Guild Wars 2

So. Up front, I’m more a WvWer than a dungeon-er. Several of the dungeons I’ve only done story mode for, so my views may be a bit skewed based on that. However, from my experience the answer to many explorable encounters seems to be, “MOAR DEEPS.” And not just moar deeps, but “MOAR DEEPS NAO.”

I mostly run pretty balanced stats on my ele. I focus some on support, but all my armor is Carrion so I’m not neglecting my DPS stats. For many encounters I run D/D in dungeons, swapping to staff occasionally. I chose a cleric’s staff since the ele staff is such a support-y weapon anyways. My daggers are more offensive. I also have some guildies who like to run more control or condi builds that I play with fairly regularly.

These are the specific encounters that make me feel like support or condition builds are a liability.

• AC Explorable, Path 1
  -> Straight forward, burn the graveling burrows down. Unfortunately the burrows don’t take condition damage, and any support or tanking stats mean less DPS.
• AC Explorable, Path 3
  -> Since no amount of support will save the crystals, again, you’ve gotta burn the burrows down. Suffers from the exact same problem as AC 1. You have to hit hard and quickly and with direct damage, and anyone who can’t do that is kinda baggage.
• CoE Explorable, Path 1
  -> The easiest way to manage the exploding golems is to just kill them before they kill the person using the console by AoEing the hell out of the area in front of the console. Are we seeing a pattern yet?

I dunno. Again, maybe it’s just the majority of the ones I’ve done have been geared around this mechanic (Caudecus Manor Seraph path didn’t have this problem I recall), or maybe Anet expects us to respec for these and keep several sets of gear to do dungeons. If that’s the case, OK, but I probably won’t be doing too many dungeons then.

A better solution, imo, is to have objects take condition damage (and improve that “miss miss miss” you get with some melee weapons while you’re at it). Then my only gripe is that Cleric staff purchase I made … Not sure what the solution is to making purely offensive stats less desirable.

Personally i find pure DPS builds to be more of a liability, me and my guildies run together often in groups which are all support or mixed builds with survivability and synergy… we blow through most of the dungeons with ease. We occassionally grab a PUG for 5th spot and he is some leet DPS thief or 5 signet warrior with a greatsword… thats cool its their choice and we still complete dungeons fine but we spend a lot of time reviving them, that we may as well have gone with 4. (sometimes we do and its still just as easy ;P)

I have to agree that there are certain parts of certain dungeons, like the burrows in AC that you quoted, that require you to have high DPS output. But DPS isn’t the focus for all dungeons and indeed for the rest of AC you can go back to your condition/support build.

But you don’t actually have to retrait anything. You might need to change one or two weapons just for that part but I was under the impression that most people carried spare weapons around just in case they come in handy.

Everyone brings something different to the dungeon run. Maybe your DPS isn’t all the way up there but conditions are great on bosses and what kind of party doesn’t enjoy having someone with a support build on their team? Bearing in mind that people who focus on DPS usually go down pretty quick and I think someone who downs often and requires a lot of resurrections is more of a liability than someone who can deal nice damage over time. I’m pretty useless for DPS as well but if you’re good at everything then every stage would feel kind of easy and it wouldn’t feel much like a team effort to get through a dungeon.

So you don’t find the mechanics in these situations would be better with higher DPS?

I mean, we did them. We got through it. I just felt like in these instances I wasn’t really optimized, that the group was carrying me. From my experience, as long as people have enough survivability that they don’t die when breathed on the important things are:

• Dodging well
• Having condi removal
• DPS

…with a smattering of control skills spread across the group.

EDIT: Sorry, that was directed at Ainianu.

@lcp:

I do carry spare weapons … I just don’t usually carry the same type of weapon with different stat spreads. IE, I don’t carry both a berserker and a cleric staff or whatever. I keep one (two, in the case of daggers) of every weapon I can use on hand.

Oh I see what you mean. I would think it’s unnecessary to carry more than one staff around too. But there’s no point buying a staff just for like 5 or 10 minutes of ‘high DPS required’ per dungeon run. Are you saying your current staff would have noticeably lower DPS than if you used one that had maybe higher power/precision?

Yup, it certainly would. And/or if I were traited, say, to reduce the cooldown on fire attunement skills (which would mean little delay on dropping another Lava Font as soon as the first one is cast, etc. Lots of things I could do to bring up my DPS, but nothing I could do without carrying multiples of the same weapon type, keeping a second gear set and/or respeccing.

For instance, the way we ultimately did the CoE fight was for a thief to stealth me at first, then I’d slotted Armor of Earth and Arcane Shield so I just ate the explosions of the ones people couldn’t kill quickly enough or knock away. It worked, but it required waiting out my cooldowns, occasional resets because of the big golems’ lasers (I read they weren’t supposed to respawn until after each console use but they appeared to anyways) etc.

It just … wasn’t fun. And it could have been way, way simpler if we’d had higher direct AoE damage as a group instead of me and a condition guy.

CoE is ridiculous by the way so don’t be too disheartened. Quite a few of the other dungeons are comparatively easier. Honestly I think there are parts of dungeons where you just have to concede that it’s not your forte, but you would expect the other party members to be better at – it’s a team effort after all. Any party of randoms that I have run with in most dungeons that are like 4 DPS chumps and me have just wiped over and over again. You may not be the most helpful in one part but the party can’t complete the dungeon without you.

Though it would be nice if inanimate objects took condition damage, of course. I’m all for that too xD

I would like to see Anet let us put conditions on objects. It’s pretty unbalanced if you’re mainly condition DPS (as many are mainly power based), yet you suck at killing the objects in the dungeons. Add to the list of OP the prison crystals of subject alpha in CoE, the plant turrets in TA and just generally any object that has to be damaged.

It’s just unbalanced like it is now, when power builds can fully damage objects, and condition builds are worthless.

@LCP: Heh, I didn’t actually think the rest of CoE was that bad. Laser puzzle was creative and Project Alpha or whoever he was, was pretty easy.

And I said “we did them” but we actually couldn’t manage AC Path 3 with the group we had. A couple weren’t yet 80 (50s-60s) and there was me and a conditions guy so in the time alotted we didn’t get past the first burrows. Just decided to do a different path instead.

So, yeah. I know it doesn’t make sense for inanimate objects to suffer from conditions but imo fun > sense. Lol.

Nothing scares me more than seeing map chat for “LF Guardian/Warrior whatever dungeon they’re doing exp.” It screams "I’m a glass cannon build that relies on someone who thinks they can “tank” in order to live at all and will die anyways since there’s no aggro table in this game and things just have to look at me the wrong way." I’ve gone into dungeons like SE with almost full “support” groups when I bring guildies and it makes the run a snooze fest in comparison to pugs who’re all too clearly DPS focused. I don’t know if they’re playing worse, if they have ways to survive and just aren’t, or if they think that constantly reviving them is just part of the run, but it’s frustrating. Is condition damage “weak” in some parts of dungeons? Absolutely. But even my “DPS focused” elementalist friend has points down the water tree. As me and her used to say in WoW. “Dead DPS is 0 DPS.” And in dungeons where EVERYONE is at risk for taking damage no matter what you are or what you’re doing, some sort of survivability is key.

As long as you switch to a staff you should still do respectable damage to burrows with meteor. I also highly advice you to take get out a frost bow for the burrow part. Frost bows do massive damage on objects so when 2 or more people in the group run with them it should be pretty easy.

For p1 the 6 burrow spawn (which is harder then p3 in my opinion) you can take out 2 burrows alone in no time with frostbow/meteor. One other member also having a frostbow means 3 down that’s just 3 left. If you cant handle that something is wrong.
For p3 you can almost alternate meteor and frostbow (I think during the 3th it ll have cd), so just learn the order of spawns and you should be fine.

For CoE path 3 it’s better to have the ele use the console since they have mist form and obsedian flesh which means 7 sec of invurability + arcane shield for 3 blocks. If that’s not enough that nothing ll save you and you should start looking at your teammates.

Rainshine.5493:

So. Up front, I’m more a WvWer than a dungeon-er. Several of the dungeons I’ve only done story mode for, so my views may be a bit skewed based on that. However, from my experience the answer to many explorable encounters seems to be, “MOAR DEEPS.” And not just moar deeps, but “MOAR DEEPS NAO.”

I mostly run pretty balanced stats on my ele. I focus some on support, but all my armor is Carrion so I’m not neglecting my DPS stats. For many encounters I run D/D in dungeons, swapping to staff occasionally. I chose a cleric’s staff since the ele staff is such a support-y weapon anyways. My daggers are more offensive. I also have some guildies who like to run more control or condi builds that I play with fairly regularly.

These are the specific encounters that make me feel like support or condition builds are a liability.

• AC Explorable, Path 1
  -> Straight forward, burn the graveling burrows down. Unfortunately the burrows don’t take condition damage, and any support or tanking stats mean less DPS.
• AC Explorable, Path 3
  -> Since no amount of support will save the crystals, again, you’ve gotta burn the burrows down. Suffers from the exact same problem as AC 1. You have to hit hard and quickly and with direct damage, and anyone who can’t do that is kinda baggage.
• CoE Explorable, Path 1
  -> The easiest way to manage the exploding golems is to just kill them before they kill the person using the console by AoEing the hell out of the area in front of the console. Are we seeing a pattern yet?

I dunno. Again, maybe it’s just the majority of the ones I’ve done have been geared around this mechanic (Caudecus Manor Seraph path didn’t have this problem I recall), or maybe Anet expects us to respec for these and keep several sets of gear to do dungeons. If that’s the case, OK, but I probably won’t be doing too many dungeons then.

A better solution, imo, is to have objects take condition damage (and improve that “miss miss miss” you get with some melee weapons while you’re at it). Then my only gripe is that Cleric staff purchase I made … Not sure what the solution is to making purely offensive stats less desirable.

I think this is a serious issue in AC. The whole burrows thing is what makes DPS needed. And I feel exactly the same way for AC. Support or tanking seems a big liability.

But it’s different in other instances. A good non-glass cannon build can rally turn the tide when all your friends go down and you just survive and kite until you get reinforced. ITs because they aren’t dps races. LEss damage just means a longer but safer fight.

“•AC Explorable, Path 1
→ Straight forward, burn the graveling burrows down. Unfortunately the burrows don’t take condition damage, and any support or tanking stats mean less DPS.”

I think the problem is there are too many fail elementalists out there. who are fixed in the guild wars 1 idea that if youre a “Fire ele” that you have to only use fire skills.. the boons i get from attune swaps and the large assortment of control and healing and damage i can do to a large group of allys/enemies makes me highly valuable in a dungeon. whenever my guild goes they know to call me.. and also. i suggest using a staff in dungeons and during pve and WvW and to attunement swap like crazy, and see how much easier it is to bomb a group of flame legion while their frosted, crippled, immobalized, standing in a meteor shower, and lava font… and im /dancing next to the npc xD. grab the lvl 20 trait in arcane that increases staff AoE. itll do wonders!

Other than that i completely agree that a balanced elem is a successful elem… you have way to many options to limit yourself… we have the most skills activateable at one time and thats before we conjure the greatsword!

The COE event you are talking about is the one with constant robot spawning and that requires you to press the console?
If yes i found that the few times i have done it i as a support guardian was the most useful.
I was using a shield and a GS, using the AOE pull and the AOE bump to keep the button pusher safe.
Also as i had a lot of survivality i could activate the small robots to detonate before they reached the guy, while leading the big ones away.

That said, i also suuport the objects taking condition damage! =)