First order of business, and this one’s gonna disappoint you, don’t start with Arah. I was in a similar situation when I started doing dungeons back in the days, so I feel your pain, but Arah is the most challenging dungeon, and dungeons are the most challenging part of GW2 PvE. You’re not gonna have much fun starting out in Arah, I’d assume. Another way to acquire the armor regardless, is to do the Arah story to unlock the respective PvP reward track and then play that for long enough to get a few pieces. That’s gonna be considerably faster if you are dead set on getting the armor asap, but I know nothing about your stance on PvP and still kind of urge you to give dungeons a chance, as they’re a ton of fun!
A great way to prepare for a dungeon is to read up a bit on gw2dungeons.net/ but that’s actually not the most fun way to learn them and won’t provide you with what really counts – experience. Finding a group of non-pseudo-speedrunners is much more important, which can unreliably be achieved by setting up LFG texts such as “path x everyone welcome” or “first timer requiring instructions”. Whatever you do, state that you’re inexperienced. Many people – like me – don’t mind newbies as long as they don’t just silently run along hoping to get carried. As for your physical preparations:
- exotic armor is not required but it greatly helps your survivability and damage output, regardless of stats. If you’re short on money, level-appropriate rare armor can do the job decently until you can afford exos with tokens.
- food, for a dungeon newbie, can be neglected. If you get some of the +10% damage/-10% damage food (potions of slaying) you’ll do noticeably more damage, but receiving 10% less is not really all that impressive considering the next bullet point. Health regeneration food might make you feel less likely to die, but that’s really only for moral support if you ask me.
- know that in dungeons, things hit you incredibly hard. You get bombarded with conditions (10+ stacks of bleeding), crowd control (knockdown chaining) and hard hitting attacks (some of them intentionally one-shotting everyone, some of them eating up more than 50% of your health but most of the time with a reasonable amount of visual cue that you’ll have to learn). Be aware that avoiding this damage (through dodges, invincibility, blocking, distortion, blur,…) is your best bet rather than tanking them. You’ll have to learn which dungeon encounter brings what to the table, and how to use your utilities against it. This point is important to understand.
- bring every weapon you have access to. Most of the time, melee will be the favored strategy regardless of stacking/not stacking, as it generally inflicts damage faster and has other benefits, such as area of effect healing and buffing. Sometimes a specific weapon has niche applications that you want to utilize, so for example bringing a focus for swirling winds on a staff-elementalist can be beneficial. Listen to your team if they suggest taking something specific for a specific reason, and get used to the idea of hanging out in melee range most of the time.
- bring level 80. I’m generally of the opinion that level 80 is not required to complete a dungeon, but despite the downscaling, traits make 80s much stronger even in low level dungeons. For learning the ropes, level 80 will take some more stress off you (and your team).
- be aware that condition stacking is greatly hindered by the stack limits, when groups of five people focus on one single foe. Being a pure condition build will not contribute much in the wrong team compositions – at least go for a hybrid if direct damage weapons don’t feel appealing to you.
- get some general dungeon experience before you start rocking Arah. AC is fairly easy but has a lot of knockdown/condition barrage, making it very intimidating until you get used to stunbreakers. TA is fairly newb-friendly once you realize volatile blossoms can be used to rally on the fly. SE has a few nasty bits, such as a knockback-friendly boss on a relatively small platform or a set of golems that is pretty devastating unless you reflect at the right time, but offers a good and balanced experience in general. I’d suggest doing CoE at some point – maybe not first – and then stepping up to Arah once you feel confident in your abilities to survive it.
Just my two cents…or in hindsight probably more like 20. kitten, that nutshell doesn’t look much like a nutshell anymore now.
