Guild Wars 2

Hi folks. A couple weeks ago I released an Ascalonian Catacombs video guide that was well received. I just finished the next one, covering Caudecus’s Manor, and I’ll be doing an entire series covering all eight dungeons.

These aren’t just recorded dungeon runs with accompanying voice chatter. These are edited, narrated strategy guides that lay out for you how the dungeon works and how you can best defeat it, and many (many!) hours go into each one. I know how frustrating it can be when a dungeon party just isn’t working out, and making sure you have the knowledge you need to succeed and have fun is the entire reason I’m making these. I hope you find them useful.

Ascalonian Catacombs (full video)

Hodgins’s Path (link)

• The six burrows in the first event on this path are not equivalent; they form two spawn chains of three burrows each. By killing the correct three burrows first, you can get down to one active burrow, and cut down the graveling spawns, earlier.

Detha’s Path (link)

• Do not revive Detha mid-combat during the waves of Ascalonian ghosts. A new wave spawns whenever Detha starts or resumes repairs on a mortar; revive her with a wave up and you could be facing a double spawn.

Tzark’s Path (link)

• Unlike the Howling King, Colossus Rumblus has a fixed order to his abilities. He alternates between the rockfall and his scream, and will use at most two abilities before burrowing. Use this to know when you can move about freely and when you need to focus on staying behind him.

Caudecus’s Manor (full video)

Asura Path (link)

• For Gunpowder Morgan, have four party members dash across the barn and up to where the adds spawn while a fifth stays in the cutscene. When his cutscene ends, you’re already in melee and can kill them before the ranged damage becomes an issue.

Seraph Path (link)

• For the door event, have the party grab kegs without aggro’ing, then stack right outside aggro range and count down + pop Swiftness. One player drops their keg (which makes all the bandits run to where the keg was dropped), grabs a new keg, and runs to the door. The other four simply dash to the door and place their kegs. Area knockbacks and Guardian wards+Sanctuary can buy you more time.

Butler Path (link)

• The traps in the corridor after Wahlen don’t activate until Wahlen dies, and they’re deactivated by getting far enough into the next room, not killing the bandit trio there. Just park a guy next to the door before Wahlen dies, then have him cancel the cutscene, dodge/Aegis/Blind the bandits, jump onto the rock face, and run ten feet along the ramp to disable the traps.

A Twilight Arbor guide is next on my agenda. Safe travels in Tyria.

Sticky this, much much better than the other “guide” thread.

Regarding the door event on CM exp, Seraph path: a Ranger friend pointed out the Ranger elite Entangle, which can root all the bandits for 20 seconds. If you have a Ranger in your party, the event should be trivial.

Oh man, dont do these in order haha, I dont think I can wait that long for CoE front door path haha.

Awesome guides, should be stickied. Looking forward to TA. Also, why did you decide to not do story mode guides? Did you think they were too easy?

This fell off the front page. I would like to use this bump to thank all of the people involved in the expertly crafted and wonderfully informative videos. You have produced a beautiful piece of work.

Heartfelt thanks for the hard work I know it takes to produce guides of this caliber. I know it can be easy to get burnt out on such work, and that doing such work for the community is a labor of love. Just know that it’s work like this that can make the difference in helping entire guilds either enjoy and be successful at dungeons, or deciding internally that “dungeons suck in this game and aren’t worth bothering with”.

The chatter that happens on forums like these often aren’t representative of what players really think and do. In actual practice, guilds are an echo chamber among themselves. My guild wrote off dungeons here as being abysmally designed and not at all fun after trying AC and CM. We walked away entirely, in wait and see mode, hoping for significant redesign from Anet.

Only guides like these would ever help/entice a guild like mine to try again after enough of us are in level 80 exo gear.

I’m sure my experience and my guild’s experience and attitude are not unique.

Hey Kethas, do you mind sharing your spec with me? i just got through viewing some of your vidoes and they are very informative.

Very good thread, fun and useful videos, stick it please.

Bumping this as this is far superior to the current guide thread. Much appreciated for the effort put into this.

very nice guides.

Great videos and great guides.I agree with you that Wiping is over rated.
I’d really like to see new videos soon.Those here are very good explained.
Keep the good work.

Great guides! My small guild already farms AC paths 1 and 2, allowing us to buy weapons for many members.
We were able to complete path 3, but the first event was really hard.

On Sunday we ran CM explorable paths 2 and 3 for the first time and had a really hard time.
I’m sure the guide will help us next time!

Sticky, this, delete other useless sticky

Even though my guild runs dungeons almost religiously, it was still entertaining to watch. Great tips and great humor.

I concur with a sticky.

Hey, a lot of posts, awesome. Let me take care of those questions:

dmt.3490:

Also, why did you decide to not do story mode guides? Did you think they were too easy?

Ehhhh, I wouldn’t say “too easy.” I’m not a fan of blaming someone for not happening to have already played a ton of MMOs and have the reflexes, etc. I just thought that explorable mode guides would provide more help to more people.

There’s also the fact that most people tend to run story modes only a handful of times per character, whereas explorables get farmed, so even smaller optimizations are useful there.

Svarty.8019:

This fell off the front page. I would like to use this bump to thank all of the people involved in the expertly crafted and wonderfully informative videos. You have produced a beautiful piece of work.

Just me, actually. Well, me, a lot of ice water, and about twenty cans of various sodas once I hit crunch time on a particular video. I wonder if they’d consider a sponsorship deal…

shaktiboi.5194:

Heartfelt thanks for the hard work I know it takes to produce guides of this caliber. I know it can be easy to get burnt out on such work, and that doing such work for the community is a labor of love. Just know that it’s work like this that can make the difference in helping entire guilds either enjoy and be successful at dungeons, or deciding internally that “dungeons suck in this game and aren’t worth bothering with”.

Thanks, I appreciate it. These videos (my first one especially, for AC) are basically giant holes that I throw days of my time into with little clue about how much good it will or won’t do. It’s only productive if people watch it and use it, so posts like these show me that, yes, folks out there in the GW2-verse are benefiting and having a better time. Cheers.

LNCXerro.9513:

Hey Kethas, do you mind sharing your spec with me?

http://www.gw2builds.org/create/bwe_1/guardian#0.0.2.0-3.7.18.16.2-30.25.5.0.10-3.2.11.2.1.6

I use a combination of that and a (mostly) power/precis/conddamage/MF set. The thinking goes something like this:

• I can improve my survivability by better play, knowing mechanics, dodging correctly, etc. It’s much harder to improve damage.
• Any time I am NOT aggro’d, I want to be in a glasscannon build.
• Any time I am NOT in an instance, I want to be in a glasscannon build.

My current set is probably too far towards glass cannon, though. I did the tons of AC runs to prep for the video back when DR was bugged, so I was shortchanged 300+ tokens and only bought one Power/Tough/Vit piece (the chest). I have, I think, FOUR pieces of Power/Precis/Conddamage CM gear + a greatsword.

This is very helpful, I enjoyed the concise information on the paths and I look forward to the guides for later dungeons.

hey, are you working on guides for rest of the dungeons?

btw I am having a hard time watching your vids, for some reason they load incredibly slow on youtube, doesn’t matter if I watch them at home or in school with 100 mbs :/

Please could you redo the audio of Colossus Rumblus? Apparently, he now does his uber scream between each of the other powers.