Guild Wars 2

It’s almost comical.
When somebody first hollered ‘run!’ and the group started tearing kittenbooty forward through all manner of nasties like the devil himself was on their heels, I actually looked behind me to try and identify the danger. That’s how dissonant this practice is with all my expectations of what a dungeon run should be like. It literally took me a solid minute to figure out we were running through the danger, not from it.

Don’t get me wrong.
I can merrily skip past that small enclave of baby spiders in AC EXP on my way to the traps boss and barely even register that as decision (much less an odd decision). But somehow running past hordes of worms, packs of spiders and a half dozen NPC mobs in TA EXP immediately brought to my lips the first note of verbal confusion I’ve utter thus far since starting.

I’m thinking it’s some culture thing from Guildwars 1 that veterans of that game are just so used to they don’t even think twice about it anymore. But just as a general public service announcement; this actually kind of bears some explanation to the rest of us. Because, while you can skip small select clusters of trash mobs in other games, it’s not normally feasible to skip basically the entire dungeon by just simply running past it. This is odd enough to warrant typing out a sentence or two going over the battleplan, at least in earlier dungeons.

On a personal note, aside from the initial confusion;
…I’m not just super sure I’m enjoying this?
But I’m torn about suggesting incentives otherwise (like trash mobs can drop dungeon armor currency) to make my experiences more likely to be enjoyable. Because, while I’m quite the old lady who can remember the days of camping spawn windows for hours on end, I’ve never before been the type of old lady to shake my cane and grouse some grade-A young whippersnapper babble at the latest newfangled thing. Is anybody else struggling to enjoy this and would appreciate suggestions to incentivize fighting the trash mobs, or should I just go find myself a porch and rocking chair?

If they’re skipping the content, especially if it’s reasonable and not broken hard, then they are probably running the dungeons for the wrong reason.

What you saw is just a speedrun. The purpose is to be as fast as possible, every minute makes the difference, at the end of the day, if you’re planning 30+runs.
This kind of idiocity will end next hours when finally DR will be patched.
It should work with a timer, so completing a dungeon too much fast will reward less tokens than 60 as expected.
So, finally, you will kill all adds, not running half dungeon anymore, no more reasons to do it.

Lucas Ashrock.8675:

What you saw is just a speedrun. The purpose is to be as fast as possible, every minute makes the difference, at the end of the day, if you’re planning 30+runs.
This kind of idiocity will end next hours when finally DR will be patched.
It should work with a timer, so completing a dungeon too much fast will reward less tokens than 60 as expected.
So, finally, you will kill all adds, not running half dungeon anymore, no more reasons to do it.

yea right, because a punishment system instead of a reward system will surely make those people do the trash instead of just idling for x minutes in front of the endboss…

Ah well. Depends. If people is so idiot to prefer to watch a final boss for 20 minutes, moving a bit the character to not go afk logging off, up to them. Idiocity doesn’t have a limit

I find this stuff very annoying. I wanna do dungeons properly, not bugging mobs or taking advantage of issues with mob ai to get ahead.

Yeah, I made a thread about this, it’s pretty excruciating. It’s part of a whole bundle of exploits of the GW2 mob AI, along with a bunch regarding boss leashing and areas they will and won’t target. (I use the word exploits in the traditional sense, not the “this should get you banned” sense; it’s just something that the devs should patch up somehow.)

Funny topic.

I do enjoy skipping all the unnecessary fights for plenty of reasons.
First of all, we’ve been given a very handy set of skills and abilities, like invisibility, swiftness, wardings and teleporting. I believe, that one of the reasons why it was given to players, is, that they could sneak past foes which they don’t need to fight. Being resourceful isn’t really anything wrong, and fighting the same AI over and over can drain all your patience away.

Second of all, some players simply don’t have time to run a full length explorable path, which could take over an hour or two, while they could save a lot of time by skipping everything that could be skipped. Not all of us are old enough to enjoy our retirement

Third of all, the skipping gives me the most adrenaline rush in this game. I think many other players simply enjoy it as well. The foes aren’t easy to skip, especially the Knights in TA, who can knock you down and pin down to the ground. It does require a nice cooperation between teammates, and utilizing a lot of different skills from different professions, to make it a successful skip. Exaclty as much you need to fight those, it’s just a shorter and more efficient way.

On the other hand, I do understand people who dislike skipping, as they either feel like they should clear all the foes in the area, or they feel like it’s not “honorable” to run away and pass by some foes or they are simply worried about their survival and repairing costs. I know that there are many reasons to hesitate, that’s why I always ask people in my party whether they are fine with skipping, or they prefer fighting all the foes. I am fine with both options, but if posisble, I would like to skip. I do want fancy looking armors and weapons too, but I can’t spend enough time to do it slow way.

As a side note: do the people who don’t approve of skipping also fight every single foe in their sight whenever they expore all the zones? I don’t think so, and I guess it’s the same with Dungeons for me.

I used to kill every single “red dot” on my compass when I played GW1. After some time I learned Speed Clearning, and it totally turned me on. It was the most enjoyable part of the game. Not for the loot, not for the profit, but the perfect cooperation with my friends, synergy between our skills and adrenaline rush. I simply love it, and I wouldn’t like it one bit, if Arena.Net would disable all the possibilities of skipping foes.

So whether you like something or not, try to consider the other half of the unvierse, which might enjoy doing things in a different way than you’d do. It’s a very subjective matter, and I believe that the parties should agree upon skipping or clearing on the very begining of the dungeon, just as I try do it.

Well the skills you mention are available for a tactical purpose during a hard fight, not run 3/4 of a dungeon.Do i need to explain why there is invisibility, or speedboost skills, seriously?
Nice for you having fun running all the dungeon. This is not play a game against enemies, it’s cheating their AI. 3 more mobs along the way, or a bit better positioning with AI ready to pwn you if you try to run past them, and you can forget your funny run. This is exatly what devs are planning

Over all, the dungeon timer will help a bit, just to be sure you’re not trying to skip the entire dungeon except bosses, because “you love the thrill of run”.

I guess on future patches we will have a better timer per dungeon, so (example) a dungeon path completed from hardcore players (playing regurarly, no skip) in 2 hours, will have 2 hours as a minimum. No skip.
After all, as you see, some players keep posting timings. Devs are not ignoring those posts

This game is not meant to be completed, nor giving special rewards like dungeon armor/weapons for free because you don’t have time

Lucas’s post summed it up. If you don’t have the time to invest in completing a full EM run of a dungeon, then you shouldn’t be looking forward to obtaining the Prestige gear from that dungeon.

And by a “FULL” run I mean, not skipping content.

Yeah, seriously – give me examples of a more efficient usage of the skills mentioned above Will you say, that swiftness is used so you can move faster between killing one foe to another? And invsibility is used just to revive your allies without being noticed, or lose aggro when you are barely alive? Well, I still won’t agree that that kind of usage is any more efficient Skipping is also a tactical approach, in my humble opinion. You just do “Retreat!”, but instead of literally running away, you run past them.

So, what about pulling. Do you use this “tactic”, or do you charge in and take all the foes in a pack, at once? Isn’t pulling also “cheating” in your dictionary? Or is pulling allowed as a “fair play”? What about kitting? Is it also cheating? Can you defeat Giganticus Lupicus in Arah without running around and kitting it from a safe distance?

We will probably not agree on that opinion, and as I mentioned, it’s very subjective. For me, skipping is same kind of tactic as pulling, tanking or kitting. Foes in dungeons require players to use optimally clever ways to f i n i s h it and avoid tremendous repairing costs, thus, we do just that. I understand that some people might dislike that, but I can’t find anything wrong about doing that still.

Also, I don’t see a point complaining about that. If you dislike skipping, don’t do that, and play with people who share your point. I bet there are even more of those than “skippers”. I’m sure you will love your 3 hours runs and repairing bills

Ah, now it’s a matter whether i deserve a prestige armor or not? Well, I find your argument very funny, to say the least And I will stop my discussion here, as I still think we won’t find a compromise, as you seem to be very upset about skipping and the rational arguments won’t find an undestanding.

I’m not going to just ignore everyone but OP even though most of you are making biased statements without any sign of compromise or understanding, but I’ll reply to the OP first.

So:

Dear OP,

In Guild Wars 1 skills were handled a bit differently and character builds were extremely robust and diverse, utilizing the skill system players found ways to “Speed-clear” dungeons (A quick ratio: Underworld took 5 hours with a balanced team, they brought runs down to 15 minutes average). This became a huuuuge e-sport in the community where entire guilds dedicated to it formed, there were constant record breakers and it became a pretty serious deal, eventually that instance specifically got nerfed since it was hurting the economy, however speed-clearing was so popular that it was left alone.

Many of the players that started this trend are carry-overs from guild wars 1, most of them don’t even do it for the profit or gear, it’s just super fun to see how much time you can knock off a dungeon run. I have a few suggestions for you:

1. Give it a try with friends or your guild, finding shortcuts on dungeons is a rewarding experience, you learn more about game mechanics and that knowledge can and probably will carry over into other gaming formats.

2. If it really bothers you and you just don’t enjoy it try to find a guild or group to do them the gritty way. If you make a thread here on the forums you’ll get dozens of people who would like to do a nice balanced clear.

Now, to address both biased sides of the argument:

1. Just because people want to clear trash mobs doesn’t make them stupid, it doesn’t make them noobs, and it doesn’t make them jerks. Different people like different things, some people like the long fights that lead deeper and deeper into enemy territory, it’s immersion for them.

2. Just because Chazor Teh Ninja and his guild want to rush dungeons doesn’t make them exploiters, cheaters, or jerks. Speedclearing was a meta game format in the last game, while most of you are coming from other MMO’s where this isn’t possible you need to understand that Guild Wars 2 is the merging of several extremely different communities. If you don’t want to do it then don’t do it, don’t complain because chaz got cool loot faster than you, what the hell does it matter?

Just do what you guys want to do, stop trying to inhibit or provoke others. Arenanet made a firm stance well before announcing betas that this is going to be a game where you are not limited by metas, other players, or your class. A game where anyone can play how they want to play.

Addressing speedclearing aside, I would like to say that yes, exploits such as jumping the gate in magg chain in CoF is kitten Running past trash mobs is not.

Stay breezy, Rask

You do realize that there are some fights in CM EM where its actually part of the dungeon that you sneak past and skip certain trash mobs. In fact, unless you want to enjoy many deaths, trying to engage the trash mobs (talking about the pit fighters under ground where there are 10+ elites mobs in a circle, and pulling 1 pulls all of them) is suicide.

In fact, there is a convenient path to the side that part of the story of the EM path tells you to run past them.

There’s absolutely no incentive to fight overtuned trash mobs for the same loot that drops from mobs I can kill in 1/5 the time elsewhere.

With the tokens only awarded for completion, what reason do I have to not avoid every encounter possible?

Nice post Rask, I wish I could put it just as nicely as you did
Just to add a note – I’ve been talking only about skipping groups in a “fair way”, not by using exploits like the one mentioned in the CoF dungeon (which I’ve never done).

pretty good laugh from this thread, ty

people skip mobs because

A) theyre not worth the time investment
B) they WILL kill somebody and make them lose money
C) theres a boss after, and if you need to blow big cooldowns to not die; you just kittened yourself for that boss fight (took extra time to clear this mob + rather have to wait on cooldown or use that skill 1 less time vs boss)
D) they want their tokens for the gear.
E) theyre there to get the 60×3 from the paths and then head back to their buddies / PVP / WVW etc… not everybody wants to spend 90 mins clearing one dungeon when they can do it in 30-40 and get 90% of the same reward (and what if they dont even want the 4 extra frayed cloth and white chainmail helm?)

Don’t rag on my chainmail helm!

They.9516:

1. Give it a try with friends or your guild, finding shortcuts on dungeons is a rewarding experience, you learn more about game mechanics and that knowledge can and probably will carry over into other gaming formats.

2. If it really bothers you and you just don’t enjoy it try to find a guild or group to do them the gritty way. If you make a thread here on the forums you’ll get dozens of people who would like to do a nice balanced clear.

1 What exactly do you learn about game mechanics running between mobs, one day explain me lol

2 No problem. Anet will force us

i actually got a rare once during TA exp

was a lvl56 rifle while im lvl80

Lucas Ashrock.8675:

1 What exactly do you learn about game mechanics running between mobs, one day explain me lol

2 No problem. Anet will force us

dodging and how to avoid damage and deal with movement impairing conditions?

was real hard to answer that…………..

Lucas Ashrock.8675:

1 What exactly do you learn about game mechanics running between mobs, one day explain me lol

2 No problem. Anet will force us

You’ve brought nothing to this discussion at all. I’ll go into extreme detail on game mechanics if you’d like to pm me, maybe then you can explain to me how chazor clearing a dungeon in 15 minutes with his buddies hurts you as a player.

Could be an interesting info-swap don’t you think?

you can kill the mobs in ta if you want.its just that they arent worth the effort.chain knockdowns,chain aoe knockdowns,chain aoe conditions,chain paralyze,if it wasnt for all the chaining then it wouldnt be so bad

Buff Jesus.4263:

i actually got a rare once during TA exp

was a lvl56 rifle while im lvl80

Lucas Ashrock.8675:

1 What exactly do you learn about game mechanics running between mobs, one day explain me lol

2 No problem. Anet will force us

dodging and how to avoid damage and deal with movement impairing conditions?

was real hard to answer that…………..

Running between 30 mobs 1shotted when caught doesn’t exactly teach me so much

There is a difference in “Sneaking” past a mob and “Bugging” it out. Getting by mobs by avoiding and evading them without gaining aggro is tactical, however, when we refer to skipping in this game atm, most people run thru, with aggro and hope to survive until the adds bug out and return. Is it a tatic? Yes a lame one. Level of skill required, novice-intermediate, based on your class.

With killing adds. I do most runs close to or slightly over 45 mins. After figuring out how to deal with certain adds and mobs, its pretty simple. If killing adds is that hard and it takes people 3 hours, its very indicative of where peoples’ skill level of play is at.

When people cry about good players being punished, you better fit under the category:

A. Do all trash mobs, clear all boss mechanics without bugging mechanics under 1 hour.

Otherwise, if your a skipper complaining that your being punished. That’s just silly. If we added the WoW feature where mobs hunt you down to a corner. I’d be surprised at how many people who would no longer be able to do any of these dungeons under 3 hours or worse, unable to finish them. The trash mobs in some instances are “Significantly” hard.

I believe instead of using a DR system, we should be rewarded tokens on how much of the dungeon we clear at the end. For example, 90% dungeon clear = 60 tokens, greater then 50% dungeon clear = 30 tokens and less then 50% clear would be 15 tokens. This would reward the Good players who can do quick runs and clear most content and give less tokens for people who wish to just cheese for tokens and loot. This will promote people to become actually GOOD at this game vs. cheesing and claiming to be GOOD.

Haha, The same thing happened to me.
I was in TA Exp for the 7th time and this group decided to run past 3 of the worms that pop up just before the spiders prior to Fyonna.

I was a little dumbfounded by the decision to skip these pesky guys and realised they must be ‘speed running’ it. So I ran past them too and engaged the spiders after.
But we were still getting pelted by these in the back.

A couple of them died and found it hard to get back so we had to go back and kill these worms anyway.

Time saved: -5 minutes haha.

Amen, Belcross, and i like your idea too

Belcross.6127:

There is a difference in “Sneaking” past a mob and “Bugging” it out. Getting by mobs by avoiding and evading them without gaining aggro is tactical, however, when we refer to skipping in this game atm, most people run thru, with aggro and hope to survive until the adds bug out and return. Is it a tatic? Yes a lame one. Level of skill required, novice-intermediate, based on your class.

With killing adds. I do most runs close to or slightly over 45 mins. After figuring out how to deal with certain adds and mobs, its pretty simple. If killing adds is that hard and it takes people 3 hours, its very indicative of where peoples’ skill level of play is at.

When people cry about good players being punished, you better fit under the category:

A. Do all trash mobs, clear all boss mechanics without bugging mechanics under 1 hour.

Otherwise, if your a skipper complaining that your being punished. That’s just silly. If we added the WoW feature where mobs hunt you down to a corner. I’d be surprised at how many people who would no longer be able to do any of these dungeons under 3 hours or worse, unable to finish them. The trash mobs in some instances are “Significantly” hard.

I believe instead of using a DR system, we should be rewarded tokens on how much of the dungeon we clear at the end. For example, 90% dungeon clear = 60 tokens, greater then 50% dungeon clear = 30 tokens and less then 50% clear would be 15 tokens. This would reward the Good players who can do quick runs and clear most content and give less tokens for people who wish to just cheese for tokens and loot. This will promote people to become actually GOOD at this game vs. cheesing and claiming to be GOOD.

You use the word bug to describe actual game mechanics, it’s called leashing. Enemies have a “Patrol” Route or radius, once they pass this radius they reset to full health and return to the start of their loop. It’s not a bug, It’s not an exploit, it’s a mechanic. It was an intentional feature placed there by the developers, not an accident. Not going to argue on the legitimacy of skipping mobs because everyone in this mob has made up their minds well before they posted, just thought I would correct you.

So reset radius is the game mechanic you learn speedrunning a dungeon huh? Lol.

I think the primary problem is that there are no rewards associated with mobs. The recent changes also made chests fairly inconsequential (outside of the occasional core/lodestone). There really is just no incentive at the moment to kill anything. While it’s fine to argue that “this is not how you play the dungeon”, in practice that’s just not going to be enough.

I think the solution that can be attempted is mere to add “flags” to certain mobs. For instance, if you really want the players to fight the first spider in AC, then mark it with a flag that it would drop 5 tokens. The tokens won’t drop when you kill the spider boss, but will mark the final reward as having 5 tokens (the same can be applied to money afterwards). This will make mob skipping less desirable as you wouldn’t get the full 60 tokens and 26 silvers unless you kill the specific mobs for the flags. You can even apply this idea to elite mobs, and just randomly mark (randomly generated each instance) a couple of elite mobs. This way players will have to clear all mobs to make sure they achieve their awards, or they could skip a couple and hope they got lucky hitting the right ones. The only thing I concern of this method is to make sure the mobs marked are only on the primary path of the particular path chosen. Don’t mark it on some elite that’s way off in the middle of nowhere.

Basically, unless rewards are associated with killing trash mobs, or that progression is tied with killing trash mobs, there will be an effort at avoiding them, regardless of what is considered the “correct” way to play a dungeon.

Edit: Just to clarify, I would rather that the dungeons be made more difficult and a check point system than the flag for loot system described above. But the former would be take much more time to implement than the latter. We will see how it plays out.

This thread is silly. As someone who “runs” in Dungeons when they can, I’d like for you to try to see this from my perspective.

As someone who has played a good handful of games, both online and not, competitive and casual, one of the most common mistakes I’ve seen other players make is inhibiting themselves with imaginary rules. I’m sure we’ve all been there before, maybe it was playing Call of Duty and we get upset because someone is just running around using the “Noob-tube” and in your mind, getting free points without skill for it.

But the fact is that it’s not up to the players to make the rules in the game, it’s the developers. They hand you a rule-set, as a player, and you can BEND those rules to heck and back to win. That’s your job.

I’m not going to flatout say that people are wrong. But here’s a way to look at it: if you feel that you shouldn’t run through dungeons, don’t. If you feel “morally” obligated to fight at least two or three mobs in a dungeon, again, feel free. But don’t project your imaginary rules of the game on to every other player. It’s not fair, it’s not productive, it’s not accurate, and you are not “right”. As long as a group is obeying the rules of the game (none of which state you ever have to kill ANYTHING in a dungeon, by the way, save for a few bosses) then there’s nothing to complain about.

As someone who just finished getting an 80 Exotic Greatsword as a Catacombs reward, I can say that running dungeons is a very tactical thing. If it doesn’t feel satisfying on your first run, sorry, tough kittens. But if you get an average of 60 tokens per path, and the items you want cost 390, that’s a minimum of seven runs, possibly more depending on DR and second runs only granting 20 tokens. Aside from that, your path can be limited by the group you’re with. So at best you can do two runs a day (typically), with slight deviations of course. A few things start to happen after that:

1) You get SICK of looking at the dungeon you’re in. Heck, after three runs you’re downright tired of it, especially after each one takes roughly an hour with an inexperienced group, sometimes significantly longer.

2) You start to learn little “tricks”. Heck at this point, I could get through Catacombs with my eyes closed. I’m sure other people can as well. But on top of this comes a new emotion or feeling, maybe even a high (whatever you want to call it) and that’s the feeling of a completely synergized group. Once you start doing these runs, and coming to understand them very well, doing a run FLAWLESSLY in 20 minutes is arguably one of the most satisfying feelings I’ve had in this game.

3) You stop inhibiting yourself and start being more diligent with your calculations. You literally start thinking in terms of “okay this group has these enemies and requires these tactics to deal with; our group has professions x, y, z. Based on this variation we have an 80% chance of fighting this mob successfully, with one or two going down @ a cost of 12 silver total for repair. Running through mob is 60% chance of success, with potentially up to four going down for a total repair cost of 18 silver. Choice one is more efficient, fight mob, make sure you tell class x to remember to do action b to maximize success, call target priority and have profession y pull. chance of good item reward 10%, applying magic find booster and swapping out piece or two of armor to increase magic find chances and damage against ghost enemy, swap out traits and engage”. Your thought process can and will get incredibly refined IF you stop trying to convince yourself to fight EVERY MOB or ANY mob simply because “it feels like the right thing to do”.

To the person in this thread that said fighting a mob takes more skill than running past it, I would respectfully disagree. Many times if a mob is skipped, it is a more experienced leader determining that the return from the fight will be less than the cost of the engagement, and the chance of survival when running through is equal to or greater than
a direct engagement.

So, take that for what it’s worth I guess. My personal recommendation would be to actually run a dungeon for the rewards and get ONE, and then see how much you know and consider whether or not your previous evaluations of skill were correct. I’m guessing they won’t be. Also worth mentioning is that the PURPOSE of running dungeons in explore mode IS to grind them for tokens. If you’d like an easier run and just want to go through the dungeon again, replay story mode instead, as that is what it is designed for. Explore mode is for grinding for rewards and putting a heavy challenge on the group. Period.

Trash is 10x more annoying to fight than most bosses in this game.
Chain paralyze, chain knockdown, chain fear… or simply getting RNG kittened by aggro on all 5 mobs at once and instagibbed, etc.

So Risk >>> reward, which is why skipping trash is quite often the least painful solution.
The only way they’ll fix it is make trash cc a lot less, not be immune to cc so much, and actually have a chance to drop something decent, or at least coin.

I’ll stop skipping monsters when they stop having ludicrous health, and drop nothing good.

In all seriousness even if I was doing a proper run with guildies we’d probably still skip some trash. it’s simply MUCH easier. My teams chance of survival increases for every monster we skip. Simply because it’s easier to dodge damage if you’re constantly moving and prepared to pop all your survivability skills, and dont have to stop to DPS. That’s just basic common sense.

to anet. If you want me to do your content, either make it fun or rewarding for me to do so. Currently, killing trash monsters is neither.

Here’s my take on skipping mobs:

If it’s just a small pack or two, it’s probably not a big deal and were probably intended to be skipped in a tactical manner. Although, there might be some kind of grey area between being “tactical” and utilizing an “exploit”.

If it’s a larger wad of mobs then there’s something to consider. Are they all Silvers or Champions? If they are, then do they have to be killed using something outside our default skills (eg. by using a Siege Weapon or assistance from NPCs). Or are there subtle hints that the mobs can be skipped by following an alternate path? On the other hand, if they are lesser creatures, can they be easily plowed through using AoE abilities?

If anything, skipping would be situational. Exploiting AI is one thing, which I feel a bit iffy about. However, I wouldn’t be mad if I skipped a patrol pack or two. Entire rooms and corridors of trash on the other hand … I think I would feel somewhat “dirty” about the situation.

Skipping bosses on the other hand … no. I have no exceptions to this rule. Regardless of what MMO I play, if I lead the party and it’s a boss, then it dies. Yes, I’m kind of stubborn about that, but I have always opposed in “optional” bosses. It never made much sense to me.

A side note but if mounts were added to GW2 and you could use them in a dungeon to skip about half the trash, then I would find that quite annoying.