Guild Wars 2

Before the usual “L2P” comments pile up:
We did the dungeon in a melee heavy group, it’s doable, no argument there.
But that’s not the point I’m trying to make.
It’s also not the point that this is a temporary dungeon. And I’m not saying the dungeon is too difficult.

What I’m trying to point out should be clear from he title: The dungeon is unfriendly to melee oriented characters, sometimes in the extreme.
And please spare me “your fault if you have no ranged weapon on you”. Because any half sensible player will carry one with him and use it if a fight requires him to.

What bugs me is that the dungeon forces you to go for ranged in a lot of situations. both boss fights in particular. Trying to fight the the golems close up will have you inside lightning wall faster than you can spell it in most cases. Or it will have them inside the beam or wall and thus make them hit harder or go into “blockmode”. (Which they tend to be often enaough already.)
The same goes for the fight against the captain. The kind of damage she dishes out in combination with the amount of bleed stacks she applies will even bring down a bunker rather fast. If you’re lucky an your group is heavy on condition cleansing it migh work every now and then since she tends to pick a non melee target for her shadowstep attack. But If you try not to play rez wars, than melee is mostly a no go against her.

And the trash groups? They hit rather hard in combination with a lot of control abilities (knockdown and stun). A bunker with the proper utility skills chosen will be able to survive the brunt of the first wave. Any other melee trying the stunt will most likely be down.

As I already stated, I do not think the dungeon is too difficult. I just would like to point out that the dungeons favours ranged characters over melee characters in a lot of situations.
And I do so in the hope that something like that might be avoided in the future. There will always be fights that favor ranged combat and fights that favor melee combat. That is unavoidable. But an entire dungeon that favours one of the two is a little bit of a misconception in my opinion.

Although I think you’re right about boss fights I’m sure you’re wrong about every other fight. I was there with my ranger and 2H sword. Didn’t have problem with it. Southsun gave me much more trouble with fighting melee then this dg. :P

And boss fights…I think this is intended. I didn’t even think about fighting in melee with walls coming at me and I didn’t try to fight this way with second boss. But I don’t have problem with that. Those fights are designed to force movement.

I think a greatsword ranger is a bunker almost by definition. Yes I know, it takes more than just the right weapon to make a bunker, but the evade on the 1-chain and the additional block on the 4 make a greatsword ranger pretty durable even when not geared as a bunker. Especially since you most likely have at leat 20 points in survival (not necessarily though).

That aside, I won’t rule out that we simply made some mistakes but we had a lot of downed characters along the trash if they tried to go melee at the first contact right on.. However since I was a pugging, I don’t know exactly how people were geared or traited, so that might be a factor.

As far as movement heavy fights, I have no problem with those, but you can even make a melee viable fight that is movement heavy. They proved that themselves during Flame & Frost.
In addition, I don’t mind having to go ranged for a part of a fight or some of the fights in a dungeon, but all of them? Thats a design mistake in my book. Even if you only consider the boss fights in the argument.

What I’d like to point out as well: I actually liked the dungeon. I just didn’t like the aspect of being forced to go ranged so much.

Slightly off topic, but since you played a ranger: I heard a lot of rangers complaining that there pets were down most of the boss fights due to the carload of AoE effects, moving walls etc. What was your experience in that regard? Just asking out of curiosity.

Ok, I get your meaning. I know that my ranger is pretty durable but when we consider only normal fights then there was only one where I felt like I could stand better then others. Every other I had same problems: had to roll as much as I could. I was in pug.

Could AN make this more melee friendly? Probably they could. I need to go there with my thief to see the difference.

OT: I didn’t count boss fights to be honest. It died quite fast when walls were involved and I didn’t pay to much attention to it because I was fighting for my own life. Especially when it was my first time. But I swapped pets whenever I could. On last fight it depended utterly on luck. I mean…when it has it’s god skill ready it could last long enough.
But I know that pets are easy kill. I just used to it. I don’t play as a beastmaster as opposed to GW1 so I don’t know how fights would go on when I had traits to make pets stronger. Maybe if I would sacrifice some of my fighting abilities or survivability and didn’t get equal buff for pet I would be more upset on how things are.

Can’t say I ever felt I needed to use a ranged weapon tbh. It does help to have at least someone there tanky enough to stand around slapping Mai Trin about the head for a bit while the AOE is applied to her shield, but even that isn’t strictly necessary.

I completed with groups up different comps. First completion was with 2 guards, 2 engis, and a war. 3 melee, 1 bomb engi, and a grenade engi, for a total of 4 melee range. Second completion was with 3 guards, 1 engi, and 1 war. 4 melee range.

So no. I don’t think this dungeon is particularly melee unfriendly. The only time I ranged was against the golems when there were lasers between us, and Mai while she had her shield up, because we were grouping up to try to get Mai into aoe.

I find only the last boss melee unfriendly. With the rest of the dungeon I have no problem (from the guardian pov is easy to write about it becouse of all the available stability skills).

Yet the last boss stacking so many bleed in such short time, and they are long term conditions it’s hard to melee, even with Pure of Voice and Indominable Curage it’s still hard to melee her more than just GS-3-4-2-distance-5-change range… I don’t like spamming shouts and virtues just to do a 20k dmg and use one of the precious cooldown that can be a life saver to a party member or myself, better give her 10 crits with a scepter auto attack for over 2k+ and have those cd for when really needed.

I would like to watch someone skilled melee her just to lern some tricks

meleeing golems is asking for death. they have a ridiculously high upkeep of stun aura thanks to the lasers, which will be almost impossible to dodge if you’re busy meleeing.

BrunoBRS.5178:

meleeing golems is asking for death. they have a ridiculously high upkeep of stun aura thanks to the lasers, which will be almost impossible to dodge if you’re busy meleeing.

They only get the aura when the small wall touches them, otherwise thay don’t have it, so it can be melee while kited (sorry for 100b warrior can’t use GS “2” skill and move, the Guardian’s GS all can be done while moving – small stop for the symbol).

Also if You walk close to the inner part the You can melee more becouse You move quite fast, the more outside You are the more distance you have to beat in order to run from the lasers and that’s where melee gets harder.

It only gets complicated in p3 with both walls in p1 and p2 it’s doable.