Guild Wars 2

Greetings. My wife and I recently hit L80 and are looking to do some dungeons. We duo’d our way to 80 and aren’t guilded but may start looking. Meanwhile, we’ll PUG it. She’s a Guardian and I’m a Thief and we’ve both specced for sustainability and support and are reasonably geared up for our level.

Where should we start? What is a good dungeon that will provide us with the kind of environment that we can expect in dungeon play, without murdering us?

Thanks

I’ve found ascalon catacombs to be the best starting dungeon, since it has simple mechanics and the bosses have delayed cues for their special attacks. You will need to complete story mode for the dungeon first if you want to host explorable mode. As someone starting dungeons, I would try to avoid joining groups that want to do the speed clears as having no experience in the dungeon would cause a lot of confusion. I recommend either starting a learning group or join a guild that is willing to teach you the basics. If you’re dedicated enough, there’s a few youtube videos with some good commentary of what to expect in the dungeon paths.

I started doing ascalon catacombs a few weeks after release with my team of friends, and it has been a blast going through the trial and error. These days, we finish each path in under 15 minutes.

Good luck with your runs!

Doing Ascalonian Catacombs for some fancy Exotic gear (via Tokens) never hurts. You might even get lucky and find some Rares to sell.

AC is generally your best bet for a dungeon to get your feet wet. It’s not too terribly hard, but it takes a few runs to learn where you need to be careful. It’s also pretty good money as far as dungeons go. So much so, that my guild still does all 3 paths basically daily.

Since you are a guardian and she is a thief, you could do CM without it becoming frustrating if she takes smoke screen and you take wall of reflection/sanctuary/shield of the avenger to fight against the projectiles.

Guides on the wiki are really well written. Not always the best tactics, but quite good if you never did it or aren’t used to it.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ascalonian_Catacombs_%28explorable%29
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Caudecus%27s_Manor_%28explorable%29

Thanks for the replies, folks, sounds like the consensus is AC and that’s where we’ll start.

I just got through reading the thread regarding GW2’s “eye hand coordination” requirement and I’m dreading introducing my wife to a merciless PUG that has no patience for her learning (or mine, for that matter, but I have definitely have the edge on twitch over her). We are both age 60 and twitch isn’t our strong suit ;-) but we’re hard core gamers from way back. She has MT’d heroics and hard modes in lots of MMO’s and has adapted well to the trinity-free environment that GW2 provides and that we both love. We are very social (have run guilds) but we also enjoy just being on our own as a duo, so we haven’t yet looked for a guild.

Question: is duo’ing AC completely out of the question? We are very patient and have thoroughly enjoyed figuring out all the Vista and jumping puzzles, so time is not an issue. We started playing at launch and just hit 80 yesterday lol (well, we level capped Borderlands 2 in there somewhere, too).

Anyway, thanks for the honest advice.

“Men do not stop playing because they grow old. They grow old because they stop playing.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

Unless you’re one of those super hardcore fellas that can SOLO dungeons, then yeah. At least four people is advisable.

Don’t bother trying to duo it. It can probably be done, but it takes an excessive amount of time.

And that thread is an exaggeration. Read the guide about AC on the wiki that I linked before, to get an idea on what you will be up against and then it’s only a matter of practice that you shouldn’t have too much difficulty with.

You could duo it. It would be extremely painful and long run (with your experience) but in the end you would have learn it better than most people ever will.
But don’t do it…. yet

Buy/Make a full set of rares. (not berserker, you’re new) and start dungeon diving. Get a full set of exotics.

I recommend starting with CoF or AC. They’re the easiest by far.

Ok, points taken, we won’t bother trying to duo it. Had to ask.

Thanks, Wethospu, and a big congrats for your solo ACP1 run. You of all people should know how doable this would be.

Thanks to all.

If you ever want to run a dungeon ingame, just send me a whisper

We can’t resist a challenge. We entered as a duo without reading a guide just to see how bad it would be trying to figure things out on our own. Was not as hard as we expected, but we could not complete it. We took out the Lieutenant, Kasha Blackblood, and Master Nente with relative ease but could not deal with Relena and Vassar. We tried lots of things to separate them but nothing worked well enough to stay alive. We even tried luring them into the back door that goes into Blackblood’s little chamber but they would not come up the steps.

It was fun. But I’ll go read a guide now and we’ll get a group to finish it. I’m assuming story mode is easier than explorable so I don’t have any illusions about being able to duo this. But it was a fun try.

I particularly find AC story harder than the explorables. If you guys got through that much, kudos. Better than most full pug groups can do in there. Ralena and Vassar are very difficult if you can’t separate them, which as a duo would be nearly impossible.

Yeah, the lightning aoe Relena shoots is bad news, and the little purple jobbies Vassar shoots hurt really bad. All those boulders are obviously there for a reason, but we couldn’t figure out how to use them other than to toss them and knock the mobs down for a few seconds. My Thief’s Scorpion Wire wouldn’t pull them, either. Fun fight, but yeah, we’re going to need some help getting those two separated.

Might try the other one that SteepledHat recommended, CoF. Thanks all.

Story Mode is definitely harder. If only because the Ascalonian Ghosts are way more difficult adversaries than the Gravelings.

If you managed to get there as a duo, you should be fine with explorable.

And with AC, the explorable isn’t really harder than the story mode. It’s different, but I wouldn’t say that there’s a huge gap between the two mobes.

Ahh, I expected story to be easier but I guess we did ok then. We logged in too late tonight to try a dungeon but will give it a go another time. Very encouraging, thanks.

We both focused on builds/gear with survivability and sustained damage (so, for me Power/Vitality/Condition, i.e., Carrion gear) and support. She’s using a variant on the AH hammer build so we still have some DPS to make up for my lack of burst (although I’m stacking a boatload of Might and Bleeds/Cripples). With just the two of us, we’re not getting optimal return on our support potential (or her AH for that matter), but it sure as hell is fun and, hopefully, is teaching us good habits for when we do start grouping.

Combat is sure fun in this game. They really nailed that.

1: CM Story > AC Story > AC explorable 1, 2 > CoF explorable 1, 2 > AC explorable 3 >
2: CoF story > Arah Story > CoF explorable 3 > CoE story > other stories modes
3: FotM scale 1-9 > CM explorable 1,2, 3 > TA explorable U/U > TA explorable F/U > TA explorable F/F
4: SE explorable 1, 2, 3 > HotW 1,2, 3 > FotM scale 10-19
5: CoE explorable 1,2,3 > Arah Explorable 12,3 > FotM scale 20-29
6: Arah Explorable 4 > FotM scale 30>39

This week-end, if I get the time to play, I might PM you to do dungeons. I’ll grab two other guildies (if they are available, else a PuG will do the trick) and we wouldn’t mind doing whatever dungeons you want to do ^^

• Run CoF path 1 for the next week at least once per day. The patch is in 5 days and we expect dungeons to be much more difficult after that (no rezzing, etc).
• Use http://gw2lfg.com/ to find a group. I recommend you put in the description that you are new to dungeons.
• I would recommend that your Thief start getting DPS gear (same stats as Berserker’s gear: Pow, Precision, Crit%, you can trade in CoF dungeon tokens for this set). Damage in dungeons is key, as several encounters are a race against time (graveling burrows in AC and the … other graveling burrows in AC come to mind: paths 1 and 3 – you might find those paths very hard until you have said gear).
• At the token vendor you will find that each set of gear has 3 alternative sets with the same graphics. I recommend not buying the rares, but click the next bag on the left and look at the pretty exotics. Don’t just buy the top ones, look at all 3 sets before deciding.

Svarty.8019:

The patch is in 5 days and we expect dungeons to be much more difficult after that (no rezzing, etc).

Dungeon will be exactly the same. The only people that will be affected are the ones that never took the time to fight something properly and just waypoint zerged.

Xaaz.8472:

Svarty.8019:

The patch is in 5 days and we expect dungeons to be much more difficult after that (no rezzing, etc).

Dungeon will be exactly the same. The only people that will be affected are the ones that never took the time to fight something properly and just waypoint zerged.

pretty shortsighted statement here. if you’re in a pug, downs happen, even if the group generally works well together. depending on boss, terrain etc, down means death. i.e. CoF the boss with lava around which always pushes you around. is he path 3? don’t remember.. anyway, if for some reason your dodge fails (personal or technical issues) and you are lucky enough to get knocked back straight into lava, you’re pretty much down/dead with no chance for a comeback.

I agree that waypoint zerging should be limited somehow, but saying just playing correctly is enough to not die is very naive, on a game with this many bugs.. what do you do when you get the ’can’t move anymore’ bug, which only fixes itself after you’ve used a move skill (good luck if your weapon set doesn’t have one. wait for the next knockback/down).. or the occasional ‘character won’t dodge despite enough endurance’.. or even the ‘instead of taking something, just run for 3 seconds while unable to do anything’ ? I get the first two both quite often, about once every day, second one constantly.. usually its at a boss but most of the time I survive – mainly because I run AC alot, where it really doesn’t matter. but what if it happens in harder, less forgiving environments?
fractals already have no waypoints and sometimes I die thanks to stupid bugs like the ones mentioned and it’s always a pain for the whole team.

waypointing should always be possible, maybe with an increasing cooldown each time you die. zerging won’t be possible but the occasional glitch or player error (in a game this fastpaced errors are sometimes punished very harshly) should not doom the whole team to defeat/reset.

That boss is in path 3.

And yes the new waypoint system might be problematic during some encounters, especially if bugs are involved.
They should let the very first WP on a dungeon always usable. It’s not like you can zerg with this one.

And I really hope that the game will correctly recognize when you are in combat and when you aren’t with this update…

If you guys got that far in AC with just the two of you, I’m fairly certain that you could complete CoF story mode by yourselves.

Explorable mode requires 5 people, however, due to a few mechanics.