Sometime the patch notes can be a bit deceptive. I know that myself, because I’m a tech writer for a software company. But in this case, there’s far more to the following patch notes than meets the eye:

Added a system to limit the experience and gold that players can receive from speed-farming dungeons.

Later, the devs clarified this in an official forum post: 

I wanted to shed some light on the dungeon speed clear stuff as well. You should not see any diminished returns unless you.

1) Run the same exact chain over twice in a row
2) Complete multiple dungeons in 30 minutes or less each.

We also reduced the rewards of completing story mode, once you have already completed it, because the rewards for story mode were never intended to be a high as they were.

Right now we are working hard to make sure there are not any ways for players to circumvent the normal rewards in the game and then we will be able to look at the actual rewards and make sure they require a reasonable amount of investment.

Dungeons are meant to be difficult and we will continue to update them to try and reach a point where the time invested to XP/Gold/Tokens is similar for each dungeon. Some right now are just too easy to complete while others may be too hard. Moving forward we will try and post more clear change notes for those dungeons we do fix.

What does this mean? Sounds like they’ve buffed the difficulty and severely slashed the rewards. Needless to say, the community has a LOT of feedback, skyrocketing this thread to be the largest currently on the dungeon forum. 

My thoughts on this? I’m somewhat disappointed. Not because I am an uber leet dungeon runner… but mostly because I’m just the opposite. Yes, I am a casual gamer. But does that mean I am a bad player? I don’t tend to think so. I’m still learning my class, as are a number of leveling folks in my guild.

We saw finishing our first AC story mode runs an accomplishment and found it fun to simply rise to the challenge and explore the dungeon. The rewards at the end were just an awesome cherry on top that made the feeling all the more sweet. 

Couple that with the fact that the story mode dungeons are the only way you can see the complete storyline for Destiny’s Edge, which is one of the main motivations that I and my gaming partner have for running the dungeons. Loot? Bah. That’s secondary to finding out what happens in the story, playing with friends and just exploring! 

The dungeon gave us a lesson in learning our skills and honing our abilities. I know I came away from AC a better player because it challenged me to learn to work in a team and figure out exactly how certain traits meshed with certain skills. 

I have yet to try a dungeon since this change, and I’m worried that it may prove more frustration and loss than it’s worth. I have a feeling that I’m going to wait it out and hope that A-Net balances things a bit better, at least as far as Story Mode goes, before attempting future dungeons. 

I agree that hardcore players need some sort of challenge. But I plead that developers not gate  lore and story behind frustration. Especially something as central as this storyline. 

That’s just my feels on it.