Could more solo content like the recently added Canach's Lair be added to Guild Wars 2?

That is where the idea of solo dungeons comes in. The recent content patch added a solo dungeon of sorts as part of the living story content. In the “dungeon” players face off against a single boss, Canach. I use the term dungeon here lightly, as the instance is just the single boss encounter. While not really feeling like a full dungeon, the instance shows the possibility that solo dungeons can offer.

When facing off against Canach in the instance, players don’t directly attack the boss. Instead players use an environmental weapon to use the boss’s weapons against him. In this case these weapons are mines littered throughout the encounter room. Players use the weapon to “switch allegiances” of the mine so that they hurt the boss instead of the player. These mines are then the only way to damage and kill the boss.

I really enjoyed the Canach solo boss encounter, though I don’t think it was perfect. I thought the mechanics of the encounter were fun, but only after you figured out how they worked. The layout of the dungeon worked well for teaching the players the mechanics. At the beginning of the dungeon you are given the environmental weapon, the NPC says you can use it to disarm the mines and there are a bunch of mines to test this out on before you get to any enemy. What the dungeon’s dialogue never said was how the mines relate to the boss.

Upon getting into the boss room I saw Canach and all the mines. I might have tried hitting him a couple times to no avail before looking at the mines and thinking that there had to be a reason that they were there.

In the dungeon there were three types of mines and your weapon had three types of disarm skills: one for each type. If you hit a mine with the right disarm it disarmed it. If you hit it with the wrong type the mine then did this shorting out electrical explosion.

For a good amount of time I thought this was how you were supposed to defeat Canach – get him close to a mine and short it out with the wrong disarm so the electrical discharge would hurt Canach. After a while I tried defusing mines with the right type to discover that the skills weren’t disarms but really reprogramming their allegiance.

The solo instance has since changed to only reward players the first time through, but the first day it was out it was available once per character before players exploiting this caused ArenaNet to change it to once per account. Having played it the first day, I ran through the dungeon on each of my characters. The dungeon was a lot more fun when I knew what was going on with the mines, a sentiment that players might not experience when they are only rewarded for the first run and therefore only run it the single time.

The Canach boss encounter was something special because it was part of the living story content. While players are upleveled to 80 for the dungeon, having a straight up fight against Canach would probably end up too easy for level 80 players and too hard for original low level characters. The interesting mechanics of the fight allowed for a level playing field. Not all solo dungeons would require this as they could have level restrictions (something Canach couldn’t have due to its time limited nature) and be fine-tuned for normal combat at that specific level.

How could permanent solo dungeons work? -->