f13.net

Yeah the first dungeon made me feel like I was trying to run a WoW heroic with no tank or healer. Which is when I started to look at my character to see what I could do to help. 

This game seems to be fundamentally different to the way I've been playing for years. Which I kind of knew going into it but it had a nice way of reminding me with massive amounts of failure.  From reading some forums it seems to be about stacking conditions on the mobs so they either can't attack, you reflect the attack back to them, or they miss a lot. If you can't do it through your skills then its time to start double tap dodging.  This also goes into the combo moves thing and trying to recognize what others are using around you.

Just as my own example. I am playing a guardian and have found the power of blind!  Its absolutely amazing how much better my group can survive when I'm spamming it. I run greatsword and sword/torch.  My greatsword #4 is a leap that ae blinds when I land.  1h sword #2 is a teleport to mob and ae blind on land. Through traits my Virtue of Justice buff, when activated, ae blinds but has a pretty long cool down. Except..... that with my mastery skill, killing any mob resets the cool down.  Which means in AE packs, assuming I've hit everything at least once, it pretty much refreshes like crazy.  I just spam my F1 in huge ae packs and it has greatly increased our survivability. I actually had a pug mention on a pack in CM that that was the first time he'd done it w/o someone dying. No one even reached 80%.  First mob through the door got wrecked and it was a blind train from there on out.

I haven't played any other classes but I would assume others have similar type conditions they can put on mobs. Some coordination of those abilities would be scary.

I still feel like a total noob playing this game when it comes to combos though.  But I'm getting better. I didn't even know I could combo off my own moves until level 35, so I started with that. I can drop a fire on the ground, which if leaped into, gives me a flame ae aura, and if I do a whirl move in the fire, my attacks do some flame stuff. Being in voice chat with friends and having them verbally tell you what they are casting that you can combo off of helps a lot when you start. I've been playing with 2 warriors and I call out when my flames are going down.  All 3 of us do a leap ability and the flame auras all pop up.  After 2 dungeons of verbally saying it, now they just do it when they see the fire.

Also starting to realize in the dungeons that rushing in and blowing all your weapon cool downs and swapping to the next weapon to blow all those as fast as you can get them off, isn't the most effect way to play.  It is good fun though!  Knowing when to use a move that combos with another move (light ae + my whirl = ae heal) is better than just face rolling the keyboard to spam buttons.

Nothing better than finding a group of three mobs on my thief. Shortbow for the poison field just on the outskirts of the group then switch to daggers and throw dagger and watch it bounce around poisoning everyone. Then Steal into the group and use whatever you get... whirlwind of death is a great one to mop up the group.

But yeah... I love figuring out self-combos. I seem to have the life-stealing one figured out on my necro. That has saved my ass a few times... especially if necrotic reach pierces through the mobs in a line.

As a longbow/greatsword warrior, I only really self-combo for area might intentionally. Any burning arrows or whatever are a bonus.

I wish I knew sooner how much melee sucked in this game. Having switched to ranged on my guardian it's like night and day.

I find guardian ranged incredibly boring, personally.

We talking staff / scepter+whatever? Yeah... though it has to be done for some of these mobs you just can't stay in melee range with.

Scepter/focus is actually a lot less boring since there is a lot more moving around for me.  That and compared to how slow two handers feel it's just a different world but really, after doing AC for the first time last night I realized how incredibly screwed melee are in a game without healers.

It's just the group PVE that's shit for melee (meaning dungeons and some of the Group Event outdoor things), and I would argue that it is actually just the core design of group PVE that is shit for everyone, it's just MORE shitty for melee. When I ran AC I swapped to ranged too, and it lowered the frustration value slightly but didn't increase the fun. Regular event PVE and WvW is fine as melee. You do have to carry a ranged swap for keep wall situations, obviously.

Guardian ranged feels shittiest to me, but this is probably partly because warrior ranged is a hoot. But I try to avoid ranged on my guardian as much as possible, but in the giant zerg fights against champion mobs, I give up and switch to staff. And then I get a bronze medal because the way they calculate contribution is stupid (and sometimes buggy, I got a gold medal for an event while I was afk at a waypoint).

If you're melee and want to actually STAY in melee, you need a lot more setup than a ranged char. Basically you need the enemy debuffed with blind/weakness/chill at all times (and you probably can't apply all of those by yourself), some way to get good protection uptime on yourself, and a skill that gets you some sort of active avoidance like block. You also need the reflexes of a crack-addled monkey to dodge enemy big-hitter attacks as the animation happens... and I'm not talking about the aoe circles. In the end, I'm not sure what the payoff is, other than maybe soaking up attacks instead of the glass cannons tossing fireballs (and you can only facetank a boss in *story mode* if you're getting the appropriate buffs/debuffs, see above - I'm not sure if facetanking is an option at all in explorable mode). Does melee do more damage than a ranged build with equivalent gear?

...so yea, me and my 400 ping are sticking with ranged, thankyouverymuch. If you're taking hits from range, you have more dodge options, can LOS, kite, or use a projectile reflect ability.

I do feel like I kill things much faster with a greatsword than with ranged, but I'm not sure if that is reality or perception because I am having more fun. Melee all being cleaves probably factors into it.

My next character is going to be a guardian (asura, obv  :awesome_for_real:) and I like what I've seen of hammer and sword/focus so far... but I'm also worried about a lack of ranged options.

For reference, my staff elementalist gets gold medals for everything, even events I join late. Tons of combo fields (do those count for contrib?), heavy aoe damage/healing, and 1200 range makes for good times. Guardian staff skills look like they suuuck, though.

Hammer's 3rd swing is sooooo slow. It really irritates me. Greatsword is nice and snappy through all 3 animations, and importantly, it has a closer which hammer lacks (you could get it by running sword/shield or greatsword as your weapon swap with hammer, but then you lost your ability to drop to ranged if you need it.)

Thief dagger/dagger is just a joy to watch and does nasty damage, but you're incredibly exposed to just getting gibbed.  I have to drop it for pistol/x and short bow, because short bow lacks DPS, but pistol lacks AOE.  Also, it's hard to keep so many weapons updated.

I think I've read somewhere that they actually do make melee do more damage than ranged to make up for how much easier ranged have it.

With my Ranger i feel my sword/warhorn combo does do more damage than longbow, but longbow fits me better :)

I wasn't a fan of the guardian's ranged stuff through level 23, and yes the melee-only stuff is hell with some of the aoe stuff mobs have. Even on my vitality/toughness guard with mace/shield I'd often get my ass handed to me by bosses or stand around outside their aoe waiting for health to regen before closing again, plinking away with ranged. I also agree on the shortbow, it's a lot of fun and very useful, but it's limited in dps.

I generally run my thief dagger/dagger and shortbow; I usually bronze or silver boss events :( I did make her a bit too vitality/toughness for soloing, though.

With the warrior, I'm about even dps (except 100 awesomeness) between melee and ranged, so I do a lot more darting in and out in boss fights and haven't gone down yet despite being precision/power focused. Start in longbow, use f1 for fire field (if up), then bow3 for area might/decent aoe damage, pin the mob with bow5; swap to greatsword and whirl into melee and pop 100 for might+crit alpha strike; roll back out and repeat. It's really nasty.

I don't think combo fields count for contribution. When I go full-on support with my elementalist in those events, it's bronze medals, even though I am a combo field generating machine. If I go "fuck all of you" and just DPS the entire time, gold medals.

This is my experience especially when dealling with big bosses and lots of players it's hard to get silver.

If you like dagger melee, then try dagger/pistol.  The blind field from Black Powder is great.

The fact npcs/players block projectiles can really be abused with the heroes in dungeons.

Guardian Staff is just bizarre, it's this odd mishmash of abilities that don't seem to mesh well together at all... EXCEPT for any choke point situation.  

Then you drop the wall, channel the might and AE the shit out of everything on the wrong side of the wall.


I wouldn't use it to just do random questing though, just about any other weapon combo is more suited for it.



I'm still running Mace/Shield and Scepter/Shield, partly because I got sick of keeping 15 weapons up to date and partly because I find the shield offhand the most useful while leveling and mass zerg eventing. It's like 80% Mace up time, and 20% Scepter. The only good thing about Scepter is you can back load it quite a bit. Otherwise it's pretty straight forward and simple, and doesn't really combo with anything. It gets the job done though.

Yeah staff is very much a 'door to keep just fell YOU SHALL NOT PASS' sort of thing. (Also the 2 orb turns out to be decent for long range plinking of siege weapons and keep archers.)

The orb thing works pretty well in the ZERG THE CHAMPION RAAAAARGH things too, I can hit a lot of people with the heal part.  :why_so_serious:

I vastly prefer staff to scepter. I don't like the scepter animations, it's boring to use, and the only time I use ranged stuff is during the One Big Dude parts of world events, so all the "choke point" stuff works just fine. The main thing is the wall just becomes "extra combo field" rather than "NO STAY OVER THERE."

The little AE smite thing on scepter 2 is good for farming contribution.  :why_so_serious:

More importantly the immobilize/vulnerability nuke on 3 is really pretty good in its own right.

Glad you're playing an Ele so I can pick yer brain! Which stats do you focus on for your gear and which Traits did you take?

And I kinda wanted to use this icon:  :Love_Letters: but couldn't accept it was called "love letters"...

It's ok. Most of our love letters here are rants about games.

I want to say each tick of the AE smite will contribute to the burning virture stack, but its such a cluster fuck most of the time I can't say for sure.


That would be my current complaint overall. I can be fighting the same mobs for 10 minutes without any issue at all, then randomly those same mobs suddenly kick the living shit out of me and I have no idea why. It's not like a veteran sneaking in or anything, it's just regular mobs, that I have been murdering without issue for awhile, suddenly dismantling me.

I was going for a support-ish build that could still do decent damage (split between fire, arcane, and water, and even some air)... it's not really optimized for anything, but I found the grandmaster traits uninspiring for the most part. The must-haves (IMO):

20 fire for burnination (it also gets you +power, which is nice)
- 5 is not very useful
- 10 is basically 10% extra damage if you're in fire attunement (or in the first 5 sec after you switch to another attunement, see below), from everything. I think that's pretty good. (Internal Fire)
- 15 is also not that good
- 20 is great, it reduces cooldowns for your fire spells by 20%... it's not directly a 20% damage increase, but it definitely makes things die a lot faster (Pyromancer's Alacrity)

10 air if you like glyphs
- 5 in air gets you slightly faster move speed, which is nice (not sure if it stacks with swiftness - as a staff ele I have perma-swiftness anyway)
- 10 in air reduces your glyph cooldowns by 20%, this is huge! I'm using a self-heal glyph, an aoe glyph (glyph of storms) and a summon elemental glyph... it's noticable. (Quick Glyphs)

15 water for teh haelz
- 5 in water gives you a passive aoe regen that really increases survivability in my experience.
- 10 in water removes a condition when attuning to water - a lifesaver to remove poison before you heal (Cleansing Waves)
- 15 in water gives a noticable aoe heal when attuning to water, pretty good for ohcrap moments
(20 in water gets you Vital Striking, which gives a bonus - 10%? 15%? - to all damage dealt as long as you're at almost full HP.. very nice for a glass cannon build if you're kiting and not taking damage in the first place.)

20 arcane reduces your attunement cooldowns, which is very important imo. Going 30 arcane -may- be warranted for Evasive Arcana (you get your own blast finishers!), but I haven't looked into it yet
- 5 arcane is kind of confusing, but it basically means that if you have a bonus for being in a certain attunement (like the passive regen in water), it stays with you for 5 sec when switching to another attunement - it also means that you can switch attunements while you're casting a spell and it'll still go off (since you're "in" the previous attunement still). It's pretty good.
- 10 arcane gets you Elemental Attunement, which is very powerful defensively (on-demand free protection/regen? yes plz)
- 15 arcane is meh as you'll probably only have enough time to fire off one spell with the crit buff, but...
- 20 arcane gets you an absolutely crucial trait if you're using a staff, it increases all your AOEs by quite a bit (Blasting Staff)

Honestly I didn't build for any one stat, I just picked up gear as it dropped... tried to get +power first, followed by +toughness and +healing. But if a +condition damage yellow dropped, I was all over that crap, too.

Now that I'm 80, I've started to pay more attention, and will probably end up building multiple sets (healing/toughness for dungeons, power/precision for glass cannon solo pve and wvw since if something's hitting me, I'm probably already dead, and maybe a more survivability-focused set for killing tough things).

Meh. too late.

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/33271127/forest-angel.jpg)

Hi there!  :awesome_for_real:

What does combat log say?

Not to get all light-hearted conspiracy - but I always thought that when you target an area and start mass murdering the same type mobs, there is a built in revenge mechanic that kicks in after a time. This started, obviously, when I was playing FFXI and always had that one starter zone mob that hit infinitely harder and took very little damage even though it was the same con as the rest of the same mobs I had littered the landscape with their corpses.

In that same context, I have noticed that I have a nice rotation now on my thief in which I can shred through a single etten in a couple key presses. However, I get to another etten - same make and model and year, and my rotation only brings them down 3/4 in hp. A little odd given nothing really has changed on my end. Perhaps the mobs have a hidden tier of difficulty.

The grey con chickens will fuck you up if you kill enough of them.

Not sure this relates: but there was a gray con chicken kicking ass in Lion's Arch the other night. I port and as I'm running by I see a few players beating on this chicken. I was surprised because it wasn't already dead. I target it and it's only down 25% or so, and these players are whaling on it. So I join the fray. Takes another 2 full minutes to finally kill it. There were some ghosts around and they went away too, though I thought they were originally some Mesmer trick (I know dickall about most other classes).


Is it possible other players showed up in the same area during the fight? Is the combat system that responsive that stats can change mid-fight like that?

I do like the revenge idea/conspiracy though. That would make some sense as the other side of granting XP bonuses to under-hunted mobs (which is in game).

edit: Thanks Zetor, digesting your Ele insights!

I've insta-died (not downed, just BAM dead) to mobs I'd been mowing through pretty well, when assaulting a Svanir camp with insane respawn. Nothing untoward in the combat log. I put it down to a bug, because it would be a stupid mechanic.

I have no idea what that is!

My only guess on the occasional stomping that comes out of nowhere is that there's something goofy connected to how stuff scales with multiple players. Like maybe someone wanders into the bubble and suddenly a mob is hitting like a champ because its got an incorrect flag or something.

I split this off; use this thread for talking about dungeons, other hard encounters and specs to use against them. Use the other one for quick tricks and tips.

That's a mob that would stun as you ran past in final fantasy 11. It was a real asshole.

That would be a rarab - FFXI's version of a rabbit. The story goes, back in the day, you'd be soloing your ass to 10-15 in order to make a frantic, terrifying run to Valkurum Dunes to start party grinding. During this me-time soloing, you'd go about killing minor mobs that con'd easy prey or decent challenge. Among those were the cute fuzzy rarabs. However, as you traversed the landscape slaughtering these fine creatures, you would inevitably come across one that would completely annihilate you even though it had no discernible difference from any of the other rarabs in name or constitution. For whatever reason, your damage just would not make a dent and this mob would hit you for much more than previously encountered - and yes, these fuckers would do an AoE whirl claws that hit for a pretty large amount and also stunned - you gave a person a wide berth if they were fighting this mob as not to get hit.

I can't find the article that talks about it, but everyone I know came across a mob like it. That one mob that would just mop that floor with you and send you back to the crystal - even though it really should not have.

Saw people advertising for a 16min CoF explore mode run. I haven't gotten to that level yet but isn't that like 25s a run?  Seems like you'd be able to print money at that speed.

Think I need to hurry up and level before this one gets a patch. It sounds too good to be true.

I jsut finished off the zone where that dungeon entrance is, and moved to a zone with another dungeon entrance... the difference in map chat is insane. On the bright side, you'll never be looking for a group long if you want to do CoF, downside, you better not want to take your time or try other paths in the dungeon because nobody will do anything else than the Magg (fastest) one :/

The money thing is pretty interesting by itself, with the cash shop and all. Though even as a non-grinding level 80, I made enough gold to buy all the bank/char slots I'd need for now... still, who is going to buy gems at this rate?

Casuals who are the target demo after the achievers move on?

I've got less than a gold across my three characters.

People like me who hit 60 with 2 gold and need to buy their 10g book? I haven't bought gems, yet, but generating gold doesn't seem to be as easy as people are implying. I had more than enough to buy my books at 20 and 40 (or was it 10 and 40) but gold generation has not increased 10-fold, not even close, from 40-60.

Did my first dungeon last night (AC story). Wow. That shit is hard! Really interesting though. We had 2 guardians, so I think we were better off than some groups, but we still wiped numerous times. Had one guy bail after 1 fight with the twins, but managed to find an experienced replacement who was very helpful. Really makes me want to learn all my skills more in depth- other PVE is so trivial that I barely know what anything does. Alternated between staff (for cc, condition treatment, and heals) and greatsword (for dps at the end of fights). Mace and shield might have been better, but I don't have updated equipment for those slots atm.

It could be that wvw gold rewards suck (especially with all the armor repairs). I did a pretty straight run through pve zones (not farming events or anything), didn't sell anything on the AH, kept artifice/tailor crafting up to speed, vendored/salvaged blue gear, gave away / banked / used green+ gear. I was always able to buy the books... had about 9g to my name when I hit 80. I -did- 100% complete zones though -- not sure how much gold that brings in.

I've actually barely WvWed - I've been 100%ing as well. Have you been crafting, or just selling gathered mats? I suspect I'd be a hell of a lot closer if I was just AHing the stuff I picked up rather than trying desperately to skill up my crafting (and not being able to keep up on that without buying mats on the AH - which I have not been doing.)

I levelled both artifice and tailoring as I levelled, didn't sell anything I made (or harvested) on the AH. I did buy a few low-level fine (blue) materials to level tailor past the newbie tier, but only after 100%-ing all but one of the lowbie zones. Artifice is at 400, tailoring at 367 (though about 1/3 of that tailoring skill only came after I hit 80 and decided to 100% a few more lowbie zones to get more of those blue materials)

We did AC in exploratory mode last night, choosing the Ghost Eater path. Now partly because we were over levelled, partly because of better design but also partly because we knew how to play together better it went very smoothly. We wiped once on each boss to learn the abilities, but it never felt 'unfair' or cheesy and was actually a great deal of fun. Really enjoyed the first fight when he drags everyone in the group in and one shots you, and figuring out that if you dodge when he puts his blade behind his back made it a really fun fight.

The entire 'no tanks, no healers' concept seemed to start to come together for my group.

I love the way you can swap weapons and/or attunements in midfight to fulfill more than 1 role depending on how it is going.

So it turns out the issue was that I was totally misremembering the price of the level 60 book, and never went back to the merchant to confirm that.  :why_so_serious:

Did this path last night and it was thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyable. Fast, just the right difficulty, fun. Loved the last boss, too.

They really need to adjust the costs of the dungeon set rewards, though. They are astronomical. While GW1 was never grind averse, this is way too much. Roughly ten runs for one piece plus, what, six pieces? Sixty runs of ONE dungeon over and over is a little much.

That actually doesn't sound too much different from what I remember hearing about people running raids to gear up in WoW, except that what you got was entirely random so you could luck out and get stuff faster than average.

I don't like the dungeons.  Regardless of whether or not you like difficulty they are just badly designed.  Too much trash, the plotline linking them together is shit and the fights are just scatter brained.  Rewards suck for the amount of time they take too.  Without designated tank/healer/dps roles every fight is just the same damn thing.  Keep moving, spam the abilities the boss doesn't reflect/heal from and revive people as they die to the boss' autoattack and unavoidable damage.  Everyone does the same thing and it mostly involves flailing about.

After most every story mode I say to myself "never again".

Kite the mob in a big circle while avoiding X mechanic. 

The dungeons are more trouble than they're worth.  They aren't all that fun, are poorly balanced for casual players, and the loot tables discourage the effort. 

Yep, kinda like how Underworld / Fissure of Woe / Domain of Anguish were in GW1.
I heart Arenanet, but they're really not very good at this "balance small-group content" thing.

e: and I say this as someone who actually found the non-AC dungeons kinda fun, though obviously not as fun as (insert WOW instance that is not Oculus here)

The exploratory modes seem light years ahead of the story modes, for various reasons.

Story modes the risk versus reward simply isn't there - the only reason to do them once is to unlock exploratory mode. Exploratory mode the dungeons seem more interesting and you get a reward for it you can use. (also seemed to give shed loads of cash comparatively - 25 silver on the last boss alone).

Also, story mode forces you to interact with Destinys Edge, which is shit. Exploratory mode I get to be the hero not some whiny charr or moronic human.

Uh yeah, not even close. You would have to be historically unlucky to take anywhere near that long to finish gearing  from a given WoW raid. WoW slows you down with lockouts far more than with drop rates.

Depends if you were one of the lucky ones with 100 Gandling kills and no Dreadmist hat*, or 100 Drak kills and no deflector.  :awesome_for_real:

* yeah I know there were other dungeon items that had better stats, but I needed the full set for tier0.5

Plus there's no real reason you HAVE to grind.  It's strictly for cosmetic looks for the most part.  You can get gear with the same stats from a bunch of other, much easier sources at 80.

Oh, for sure. And I've always been in the camp (since GW1) which says that there's something oddly refreshing about a system which has people gearing up just to look badass. That's kind of cool. I waltzed into the TP the second I hit 80, snagged a complete set of 80 yellows, and I'm square. I just look kind of dumb.

But the numbers are just a little discouraging and there's a vital piece missing from how GW1 handled the grind, which is everything used to get the best looking armor not being tradable. If you didn't want to grind Ectos in the GW1 "dungeons", you could just buy them if you had the cash. If you weren't interested in the armor, but didn't mind grinding the mats, you could make money. I can't do that here (I can do it with Legendary Weapons, only, assuming they're not soulbound) and it makes what is otherwise a totally manageable system a little more intimidating.

And the Karma costs for Cultural Armor is hoooooo boy.

What karma cost for cultural armor? Only the weapons cost karma, the cultural armor is just shitloads of gold, last I looked.

I may have mixed up the armor and the weapons.

To be fair, the gold cost is also hooooo boy.

They want their content to have longevity, and that basically means grind. It's probably going to be a while before there's a substantial packet of new content and they want something for people hanging around to do.

You can see the same thing in their achievement system.

If you ahve a Mesmer in the group (and a lot of practice) there's a really fast way to grind 8 Orrian shards in 20 mins by farming the first 2 bosses of the Warden/Forgotten Arah explorable mode, by skipping all the trash with the Mesmer's portal, invisibility fields, and having other people use speedboosts.
It's not easy to figure out the exact places to stand and so on though, it seems Very exact, so no idea if they'll nerf that like they probably will CoF Explorable 2.
Ranger's also useful to pull the first 2 bosses separate from each other.

You know, I don't mind grind when it's for vanity items and ways to look unique. Grind kills me when it's for gear that is necessary to be either productive in PvP or in order to continue playing without rolling an alt.

There's apparently something called exotic armor, that DOES cost karma, in addition to the cultural armor that costs gold.

Exotic is a tier of rarity above Rare. Masterwork is Green, Rare is yellow, Exotic is.. dark orange I think?

Cultural Armor (your race specific stuff) is sold for cash and is Rare I believe (yellow)

Faction Armor (your faction. Vigil, whatnot) is sold for cash and is Rare. Also, far cheaper than Cultural.

Dungeon Armor is Rare or Exotic, and costs dungeon tokens.

Exotic Sets are Exotic, and cost Karma (42k/piece) and come from various special vendors in Orr. There are I think 6 different sets of this stuff, all with their own looks.

Just like GW1, there are way too fucking many armor sets, and most are crazy expensive. Give it a month for someone to post all the armor set looks in a nice grid.

Yeah dark orange.  Then legendary, which is above exotic, is red.  Some of the crafting components for the legendaries are purple.  Good thing I'm not color blind because they use pretty much the whole rainbow.

The orange gear costs about 45k karma, doesn't seem worth it.

I think most of them are covered here:
Cultural Armour and Weapons (http://dulfy.net/2012/07/21/gw2-armor-previews/)
42k Karma Armour (http://dulfy.net/2012/09/08/gw2-templegod-karma-armor-sets/)

Man, Dulfy, could you pick worse colors to use?

I find the sylvari stuff universally hideous.

EDIT: Man it is a good thing I find the Vigil stuff acceptable, because there's almost nothing available in heavy armor for a Norn male that I'd ever want to wear. Some of them might be made acceptable with other colors I guess.

I don't mind the idea of having a soft goal of cosmetic armor... but most of it just looks ridiculous. To make it look special they put so many spikes and decorations that it looks like some sort of fetish outfit rather than armor. Especially for the heavy armors which seem to be way too into spikes and WoW level shoulders.

Not a good first impession of dungeons.  Got a letter inviting me to Twilight Arbor.  Went there, found a group on explore mode.  I was 51, the mobs were 55.  :oh_i_see:  A frustrating ordeal trying to help.  Didn't make it past the big worm. 

I guess explore mode is hard mode or something.  Machine gun AoE's everywhere, poison gas everywhere from plants I can hit.  It felt ridiculous. 

Story mode: easy-ish, no vanity rewards (just random loot chests)

Explore mode: ~5 levels higher than story for the same dungeon, basically Heroics from WoW. Different fights/mob layout, drops tokens for vanity gear.

OK thought so, thanks for the tip.  Now I don't feel quite so lame.

Also, Ascalonian Catacombs is special. Even story mode.  :awesome_for_real:

I find exploratory modes a lot more interesting and faster than story modes to be honest. You never, ever need to do a story mode more than once to unlock exploratory that's for sure.

In the "misunderestimatingmisunderstanding what players want" corner, Colin Johanson thinks y'all should l2p (https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/dungeons/Do-NOT-nerf-please/first#post126835), btw have you run Domain of Anguish in GW1 in the first month after Nightfall launched? (for the record I haven't - you needed very specific builds to even think about running it, and pugging was out of the question. I did participate in a few Underworld runs back in 2005-2006 though... which was a LOT worse than the dungeons we have now, for what it's worth.)

It makes sense, doesn't it? He might have a point.
Sometimes the biggest cockblock in learning a new game is YOU and all the other games you played up to that point.

EDIT: that "YOU" includes me, of course.

I don't completely disagree (and the dungeons are growing on me... well, except for AC, fuck that dungeon and the triple ranger pull it rode in on). It's just that making exploration mode 'hard' is just fine, but storymode? That shit needs to be a tiny notch ahove 'faceroll easy', that's just the way it is. And right now the only dungeon that fits that description is CM (after the first boss, that is)

It also underscores the problems they had making dungeon content fun/balanced ever since GW1 Prophecies. Remember the PCGamer video showing Twilight Arbor? The Arenanet dude was saying that they balance explorable mode by 'making it a bit harder than our best testers can do, since players will do better than them anyway' and how they have testers running storymode dungeons 40 times a day to finetune balance. I'd say that right up until the 7-hero patch the elite areas were pretty much unpuggable. I also have no idea why AC is as hard as it is when it was the single most tested group content in all of the BWEs.

Because a tiny fraction made it over 30 and a tiny fraction of them played AC. (I hit 32 the last weekend in beta and never got around to checking out a dungeon. I know I wasn't alone.

There is definitely a learning curve to all of this that we just weren't expecting.

For example, last night we realised that if my Mesmer specs for mantra's and uses pistol and greatsword, I can interrupt the ghost captain boss in AC exploratory mode every single time he does his chain pull & slaughter move with very little assistance from anyone else. That fact that's it's possible to co-ordinate moves to the extent that you can lock out a huge part of a boss fight, including their signiture move, is so different to other games it requires a complete rethinking of how we approach fights.

Our warrior has also finally figured out how to survive longer than 10 seconds by Respeccing and regearing. In any other MMO versatility is trumped by specialists, but in this game everyone needs a bit of health, toughness, healing and condition removal. That's another change of mindset required - doing 5 times the damage of everyone else as a warrior is all well and good, but having permanent aggro and dying because of it doesn't help anyone.

I still need to figure this out - but I think you're right, a more balanced spec might be better than the precision/power dominate one I have been running with.

Different gearsets definitely have their purpose. I like my Cleric set (+healing power/+power/+toughness) for grouping in general, and a pure glass cannon power/precision set for wvw and soloing. I imagine I'd have a condition damage set if it worked with my weapon/build (it's not so hot for staff ele).

There's probably a good reason to have a full set of magic find gear for farming too, but fuck that noise imo.

My mesmer tends to run Pirate/Magic find for DEs, and Knight (Toughness/Precision/Power) for dungeons.

I'm going to need some bigger bags.

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/dungeons/Dungeon-Updates/

anti speed clear and story mode farming nerfed.

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/dungeons/2-6-Silver-and-17-7k-XP

and the nerfing is glitched apparently. oops


Bonus L2P dev post.
https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/dungeons/Citadel-of-Flame-Path-1-the-superweapon/first#post189294

And meanwhile they let blatant macroing in Kessex Hills and Gendarran Fields get a free pass. Typical kneejerk dev reaction. I thought story mode was supposed to be EZ mode?

They didn't make it for speed-runs and farming so it's no surprise they work against that.

Did AC for the first time today. Story mode was fine but Kohler is still a pretty big PITA. With all the big flashy lights and some ping its not that fun. Did Detha's route of explore without much of a problem. Tzark's route was just stupid especially when combined with the hit boxes of stuff like burrows.

Got to do my second story run through AC this weekend.  I hate the Lovers.  Conceptually we know what it takes, but they're such a pain.

Just did Sorrow's Embrace.. most of the dungeon was fine (and I'd say the last boss was pretty neat), but the second boss...  :ye_gods:

5 phases and more things to look out for than a typical RAID boss (and I'm not talking about LFR) in a casual 5-man? Jeez. The fight lasted forever, too.

The bolded bit is a big part of why I'm not even trying dungeons, while it's possible I can play for a couple hours straight I'm just as likely to get called away to deal with some kind of work thing at just about any point in time.  Usually this happens when I'm hip deep in some long personal quest instance or pounding on a keep in WvW, at least in those bailing doesn't really cause anyone else problems.

Apparently our mistake in general is thinking this game has casual group content. It doesn't.

Well appearantly they now agree that the token collection was a bit grindy as they are increasing the tokens rewarded for a run.

Exploratory modes have been a lot faster for my group than story modes. Story modes are simply far, far too long (Sorrows Embrace in particular) and have 0 rewards attached to them. Hell, they actually come with a penalty as you have to listen to more of the story...

The sad part is that I'm sort of a crazy outlier who loves difficult small-group content (and I don't raid due to schedule issues). I had a blast doing 45min strat back in vanilla WOW, healing heroics in blue gear at the start of cata, tanking ZG/ZA in the bare minimum itemlevel... those things were tough (and not very puggable), but I found them fun. Here is what that boss looked like:
- 100% to 75%: straightforward, except for a ridiculously hard hitting single-target attack he uses every 15 sec or so
- 75%: he goes invulnerable (still keeps doing that attack throughout the rest of the fight) and summons a golem that has very hard-hitting melee attacks and some sort of chain lightning (spread out). Golem has a lot of hp.
- 75% to 50%: straightforward again, use this opportunity to revive NPCs
- 50%: invul again, time for boss #2! This one has a ton of hp, places fire zones throughout the room, has a fire whirl on a timer, puts a heavy burn on everyone in the group every 10 sec or so, and consumes all conditions every ~30 seconds, which heals him for each condition [!]
- 50% to 25%: normal phase again
- 25%: invul again, boss #3 inc! This guy leaves a poison trail on the ground that hurts... he also pulls people in every x seconds (can LOS, but hard to tell when he's casting it; basically keep a dodge ready to gtfo of the poison right away, or you're probably dead). Also poisons random people, so cleanses are needed again.
- 25% to 0%: normal phase again
- 0%: boss disappears and leaves 3 'normal' elite golems... these aren't very hard, just a fair bit of hp and of course /trollface

So to properly kill this guy, you need to swap out weapons and utilities that have range (this much is obvious from all the melee hate on other bosses), do NOT cause conditions (except for long-ish cooldowns), and most people in the group need to have some sort of short-cooldown reliable cleanse (we had a ranger do the pet cleanse / swap thing and I used evasive arcana in water attunement for aoe cleanses every 10 sec + healing rain). Is this really the level of organization you expect from a random level 60 pug?

We haven't *wiped* (a few people died and ran back), and it's possible that you restart the fight at the phase you were at... but still, having something like this in a storymode dungeon is just crazytown.

GW2 seems to follow the GW1 philosophy in dungeons, which is basically "for the super-hardcore, everyone else stay out" (they only relented on this with eotn mini-dungeons). They're trying to make dungeons into DOA/Underworld/FOW v2.0, when they should be looking at dungeons in uhhh.. every other MMO in the market. Their 'l2p' post only reinforces this.

Thanks for confirming my decision to avoid dungeons in this game.

Most people I know are doing what is known as "shard runs" now.  They don't even try to finish the dungeon because the gw2 dungeon designers are retarded and stuck in the EQ one LDoN timeline.  All they do is kill two or three bosses and then reset to do them again.  I can't blame then since the time and effort it requires to actually finish a GW2 dungeon is fucking absurd for almost no reward.

Yes if you wipe on the golem fight in SE it restarts you at the bit you wiped at. So once a golem is down, it stays down.

Meh, probably won't step into the dungeon anytime soon, then.

I don't know much about dungeons. Sure, I've run a few of them in every mmorpg since the nineties, still it's not the part yhat I focus on so I am absolutely no expert. I wanted to love GW2 dungeons, the lack of trinity and lots of needed mobility being my favourite parts, but to day that I'm underwhelmed by what I've seen so far doesn't do my feelings any justice.

I've run Crucible of Eternity (intended level 78) with a group of friends, all 80 and decently geared, and it took us forever. I am sure it's mostly our fault, the l2p part isn't one you swallow easily, but I gotta say that no matter what I didn't like the encounters nor the bosses, to the point that is hard to say what's  a trash fight and what is a boss fight. Too many silly npcs with too many HP and not enough recognizable features. The lack of reasonable rewards (story mode) doesn't help you find the fun here.

Or maybe I am just spoiled from The Secret World's dungeons, my favourite ever, save for a few Eq2 ones, so far.

Obsidian Sanctum, the pvp one in Eternal Battlegrounds, no matter how non-conventional, is still my absolute #1.

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/info/news/Update-Notes-September-25th-2012

For those thinking dungeons are too hard, AC Explore Path 1 with three people: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjCttqquQoc

Dungeons are too hard, i don't care what three catasses can do.

I thought so too on AC story, while I was glass cannoning my ele and running with 4 people, just about 30, who'd never run a dungeon before.  Experience, practice and coordination, and they're really quite a breeze, but still a bit of a challenge to be on the ball.  I've run AC exp 5 times in the past couple of days, all with PUG's, and it was fairly easy.  Made about 50s and a 1/3 of an armor piece in tokens per run.  I bitched about story initially, but explore is a whole different ballgame, especially running with experienced people.  From my experience, the dev's telling people L2P is quite true.  Being flexible in your traits, technique and weapon choices is a must as well.  I don't think armor choices make that big of a difference as much as skill and playing for the team.

Do you think they will ever put in a token system like WoW has that doesn't require you to use inventory space to collect them? I'm trying to avoid spending much on bank space but between cooking and daily tokens from dungeons there isn't a lot left. 

haha, I would definitely say cooking is our larger problem as I have two full tiers of bank slots filled up with intermediate ingredients.  Never know when I'll need 5 bowls of basic chicken stock.

If story mode is too hard for people with this setup (and we had 5 for most of it) then it is *too hard*. Period. Explorable mode can be as nut-punching hard as they want, whatever. Story mode needs to be easy enough that it can be done in random gear, by people who haven't unlocked every skill and don't necessarily know what they're doing yet, without optimizing their spec and voice chat and whatever else, as soon as they get the email from the game telling them they can go there.

The point of multiple difficulties is to accomodate everyone. Right now they're not coming close.

I definitely agree with the Story modes being tuned down a bit.  Took a buddy of ours who is new to the game on his first CM story mode run.  We were telling him about how easy and good xp it was.  Apparently none of us saw the patch notes where it got buffed. Needless to say he got squashed and stated if we weren't there with him, he would have left half way through. 

Personally, I think the first couple dungeons should be an introduction to how this game works.  Departing with the tank/healer/dps trinity is certainly something that doesn't come overly easy to new plays that have done it for 10+ years of gaming. 

It's sad really. He was already on the fence about coming to GW2 and that run really made him think twice about his purchase. He likes raiding and is definitely one that would spend money on this game. The whole thing just really left a bad taste in his mouth.

Whats worse is that not one bit of the PvE is challenging until you get to level 30 where you get mail going "Hey come check out our awesome dungeon", where you proceed to get curbstomped.

There's no intermediary.

This. It doesn't change at 40 either. I tried CM for the first time last night and it's fucking ridiculous. Someone said to me last night that they recently made it harder. Whaaa? Between the annoying camera with the low ceilings, mobs dropping bombs that you can't see because of that camera issue, the tables and chairs counting as barriers to your line of sight, the chain fearing mutts, the one shotting snipers, and the zergs of mobs, I'm pretty much all done with that dungeon and maybe all dungeons in this game. This is story mode. I'm supposed to learn my way around the dungeon in this mode, not blink and be dead and have no idea wtf just hit me and learn what I could have done different. Just repeatedly run back from death until the mobs are dead. This just isn't fun at all and the rewards for doing it are basically nonexistent. Fuck this.

Maybe their dungeons are intended to be 'raids'?  I just don't get why they keep them so tough.  Are they going to be part of their pve 'esports'?

I have to think they'll nerf them eventually.  They must be seeing that very few do them.

I just don't get why story modes are so much harder , longer and unfun than exploratory modes. Seems completely the wrong way round.

I don't get this. Why is it so few have figured out when to selectively remove the world geometry, or make ceiling height higher than displayed geometry that is transparent from the other side) so it doesn't fight the camera?

Uh. try fighting underwater dungeons bosses that restricts 1/4 of skills like a few team heals that you specced for and made a lot of traits near useless.
Utterly ridiculous.

Did twilight arbor on explorer on Saturday .  Maybe we suck but with breaks and all that shit took us four hours. And now I hate flowers.   Iearned a lot, next run will be faster etc. but it doesn't seem worth it even though I really want the tunic and pants

I did that last night. The tree boss forces everyone to range.
I'm not sure what the fucking deal is, I understand trinity is not a must for dungeons anymore but forcing a Warrior to plink with arrows from a distance or be obliterated is not the way to design encounters. It wasn't challenging, just boring. And it was literally an endurance test - not a dps race.

When i cleared out TA, i actually had it worse than the melee at times, as a ranger.
For example that bloody worm boss, they have immense range for their spitting, also some other bosses where i had to move like mad while melee were pretty good up close.
I'm a ranger with the longbow range trait btw

I can't say any dungeons so far left a positive impression on me. I only wiped like once or twice in some dungeons - but I can't say I'm having fun.

I remember running my first Deadmines instance at lvl 20ish in WoW.
Going through it was fun. Even though I did not get much reward of gears nor token in the end, it was worth the trip and quest completions.
It wasn't too easy, it wasn't too hard as well. A friend coached us through the instance telling us what to do and how to pull and sap. The learning experience felt smooth and understandable - it was the basis of future raids - teammates understanding what their role is - what to do and what not to do.

Contrast that to lvl 30-40 runs of Dungeons in GW2 - clusterfuck. You know what to expect, but the numbers will blow you up so quick you realize straight away that the feeling of - 'you're not ready for this' is so obvious. Persist, and you won't even get much of satisfaction of beating it, only the feeling 'this isn't a great deal of fun vs time spent' when you're auto-attacking and spamming the same attack over and over again when dealing with trash mobs.

That happened to us, only we had to give up.  I felt really bad, because my first time through CM was a much easier and the group composition was a bit more balanced.  It was pretty demoralizing, and Story Mode just shouldn't be so.  (My Mesmer fared the best of the lot dying only once.  But when my friends aren't having fun, it totally blows the evening for me, too.)

At some point, the explorables became WAY fun. I'm not sure when. We can run one leg of just about any of them in ca 30 minutes, which is just right. We got good or something.

As long as you're not running with randoms/pugs, a lot of stuff is do-able, with the right mix of patience and team chat.
I was getting too used to just blowing away CoF now that when I ran a PUG grp today, I felt kinda disgusted at having nearly wiped on the first major encounter.

The majority of pug's I've run with have been perfectly fine.  Some were stellar greased lightning and some were wipes, but those are both in the minority.  The ones that have pissed me off the most were the messy speedrunners.  Speed running isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's not my cup of tea and not something you can do when everyone isn't on the same page and well oiled.  Skipping Kholer in AC for instance is something that I refuse to do with a pug as it's an easy central waypoint in case of wipes, not to mention a chest.  If someone insists on skipping Kholer, I usually tell them to either kill Kholer or find someone else and get out of the group.

I have run AC3 though with a pug in 20 minutes flat, no skipping shit.  That blew my mind.

Yeah, I'm at the point where we're not deliberately speedrunning, but our speeds are great. And they're REALLY fun once you adjust your expectations of what they want you to do. Which isn't something that needs to be said again, even though I did.

Even when they go well I find the fun (and reward) level far behind similar content in other MMOs. Tomato/tomahto I guess.

About how long does it take to run story mode Arah?

According to guildies, 1.5 hour if all went well.

 :uhrr:

Great.

Went to do Arah story mode to finish up my personal story on the weekend and it's bugged and nobody can get in. 

The rewards are still garbage, but they've finally come around on that. I totally got my AC token staff, though, and it glows at night. Because GHOSTS.

We've got AC down pretty well now.  It helped that Sachiel and Selma knew the dungeons pretty well, but now Vu and I do, too.

Composition matters a lot.  There's a huge difference in speed when we bring a Warrior and Ranger versus a Guardian and Mesmer.  (One run was a Warrior, two Guardians, and two Mesmers.)  Defense is great, but there needs to be enough damage happening to burn things down quickly with gravelings running about.

We ran a three thief group through. Once we got all the thieves using sword pistol for the gravelings it went swimmingly.

Give me a yell if you see me on, my warrior is deeps. She's in a weird spot, now. Was focused on precision but gear has been weird lately (51 or 52) and it's very mishmashy, and my signet build is weakening somewhat (40 precision for unused signets, doesn't scale). Still badass, but I'm so used to constantly critting I'm going to have to rejigger some things (that trigger from crits).

We're all on Jade Quarry.  Aren't you on Madness?

Yes.