I’m going to make this very brief.
When I first heard about dungeons, I swear hearing that when you completed an explorable dungeon run, you would get A TOKEN that could be exchanged for dungeon armor. This was because dungeons were going to be VERY DIFFICULT. Right now, the current system would never support this. Everyone would have the dungeon armor. Here’s how I think they need to overhaul the dungeon system for a real sense of satisfaction. These would be changes to the explorable dungeon modes.
- Disable armor repair costs for dungeons.
- Enable wipes to reset dungeon, or to nearest waypoint.
- Ramp up difficulty on bosses to an extreme, minor adjustments to trash mobs (They’re already tough enough).
- Boss difficulty increased with abilities, not straight damage/health buff. Make the bosses more dangerous and lethal because they are smarter, not cheaper.
- If players beat an explorable dungeon mode, they are granted a token in exchange for one piece of dungeon armor.
- Players are rewarded based on progress every time they wipe. This pales in comparison to dungeon rewards, but players are granted some kind of incentive to keep playing.
What this does is create a system where dungeons are not supposed to be farmed or cleared repeatedly, but are a significant and great challenge. The emphasis is not put on grinding it, but on beating it and being able to repeat the process maybe 1 or 2 times in the future to totally complete the set.
This might sound insane, but think about how the new system works. Each attempt is rewarded, so people will keep trying. With emphasis on very powerful bosses, the challenge comes down to working as a group and overcoming an actual challenge to gain your reward. And you are provided with a significant reward for doing so in terms of a piece of the dungeon armor.
I think this really goes back to ANet’s manifesto. They wanted the game to be challenging, and not a grind. Right now, dungeon armor is a grind. It’s a huge grind, and we all know it. But there are ways to get around this without compromising the rewards and their rarity. Ramp up the difficulty, give the player a reason to keep trying, and when the player finally conquers the challenge, they are substantially and fairly rewarded for their hard work.
