Guild Wars 2

Got a couple complaints about this place.

Complaint # 1 – Right before you fight Frost
In the first room there are two HUGE groups. Group one has like 3 or 4 Silvers and about 5 normal’s. Second group has the same. both groups are pulled seperatly… if you want to die repeatedly and never get past it right? We ended up finally having to use a group run speed buff and all of us sprint past the groups to the stairwell on the right and go halfway up the ramp, then use a group stealth to drop combat and make the horde go away. Then you have to drop down to the platform below and fight like 3 ranged silvers, then two more ranged silvers before you get to the second room.

At the second room use a ranger with a longbow and traited for extra distance to shoot the two silver rifleman on the top of platforms, making sure to stay in your bow range and out of thier gun range so you dont aggro the horde of normals and two elites below them. After the two rifleman are down go in and AOE the crap out of the normals then focus the 2 elites… hope you dont pick up the roamer’s… or it’s repeat of all the above after yopu wipe.

Now my actual complaint… Why are the trash mobs a hundred times more difficult than the bosses? In this explorer dungeon we probably wiped about 30 times on trash and only twice on the last boss. You have way too many mobs in this place. It needs to be toned down. This dungeon was, to the point, not fun at all. It is not simply challenging but just stupid.

Complaint # 2 – Boss fights? What bosses are those the pushovers with the purple or gold frames?
Here’s the strat to beat about 80% of them = Shoot – Shoot – Shoot – OMG the boss is looking at me = dodge/evade – shoot – shoot – shoot – dodge/evade cause hes looking at me again – Drop group heal – move out of the stuff on the ground[rinse/repeat]

The trash is way more of a challenge if a challenge for you is smashing your face into a brick wall.

Complaint # 3 – Downscaling for higher levels
I am level 80 and running this. My loots from the whole dungeon consist’s of about 2 rows of blues that I salvaged for TP auctions that got me about 6 silver total. made no more than 3 or 4 silver from mob drops and trophies sells. Paid about 5 silver to portal to the map from ore then another 5 silver to go back to ore after it was done, then about 20 silver in armour repairs. Thats me losing 20 silver to run this dungeon. Additionally get to the final boss (Frost) and clean his clock and no chest spawns nor any loot other than a white level 43 gun that is lootable off him directly? Is this normal? So i pretty much have to grind event’s in ore for an hour to run a dungeon, just so i dont run out of money?

Overall this is our second explorer mode dungeon as a guild and after we got done in this place last night we had 2 people saying that they are through with pve in gw2, one making fun of the two who said they were done with pve, and 2 others who agreed this might be the worst dungeon they have ever run in any mmo second only to stratholme in original wow.

Im venting, I feel better now.

Hi. I’ve done CM explorable maybe 6 or 8 times. The pull you mention in your complaint #1 is for me the hardest part of the dungeon. The only time our group didn’t wipe is when we were with a mesmer using the phantasmal defender with +50% health from the signet (maybe more from traits). We pulled the group around a corner so that they would all bunch up. I tried to keep regeneration, AE heals, aegis and protection up on the group as much as possible. We used AE/PBAE knockdowns, knockbacks and blinds. We had an engineer with bombs that healed the group. We used AE damage to kill the enemies. When someone went down, we didn’t try to bring him back up, instead we tried to kill an enemy as fast as possible in order to rally him. It’s a very hard pull.

I think it’s intended that people try to avoid the thrown bombs, which seem to be the highest source of damage from that pull. However I’ve found that there are so many red circles, so little space and we have so little endurance that this doesn’t work too well.

If someone else has a better strategy for that pull, I’d like to hear it.

Now about your 20s repairs, that seems excessive to me. There are probably some things you could do to reduce the amount of deaths/wipes you have. I’m not sure about your situation, spec or group makeup, since you don’t really go into detail about those, but make sure that no one in your group is using a glass cannon build. Everybody needs to pull their own weight. It’s not like other MMOs where you can expect someone else to take the damage for you, and just concentrate on DPS. Also try to bring as many group buffs or AE conditions like blind and weakness as you can.

Our dungeon group consists of:

80 thief
80 guardian
80 warrior
80 ranger (me)
80 elementalist or another warrior or another necromancer (depends on who wants to run and who is online)

For the other people in the group I have no idea how they are traited but i do know that when we entered CM last night we all compared toughness and we were all about the same “within +/- 50”.

My dungeon spec is traited for 10 marksmanship (power) / 20 wilderness survival (Toughness) / 10 nature magic (Vitality) / 30 Beast mastery (Healing). For group buffs I bring my ground target group heal, group heal spirit, group protection spirit, bear that can tie up at least 1 silver frame indefinately and csteady never ending dps <- although not very high.

The only time I die is when everyone else is dead and the mobs come after me. The only time everyone dies is if there are more than 2 silver’s. 3 or more and people start dying every time. we really had no problems untill we hit the two rooms before frost and then thats when the slaughter fest began. Those two packs of mobs tied us up for about 15 wipes before we finally said kitten it and came up with the idea of group running/ stealthing past them. That idea sucked cause we were constantly aggroing crap behind us and to the side that caused another 5 or so wipes. After we finally managed to get to the last room and found the whole scenario repeated half the group almost went into a nerd rage.

After wiping three more times on the two elites and gaggle of normals we finally realised there was a pack of 3 roamers entering the area as well as two silver gunners up in the rafters. Another 3 or 4 wipes before we found how to kill the gunners (ranger longbow method) without aggroing the mobs below which made the big pull pretty easy.

At frost I think we only died once figuring out how to dodge that stupid ice flame thrower by jumping in the water. He was a joke compared to the trash mobs preceding him. Just lots of jumping in and out of the water for whomever had aggro on him.

Some things that I remember were useful in CM:

- Group condition removal (as a guardian with Pure of Voice and specced in Virtues I have 4, and our warrior was bringing Shake it off!). Some bandits can stack bleeds very high. Whenever an ally had a bleed on him, we would remove it.
- Thugs heal other bandits, so they are usually our first priority.
- Once we understood that the riflemen 1-shot you (or almost) if you are moving, we stopped moving when they target us. You can tell when you have this orange/red circle at your feet.
- Keep archers for last since they don’t hurt that much and are hard to kill.

Now when I run CM explorable, as a 0/0/10/30/30 Guardian with Cleric’s exotics, I only die 1-3 times per run. But at first I used to die a lot. Our group is usually 3 members of our guild, me, a Warrior with high toughness and condition damage, and an engineer who changes specs a lot. The other two are usually random people we pick up outside the dungeon. So with a well coordinated guild group, if you keep practicing, eventually you should stop dying so much,…

Big packs of normal’s are easy, big packs of normals with one or two silvers is easy – it’s just when there are more than 2 silver frames were everything seems to go south. Can anyone offer methods for how to deal with 3 or 4 of them?

Is aoe weakness’ and aoe blinds the only way to do it?

PS. we know to check the specials below thier health bar prior to entering combat for what they do. Obviouslty kill the healers and buffer’s first ect…