Guild Wars 2

So far I’ve only completed two paths of Arah (with a guild in their Ventrilo) and by far this is the most ridiculous dungeon in game in length and difficulty in terms of the poultry rewards given. I would expect with the dungeons being so difficult and long you would be handed Ascended gear.

• Every path takes too kitten long! The first time I ran Path 3 I thought the Lupicus guy was the last boss because he took so long to kill (took us like a half hour in wipes) only to be slapped in the face that you’re not even done!

• Dwayna in path 4 requires more coordination and DPS stacking than any other fight in game. Literally 3 of us in the group (I was on my Guardian, tank spec) had to relog on our DPS alts (my Thief) and go re-trait max DPS just to finish this boss in one attempt. What a joke.

• Too much trash — that is just skipped. Half of the dungeon is spent dodging trash and the other half is spent on the boss fights.

• 60 badges and a couple of blues for each path — that’s it. Talk about NO satisfaction. At least with Fractal’s when you start getting Rings, tokens, and weapons you feel like your time was well spent.

• You can literally do ALL THE PATHS in AC, Path 1 + 2 CoF, and maybe all of TA (not all at once, just one complete dungeon) in the length of time it takes to finish an Arah’s path. Fractal’s usually takes 30-80 minutes depending on if you get lucky. Arah feels like a 2 hour grind fest.

Honestly this dungeon is way too hard and time consuming for the little rewards given.

If you want quick gold and chance at items, there’s always AC and CoF. If you have some time to kill and want to get slapped around for a bit, there’s Arah. Don’t do it if you don’t like it.

I want to point out that I do Arah p2 with my guild in 22 minutes, it just requires that you skip every single mob inbetween each of the bosses, and is very merciless to players not very good at skipping. I do this strictly for the tokens because I love the Arah weapons/armor; otherwise the rewards for this dungeon are terrible. Also, I’d like to point out that Rob is aware of this, and is looking into rewards for dungeons like Arah in future updates.

Path 3 takes about 45min – 1 hour for a normal smooth run which isn’t that bad (being generous with times instead of giving exaggerated low times for a typical group). I take 1-4 new people and explain most things and it takes me about 45min. A good group focused on power could do it in 30min or so. The rest of the paths are only worth doing if you are going dungeon master. The rewards are some great skins that you actually have to earn by doing something challenging instead of flying through AC/CoF etc or farming gold so I guess that would be the point of doing Arah. The game needs more dungeons like it and more epic bosses like lupi. I do agree with about Dwayna though as I’m sure many others do as well.

AC and COF you don’t need a good group to beat them, only 2-3 players have to know what their doing. In ARAH if you have a good group of 5 Solid players its just the same as a bad group in ac or cof.

Path 3 with a good group is what.. 20-25 minutes?
Path 2 about the same
Path 1 30-35?
Path 4 around 45-60 minutes

The problem isn’t that arah is to long or is to hard, its that the general population of this game just simply doesn’t know how to do it like they do cof or ac. As always it all depends on the people in your group. You can go do a Se path 3 speed run in 15 minutes or it can take 45 minutes because people are unable to run past the bridge.

- Paths are long but they get better the more practice you have and the better group you can manage. You can do path 3 in 20-30 mins with a good group on average.

- Dwayna is pretty tough because of sparks pathing and the coordination it takes, dps is not a must but its a plus, not many do this path except for dungeon master and considering the rest of the dungeons only have 3 paths there’s no complains from me here.

- I do agree trash is strong and unforgiving at times, but it’s arah, toughest dungeon in game, it makes sense.

- It’s worth it if you want the skins.

- I doubt you can do all those paths if running with a good group, I’d say 2 AC paths or 2 CoF is about 1 path 3 run with competent groups.

Anyway people do it because of the skin and dungeon master title, the skins are pretty cool in my opinion and this game is a lot about looks, not stats.

Did our first Arah exp. Have to say, largely unimpressed for the 1st time in this game. Loved every dungeon design up to this point and loved the boss design in Arah. But, to have harder trash than bosses is just poor design imo
Hopefully it’ll be re-balanced to be sensible and fun.

The challenge is the point.

There’s no raids or anything like that in GW2, so this is about the closest you get to seriously challenging PvE end game outside of fractals.

I think the trash in pretty much every dungeon is harder than most of the bosses in respective dungeon. The few bosses that are harder than trash are either exploited or targeted by endless “nerf nao” threads.

WHen we died and the trash turned on and nearly killed a boss for us, then you know the trash have been over powered and something has gone wrong in the design

I was lead to believe level 80 Exp modes are kinda this games versions raids, i’m looking forward to it being hard.

You should die on max level content, atleast when first attempting, if I walk into any Exp mode for the first time and don’t die a few times I am going to be very dissapointed.

Too hard? Sounds awesome.

If that’s what you are after Hermit, you will love them. And to be honest, some of the boss designs in Arah are really good. Even Lupin, who despite being a long fight, was still a decent mechanic. Kudos to their designers and I hope they aren’t affected too much by the upcoming changes. It’s just the in between bits where my (personal) issue lies.