Date: Sep 18, 2012  |  Written by Jason Dodge  |  Posted Under: News  |  DISQUS With Us: No comments yet

Originally posted by Jon Peters (Source)


Let me clarify the change a bit since not everyone understands it.

If you run the exact same chain twice in a row you will have your rewards cut. This means you can bounce back and forth between 2 different chains, even in the same dungeon without ever hitting this change. This change is made to encourage people to try different chains.

If you speed clear dungeons at a rate of more than 2/ hour, and continue to do that for some time your rewards will slowly begin to degrade. It doesn’t kick in after running a single dungeon and it doesn’t immediately zero out rewards.

Finally we reduced the value of repeating the story mode, because they are built to be easier and we want to encourage those repeating dungeons to run explore mode.

Originally posted by Robert Hrouda (Source)


Hey folks, I’ve been reading this thread for a bit and figured I’d come weigh in on things. I built this dungeon, and fixed the problem, so I’m going to come at you from the designer perspective on things to try and illuminate why I did what I did, and what exactly I did. It wasn’t made clear, and I apologize for that.

The main thing I am seeing, is that people are upset that I took away their super profitable low risk, fast, token grind. I did not go into this thinking everyone would be happy with my changes – I knew I would be upsetting people because I was taking away a super easy speed-run money printer.

I took it away for a few reasons – chief among them being what I feel is taking advantage of a couple bugs found in the same chain, and our leashing/aggro system. I played with groups who did this, and watched you-tube clips of what was going on. The problems I identified with the speed run aspect of this are as follows:

  • 1. You just need 1 person to get to the magmacyte across the magma field. This will cause an invulnerable Magg to run across the entire field through mobs and progress the dungeon. Then this person teleports back.
  • 2. Instead of fighting the enemies in a timed event at he door buster, you just circle strafe them or leash aggro them to “kill the clock” since it was only a 100 second timer on the event.
  • 3. Final Boss encounter isn’t threatening.

So what did I do?

  • 1. I made it so that Magg has to get to the other side of the Magma field and close to the magmacyte – not just a player. Magg not taking aggro from nearby enemies was a big reason for this issue to be resolved. By giving him aggro, and forcing you to escort him to the ending, I fixed what I considered to be a bug/exploit that I introduced through poor planning.
  • 2. I extended the time from 100 seconds to 200 seconds at the Door Buster event. I intended for you to fight those guys, not circle strafe them and aggro leash chain them. I also added 1 additional mob to the encounter at the very middle (a bow dude) to account for you now having twice the time to defeat the waves that come in.
  • 3. I made the fireballs hurt more. Not greatly more – they’ll do about 3-4k damage to a DPS focused player, but you should have anywhere between 15k-25k HP, so there’s a bit of wiggle room for error.
  • I made this path hard, because it was easy. It’s an explorable dungeon path, and they should be hard. Wearing the flame legion armor set should be a symbol of what you went through to obtain something. It should mean something. Right now it means you did 40 speedruns in 2 days.

I hope this helps a bit, but I understand you’re upset. For all it’s worth I’m sorry, and I hope we can move past this.

Date: Jun 18, 2012  |  Written by Jason Dodge  |  Posted Under: Buzz  |  DISQUS With Us: No comments yet

We’ve discovered a video by Navi B. Zhang that shows us the new dungeon added to the W3 maps. In order to get in your server needs to control one of the keeps.

A first impression of the new wvwvw dungeon in the eternal battle ground is a nice jumping puzzle with loots in the end and many broken legs and faces in between.

Few things in the video are pretty awesome and worth mentioning. First, there is a second of the dungeon that requires torches, and if you don’t have them, your screen is completely dark (10:42 in the video). There are traps that you have to avoid and you need to throw your torch to light your way (14:27). The rest of the video shows us the really cool jumping puzzle inside.

Watch the full video after the break.

Date: Mar 22, 2012  |  Written by Jason Dodge  |  Posted Under: News  |  DISQUS With Us: No comments yet

Totalbiscuit talks about the hardcore and normal mode of explorable dungeons in Guild Wars 2. Players in the video represent levels 34 through 48 in a dungeon with level 35 mobs. Watch as the players explore the dungeon taking part of many events and encounters within the dungeon.

Date: Feb 21, 2012  |  Written by Jason Dodge  |  Posted Under: News  |  DISQUS With Us: No comments yet

Check out more beta footage, this time from one of GW2′s dungeons.