kalendraf

I agree that this seems to be something that will probably benefit servers in the higher tiers, but will be extremely bad for those in the lower tiers.  This may well kill WvW on the lower tier servers.

Bright Star Shine, on 24 April 2013 - 10:30 AM, said:

I was never really a hardcore farmer, largely because I found most farm-runs to be excessively grindy.  From what I recall, popular farms like Raptor farming were usually able to pull in about 15K gold per hour on average, and upwards of 50K per hour when festival drops were active.  I tried farming Raptors for all of about an hour before realizing it was just too mind-numbingly grindy for my taste.  For me, the advantage of dungeons was diversity.  I ran different ones, usually across multiple characters to coincide with daily quests I had banked up for extra z-coins.  That's something else I forgot to mention as a reason for doing these - you could sell z-coins for extra profit, and it was rather easy to amass a lot those by doing certain dungeons when they lined up with the daily quests.  I'm not sure what kind of farming gold rate you were used to, but for myself and many of my friends that played, getting 20K+ gold per hour, without doing something that was completely repetitive and mindless seemed like a pretty solid income rate.

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I agree that there is a loot issue with the GW2 dungeons.  However, I don't think having unique weapon skins is necessarily the right way to fix the issue.  I've never been fond of weapon skins in any game, and GW1 or GW2 are no exception to this.  I'd be happy holding a twig if it did max damage.

On the other hand, I do like cool armor skins.  Unfortunately, the currents sets of dungeon skins (and most skins in the game for that matter) do not appeal to me at all.  I do want to see ANet add a lot more cool-looking and amazing armor skins.  (I'll even just settle for one of each armor grade for now!)  However, I would hate for those to be random drops from dungeons and force me to have to repeat one over and over and over to have a random chance of getting it.  That would utterly suck.

So what would it take for me to find dungeons attractive?  Start with the chest rewards along the way.  Right now, too many of them seem to only give blues or greens, and even level-bound loot.  They need to be upgraded to at least offer what world boss chests currently offer.  For example - once per day guaranteed rare bonus chest, and a small but not insignificant chance for rares or better from the regular, repeatable chests.  Alternately, allow dungeon tokens from a single run (60'ish) to buy prize coffers that provide similar numbers and levels of rewards.  For example, if you could buy Gear boxes (which currently cost 5 laurels) with 60 dungeon tokens it might be about on par with what I'm looking for.

Bright Star Shine, on 22 April 2013 - 08:58 PM, said:

How can I be agreeing with you?  You said "the only reason people ever did dungeons in Guild Wars 1 was for the skins", and that clearly is not the case.  I repeated several dungeons and didn't do them for skins at all.  That goes for other players I know as well.  Hence I'm not agreeing with you at all, and also showing your statement is invalid.

As for farming, you could actually turn a pretty good profit in some of the dungeons, especially after the big LoD update (~10 spots per level, all level 2 or deeper giving a chance to produce gems or lockpicks).  A typical run in some dungeons would net several lockpicks and gems even without the final chest factored in.  Elite tomes were another source of income, and those could drop from certain mobs or from the locked chests along the way.  I know prices on these things varied over time, but at one point rubies and sapphires were selling for upwards of 7K each, lock picks would easily fetch 1K, and certain rare tomes were a few K gold as well.  It wasn't uncommon for quick and easy hardmode runs in certain dungeons to net multiple gems and a few lockpicks, and sometimes an elite tome.  I know there were many other ways to farm gold, but it was rather easy to earn 20K+ gold per hour just running certain dungeons and selling the gems, lockpicks and tomes.

I prefer whichever option(s) leads to us getting new and better armor skins sooner.

I agree with most of these being issues.  My list would also include lack of armor diversity somewhere near the top.