Guild Wars 2

Very generalized question: What’s the average time for a run through [dungeon name goes here] in [path name goes here] mode?

I’m a family man with very limited game time available to me, so I’d like to know ahead of time how much time I need to plan for on a specific dungeon run. I haven’t finished a single one yet, so I’ll be starting with Story mode on all of them, but I’d like to know the different paths too.

Base time estimates on what to expect for a random PUG with widely varying player skill levels. Thanks in advance.

Plan for an hour for a single path. It varies depending on the dungeon and people you do it with.

Yea an hour is good for your first time. With an experienced team it could take a fraction of the time, with a bad team it could very well take the full hour. That’s actually pretty reasonable for doing story as you’re more likely to watch all the cutscenes too.

Arah takes longer, if it’s a good pug, story mode is a couple of hours. Explorable… I’ve spent 4-5 hours on some runs of path 1 or 4, path 2 and 3 can be done in under an hour by experienced groups.

Arah can be very well done in 15-20 minutes, except path 4.

We’re talking about average time with pug groups; not experienced speed run groups.

Story mode is a couple of hours?! Have you invented time dilatation machine?

Depends on party make up too. Five Thieves running AC Explorable will have a harder (and longer) run than a Plate Party doing the same path.

I did story on another toon and it took less than an hour. It would be less if they removed all of that dead time just standing around.

I have not run SE or CoE before, but if you include the time it takes to assemble a PuG on gw2lfg.com and consider that they are PuGs and not a coordinated guild/speed run party.

Here are the paths that I know of that typically take under an hour in a PuG: AC Path 1 and 3, CM Path Asura and Butler, TA Path Up and Forward/Forward, HotW Path 1 and 2, CoF Path 1 and 2, Arah Path 1, 2 and 3.

Here are the paths that take one hour or longer: AC Path 2, CM Path Seraph, TA Path Forward/Up, CoF Path 3, Arah Path 4.

AC Path 2: it can be incredibly frustrating to coordinate a PuG to do the Oozes in the final boss.
CM Path Seraph (I think this is path 2): running the bombs to the gate can be a nightmare in a PuG.
TA Path Forward/Up: actually not too bad but most mixed bag inexperienced parties will struggle with Vevina, the Mesmer boss before the final boss. Also you will have to contend with an onslaught of spider adds at the final boss.
CoF Path 3: Hardly anyone runs it so when you do find a party to run it (this alone can take up a good part of that hour you allocate for this path) most people don’t know how to handle the torches.
Arah Path 4: It’s just long. You have to activate 4 or 5 statues and each statue has a mini boss. You do like 2 or 3 statues, and then there’s Lupicus in the middle, and then 1 more statue I think (Grenth? I haven’t done this in ages) and then final boss Dwayna.

EDIT: The fastest dungeon paths are: AC Path 3, CM Path Butler (3?), TA Path Up, HotW Path 1, CoF Path 1 (currently fastest in the game – 8~15 minutes depending on party composition), Arah Path 3.

EDIT #2: If it’s your very first time running a dungeon in explorable mode, I would suggest CoF Path 1 or HotW Path 1. You will need some DPS to do AC Path 3, you will greatly benefit from party members or yourself with reflect skills (wall of reflection, feedback, etc.) with CM Butler, TA Path Up you will want to find a party that kills along the way rather than skip or you’ll be dying a lot while you learn it, and Arah is arguably the hardest dungeon family in the game so you might want to leave that until you’ve done a few other dungeons first. There’s a lot of running and wallhugging required in Arah Path 3 so do stick together with the group.

If you’re in an NA server I’m happy to take you on a run of your choice, but I’m in an Oceanic timezone. Feel free to add me to your friends list anyway and message me when I’m on – we’ll get a group together and try out a dungeon =)

Your best bet is taken lcpdragonslayer offer to help & tony on TA dungeon (search for TA thread). They will make your dungeon runs shorter & more enjoyable than just going w/ PUG. 1 hr is about right on and w/ them, it could be shorter. Only Arah p4 is really long & tedious, approx 1 1/2 – 2 hrs.
With PUG, you might get lucky & then you might not. And if you are not lucky, it could end up longer than 1 hr with rage quit etc.

I thought if you ranged attack in TA and dodged at the right time, you could evade the spider spawn? I haven’t done this since October so I could be mistaken or they changed this since then.

For CoF 3, there’s just 3 torches and the enemies stay around them stay dead for a decent amount of time. People struggle more on the next part where you have to defend the circle. Oh, and the tunnel part with the lanterns that explode. That was always fun…

Ayrilana.1396:

I thought if you ranged attack in TA and dodged at the right time, you could evade the spider spawn? I haven’t done this since October so I could be mistaken or they changed this since then.

For CoF 3, there’s just 3 torches and the enemies stay around them stay dead for a decent amount of time. People struggle more on the next part where you have to defend the circle. Oh, and the tunnel part with the lanterns that explode. That was always fun…

They might have changed it since I last did TA regularly but I think the caster classes in particular tend to AoE the Nightmare Tree and aggro the spiders hanging around the front half of the room. They’re not a problem if the party shifts focus to take care of them first but even the most common sense things seem to be difficult to coordinate for PuGs.

Most PuGs I’ve been in fell apart at the torches so, good to hear that there are more people out there who are Path 3 savvy, so to speak x) Those are other things PuGs lack – patience, willingness to listen and willingness to wipe to learn – so despite some of us making an effort to take people on their first dungeon run to make it a more enjoyable experience, the majority of PvEers do their first dungeon in a PuG and end up hating it because the party tends to be just a total mess.

That said, I’ve been in good PuGs so they’re not all bad. It’s just that when they’re bad, they can be 4-hour-long dungeon run kind of bad.