Guild Wars 2

I still haven’t done any of the Dungeon Story modes (or explorable, for that matter), despite playing for 1.5 years and focusing on story. This is mostly because I have a pretty strong aversion to pug things I haven’t done before and my guild having seen a reduction in activity for some time.

I play most of my time with my spouse, and we have a pretty wide selection of lvl 80 characters, variously well geared, and with a couple each I’d say that we’re decently competent with.

Which Story Mode Dungeons (if any) would you say are feasible to duo?

It depends more on you & your spouse, Tanner. The best players in the game can duo just about anything; many of us still struggle with a team of 4-5 for certain types of things.

The only way to tell is give it a shot. If you have to, look for videos of people duoing or soloing and/or ask for specific help here. The walkthroughs on the wiki and other sites are also good places to start.

I’d recommend trying AC, SE, and/or CM. If you have trouble with the first you choose, swap to the next and see if it’s better for you. Success at duoing is a combination of understanding your prof, your partner’s prof, the synergies between them, and, of course, the mechanics of the encounters. You’ll get better with practice.

tl;dr Yes, you can duo story mode. Choose one of AC, SE, or CM (or any of the others) to see how you do. Regroup as necessary; search or ask for help as needed.

Please let us know how it goes, too.

I would say all except for the CoF, CoE, and Arah. The explorable mode of those have been done solo, but if you aren’t experienced in doing something like that, I’d say to not try just 2 manning the story. Arah is difficult because a lot of it requires the full party, at least from what I remember.

blakkrskyrr.7413:

I would say all except for the CoF, CoE, and Arah. The explorable mode of those have been done solo, but if you aren’t experienced in doing something like that, I’d say to not try just 2 manning the story. Arah is difficult because a lot of it requires the full party, at least from what I remember.

There is no story mode of Arah anymore. It’s simply a personal story step now and can be soloed.

Thanks everyone! I’ll make sure to update with how it goes Good idea about youtube! I always do thay for JPs, don’t know why I didn’t think to do that for this :p

AC and TA are fairly easy. CM has some crazy bits with rooms full of elites. Manageable if you know where they will be and pull carefully. This is a bit like GW1.

SE … the fights before the last boss can be quite painful although the last boss is very easy.

CoF is actually easier than SE.

HotW has several spots with very high incoming damage and the last fight is agaist a champion and a legendary. One of which can pretty much oneshot with a skill with fairly low cooldown.

CoE … maybe with some combination of dragonhunter, elementalist, engineer, druid. There is one spot where you need large amounts of AoE damage as well as the ability throw out heals to keep an NPC alive.

Vayne.8563:

blakkrskyrr.7413:

I would say all except for the CoF, CoE, and Arah. The explorable mode of those have been done solo, but if you aren’t experienced in doing something like that, I’d say to not try just 2 manning the story. Arah is difficult because a lot of it requires the full party, at least from what I remember.

There is no story mode of Arah anymore. It’s simply a personal story step now and can be soloed.

huh. well, thanks for that info.

My wife and I actually managed to duo all stories, the only hard time we had was during CoF and Hotw. But it is doable. I played support guardian and she played standard ele.

Nick Lentz.6982:

My wife and I actually managed to duo all stories, the only hard time we had was during CoF and Hotw. But it is doable. I played support guardian and she played standard ele.

Awesome

Thanks for letting us know about your successes.

Next challenges (should you choose to accept them):

• Duo explorable mode dungeons (a few require tricks, for which a mesmer is really helpful).
• Duo the lower tier fractals.

Duoing higher-tier fractals can be really tricky, except for some of the game’s top players. The T1s aren’t that bad (although again, you’ll need to use tricks from a mesmer or something similar for some, mostly non-combat, parts).

Arah Story is totally duoable. The only issue is the random disconnects causing you to start over.
Though I main a heal druid, so I havent found one I couldnt do yet. It would depend on the classes

Cercie.1025:

Arah Story is totally duoable. The only issue is the random disconnects causing you to start over.
Though I main a heal druid, so I havent found one I couldnt do yet. It would depend on the classes

Arah doesn’t have a story mode anymore. It is just a long PS instance that scales with party size. The conversion to a PS instance is part of your random disconnect problem. At least when it was a story mode dungeon you can still rejoin as long as one of the party members remained connected.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Nick Lentz.6982:

My wife and I actually managed to duo all stories, the only hard time we had was during CoF and Hotw. But it is doable. I played support guardian and she played standard ele.

Awesome

Thanks for letting us know about your successes.

---

Next challenges (should you choose to accept them):

• Duo explorable mode dungeons (a few require tricks, for which a mesmer is really helpful).
• Duo the lower tier fractals.

Duoing higher-tier fractals can be really tricky, except for some of the game’s top players. The T1s aren’t that bad (although again, you’ll need to use tricks from a mesmer or something similar for some, mostly non-combat, parts).

My guild mates and I use to try to see how far we could get if fractals from a freshly rolled character, naturally this was before pre determined levels. But you could only use what was dropped and only use any fractal relics you received from that character. Was quite fun

Me and my brother managed to duo all of the story dungeons and it was one of the best experiences ever in GW2, second to raiding.

I played an elementalist, elite specialised as tempest, having medium to strong experience of playing with the class. I made use of most of my reflection skills and the Glyph of elementals summons if I needed extra bodies to take in enemy fire.

My brother played a non specialised warrior with the defense line trait. He was fairly new to the game at the time (bout 1 year ago) but he managed to pull it off perfectly with a bit of advice from me.

Notes:
Many encounters proved to be easier if each of us spawned friendly NPCs such as Warband Support (charr racial elite) and Glyph of Elementals (ele elite).
Some encounters were easier to clear with ranged DPS but most of them were done using melee and dodges.
The hardest part was the final boss in Honor of the Waves. it took us quite a bit of tries but once you understand his mechanics, it’s tricky, but you can beat him as a duo.
*I reckon that a condition engineer or a condition berserker could solo all the story dungeons.

Good luck and let us know how it went oh, and don’t be afraid of pugs! Be friendly and learn the encounters together. I just did all the dungeons again with full parties of pugs and every boss melts. At this point with all the power creep, story dungeons are plain boring with a full party. Immensely more entertaining as duo.

What boggles me is, you’ve played the game for over a year, you showed interest in completing the story mode dungeons but you never just tried it? Solo or duo? I mean, this is a game, you don’t lose anything for experimentation. You do lose out on a learning experience when you just look up how to do it, especially if you’re not concerned with just getting it over with (1 afternoon of PuG would get them over with).

Tanner Blackfeather.6509:

I still haven’t done any of the Dungeon Story modes (or explorable, for that matter), despite playing for 1.5 years and focusing on story. This is mostly because I have a pretty strong aversion to pug things I haven’t done before and my guild having seen a reduction in activity for some time.

I play most of my time with my spouse, and we have a pretty wide selection of lvl 80 characters, variously well geared, and with a couple each I’d say that we’re decently competent with.

Which Story Mode Dungeons (if any) would you say are feasible to duo?

A guardian/druid duo can pretty much do anything in the dungeons.

That’s not to say I’ve done it, but I’ve done about 75% and plan to eventually do them all. There will be mobs that you’ll have to do some experimention and come back a few times, but I believe that most people who play those classes well can do it.

Well, reporting in with the first try – a success!
We did AC, as it’s the first chronologically. Power Druid (lb/staff) and Tempest (sc/wh). Took it nice and slow; it was much easier than I expected! Emboldened, and will try more, going in order!
To those wondering why I asked rather than just tried: mainly because I wanted to know it was realistic, and even mechanically possible. Trying, and finding it actually impossible, is not really something I find enjoyable. This thread confirmed to me that there were no mechanical stops, just skill-based ones.

Thanks everyone for the encouragement!