombs were brutally unfair and senselessly hard. Then I played through it again a couple of nights ago and it had been changed and it was basically tolerable now.
On October 5th, 2012 I got together with this party:
 |
| Some of us are naked because our armor has broken from repeated deaths. There’s a cap on how much repairs can cost, so it’s more economical to wait until you’ve got multiple damaged items before fixing them. |
We had an enjoyably miserable time running face-first into the wall-shaped difficulty spikes, and as part of this bonding experience we all agreed that we should write about it. Here was our group, from left to right:
Jarenth – Level 69 Charr Engineer
Hoffenbachager – Level 80 Norn Mesmer
Myself – Level 80 Human Warrior
JPH – Level 80 Asura Warrior
Krellen – Charr Engineer, later swapped for level 42 Norn Guardian (pictured)
Click on them to read their thoughts on why the dungeon system is broken. Everyone has a slightly different take on it, and they all make for an interesting read. They do a pretty good job of outlining why the dungeon was broken, stupid and unfair, and why most of us aren’t wearing pants, so I’m not going to go over all of that again.
Continue reading 〉〉 “Guild Wars 2: Dungeon Crawl”
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.