Guild Wars 2

Having a gotten full armor, the greatsword and longbow in AC, I could not understand people complaining about the dungeons. For the most part it was enjoyable, challenging, but not frustrating. Having moved on to CoF, I again felt the same way. Then, I tried CM and TA, and wow, what a terrible experience. Both have been a complete “cheese” fest, and have been nothing but frustrating. If anet is designing the dungeons to be so difficult or boring, that every opportunity to skip content is being used, that is a poor design flaw.

I had no problems with either AC or CoF as far as completely skipping content, and using every available trick to get through the dungeon (ok, Magg sucks and especially the part where he arms the explosives, and that turns into a cheese fest, but overall it is not like CM or TA.) I literally had zero fun doing them. So my advice to those complaining about dungeons, stick with AC or CoF (maybe CoE, HoTW or Arah, I haven’t done the explorable modes there yet). I sincerely hope that the dungeons are fixed, so that cheesing is not the only available option. I want to be able to complete, without feeling like I would rather stick forks directly into my eyeballs.

Still love the game, but I will be extremely cautious about which dungeons I am trying to do.

In TA and CM to a slightly lesser degree, these fights are tedious. Take too long, there are too many of them, and you have a reasonable chance of dying. (Everybody hates those violent blooms (sic?))
Although personally I don’t like skipping content at all, I can understand people cheese through these dungeon.

I mean, why fight the one-shotting boss in the middle of VB’s with up to 6 adds that do massive damage if you can stand in an unreachable spot for the monsters and slowly kill if from there risk free :P

I think with TA, at least, the problem is the extreme lack of waypoints. There are tough encounters in the dungeon, and they’re a challenge to learn – which is obviously going to lead to a fair number of deaths as you experiment and figure things out.

The problem is that you can easily spend two minutes running back (through empty, already-cleared parts of the dungeon) to get to where you were, and then lose a fight in half that time. And that’s assuming that you can essentially run straight back – sometimes you’ll get held up for another minute along the way because you’ll end up in a situation where infinitely-respawning Volatile Blossoms get Obstructed by most of your attacks, and respawn faster than you can kill them.
When you end up spending significantly more time getting back from a failed attempt at beating an encounter than you actually do attempting that encounter, it becomes a lot more tempting to try to just bypass the encounter entirely, even if that’s not really very fun or interesting either.

I don’t think CM is all that bad for waypoints. In my experience, there are only a couple of encounters that people try to bypass in CM, and those are mostly due to them being kind of PITA encounters where you’re basically either hoping that one of the two enemy groups that aggros breaks off and runs back, or you’re trying to stack as many AoE’s as possible on a corner as they all run around it.

Please don’t complain about TA, that dungeon is cakewalk even with pug’s. I went from Arah (first dungeon to explore cause I just love the armor) to Twilight Arbor and what a drastical change that was.

TA is still one of the “intro” to EM dungeons. Its really only problematic on path F/F due to facing knights over and over again.

Want an easy run? Do Up path.
Hints:

You can melee the wurms rather safely. If you any class with a parry ability you don’t even need to dodge – just parry the wurms slam attack. Also blooms = insta rally.

Pull spiders into the cave and AE them one pack at a time.

The spider boss always alternates the same two attack (Unless interrupted). It will go Breath-AE-Breath-AE once you realize this it is easy to predict when to dodge and when to side step.

Kill next 4 spiders and run across to next boss.

Pull her into tunnel and beat on her to death. Mostly cheeze, but it isn’t like it is an amazing fight you would be missing anyway. And a WAY better tactic than the good old 2/3 “tactic” anyday.

If you killing – Auto target the knight. Knights are your BIGGEST threat and everything else is so so. Use forms of CC/Stuns to prevent him from crushing your team. The pack of 4 will sometimes stop and sometimes follow, it seems based on the NPC AI Ally. If they stop have a nearby pulling class single them out one at a time.

Archers are easily cleared/skipped.

The two pull (Gold + Silver) can be split by any decent pet pull to make it tons easier.

The boss is melee friendly despite what some groups think, but if your not melee just range and dodge. It is seriously easier than anything you did in AC.

Haha people complaining about CM… the dungeon where 90% of mobs can be skipped.

The only problem I have with TA is the mushrooms that keep respawning. Some classes aren’t very good at killing them (and some can’t at all, due to bugs). Given the respawn rate, the only two classes that can clear them at any reasonable pace are guardians with a staff or thieves with a shortbow. They need to be made less dense and/or have a lower respawn rate.

@Xyrm

A tip, the plants wont shoot poison if your invisible

(If you catch my drift and have a thief on your team, Ill leave it to the rest to figure out how to utilize it)

Why is TA considered the starter EM dungeon when AC is the first dungeon you can get access to both SM and EM?

Frankly, all EM dungeons should have a “cheese” path, a medium path, and a hard path… with the rewards corresponding to the difficulty (from quality of drops to token amounts).

Bruno Sardine.2907:

Why is TA considered the starter EM dungeon when AC is the first dungeon you can get access to both SM and EM?

Frankly, all EM dungeons should have a “cheese” path, a medium path, and a hard path… with the rewards corresponding to the difficulty (from quality of drops to token amounts).

This is dangerous. Even with DR people will still min max. If I can make for sure 10 silver and finish a path in 10 minutes because its easy I will do that over a path that gives 50 silver but takes over an hour. Not that its a bad idea, just needs to be implemented correctly.

Dead.7385:

TA is still one of the “intro” to EM dungeons. Its really only problematic on path F/F due to facing knights over and over again.

Want an easy run? Do Up path.
Hints:

You can melee the wurms rather safely. If you any class with a parry ability you don’t even need to dodge – just parry the wurms slam attack. Also blooms = insta rally.

Pull spiders into the cave and AE them one pack at a time.

The spider boss always alternates the same two attack (Unless interrupted). It will go Breath-AE-Breath-AE once you realize this it is easy to predict when to dodge and when to side step.

Kill next 4 spiders and run across to next boss.

Pull her into tunnel and beat on her to death. Mostly cheeze, but it isn’t like it is an amazing fight you would be missing anyway. And a WAY better tactic than the good old 2/3 “tactic” anyday.

If you killing – Auto target the knight. Knights are your BIGGEST threat and everything else is so so. Use forms of CC/Stuns to prevent him from crushing your team. The pack of 4 will sometimes stop and sometimes follow, it seems based on the NPC AI Ally. If they stop have a nearby pulling class single them out one at a time.

Archers are easily cleared/skipped.

The two pull (Gold + Silver) can be split by any decent pet pull to make it tons easier.

The boss is melee friendly despite what some groups think, but if your not melee just range and dodge. It is seriously easier than anything you did in AC.

people like this are awesome!! i wish i understood TA well enough to attach my strats to my own two cents. I found AC to be one of the hardest dungeons in general until i sat down and really gave it a go. maybe you just gotta do the same to TA. I’ve done paths 2 and 3 (2 several times) on CM and never really ran into problems like you did. my only point is that, if you find AC to be enjoyable and doable, you can certainly run CM with a similarly geared toon.

for me the only hard part of either path was the keg run, and that becomes much easier when you have the “kiting” team just toss barrels instead of trying to keep aggro with their DPS. the end of seraph also has TONS of projectiles, and can be hard if you don’t have AoE projectile reflect (i had the pleasure once of running it with both a Mesmer’s Feedback and my Guardian’s spirit shield… you barely take damage).

on a side note, if you’re concerned about having fun in dungeons, avoid HotW xplo like the plague. i actually found story mode kind of fun, but i know from experience two of the paths can be sleep-run, and the third is underwater. it’s extremely boring, but if you really want Kodan gear i’d hop on it before they buff it (which will hopefully happen).

Parisalchuk.9230:

@Xyrm

A tip, the plants wont shoot poison if your invisible

(If you catch my drift and have a thief on your team, Ill leave it to the rest to figure out how to utilize it)

It’s hard to keep invisibility up on the group in the middle of say, the champion vine fight. The whole concept of the poison mushrooms needs to be re-evaluated. It’s not a legitimate skill mechanic, it’s a nuisance that, AS YOU JUST POINTED OUT, can be cheesed. That’s not skill, that’s dependency on thieves and mesmers (the latter doesn’t even have GOOD options for invis… a 3s and 4s both on a 90s CD).

I can’t help but feel that someone at Anet just forgot to carry one or two 0’s for their respawn time and then when it was released they just said “meh, kitten it!”.

there are no dungeons worth complaining about except from Arah – all paths, and to a lesser extent CoF path 3. Everything else is simple. Yes there are some really annoying parts of each, but they’re all easily doable.

My biggest complaint is the lack of waypoints in more than half the dungeons, since this game is built around ressing and running back.

Crater.1625:

I think with TA, at least, the problem is the extreme lack of waypoints.

100% this.

My guild loves doing TA (even though some do bellyache about the violet blossoms every time), but a single death can delay the run significantly if they decide to try and run back to the group.

That place really needs a few more waypoints.

As to the fights being cheese – I disagree. We find them fun and definitely challenging. Mastering the first major fight against the plant worm things was a stepping stone for our guild groups.

dpcaldae.3068:

there are no dungeons worth complaining about except from Arah – all paths, and to a lesser extent CoF path 3. Everything else is simple. Yes there are some really annoying parts of each, but they’re all easily doable.

My biggest complaint is the lack of waypoints in more than half the dungeons, since this game is built around ressing and running back.

My group farms Arah on a regular basis; we’ve cleared all of them multiple times, but typically stick to path 3 + either 2 or 4, depending on our mood. It’s not bad if you know what you’re doing and bring a DPS group. The mistake I keep seeing made on these forums is the advice to wear some vit and toughness gear. NO. Wear full berserker’s or rampagers (whatever is best for your class/spec), and learn to dodge.

Xyrm.5602:

My group farms Arah on a regular basis; we’ve cleared all of them multiple times, but typically stick to path 3 + either 2 or 4, depending on our mood. It’s not bad if you know what you’re doing and bring a DPS group. The mistake I keep seeing made on these forums is the advice to wear some vit and toughness gear. NO. Wear full berserker’s or rampagers (whatever is best for your class/spec), and learn to dodge.

Yeah I don’t get why people keep endorsing vitality and toughness so BLINDLY, especially the full power/tough/vit believers. Then complain about taking too long to kill anything… Crit chance on average adds 1% damage per 1% crit chance up to 50% then drops off. Condi damage and Crit Damage about adds the same amount. The difference is AMAZING especially at giganticus: oh he’s knocked out of phase 2 already and I’ve only used half my defensive utilities lolz compared to OMG this lasts forever, OMG I took a hit, my-heal-doesn’t-take-me-back to-full-next-hit-downs-me dilemma. Haven’t done path 4 but I assume it’s required to kill the last boss.

Overall, if you play skillfully, you will kill trash mobs and bosses twice as fast and not have to depend on survivability, which ends up just being a needless buffer for your health bar.

a dungeon system that is built on dying, rezzing, running back. hmmm. oh wait i can already hear it. “go play WoW then”, “learn2play then” bla bla bla.

Lots of people are using the word, “cheese” in strange contexts. Clearly, it is an americanism that hasn’t crossed the pond. What does it mean?

Just FYI the deadly blossoms in TA have been increased in size and the targeting bug has been fixed. With those easier to see and hit it is lot less frustrating to run now.

@ svarty

Cheesing refers to a tactic that is a bit underhanded. Im not sure about the origin, but I knew/know it from starcraft, in which it referred to a specific strategy that was designed to beat anyone who had never seen it before, but was easily countered by anyone who knew it was coming.

In other games it usually means a tactic/strategy that’s much easier than the normal way to do things, but might be considered an exploit. For example in TA there was a tree you could hide behind and range down the first boss. This would be a cheesy strategy.