Guild Wars 2

Does ArenaNet really want it’s players to hate dungeons? Why troll the new players with this dungeon once they reach level 35? Why not just increase the required level to level 80 and get it over with?

Does ANet really expect 5 new level 35 characters can beat this dungeon?

Is this truly the best choice of dungeon to introduce to new players trying to get into dungeons?

PS. I know at least someone is going to comment that they solo’ed AC at level 35 or whatever. That is amazing and you are truly skilled in this game. This post is mostly for new players to GW2 and still learning the tactics at low level.

I played with a group of level 35-50 not later than yesterday. Except for me (6k), the highest achievement number was around 800.

We did it efficiently and had a lot of fun!

Oh yeah, only one wipe, at the spider, and Kohler died, 2 tries at the burrows.

I guess all it takes is patience from the experienced people and ability to listen for the first-timers.

Just because its level 35, doesn’t mean it is easy.

In all honesty, I think its easier than before. Mobs health has been cut by a good portion and a lot of breeders are removed from the encounters to prevent being overwhelmed early on.

The problem arises when people don’t know their class and don’t know how to communicate.

By 35, you should have a pretty good handle on your class. That just leaves you with the learning the counters; which takes communication and the willingness to learn.

Before the spider queen stack became common the amount of rage quits at the spider was 3/5. Stacking and standing on the stairs for path1 exist because frustrated players discovered them out of desperation. Personally I hate stacking (except where the guardian pulls them in ect.) and stair standing and do not pug that place anymore. But perhaps it is too hard for new players without using infantile mode. Will I receive an infraction for that?

Fror.2163:

I played with a group of level 35-50 not later than yesterday. Except for me (6k), the highest achievement number was around 800.

We did it efficiently and had a lot of fun!

Oh yeah, only one wipe, at the spider, and Kohler died, 2 tries at the burrows.

I guess all it takes is patience from the experienced people and ability to listen for the first-timers.

Achievement Points doesn’t tell you anything about the coordination required for AC.
I also notice you conveniently left out the run time… And class composition.

The burrows themselves… CAN be done by a group averaging ~50 in sub par gear but it requires them to stop halfway through to nuke the Breeders & Scavs building up around Hodgins. Thus why many groups fail… b/c they try to use the speed-clear method and ONLY that method to have one person hold adds near Hodg & the other 4 all rush burrows (which only brings even more adds to Hodgins when they IGNORE that extra Elite that comes out of every destroyed burrow).

IE: the safest method is actually for the Burrow team to also kill whatever spawned from the destroyed burrow before running to the next one.

Conveniently? No, it wasn’t intentional, I didn’t even think it was relevant. You wanna know the composition? Sure: 1 guardian (me), 1 ele (with ice bow), 2 necros, 1 mesmer (without timewarp). Wanna know the colour scheme of each of our armor too? All of that was run in 35 minutes, maybe 40 minutes tops, including the time I took to explain the mechanics to the two guys who never ran any dungeon in GW2 before.

We killed everything because they simply rejected the idea of skipping.

Achievement points don’t tell anything precisely, but’s an indicator about the dedication of the people.

So now, please stop seeing evil everywhere.

Also, you seem to assume it was p1. No, it was p3.

The fact you all chose P3 proves that they’ve done this Explorable before or you helped preplan it, and it wasn’t a spontaneous newbie Pub.

Guardian + Dual wells with high curse Dagger weap swap … they could have farmed SP’s as well to get Lich Form before 40… Any number of possibilities here that a real Pubby group of new players would never even try.

Either way… it didn’t tackle the OP’s main point: that this isn’t a proper dungeon to “Introduce” new players to Explorable mode. HotW & COF are much better for that.

The elementalist and one of the necro never ever ran a dungeon in the past.

Also, except for using ice bow, I never told them to use a specific skill/weapon.

Post-your edits:

Ilr, stop arguing. I didn’t check their gear, I didn’t even blink at the composition. I know what to do in general and we did it. 2 never played the dungeon, they aced it. Guided, evidently, but they did really well for a first time.

All I’m saying is that a group of 4 new guys and 1 decent player, the whole group did well. It wasn’t exceptional: it was good. Is it so hard to admit that not all your preconceptions fit each encountered patterns?

If you want to do a monologue please go ahead, I’ll stop here.

If a group of 5 new players who barely understand the game’s mechanics, barely knows what their slot skills do, doesn’t bother to keep their gear up to date, and can still rip through an exp dungeon, then that would be an issue that needs addressing.

The revamped AC does a relatively good job of making players learn their classes by the time they learn to complete the dungeon smoothly. Also, if people don’t know the mechanics and their class well, making this a lvl 80 dungeon won’t help, like at all.

The real difference is probably in the experience. Since there isn’t much difference between a level35 and level80 in raw stats.

My guardian just got to level30, so I compare it to a levle80 guardian in AC story. Dont’ seem to be much difference. My 30 guardian is wearing blue, while my 80 guardian is wearing exotic and 6 ascended jewel.

level 30(dps) level80 level30(balance)
power 496 406 396
percision 466 411 381
toughness 206 401 306
vitality 206 318 306
condition damage 100 22 0
Boon duration 0 0 0
critical damage 6 12 16
agony resistence 0 6 0
attack 810 745 713
critical chance 56 48% 39%
armor 492 730 592
health 2292 3412 3292
condition duration 10% 0% 0
healing power 0 67 100
virtual recharge rate 0 0 0
magic find 12 12 12
HP 2407 3583 3457

I don’t think it’s supposed to be an easy thing. When I started playing GW2 and people still partied at lvl 35 to do that dungeon, it was challenging, it took time to plan encounters and it made you learn things. I’ve seen several lvl 35-60 players that had cunning plans how to get through the dungeon without ever reading wiki or watching youtube videos… and I learnt from them to think creatively.

These days people seem to get discouraged and quit if they get a wipe, usually blaming it on the lowest level. They don’t understand that it’s still just a lvl 35 dungeon, we’re overpowered for it at lvl 80 by stats only. Your stats are just helpful to make the encounters shorter and your new skills will cover up your mistakes, but in the end you can’t get past hodgins if you don’t know how to dodge gravelings or run behind a pillar or drag him safety into corner.

I’m not sure if it’s good for casual, new players. I know I’m pretty casual and chill, but I enjoy difficult encounters and I usually become better from having to think how to get through them. New players will probably feel discouraged by this dungeon though which will contribute to them quitting… instead of making the dungeon easier, I think anet should make the tactic-planning more visible. Like REALLY talk the newbies through LoS and their skills. Make the npc’s comment things like “oh so many spiders! Maybe we could drag them behind the corner…” or “oh look! My reflect skill seems to work well to these spiders” and then the NPC would cast a reflect similar to guardian’s skill.

hell, maybe even make the NPC walk through all sort of different tactics through the Storymode. Like you’d have to follow him and he’d work things out for you. It’d likely inspire new players to work their own skills in exp modes.

Personally I think I’d enjoy dungeons more if they were all lvl80, but I’m not going to pretend that it’s a great idea. I think that it’s more so a mentality thing. People see the ‘Lvl X recommended’ and they think “Oh, I’m that level, this should be easy!” When the reality is that even if you meet or exceed the level ‘requirement’, the difficulty level exceeds most peoples expectations.

I’ll admit, I’ve never tried to do a dungeon with a team of players who are at the recommended level for a non-80 dungeon, but I think if players went into a dungeon with the understanding that it’s not meant to be as easy as their appropriate level open-world content, and it’s actually meant to be quite a challenge regardless of your level/gear, that players would feel less angered or upset that they struggle to complete it. Thinking that you’ll face-roll content because you meet the ‘recommended’ level isn’t a great mentality.

The specific example of AC; I think it’s an excellent introductory dungeon. As a dungeon, I think it’s actually quite ‘informative’, and gives you an idea of what is expected from you in dungeons to come. It has bosses which will one shot you if you don’t react to their ‘big’ attacks and dodge. This is a good thing, it SHOULD make players aware that if they don’t learn an encounter and dodge these ‘big’ hits, they’ll spend much of their time running back from a waypoint. It also has events which require team work, such as the burrow’s in P1/3, the traps in P2, you could perhaps say that you need team work to do ‘The Lovers’ in Story mode how I presume it is supposed to be done. Overall, this dungeon in theory should work quite well to prepare newer dungeon runners for the following dungeons, which vary from a lot easier to a lot harder.

I don’t think that difficulty should determine what is an introductory dungeon, I think that content within the dungeon should. If CoF was the first dungeon instead of AC, people would probably complain that the difficulty jumped far too harshly from the first dungeon to the following ones. CoF doesn’t particularly have many interesting mechanics which contribute to player development (this is why your stereotypical CoF farmer is a pretty poor player, when removed from their comfortable environment).

http://www.twitch.tv/aliettefaye/b/376274889

Here’s a group of people who barely knew the classes they played, and banded together with characters exactly at level 35 to do the new AC because of all these threads whining about the new AC. They even did kholer. All characters were exactly level 35.

AC is not a “lvl 80” dungeon. It just requires a lot more kiting and less faceroll melee if you’re all at 35.

I do think path 2 would be really, really harsh on a low level group though. 3 traps charged might not be enough to kill the boss so you might have to charge traps while he’s attacking you midfight.

The problem is AC is still hard even for experienced players if you bring all level 35 characters with AC rare gear. New players will have blue to green gear, maybe not up to date, and not know the mechanics.

Sigmatics.7056:

The problem is AC is still hard even for experienced players if you bring all level 35 characters with AC rare gear. New players will have blue to green gear, maybe not up to date, and not know the mechanics.

experienced players + lv35 + rare gear? no, it’s not hard it’s going to be a steamrolling team going through it fast.

new players may have trouble though, it’s not going to be a walk in the park that they can just walk in with outdated gear. If they gear properly and try to adapt, they may be able to succeed. Some will take more time to adjust (or never). But dungeons are supposed to be challenging.

If they decide to make it level 80, they must make the rare grade armors from token vendors lv 80 too.

It’s easy when people listen… Unfortunately, most don’t…