Guild Wars 2

I was excited to finally be 30 and run my very first dungeon, got the group and got completely mowed down by the mobs. the bosses seemed easier and more fun than the mobs between.

I know this game is suppose to remove the roles of tank and healer, which im totally for, but why did the experience feel like the roles were still necessary.

my current opinion of the dungeon experience is that it seems like skill isn’t even a factor, i used my slows, immobilizes and stuns, dodged and tried to save other members but between the ranged mob and no way to escape the AI’s focus ( taunts or lowing aggro) it felt like a massacre.

GW2 have taken away the meaning of the holy trinity. This is something great as they move out of the paradigm of a conventional MMO.

This also means that everyone should build their character in a way so as to not be a bloody glass canon. Everyone must be responsible on how to self heal, dish out dps, tank and CC.

You must forget about that healer in the pocket as you yourself have to heal yourself. Its kind of you have to learn how to be the holy trinity. Always remember, there are no agro management in GW2, just CC and group synergy is the key.

Heres a few pointers for instance crawling:
1) Learn to roll and dodge
2) Learn the animation of bosses and mobs
3) Learn all your utilities
4) Learn to SWAP weapons
5) DON’T EVER KEYBOARD TURN

Cheers and happy dungeon crawling.

Doing dungeons on Exploration mode is even worse. Instancing and PvE is the worst balance i have ever seen in a mmo. It’s probably going to improve but as of now i can not even remotely think of anything so bad as GW2 is in pve instances.

Moving around is important too, not just stand around and take punishment, but when someone with a toughness build gets 1shotted by a silver mob, it’s just bad development, not the players fault toughness serves no purpose.

Dungeons are designed for an organized group of players. Once you get an organized group, the challenge won’t be on completing the dungeon, but clearing it efficiently. This involves pulling correctly, stacking might and other buffs, and learning the enemy attacks. If you ever played Guildwars 1, you would see that aggro control doesn’t involve using get-out-of-jail-free skills to get enemies to stop attacking you. Melee mobs are easy to kill because you can cycle snares and damage. With ranged mobs, you change tactics, pump AoE attacks, spam blind, and have your group use the projectile shield skills as you have plenty of them.

The dungeons have a Dark Souls style of play, forming random groups to try and clear it is a trial in patience since there is unlikely to be cookie cutter setups to be introduced in the game. You will fail more than a few times trying to do each dungeon.

Relic.7148:

Dungeons are designed for an organized group of players. Once you get an organized group, the challenge won’t be on completing the dungeon, but clearing it efficiently. This involves pulling correctly, stacking might and other buffs, and learning the enemy attacks. If you ever played Guildwars 1, you would see that aggro control doesn’t involve using get-out-of-jail-free skills to get enemies to stop attacking you. Melee mobs are easy to kill because you can cycle snares and damage. With ranged mobs, you change tactics, pump AoE attacks, spam blind, and have your group use the projectile shield skills as you have plenty of them.

The dungeons have a Dark Souls style of play, forming random groups to try and clear it is a trial in patience since there is unlikely to be cookie cutter setups to be introduced in the game. You will fail more than a few times trying to do each dungeon.

There isnt enough CC to control the mobs long enough to really save anyone. There is something missing, I am all for team play, and i find myself reviving allys more often that most. But the fact that a mob of three can wipe our entire group in just a few seconds ruins the fun, and doesnt allow enough time to realize what is going on and what is the best actions to take.

Do you feel that the instances in their current state are balanced?

I’ve just posted in other thread about AC, it is pure disappointment. Explore mode was impossible to finish (Asura path) for group that had most players of lvl 50+, only I was lvl 33. We died infinite times and spent hella lot of money to repair gears and got nothing. 1st boss dropped green dagger and blue shield for whole group, so 3 of 5 ppl got nothing. And we could not complete second boss cuz of mobs that kept overwhelm us, wasted 2 hours there for nothing. And gorgules that 1shot you, srsly, who designed such things that 1shot players?!
And Relic, how do you think we gonna control, aoe, kite, blind 50+mobs that keep multiplying and run faster than we do with runspeed buffs?

Very rarely in the groups i’ve been in have we been wiped very fast. I as a support/tanky build guardian get between the mob and my allies and take a good brunt of the damage moving on those shots that will 1 shot me while i keep healing abilities rolling on myself and my group. I also call targets on casters that i know are going to mess us up and make sure the group knows to focus burn whats called. Over all it goes fairly quickly without too much issues. It just takes everyone doing there part and really helps if you have someone playing a tank type role.

Edit: This is story mode btw. I’ve yet to do exploration as i know those are not properly balanced.

Are you utilizing combos? They make a difference. I agree the dungeons need some tweaking as they’re a bit too hard atm, but not as bad as the OP makes out. Perhaps it was just the group you were with didn’t gel. I’ve been fortunate with my PUGs so far.

Story mode is possible to do at least, but also you need to have tanky class and some good dps, if you are all lvl 30 it is kinda too hard, so how is it that lvl 30 instance inappropriate hard to do for lvl 30 chars. As for exploration mode – it is pure frustration and death after death for 2 hours for ridiculous reward.

I haven’t had a chance yet to play any of the dungeons, so keep that in mind while reading…

My favorite part of almost every MMO is the dedicated group content – I find it a tad disappointing that the first available pve dungeon is lvl 30 – seems like quite a long haul for landscape exploration before your first dedicated group content – but, since I know that the grouping content is what is ultimately going to lock me into the game or kill my interest, I’ve been following a lot of the chatter about dungeons, and here is the overall impression I’ve got listening to other folks testimonials, and the general design principles of GW2

group dungeons sound like they have been very, very hard to the first few companies that enter – many of the experiences sound like the ones some of you people have had – overwhelmingly dangerous – but, I also hear a lot of testimonials from folks that have weathered their way through the dungeons, and they speak quite highly of them, and I suspect this is why…

Guild Wars 2 combat just does not work according to traditional mmo staples. There’s no threat table, no distinctively locked class types, a lot more movement – skill effects like crowd control and stealth last for a very brief time (most last 3-5 seconds, if that much), and there’s a huge range of very short windows of very powerful skill synergy

and this is I think where the successful teams have finally learned to love the game, once they figure it out – from what I’ve seen, and what I’ve heard, a HUGE portion of the game unlocks when you coordinate your own skill usage with the combo fields and boons that are provided by other characters, or when you are the one providing those boons and fields to be exploited by other players

this means that other players have to know when a boon is up, which of their skills suddenly applies, and they have a very brief window in which to work (I think most of those fields are up for what? 5-8 seconds in most cases?) – I’ve heard a lot of build talk lately that usually revolves around building a character that is quite capable in single play – which of course means that a large company of people out there are ignoring the far less singly useful, far more group powerful skills – fury, if i remember correctly, is a boon that buffs crit chance by 20% something like that? some characters have skills that buff ALL THEIR NEABY ALLIES with fury for 5 seconds or some such…

My level 11 guardian has at least one, possibly 2 skills, that reduce incoming damage to allies by 33% for 5 seconds, or some such

my guess, and I’ll be the first person to admit it’s only a guess based on discussions about the design of GW2 and the various chatter I hear from folks, is that dungeons are going to continue to prove to be overwhelming until the community starts realizing that their builds for group play need to play to those seemingly small, seemingly brief group buffing skills, and they ALL start re-building along those lines

I suspect the reason we haven’t seen more complaints in PVP and W3 is that the vast majority of PVP players are still operating by the above guidelines – worried more about individual character efficiency than in the far more…fuzzy…group skill synergy

yeah, I think “synergy” is going to become the watchword of Guild Wars 2 – learning to coordinate those combo zones, those group wide boons, the combo finishers, learning to let go of a generation’s worth of previous MMO structure – when that finally happens, I think the face of GW2 is going to change significantly, and I hope, for the better

Completed explore mode CM with a team of guildies, took about 2.5 hours. Bosses were uneventful and boring, the trash took forever to kill, and the reward for doing all of it? 25 tokens total. To get a single vanity weapon, it would take 12 runs. The full level 70 armor set would take 60+ runs. After a single clear, it’s obvious that no one in my guild has any impulse to do that explore mode grind: the rewards just aren’t worth it. At the moment, they’re overtuned and a complete slog.

Relic.7148:

Dungeons are designed for an organized group of players. Once you get an organized group, the challenge won’t be on completing the dungeon, but clearing it efficiently. This involves pulling correctly, stacking might and other buffs, and learning the enemy attacks. If you ever played Guildwars 1, you would see that aggro control doesn’t involve using get-out-of-jail-free skills to get enemies to stop attacking you. Melee mobs are easy to kill because you can cycle snares and damage. With ranged mobs, you change tactics, pump AoE attacks, spam blind, and have your group use the projectile shield skills as you have plenty of them.

The dungeons have a Dark Souls style of play, forming random groups to try and clear it is a trial in patience since there is unlikely to be cookie cutter setups to be introduced in the game. You will fail more than a few times trying to do each dungeon.

You clearly haven’t played too many MMOs if this “balance” is the worst you’ve seen. I’m also going to say that I’ve seen quite a few people asking for even more difficult content.

You do understand that ‘synergy’ only possible within a static group, right?
Say, you have PUG ranger, elem, necro, guardian and a warrior. What traits do they have? The guardian – is he a Shout build? Burn build? Meditations? What gear does he have? Toughness/Vitality? Condition/Power/Crit? Healing? He can’t just respec to a tank and still wear his dps armor – he’ll be useless.

Statics on the other hand know their roles from the beginning and their Guardian is a tank build, wearing toughness/vit gear, and a shield. Because he doesn’t need to kill open world mobs alone (which takes him ages in that build/gear).

teemoor.4397:

You do understand that ‘synergy’ only possible within a static group, right?
Say, you have PUG ranger, elem, necro, guardian and a warrior. What traits do they have? The guardian – is he a Shout build? Burn build? Meditations? What gear does he have? Toughness/Vitality? Condition/Power/Crit? Healing? He can’t just respec to a tank and still wear his dps armor – he’ll be useless.

Statics on the other hand know their roles from the beginning and their Guardian is a tank build, wearing toughness/vit gear, and a shield. Because he doesn’t need to kill open world mobs alone (which takes him ages in that build/gear).

No such thing as a tank, no one can tank. You can make your character a better control with skills and the right states, but no one can outright sit there and tank. In a team you will always need more then one control are you will die.

Well I thought Ac was kinda easy my self. Me a Mesmer who main focus is control, but of course I do other two roles a bit to.

A gaurdian, who was other control. A Engi, a theif, and a nerc who 3 did support/dps.

The hardest part of the dgn, the lovers. Even those we clear with out a prob. I just held the guy away from the gal until they killed her.

So no with a group who knows how to switch roles, and play right. It pretty easy.

Not a troll post

I from what I’ve being hearing is that the dungeons are very hard for reasons of a lack of any real holy trinity roles. Could it be that taking on the mobs and bosses can’t be done the way some popular MMOs do it?

I had no problems with a group of 5 ranged. 3 Rangers an Ele and a Mesmer

From the original post I will summarise your issues to the following two:

1) You are having trouble with the regular mobs of Ascalonian Catacombs

2) You seem to busy yourself keeping your team mates alive.

Now to address them:

1) The Ascalonian ghosts are best approached with a kill priority. As a rule of thumb

Ranger > Elementalist > Mesmer > Necromancer > others

Also, if everybody on the team is built like a glass cannon, then don’t expect people to survive.

2) You mention using a slew of crowd control to save team mates. I have 2 questions:

2a) What are your team mates doing to keep themselves alive?

2b) Are you interrupting the correct attacks or just their auto attacks?

Just gonna say one thing to these cry babies. This game is actually hard. This game is not WoW. This game takes skill, coordination, and thought. The Explore Modes have already been cleared quite easily by multiple groups across all servers. Everything Ojimaru said is exactly what you need to do. This is not a skill rotation spam MMO like WoW/SWTOR/EQ. You really have to use your abilities correctly not just randomly. What that means is making sure to keep cripples on melee mobs and blinds on ranged mobs. Between 5 classes you should have at least 2-3 of every needed condition for controlling the Damage Output of monsters. Always save stuns for those moments where you need to stop Damage Output for a longer stretch of time in order for someones self heal and Dodge Stamina to recharge.

All in all. You are going to wipe. Best thing you can do is focus on the professions of the mobs and get a good kill order going. Ranged must always die first and be blind and stun spammed to death. Melee can be kited the entire time with cripples and be a useless trash mob the entire time.

I agreed with the above post. Dungeons are not meant to be easy. If this game handfed players that much, then it would not be as successful and enjoyable as it is right now. I got through my first dungeon on my first try solely through…

1. Team communication before each major battle
2. Splitting roles and prioritizing targets
3. Patience, patience, patience.

Cloud.2178:

I agreed with the above post. Dungeons are not meant to be easy. If this game handfed players that much, then it would not be as successful and enjoyable as it is right now. I got through my first dungeon on my first try solely through…

1. Team communication before each major battle
2. Splitting roles and prioritizing targets
3. Patience, patience, patience.

I seem to remember ArenaNet implying as much, they lowered the PvE difficulty but since GW2 doesn’t have raid content, the hardcore group content is the dungeons.

There was a major misnomer going around when the game was being developed, and people started second-hand mentioning, “You don’t have Tanks or Healers!” to everyone else to describe the game. This is not completely true. What -is- true is that, “Every Profession has access to significant heals in order to facilitate the role of healer.”

Regardless of what people think, there is “Threat” and “Aggro” in the game, and it is based on a few factors. There are two interviews on the page http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Aggro that detail this information, as presented by the Development team. To recap, the following can affect whether you have threat on a target: proximity, whether you are a Guardian, your damage. Aggro is simple, is the mob angry at you? That’s aggro. Threat is simply any mechanic that defines priority targeting for the AI. GW2 has that. What the game does not have is taunting, at least that I’ve seen playing a Guardian to 62.

Furthermore, “Not needing healers!” is a phrase that is going to lead more people in this game to having a bad time more than any other, at least so far as dungeoning goes. If you don’t have -anyone- picking up at least one or two aoe heals, you’re going to be doing a lot of boss zerging from the spawn point. The ability to heal in a dungeon makes a world of difference. Arenanet just didn’t want to make classes that were shoehorned into it—It doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Why do you think we get AoE heals and Engineering kits and what-have-you? They’re meant to be used.

I completely agree with the description of the dungeon as a massacre. My first run through AC took forever. The mobs simply have too much health and too much damage combined. Even with the rest of the trash cc’d or locked down the one everyone is focusing takes far too many hits and the enemies who are active are able to do too much damage with little to no warning prior. For instance the ascalonian rangers are able to summon a spike trap that will nearly kill me (as a guardian wering heavy armor and with points invested in toughness) instantly. I keep hearing about how much player skill and dodging affects the dungeons, but as of yet all my deaths have been due to an unavoidable situation. Should we be THIS outclassed by run of the mill ghosts? Should we truly be this weak in comparison to the foes we are fighting? I feel that the hp of the enemies in dungeons should be lowered (by just a bit), bosses are fine but should we really have to focus this much effort into killing the normal enemies? Hell we can’t even see an opponents health bar deplete unless more than one player is fighting them at once. I don’t want dungeons to be easy, but I don’t want to feel like I am walking into suicide mission either.

I don’t even want to discuss the terrible experience that was AC exploration mode.

Can only talk about AC as i ran them once in BWE2 and twice in BWE3. Only in story mode mind you. I`m playing a ranger and went with a pet/heal build. The build is allowing my pet to tank any mob in story mode for about 5-15 seconds (King adelbern only 5 seconds, rest far more). With swapping out my pet every 15 seconds or so they can tank nearly any enemy. Along with my heal build (area heal and elite skill) it allows a group to stay alive for 15 seconds or so each fight if no one else heals. As every class can heal it gets exceedingly easier when 3 or more people heal. Meaning if you have 2 guardians and an ele in your group, the hp of everyone rarely drop below 50% in the group. If you have 2 rangers a warrior mesmer and ele in your group it becomes more a matter of moving out of aoe abilities than straight out healing. Some setups are slightly easier to play (it helps if you have severals members in you group that can take a few hits) but it`s by no means impossible with other setups.
About no Group content beforehand: Try the ogre events in Diessa plateau with 5 players or engage a champion mob (there are a few scattered around in level 15+ zones) with only 2 or 3 players. It allows you to get a feeling how the classes play together, how to kite a mob that deals heavy damage. Just please don`t say the dungeons are too hard, instead develop better strategies.

The dungeons are fine. Environmental weapons are there for a reason (hint: Boulders are OP), you shouldn’t just spam dodge everything. Dodge what NEEDS to be dodged, CC/Block/walk out of everything else. Do not neglect your defensive stats, they exist for a reason. Condition removal is probably the most important thing in the game.

It’s true that the dungeons are designed for an organised group.
Myself and 4 guild members did catacombs last night and we had only minor problems with coordination, but everyone agreed that it went 10x better than a pug group.

Just get a group of friends or find a guild doing PVE content and give that a go, it’s much more fun when you can have a laugh about failing :P

Dungeons are hard. Dungeons are balanced.
It just takes some time getting to know what you’re enemy. Learning boss/mob mechanic. Sure you will die many, many times but when you figure it out it’s easy (:

I’m speaking from personal experience as a mesmer. I run AC several times mode and yesterday I did CM, TA, SE for the first time. This is all story mode, and to be honest I didn’t plan on doing exploration till I have full gear (I hit 80 few days ago). Just because there’s an option to go in at lower level doesn’t mean you can run through it undergeared… My guess is lower cap on exploration mode is there so you can play it on your 2nd and other characters when you can afford decent gear for him/her and not have to wait for lv80 (;

I’ll try not to get to spoilery with some tips and advices:

• In combat res downed players asap. But don’t interupt or expose yourself. Finish what you started, cc enemy, pull them away from dead player so others can res…
• In combat never res dead player. If you die use respawn point.
• Kill healers first.
• Kill heavy damage dealers next. Depending on your group setup that could be direct damage or conditions. If you have high toughness but conditions hurt you more deal with those enemies. Keep in mind the group tho’ – if you survive and 3 of others die, change tactics. It’s beter you die and 3 others survive.
• When you die figure out why you did. Change weapons, traits, even armor if you have spare set and retry… Don’t just go back in and do the same things all over again (;

Assuming you know your skills and abilities well and don’t play agains yourself.

The big issue that I’ve been noticing on the multiple runs through CM (story) and one, single, horrible run through AC is that nobody focuses on the same target. You have a necro over there taking on a boss, a mesmer being wiped by another, an engineer running around setting off traps, and then me (ranger) and the warrior beating the snot out of the same mob. The necro, mesmer, and engineer would wonder why they were getting wiped.

Go figure.

Dungeons aren’t a place for you to solo a mob by yourself. Someone needs to pick a target and then every one else needs to select the same target as well.

Guild Wars 2 is a different MMO, yes, sure, absolutely. But grouping isn’t a new concept. Yeah, it’s a whole lot easier in this game to solo. But when you are doing a dedicated dungeon run, it’s about working as a team, not having the wizard with the toughness and armor of used tissue “tank” the main boss while everyone else is running around trying not to get killed by the other three bosses.

So TL;DR: everyone needs to target the same mob. I can’t believe I need to say that, but apparently I do.

Oh, and one last thing: For the love of god, take out the spell casters first, especially in AC.

Honestly, the biggest problem with dungeons is the messed up targeting. It wouldn’t be an issue if the groups of 5 would target different people, but the targeting is moderately confusing to me. Both times I’ve gone into AC (once explorable and once story) I find the experience absurdly boring and poorly designed, largely because I spend the whole time running around and surviving as long as possible simply because everything attacks me the moment I come anywhere near them (a little further than longbow range). If I was built to tank, perhaps it would be better, but the target lock for a melee dps class is simply detrimental to gameplay because I’m permanently unable to do what I built my character to do. Furthermore, there are times when you are REQUIRED to dodge or you are simply killed by a boss, but when 4 ranged people are locked onto you, you rarely have the endurance to do this. Anyway, that’s probably the largest problem with dungeons at the moment. Yes, story mode is easier; but the fact that it’s doable doesn’t change the fact that it’s poorly designed. If you have a guardian tank who the enemies will actually attack, I imagine it would be a lot easier (due to the fact that guardians are insanely good tanks), but without that, target swapping on the enemies becomes basically necessary to allow people to survive without dying repeatedly.

The second issue I’ve found is that running lower level dungeons gives almost nothing to the higher level player (maybe 4s in items?) and low level gear tokens, but the scaling makes it harder for higher levels than it would be for lower levels. Running AC at lvl 66 with lvl 60 rare armor, I take more damage than a legitimate lvl 30 mesmer, which seems silly to me.

Anyway, dungeons are basically a rangefest. There isn’t going to be that much in the way of CC ability because the game isn’t designed to be able to chain cc people forever like wow (good thing). What you can do, is immobilize/cripple melee people, blind is pretty useless, only working part of the time, but it can prevent a little damage, and generally just reviving and dodging a lot. There’s so many ranged enemies that it tends to diminish the ability to simply survive on skill, since 6 ranged people attacking you means you’ll die the moment you run out of endurance. Most of this is pertaining to the AC explorable, but i am of the opinion that the scaling needs to be tweaked to an extent and the AI switched around; either that or they need to move to having melee mobs, rather than enormous numbers of ranged.

People who post here that AC is easy balanced and everything consider what type of AC did you run? Once again story mode is possible, cuz zerg of mobs does not overrun you there. Now go ahead and do explore mode and pick Asura path and lets see what will you say then. How much will you spend for repairs and what loots will you get. GW2 was advertised as casual game actually and “we know what players want”. I haven’t seen any players that appreciate impossible instances with small and useless for their classes rewards.
And I totally agree with Javed, targeting system is a total mess, tab target sometimes seem to pick random targets behind you for instance, which you don’t even see, that red arrow kinda not so visible as it should be, so you have hard time to understand what are you targeting at all.
And also game doesn’t work too good with some advanced mise, like A4tech with extra buttons. If I use extra buttons for forward/backward run – I can not click on anything else with mouse for instance, cuz game just ignores any other clicks from mouse when one button is pushed. Sometimes when you rotate camera cursor keeps moving while it is invisible, so after you finish to rotate camera – you can not find your cursor. My hubby uses 2 screens, so his cursor jumps to other screen cuz of that and game goes out of focus and it is really confusing too.
And all those major issues of game interface passed through Betatest I can not get how?!?! And all those issues doesn’t make instances easier. And in pvp such issues are deadly.

Yeah, well according to the devs exploration mode was designed to offer a diverse and challenging! alternative mode for instances. It would kind of defeat the point if you clear it straight on the first try. For me finishing such an event is enough of an reward and you do get tokens. There are a bunch of alternatives for getting good gear in the game, it was clear in the beginning that you won`t get the best drops from dungeons.

Seems like a lot of baseless crying about story mode. Explorer mode I can understand, though.

I remember back in the early days of GW1, when me and my friends went in to FoW and UW for the first time. We died and died, but personally I loved it because it was refreshing to have a genuine challenge. In PvE everything is fairly straight forward and it becomes a bit monotonous at times. Anyway, eventually we learnt how to become more efficient at fighting the mobs in FoW and UW. We’d make it further and further and it was great fun. We didn’t achieve all this in a night of gaming, or even in a week, this was a timespan of months where we’d get together and spend a few hours playing and getting better. Eventually we managed to clear both areas entirely.

The point I’m making is, without the insane difficulty (at the time) we’d have got more bored and had less to do. The challenge kept us coming back for more, and I loved it. I expect it will be the same case with GW2.

ROMP.9403:

GW2 have taken away the meaning of the holy trinity. This is something great as they move out of the paradigm of a conventional MMO.

This also means that everyone should build their character in a way so as to not be a bloody glass canon. Everyone must be responsible on how to self heal, dish out dps, tank and CC.

You must forget about that healer in the pocket as you yourself have to heal yourself. Its kind of you have to learn how to be the holy trinity. Always remember, there are no agro management in GW2, just CC and group synergy is the key.

Heres a few pointers for instance crawling:
1) Learn to roll and dodge
2) Learn the animation of bosses and mobs
3) Learn all your utilities
4) Learn to SWAP weapons
5) DON’T EVER KEYBOARD TURN

Cheers and happy dungeon crawling.

Bold part is the absolute best part of this post. Some glass cannons are fine, but when everyone traits for it, you’re gonna have a bad time.

If you aren’t having fun, don’t play it. Dungeons are meant to be hard, even in story mode. However, I will provide some tips for you guys;
-Go in with good players. These dungeons require good players because of their difficulty. If you go in with even one bad player, you might as well throw in the towel before you start.
-Build a well balanced build; don’t neglect your defense stats and remember to dodge the important things, not the small ones.
-Rez your downed allies, NOT your defeated ones! It takes too long to rez a defeated ally in the midst of combat. Not to mention its way to dangerous.

Expect to die until you come up with an organized and tactical plan. It’s hard and I don’t see that fact changing anytime soon.

Glass cannon might work in general, open-world PvE, but it does not work in dungeons. Even story mode dungeons will be hell for you if you’re a glass cannon. Get some vitality and toughness. Even if you have to sacrifice some damage to get those stats, you’ll do more damage in the long run—after all, you don’t do much good to your group dead.

Also: people have to learn to pull again. This is something that many MMOs have moved away from, but is alive and well in both Guild Wars games. Fighting groups of enemies near their spawn points—their home turf—is a bad idea. You should be pulling them to a more open area, or an area free of traps, and then focusing them down in order of importance. Healers and strong AoE damage dealers need to die first, for example—like thosekittenElementalists in Ascalonian Catacombs.

Also: bring condition removal and defensive skills! As a Mesmer, I’m able to remove conditions and boons (Null Field and Arcane Thievery) and reflect projectiles (Feedback and the Warden’s Feedback traits). There are other things I can do, too—Time Warp is great as a defensive tool for ensuring you can revive your allies quickly—but as soon as I learned how to time Feedback well and when I needed to cleanse my allies my group started doing much better.

One last thing: use the Call Target function. By default it’s Ctrl + T. You’ll place a target over the head of one enemy; then if anyone on your team hits T they’ll automatically target that enemy. In general trash fights, what you should be doing is pulling them away from traps, keeping aware of AoEs and projectiles to dodge, and focusing down one target at a time.

NoFate.3786:

I’ve just posted in other thread about AC, it is pure disappointment. Explore mode was impossible to finish (Asura path) for group that had most players of lvl 50+, only I was lvl 33. We died infinite times and spent hella lot of money to repair gears and got nothing. 1st boss dropped green dagger and blue shield for whole group, so 3 of 5 ppl got nothing. And we could not complete second boss cuz of mobs that kept overwhelm us, wasted 2 hours there for nothing. And gorgules that 1shot you, srsly, who designed such things that 1shot players?!
And Relic, how do you think we gonna control, aoe, kite, blind 50+mobs that keep multiplying and run faster than we do with runspeed buffs?

2nd boss = the Lieutanent? Or one of the bosses down the paths? I found path one (the one involving the ghost) to be very doable though it takes a while to figure out the strategy. Once you’ve the strategy nailed down it is a very reasonable encounter.

Lylin I think he means the third boss, the one where you have to pretect the two… things from lots of Gravelings.

I also spent a few hours on that encounter and didn’t complete it, but that was with one group and maybe I’ll beat it next time.
Seems like it would be much easier with 2-4 Elementalists.

Also in Detha’s path on the 4th encounter, it would be nice if it actually reset when you fail, as if you wipe there is 8 mobs chilling there and if you do kill one they seemed to instantly re-appear.
If Detha gets downed he won’t go back to fixing the turrets unless every mob near is killed which seems like a tall order.
Maybe it was bugged I don’t know.

The humans path was so much easier, but I think we had a better group (and an 80 warrior + pally who were tanky, while I as Ele took care of the AoE deeps and healing when needed).

NoFate.3786:

I’ve just posted in other thread about AC, it is pure disappointment. Explore mode was impossible to finish (Asura path) for group that had most players of lvl 50+, only I was lvl 33.

I thought explorable mode was for level 35+ players? Did they change this?

I’m not 100% sure about ex mode, but it seems like you can at least do story mode while under leveled.

A few days ago I did CM with a level 34 and a 36.

I see a lot of crying and complaining.

I think the dungeons are great. They are a challenge. They are not free loot. They take 5 intelligent skilled players with decent gear and traits to complete it. They are hard work, but when you finish that dungeon they are so rewarding!! A real sense of accomplishment.

Story mode is hard, exploreable is harder. I love the dungeons.

I’ve done two dungeons, Ascalon Catacombs and Twilight Arbor. The only boss where I felt “wtf” was the lovers. Other than that its a lot about individual skill with dodging, kiting and building your utilities (and changing traits) to suit the individual fight.

AC exploration mode option 2 is the easiest of the 2, I advise starting there

While I like the throwing out of the holy trinity, saying that players must learn to play the game doesn’t help. Some things are just unavoidable and, in my opinion, just unfair. Something about the dungeons needs to be tweaked. Either reduce the difficulty or make repairs from dungeon deaths free. Dying is something that is going to happen to your group, and it happens so often you have to start to assume that its part of Anet’s dungeon design philosophy. So don’t penalize the players and make them waste their money because of your specific design. Bosses, are fine. Out of all the bosses that I’ve fought in the dungeons I’ve done, the only one I(including my group) have had trouble with are the two lovers in AC. Granted I’ve only completed 3 dungeons(AC,CM, Arah) but bosses so far are on the easy side, its just the punishing difficulty of the silver mobs that should be reviewed.

After taking lots of Xanex and using several backup keyboards after you break a few.

I have to admit, I am a bit disappointed with the way dungeons are done in this game. I recently tried the level 30 AC (when I was level 50) with two of my friends on story mode. We were each on voice comm, and while we ended up failing due to losing all our money on repairs and losing two of our party members, I believe we would have been able to finish it (through hard work, and proper coordination and cooperation).

This implies to me that dungeons are meant for guilds of players, or frequent play-together groups that focus their characters role to fill needs in the group. This is great for a fun guild challenge.

However…When I read pre-release that “we are removing the Holy Trinity” I jumped to the conclusion that it would eliminate the need to spam chat for “Looking for Tank! Looking for Healer!”. I was hoping that any dungeon could be pugged, at least on an easy mode, and if I found myself with a spare half our in my afternoon I could just hop into a dungeon. I would love a feature where I could hop into a dungeon, complete it on easy mode in a pug in half an hour, and earn, say, 1 Token toward new gear, while other players may play in a super-hard mode guild-based dungeon that takes an entire hour and get 5 tokens toward the same gear.

For a casual gamer like me, that can’t designate that much time to do dungeons (yet I enjoy the challenge), this is a complete letdown. What’s the point in removing the holy trinity if you still need to fill roles, or equip gear based on stats?

I’m not saying to remove how difficult the exploration mode can be, I feel dedicated players who often play together should be rewarded for their cooperation and planning. But please give us casual gamers that want a quick hop-in PUG session to be enjoyable AND rewarding (even if it’s a reward at a tiny fraction of that to the hardcore players).

AC is way overtuned for it being the lowest level dungeon in the game.It’s a meat grinder for the unprepared and uncoordinated.My honest suggestion? Do the story mode(if you can) and then move on.Come back later with a team for explorable if you really really want too.It’s really just not worth the frustration otherwise.

CM is about a million times easier than AC and,in my opinion really should be the first dungeon instead.

I don’t mind challenge.The best moments in gaming are when my wife and I can face a difficult challenge and overcome it together.But,as it stands….AC is just an exercise in frustration and makes you want to quit the game,if you don’t have a well oiled team to do it with.

That being said.I’m glad there’s some challenge in the game and the dungeons aren’t all just drooling on keyboard faceroll easy.Just don’t attempt some things with a pug,get a good group that knows what they are doing.

Tried AC explorable mode today as a level 62 Guardian. Boon/Shout (Vit+tgh build) specced but the whole run was still a nightmare. We wiped like 5-6 times to the spider boss because tbh I don’t even know how to play against that boss. She spams aoe poison that really hurts and somehow we pulled her up to the spike trap area which was a nightmare since one mistimed roll = death.

Eventually, my PUG killed her after half an hour. The next troll boss was also pretty bad, I could barely survive the troll AOE jump damage, and as a mace/shield combo, I get crippled non-stop and in melee range, its really really hard to roll out of the aoe in time. I died many times as a melee because I cant roll out of the aoe fast enough. This went on for a few wipes until I decided to switch to scepter although I am not specced for it at all. The fight went a lot easier after that. I keep my shout up as often as I could. Timed my retreat if I see my party members getting caught in the aoe and I can shield them in time.

The next boss was the liutenant kohl I think and we wiped so many times on him that in the end we gave up and skipped him. i can survive the pull and whirlwind combo if I timed my block correctly but my teammate doesnt. And the elementalist and the ranger just do so much damage that it seems impossible to survive long enough until you kill them.

Are we expected to have one person kite the liutenant around non-stop while we focus down the other 2 elites? If that is the case, then I think I am not gonna play any more dungeons, cause to me its incredibly stupid and not fun to have one person running around non-stop kiting one boss just so that the rest can kill the other 2. Its just not enjoyable to me and a little bit ridiculous.

And although there are many suggestions that everyone should go survival build in the dungeons, not everyone likes to do that. It seems to me everyone is forced into a cookie cutter build that maximize survivability of your own avatar. And teamwork just means you have to do the best you could to survive on your own. At least that is what I generally feel when I did AC.

Anyway on the next captain boss, it was easy enough, kill 15 adds and then kill the captain. It was doable.

The next boss the ranger was also a nightmare, we need clear the adds first which was also very very difficult. Again, as a mace/shield guy, I cant even get in range of them before being knocked back unless I go in with my block up. Once I am in range though they keep spamming the spike traps such that I can’t do kitten as a melee except to run around non-stop trying my best to survive. I don’t even have time to do any damage. So, once again I have to switch to scepter just to be viable. Wall of reflection is also compulsary just to make sure my teammates survived. But when its off cd, there is really nothing much I can do as a guardian except to run around spamming my shout, and that makes me feel disappointed in my hero cause he seems so weak as a melee. Anyway, that is my main issue, that melee classes can do absolutely nothing in some fights in the dungeons.

Before you jump on me, I would like to say that I agree with all of the above bros who are saying the dungeons are fine. I love the difficulty, and I think it is really fun. I love even more how we are the first wave completing dungeons. For example, we were stuck on the final boss fight of TA for literally thirty minutes before we finally realized that the boss became vulnerable when you killed a ghost. We thought she was still unkillable and that we had to kill them all before she rezzed. Jesus we wiped so many times, but the sense of accomplishment you get after all that is worth it in my eyes. Sure the material gains of dungeons suck, I admit that, but the feeling you get from just having beat the thing is excellent.

The only “but” that I have to the conversation is this: Aggro is dumb. I just don’t understand it at all. If there is a system in place, please explain it to me, me and my friends need to understand it. As it is, it seems like the AI rolls a d5 and aggros on the player who corresponds. Its not based on who is squishiest, who is lowest in health, who is downed, who is dealing the most damage… its just random. And when the wrong person gets aggro at the wrong time, it will almost always result in a wipe. I play a warrior, and half the time I feel pigeonholed into mace/sheild just so I have enough stuns so that one is always up when a squishy bro/downed bro/in trouble bro gets aggro. And that doesn’t even matter if its a boss with the immunity to cc buff. That bro gonna die if thats true, nothing can save him.

But seriously, I’d love to be wrong, if there is another way that I can control the battlefield either through aggro systems or any mechanic I am unaware of, please let me know.

I ran AC twice for the first time yesterday(successfully) and had mixed feelings about it.

The things that stood out were the following:

a) Threat: It was all over the place. . Even after I waited for another player to attain aggro, the mob totally dropped proximity threat and ran to me. Other than dodging/LOS/self heal, there was very little I could do to prevent myself from taking a beating.
b) Damage: Though I did live much longer than a few other members in my party with my timed dodges etc, there was a lot of unavoidable damage that was extremely hard-hitting.
Also, though the mobs hit like a tank, it was the condition damage that killed me, the poisons and the burning dot damage was very high.
c) Pet deaths: Granted I’m running lynx/leopard, pets dying in moments after sending them in was..definitely discouraging.
d) The time investment/reward ratio did not exist. It might be that it’s by design but It was slightly discouraging.
e) Last and not the least, was the absolute feeling of helplessness when other players were under pressure. If my health pool is significantly higher than that of a player that is in trouble, there was no way for me to peel aggro off that player(even for a moment).

All the bosses had one or combination of the above mentioned aspects, the “lovers” boss was particularly painful.

So overall, I came out with a slightly negative feeling about AC.
No matter how much I dodge/mitigate, the number of deaths were exceptionally high and running back to the same boss multiple times in a dungeon is not my cup of tea(though it might be yours).

Though the response of a lot of people will be to the magnitude of "then don’t do it " or silly thing such as “nobody is forcing you to do it”, it’s an aspect of the game that I did want to experience. I’m sure I’ll be doing more of them, however, I’m sure I’ll be going into them with more of a negative mindset than a positive one.

Overall I love the game and this seems to be the only aspect I am pessimistic about.

As a ranger make sure you’re using fire/ice/electricty traps all the time. And utilize other players firewalls, etc. for combos/leap finishers, etc.

Swap weaps all the time – you do have haste/and fury skills you can take for those.

Don’t just leave melee pets on a mob, drop healing spings for them and melee players – also gives you a regen combo with ranged weaps. Try using ranged pets. Cave spiders range poison and can lock mobs down. Swap pets regularly too for skill buffs.

I do agree that loot tables need addressing, 1 yellow item, a green or two and several blues is nothing to write home about given the difficulty of dungeons atm.