Guild Wars 2

So, I’ve been playing for almost an year now, pretty much most of my characters are berserkers, the so called meta.
Now, from what I understand, Meta builds like the ones presented on metabattles, or from the guys at DnT are focused around perfect scenarios, organized groups for speedruns.

That is not the reality of a pug life, some times you find good groups, some times you don’t. Nothing is organized when pugging. Sometimes you don’t even want to run meta and are just looking for a fun time.

Ok to the questions then:

META

• How do I calculate my own DPS? I know DnT has all the amazing math calculations from optimal rotations and stuff, but sometimes things don’t work out. (And I’m too dumb to make sense of all those numbers, maybe doing it myself will help that)
• How would I calculate my average DPS during a dungeon path or encounters within that path? Say I want to know what is the difference between playing my thief that can’t afford to being hit, and my guardian that can take 1 or 3 hits with aegis, during CM P1. So in the end I can look at 10 different runs and say that overall my thief still had better dps than my guardian, or vice-versa.
• Can I apply the same calculations to Condition Damage?
• How reliable is a tool like JaxnX? And how can I use it efficiently?
• I ask all this because I want to be able to see how much I’m losing when I change a trait or weapon over something I have more fun with.

PUGS

• If faced with a team that is constantly having problems, do you change builds to support them? Or are the meta builds in the hands of a good player capable of soloing every content?
  For example, one of my friends loves to play a Nomad Guardian, when playing with him we charge forward and he makes sure he’s taking the hits and providing the healing, we rarely, if ever, wipe. The dungeon paths are fast and easy. We won’t break any records though.
• Is there any site that covers these builds focused on players wanting to tank/support?
• How do you deal with people that don’t talk and appear to be new to the dungeon? Do you teach them? Play the quiet observer?
• How can I make sure my groups avoid glitching or stacking? Any LFG description I can use that will get the message across?
  Understand that I’m not exactly against stacking per se. It’s just that, most of the time, it doesn’t even make sense, and forces my thief to ignore backstab.
• What is the average time to complete dungeons?
  I would love to be able to compare the time a full party of lv35 takes to complete AC, against a full party of lv80 meta builds. Or even better a condition team against a Berserker team.
  Gw2Efficiency lists an average of how long your dungeons runs are taking. But the global average doesn’t seem to be updated, or even shows us how much data its taking into account. Although it does have a nice breakdown of some group compositions. I don’t particularly use the system, but Im considering taking the numbers that GW2 PAO gets after finishing a dungeon – would be nice to have these two tools working together -.

Freedom of Choice

• At the end of the day, I want to play with people and allow them to play with their builds. But at the same time, people can come up with builds that do absolutely nothing. So how do you approach them and get them to play something better? How do you help them adapt their builds to what they want to do and still have fun with everyone else?
• I know Berserker/Assasin is meta, is fast, is optimal, but why is it that we don’t have guides for Tank, Conditions, Support builds when the majority of players new to the game will explore so many possibilities before deciding what they actually love to play?
• Let’s assume for a minute that the numbers in gw2efficiency are a reality (I have no idea, but they seem realistic), and that most dungeons paths take 10min give or take. Would that change drastically if everyone was running Condition, or Support, or Tank, or a mixed group with people doing different stuff?

Part 2

Dungeons & Exploits

• As far as I know the speedrun community (in general, not gw2) has very specific rules on what is accepted or not. They have a category for people that do speedruns looking to break the game and use every exploit imaginable, and them one where people play the game the way it was intended.
  On that note, how come in GW2 we allow both record and tournament runs to make use of those exploits, making them popular, creating this enviroment where people just assume that hitting through a wall with a dagger is normal, where holding a cutscene for the rest of the team is normal, where its normal to stay on a corner away from the mobs because they suddenly can’t reach or attack you anymore.
  I see so many people complaining to new players that they can’t play, that they can’t even dodge, but how will they learn when all we are teaching is exploit after exploit? It’s not like the New Player Experience patch helped on this topic…
• Is it even possible to fix this? Anet terms of service clearly says that, both use and sharing of exploits would be against the rules. Yet everything is so wide spread, so much that they probably can’t take any actions now.
• Do you think it would be possible for Anet to fix these and start taking their own terms of service serious?
• And last, should communities like Reddit, Forums, Youtube, Guide sites, take the fist step and stop teaching exploits, or does Anet needs to take the fist one?

If you read it this far, thanks for the patience, english is not my native language, so sorry in advance, I had a lot in my mind and, hopefully, it has come across well enough.

I’m also posting this on reddit to hopefully get a good discussion going with both the forum’s, and reddit point of view.

You’ve done a lot of due diligence. I tip my hat to you.

I’d say the best thing you can do to improve your experience is to communicate:

Make your LFG descriptions short and to the point. “Non-meta”, “all welcome”, “full clear” and so forth will all point out what your goals for the dungeon are while PUGing.

Talk to your group while in the dungeon. Some people have been doing the content for years, but others might be too kitteno speak up themselves. Ask if they know the dungeon, if it’s their first time, and if you’re willing to teach, do so. (Go to Dulfy is not teaching, by the way. >_>) Giving even a brief rundown of the fights can make all the difference.

Dungeon meta builds aren’t solo builds. If the group is having trouble, you can either leave or swap class for something more defensive ( guardian/mesmer) or with enough dps to make everything melt ( ele). As a guardian for instance, you can take 4/5/0/0/5 instead of 4/6/2/0/2, but both of them are meta builds anyway. Nomad is good for personal survivability and it’s a bad support gear.

If you want to play with PHIW, then accept it. You can’t have the best of both, and someone playing a build for himself won’t play for the team. That’s why most “berserker elitists” don’t like people not willing to change anything for rp reasons. There’s no guides for tanks because there’s no tank in the game. It’d be like asking for a death knight guide in mario. The community shouldn’t misinform people and make them play bad builds. A dungeon run with people not understanding the game will take longer, obviously. If the question was: Is it possible to run a dungeon with soldier gear and still be fast; the answer would be yes, you can be fast as most of the time lost is mobility, but it won’t be the fastest and it’d be boring to death.

The dungeon community doesn’t like exploits and conkitten them for the most part.

I think I answered most of it.

Sorry for cherry-picking, but the speedclear guys will need to address most of that :P

Wolfeng.3784:

• Do you think it would be possible for Anet to fix these and start taking their own terms of service serious?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Very-disappointing-news-for-you-guys/

tl;dr (it’s a 9 page thread…)
- video of ANet devs saying: “no plans for new dungeons”
- Regina from ANet team saying “we don’t have enough developer resources to care about instanced content in this game, but if you guys put together a list of ‘top bugs’, we might get around to fixing some of them.”
- Forum community compiles lists of major bugs/exploits in dungeons.

The end. They came by and locked the feedback threads a while later, and that’s the last we’ve heard from them.

I’m pretty sure ArenaNet views adding dungeons and instanced content as a mistake, and aside from massive PR flareups like that thread, they’ve not paid much attention to fixing issues with them. The dungeon exploits have been around for years and have been reported hundreds if not thousands of times, and very few have been looked at.

This is likely because they laid off their dungeon development team shortly after launch and no one left at ArenaNet really understands the systems enough to modify them without breaking things horribly.

For a more current example of the level of care they put towards their dungeon content, check out this thread about an ungoing issue with Lupi in Arah that they have yet to even make a meaningful comment on, 2 months after they changed him: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Bug-Lupicus-Necrid-Bolt-hits-at-melee/

Lauren’s post specifically indicates major problems on the ArenaNet side when it comes to dungeon maintenance.

So will they start maintaining their instanced content and take dungeon exploits seriously? As long as they aren’t significantly impacting the in-game economy, no. I think the above makes it very clear that they will not addressing the numerous issues in their instanced content any time soon.

• And last, should communities like Reddit, Forums, Youtube, Guide sites, take the fist step and stop teaching exploits, or does Anet needs to take the fist one?

We can’t really stop this. As long as exploits are possible, certain members of the community will use them. The longer the exploits are allowed to persist in the game, the more people will think they’re ok to use. After nearly 3 years of ArenaNet not caring about them, most of us don’t either.

edit added RIP Hrouda link

combat log and record your boss times. Add all the numbers up divide by the time it takes to kill a boss and you have your real life DPS for that boss.

To answer your question of why no one makes pug builds: People that only pug are not interested in the game enough to come up with a pug build and spend hours editing a guide video. Special case being Nemesis who makes pug Necro builds. And of course there was a huge market for that which is why Nemesis has 200k views on his guide.

This quote from Hrouda’s facebook page also hits pretty hard:

Today marks the release of the last bit of content I built for ArenaNet. I had always hoped my last hurrah would be an epic dungeon that would stand the test of time, and provide entertainment for players to the very end… but instead it’s an instance that will only persist for two weeks, and then go away.

They kittened him good.

Wolfeng.3784:

On that note, how come in GW2 we allow both record and tournament runs to make use of those exploits, making them popular, creating this enviroment where people just assume that hitting through a wall with a dagger is normal, where holding a cutscene for the rest of the team is normal, where its normal to stay on a corner away from the mobs because they suddenly can’t reach or attack you anymore.

You seem to be a bit confused about the acceptance of exploits. Both DnT tournaments used the restricted ruleset, as do 99% of records. Those rules ban things like safe-spotting, terrain glitching, etc. Gw2 is actually pretty strict when it comes to community policing of exploits. What pugs do in their daily runs doesn’t necessarily reflect the speed run community – pugs will take the path of least resistance and that includes safespotting mossman, one-shotting lupi with wall-on-wall, etc.

We have been asking anet to patch these exploits for ages. However, they don’t have a dedicated dungeon team so anything that isn’t a progress preventing bug gets put on the back burner. We can keep sending in reports but the fixes will take months.

Telling people they shouldn’t exploit rarely works, people are going to do what they are going to do. But the restricted ruleset gives people an idea of what the community considers “fair play”, and any serious record attempt will abide by those rules. In terms of setting a good example, I think that’s the best we can do.

How is holding a cutscene an exploit?

If you’re so interested in making sure that you play dungeons “as they were intended,” then I’m confused as to why you would consider watching a cutscene as exploiting :P

Wolfeng.3784:

On that note, how come in GW2 we allow both record and tournament runs to make use of those exploits, making them popular

Just to point out (sorry about all the posts >.<), the DnT dungeon tournament generating publicity around the exploits/PvE balance issues has historically been one of the most effective ways to get things actually looked at.

FGS was overpowered for years. We knew it, ArenaNet knew it, everyone knew it. But nothing was done.

Then the dungeon tourney came along and showed that the ‘exciting high-end PvE gameplay’ consisted mostly of pushing bosses into walls and burning them down with a single skill: FGS’s fiery rush. Shortly after that public embarrassment, FGS finally got nerfed.

Another example, after the first tourney that was dominated by FGS, Nike worked with a contact of his at ArenaNet to get the Arah path 4 bosses fixed so that you couldn’t just shut them down by hitting them while they were talking before the fight. Again, it was because of the tournament, so that Arah path 4 wouldn’t be excluded from the path selection (AIUI). This behavior was also known since launch.

So I think publicizing the exploits in the tournaments is not a bad thing, because it’s the only effective method we have to get ArenaNet to give a flying kitten about fixing their game.

Wolfeng.3784:

• How do I calculate my own DPS?
• How would I calculate my average DPS during a dungeon path or encounters within that path?
• Can I apply the same calculations to Condition Damage?
• How reliable is a tool like JaxnX? And how can I use it efficiently?

I hope I didn’t kitten up the quotes.

Take a boss that you feel comfortable with(start with an easy one that is relatively short). Record yourself killing the boss with your damage log open. You then have 2 options, if you are the only player, you can take the bosses total hp(I think they’re listed on gw2dungeons.net) and divide by the seconds for kill. If you are in a group you can add up the total coefficients from skill use and put it into https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1H8FwevtNHMhoBQ7QkxYJF1W7DLTDkuKtA_oNSk4OOes/edit?pli=1#gid=1347975015 adding in the relevant buffs for a general idea.
Keep in mind how you are using skills, soloing a boss requires more defensive play than group fights and will result in lower dps(usually). This applies to dungeon paths as well, and again, keep in mind how your playstyle changes.

The same calculations apply to condition builds, they have a pure damage component and a condi. The condi part gets tricky since low rotations aren’t hitting their max dmg, you can split it into ramp-up time and sustained damage. Look at how long your longest condition is(engineer shrapnel can be going up near 18secs) this is probably your ramp-up time, and look at how many stacks you reach after X seconds to find the sustained damage. You can also calculate the average uptime/average stacks for conditions and calculate the average damage created, with the knowledge that you won’t realize that damage until X seconds later. Ramp-up damage is more annoying to calculate, you can count the total number of ticks for conditions in the time period then apply condi dmg(including your typical might) to find the dmg dealt during ramp-up.

The dps meter you linked I’ve never used, you’re on your own. Since it seems to be reading the combat log, it should be calculating only your damage whereas gw2esp(either Dub’s or Frifox’s version) is reading the bosses change in hp, therefore calculating dps based on all damage to the boss(including allies). When calculating dps using the meter, keep in mind how long the interval is(for 1sec intervals you get spikes during backstabs, for 5secs you’ll get spikes, just less noticable, longer intervals will reduce the spikes in dps from high coefficient skills).

Wolfeng.3784:

• If faced with a team that is constantly having problems, do you change builds to support them? Or are the meta builds in the hands of a good player capable of soloing every content?
• Is there any site that covers these builds focused on players wanting to tank/support?
• How do you deal with people that don’t talk and appear to be new to the dungeon?
• How can I make sure my groups avoid glitching or stacking? Any LFG description I can use that will get the message across?
• What is the average time to complete dungeons?

Supporting your team is always key, the goal of the meta builds(not metabattle, the builds published by the speedclear guilds, sometimes the same)is to have the highest damage while providing enough support to clear content. They do assume that the other party members are contributing support as well. The guardian doesn’t have perfect uptime on projectile defenses, on bosses like lupi, it can be assumed that a thief or ele will supply the downtime if your party is lacking dps(mesmer as well). The builds can quite likely solo much of the content, however tweaking some traits/utilities can either increase your survival, or increase the support provided(at alphard you can slot in sanctuary as a 3rd for pugs, but in an organized zerk group, its not useful). You always want builds to provide enough support to clear content, if you aren’t succeeding, either you need to improve, or you aren’t planning ahead. If it’s the latter, always bring more support(be aware of the difference between needing others support as a crutch, and when you actually need it).

There are plenty of builds based around supporting and tanking, they just aren’t as useful. I can go onto a benevolence ele and toss out lots of heals, but my team loses 20%(possibly more) of its dmg compared to running a meta build, and they can avoid the damage I would be healing. Tanking builds are usually built around the idea of the old trinity, which means they usually fail at tanking. Tanking requires close proximity, comparable damage, high toughness, first touch and damage mitigation. If your team is ranging, many bosses will focus on you when you melee them(they may swap between range/melee players for different attacks). If your team is dealing significantly more damage than you they will pull aggro off you(when I pug fractal 50s, the 4 champs in uncategorized come after my zerker thief regardless of the rest of the parties armour, or dmg, due to a healthy dose of backstabs and being the only player consistently in melee range). Toughness has generally been assumed to increase aggro, but you still need to keep in mind outgoing damage, which is why knight’s is recommended for tanking compared to nomad/soldier/sentinel. First touch is literally first to touch the enemy, mobs usually come back to you even when others have more dmg/toughness if you dealt the first damage. And last damage mitigation, you need to be alive to tank, bringing protection, regen, heals, blocks, cc, vigor, etc… is something many tank builds miss out on, they build for taking hits, not for taking aggro and avoiding hits/damage(bear in mind dodging away from a boss may affect the bosses aggro from lost proximity).

If players appear new, or inexperienced. You can either: kick them from the party(ur ma gurd, why you hate meh), give them advice or silently bear the heartache(if you’re confident you can just let them die and res them later). When giving advice, try to make general statements and don’t use an aggressive tone(“btw, disc banner provides better damage boost than str if you’re only dropping one banner” unless its a nomad group).

Average times are pretty subjective, but assuming you have a group of 80s(pugs) in exotics that either group buff or run full zerker. (Times are per single path) ac is usually assumed to be <10mins for p1/2, p3 should probably be sub 12. CM paths shouldn’t really be exceeding 10mins(maybe p2). TA likewise shouldn’t be exceeding 10mins. SE p1 should be <7mins. P3 will probably be around 15. CoF should be 10-15 depending on path. HotW will likewise be around 15mins per path. CoE as well. Arah 1/2 will probably be 25-30mins, p3 probably 12-15, p4 40+.

Wolfeng.3784:

Freedom of Choice

• So how do you approach them and get them to play something better? How do you help them adapt their builds to what they want to do and still have fun with everyone else?
• I know Berserker/Assasin is optimal, but why is it that we don’t have guides for Tank, Conditions, Support builds when the majority of players new to the game will explore so many possibilities before deciding what they actually love to play?
  *Would [time taken] change drastically if everyone was running Condition, or Support, or Tank, or a mixed group with people doing different stuff?

Getting people to try new things and change their build requires willingness, I can sit in ts and walk guildies through build tweaks, how it would affect play, comparing different choices, how it affects damage, support, etc… But if they aren’t willing to take the advice, it’s useless. If they are willing, give them advice based on what you can see about their build(refer to my comment about banner choice in the previous post).

Again players need to be willing to try new things, I can give a player a tanky build, but they rarely try to swap that built around to slot in pieces of berserker, or knights and look at relying more on active defenses. People tend to take a build as is, maybe tweak a trait quickly, then sit in this static build thinking, this is the the way the build was meant to be. This toxic elitist community of zerkers suggest zerker as the goal, and there are many guides and the math down for those, that give people an alternative to pure zerker dps builds as a set of training wheels. The goal is to take the wheels off, not leave them on(for years on end, possibly upgrading to extra wheels with nomads).

The time change isn’t drastic, per se, a group of condition builds get all their pure damage in, but after the first player, every1 else becomes useless for condi dmg. So you sacrifice say 60% of everyone’s pure dmg, and gain nothing in terms of conditions. The focus in reducing dungeon times is not just boss fights, having permanent swiftness in arah is a big component of reducing the time, if your mes is last getting to a boss that needs reflects, you’re going to be waiting a while. If you’re fighting the p1 entities in arah, your mes can jump off and run the long tunnel then portalling everyone from the white bear WP, you sacrifice a small amount of damage and save everyone the long run time. This applies to groups running support/tanky builds. If you’re in a tanky build, group buffing is more applicable, stacking 25 might on a player is 750 power, a nomad player has 926(1226 with traits), you’re giving them a 60-80% boost in dps(abysmally low dps) but buffing becomes more important if you don’t have dmg stats on your armour. Fury gives 20% crit, if you drop a disc banner they help boost each other, Increasing crit rate for low crit dmg is a minimal buff, likewise high crit dmg with no rate isn’t efficient. The higher your power, the more your crits hit, so might/fury/other buffs boost the players damage exponentially.

Giving offensive(and some defensive) support during fights, and supporting players on the travel portions is half the time in dungeons. There is a reason mesmer portals are in records(even though the mesmer deals significantly less damage, not including burst potential with 3 phantasms and shatter).

rfdarko.4639:

You seem to be a bit confused about the acceptance of exploits. Both DnT tournaments used the restricted ruleset, as do 99% of records. Those rules ban things like safe-spotting, terrain glitching, etc. Gw2 is actually pretty strict when it comes to community policing of exploits. What pugs do in their daily runs doesn’t necessarily reflect the speed run community – pugs will take the path of least resistance and that includes safespotting mossman, one-shotting lupi with wall-on-wall, etc. […]

Thank you for clarifying that, the videos I watched from speedruns and tournaments where probably old or not using this ruleset. I admit I didnt spend a lot of time researching that topic. Sorry for that.

Purple Miku.7032:

How is holding a cutscene an exploit?

If you’re so interested in making sure that you play dungeons “as they were intended,” then I’m confused as to why you would consider watching a cutscene as exploiting :P

When only a single player is watching the cutscene it can lead to players getting an upper hand on encounters.

dlonie.6547:

[…]
So I think publicizing the exploits in the tournaments is not a bad thing, because it’s the only effective method we have to get ArenaNet to give a flying kitten about fixing their game.

That is a really good point, and it makes sense. But the problem is when the developer doesn’t do anything at all. I guess that’s the situation we are in right now.

Wolfeng.3784:

But the problem is when the developer doesn’t do anything at all. I guess that’s the situation we are in right now.

Yup. And if they don’t do anything, nothing will change.

You can try starting a community initiative to get people to stop using cheesy tactics, but if ArenaNet doesn’t care, neither will most of the players, so I wouldn’t get my hopes up

Good luck.