ArenaNets interesting take on Guild Wars 2 dungeon difficulty

ArenaNet has made clear their stance of waiting for players to adjust to the current state of the game before making any tweaks to skills and balance in Guild Wars 2. This mindset is made concrete by Game director Colin Johanson in a forum post and also applies to dungeon difficulty. Instead of rushing to adjust according to feedback, devs are taking a the long view and waiting for players to be accustomed to the game and its difficulty.

Not surprising, this was the same approach they took with the first Guild Wars' dungeons and elite areas, which lead to the game's success. Johanson explains:

"We're actively monitoring every dungeon and working on balancing issues we encounter appropriately. We'll be keeping an eye on bosses we think don't have enough varied mechanics to warrant their large health pools and updating them over time to make them more varied/interesting fights. We'll be monitoring, and continually tweaking/adding to dungeon rewards over time and of course balancing where we see the need. And of course, we'll be looking at adding more dungeons as well!

All of that being said, the game is VERY new for most of our players, and I can absolutely promise with more knowledge of the game and advanced player skill, the explorable dungeons can all be overcome by being skilled groups. We've seen many groups do it just fine in our internal alpha test once they had time to learn how to play the game well. Just like Domain of Anguish in [Guild Wars], it takes time and practice to learn how to overcome stuff as hard as our explorable mode dungeons, and that's exactly the kind of players they are designed for."