Guild Wars 2

I did it twice yesterday and I thought I’d chime in.

First, let me say that yesterday was the first time I did CM. Before that, I’ve done a couple of AC story mode and that’s that. No other dungeons. I don’t know CM pre-patch.

So, how did it go? Pretty decently. On the first run, we were a bit cautious. Some of my guildmates I ran with were there the day before and whiped a lot, due to uncarefgul pulls by a random they had picked up.

So we pulled carefully. Also, because I’d read the horror stories about the buffed difficulty, I had respecced my lvl 42 warrior to toughness / vitality and donned sword and shield. Still, I fully expected a wipefest just like the AC runs I’d done on my light armor toons.

I died a full three (3) times, mostly because we added a group to an ongoing fight.

Second run, we were a bit careless, I died a full four (4) times.

CM story mode as it is now has some challenging parts but the difficulty seems just right. When I did everything right, I didn’t die. When we were sloppy, people bit the dust. That’s the way it should be. I was in melee almost all the time. Only when my defensive skills were all on cooldown and I was being thrashed did I dodge away and swap to my bow until my health was up again. Even at the first boss, the golem, I stayed in melee all the time. No problem, even when I didn’t block his flame-spouting whirlwind attack. If I hit block for it, I hadn’t taken any damage when he’d finished.

Also, if you spec defensively before you go in, it might just save you more in repairs than you pay for retraining twice. Just do it.

TL;DR: Chill out, CM storymode is just fine when you go in there at the level it’s designed for. Now, AC story mode, we need to talk about once more…

EDIT: I’m truly looking foreward to the next dungeon down the line. And should some guildmate ask for a CM-run, I’m in!

You ran with guildies? Because my experience with 4 random pickup members was the opposite – 7s repair and lots of tedious waypoint running. I’m not very keen on repeating the whole experience again with another 4 random people.

I just think story mode should be very accessible for PuGs. They shouldn’t require people to read forums and study about cross-class combos and copy cookie-cutter builds, etc. Let explorable dungeons be the ones that require organized guild group coordinations.

On the topic of CM. I’ll start by saying I"m a toughness/vitality guardian with lvl appropriate toughness/vitality gear.. with some healing thrown in. I use a mace/focus for the healing and defensive abilities i get there.. and for a little more damage i carry around a greatsword. That being said, CM is more of a slaughter house and less of a “dungeon”. Even with my defensive abilities (blocks, blinds, heals, etc.) the damage you take is rediculous. If i remember correctly, now don’t quote me on this, but wasn’t arena net wanting to avoid the trinity of tank, dps, healer? How can a non tank go into the instance and survive past some of the initial damage, let alone sustain it for even past a few seconds? As most seem to get one-hit or two-hit if their lucky.

Aside from just the damage, lets talk about the massive amount of crowd control abilities that get spammed by mobs in CM. The knock back, the fears, the stuns… it’s what i consider to be the equivalent of being able to take my gladiator and throw them in the mince cycle of my blender. Even with several defensivie abilities that could initially block some of them they’re spammed so much by the npc(s) that it pretty much makes those skills null and void. For example, the fear from the dogs. every 10 seconds or so… and you’re not only dealing with one, but rather, two dogs in each pack (if not more). and then you have the bombers, and the knockbacks from the snipers/ranged npc’s.

Now don’t get me wrong. I can understand them wanting to avoid dungeon speed runs so you can’t farm exp. and gold. And that’s fine. So nerf the experience and money gains and leave the dungeons as they are. Why make them rediculously hard while nerfing experience at the same time. Then what’s the point, really, of having a dungeon? Noone will want to do much of any of them past the initial run. The repair costs alone on a pug group will more than likely (based on this last run I just did) cost more than what you made in the dungeon (@ 2 silver….)

Seriously, I find no fun in running CM as a dungeon in story mode.. let alone exploration mode. I doubt many other people do either. I hope they make some sort of fix soon because I really enjoy running instances with pugs or guildies as i’m sure most other people do to. And as a casual player I would hate to have to do “detailed research” just to run a dugneon with a few friends.

As far as going in at the level it’s desinged for. It’s not like you can go in before that level and even having level 50 gear with appropriate stats helping out, it’s still a brutal place to go into

OK, so maybe the warrior is a tad overtuned himself. But what do I mean with the “defensive build” I used at lvl42?

I poured all the possible 20 points into toughness and the other 12 into vitality. Then I picked some major traits that seemed fitting. I slotted skills for support and damage reduction. How did I optimize my equipment? I swapped the greatsword for a green lvl 39 (or so) sword and a blue lvl41 shield. I’d never used any of those before. My lucky drop yellow lvl39 bow supplemented this.

While waiting at the entrance, I did the skillchallenge a few meters away 3 or 4 times to memorize the “new” abilities. That was my entire “preparation”. I knew that at least one of the group was in CM before, so I didn’t bother reading up on it. Had I not known that, I’d have googled it quickly to get a rough idea what to do. Yes, I’m willing to spend those 5 minutes while waiting at the gate anyway.

Luckily, it was a guild-group, so we had teamspeak. I’m sure that saved a lot of typing and thus time. The group consisted of me, trying to take point and soak damage as best as I could, some more DPSy types that did slot some of their support skills and an almost pure support elementalist. That was by no means a “trinity” setup. Neither could I hold aggro and take every hit, nor could the elementalist heal all incoming damage. But it was a decent setup.

I was trying to engage as many as I could in close combat, keeping them from the ranged if possible. By the power of defensive cooldowns and the “slightly” overpowered healing signet, I was able to stay in melee range almost all the time. When the defensive CDs were spent and damage kept coming in, I dodged backwards twice and swapped to the bow until my health was up again and my CDs were ready again. But being a defensive heavy armor class, this didn’t happen very often. Still, the bow is nice for AOE, too, so I used it accordingly.

When we pulled, we pulled. That means, when we engaged a group, we tried not to fight them where they were standing but to pull them towards us a bit so that we’d not add other groups into the fight. Granted, the “champion of the friendzone” Logan thwarted those attempts from time to time by running at them like the stupid git he is, but all on his own, Logan doesn’t last all that long and we were mostly able to fight where we wanted to fight, not where the mobs wanted to fight – which is mostly somewhere from where they could not fear us into other groups.

Oh, and we used <ctrl>-T excessively.

Since we (mostly) fought well out of reach of other groups, most of the time we just took the fears and knockbacks as they came. If a cloth-clad was downed while feared, one of the better-protected would res them fast. No, it didn’t take teamspeak to see the blue “res me” icon.

And thusly, the “deadly” “unplayable” CM story mode went by with just two wipes when we weren’t cautious and three deaths in total for me. We all agreed that we’d had a lot of fun and that we’d do it again if another guildmate “needed” the storymode.

Yes, it was a guild-group. But most of the things we did did not require voice-chat, just common sense.

EDIT: Typos

It was StoryMode only. Imho, StoryMode should be doable by everybody except the utter worst. And even then, 4 decent (average) players should be able to carry a real bad player through StoryMode.

You ran with all guildies. Probably experienced MMO-ers. Probably used to working together. And you did have TeamSpeak. And although you can always type in partychat, people usually don’t type as much as they speak. And certainly not during combat.

You knew you had to spec defensively. I didn’t know that when I walked into AC.

But the thing I am most curious about. How good a MMO player are you, and your guildies ?
Did you play WoW ? Most people did, therefor WoW is a good reference.
Did you raid ? In Cata, TBC or vanilla ? How far did you get ? Did you beat bosses in Dragon Soul heroic mode ? Did you play in Sunwell Plateau at 70 ? Did you play in BWL, AQ40 or Naxx40 in vanilla ? I am really curious.

I used to do CM Story with my friends for greens (Mystic Forge) and money.

Now we got stomped on 2. last boss when she summoned her 7 elite mobs AT SAME TIME. No way for us to get past anymore. It seems that I need to find new way for money.

Yea CM is no longer fun. They broke it. CM was fine before. I don’t really understand the change..

So I’m not alone in thinking the change is about right. Though I go further and call it a great improvement.

I work my build as a hybrid – points spread evenly between defense, tactics, and discipline,
I use crafting to get at-level gear every 5 levels.

I run with hammer and rifle, or hammer and mace/shield.
- Rifle is mostly for pulling, switching back to it only for backup moments. I pull with the F1 ability thanks to one of my signets, and try to pull so I grab some but not all of the mobs ahead, using LoS etc to grab them back.

Utility bar for me:
Healing Signet, Signet of Fury, Battle Roar (sometimes swap for Dolyak signet despite others saying that is weak), Banner of Discipline or Defense, and Battle Standard.

Arms: Deep Strike.
Defense: Turtles Defense
Discipline: Warrior’s Sprint (need to change this, this was meant for soloing and I forgot about it).

- CM and AC are both now fun in that they are challenging thrill rides you know will punish you if you make mistakes – and you will get that thrill of victory from when you pull it off well. They’re no longer farming content – which is good.

- CM and AC are both now fun in that they are challenging thrill rides you know will punish you if you make mistakes – and you will get that thrill of victory from when you pull it off well. They’re no longer farming content – which is good.

Glad to hear it – but shouldn’t that be what explorable mode is about? It is no secret that explorable mode is supposed to be harder – so shouldn’t story mode be for those that don’t wish to spend the amount of time you have researching and balancing their character?

I did it for the first time with a group of friends yesterday on story mode since the patch to see what the fuss was about.

Rather than say it was “difficult”, it merely became a longer process since all that was added were more trash mobs, some CC and lots of knockbacks (I felt like a pinball). I’m not entirely opposed to some of the changes but if there’s something to complain about, it’s the hp meat shields and the hounds inducing fear one after another. The hp thing in general across all the dungeons for the trash mobs were ridiculous from the beginning and it shouldn’t take more than a minute or two for a whole group to down one mob. I kindly ask you reduce it some because it’s ridic as it is. And the fearing… There’s a handful of these hounds and they’re all inducing fear one after another and when we get knocked down, we’re getting bitten to death with little room to react to the attacks.

All in all, it took no more than an hour to clear, we died a few careless deaths but we weren’t impressed with the changes. This coupled with your at-least-admitted horribly flawed and currently bugged rewards system… Whatever, Anet.