Guild Wars 2

Well, I’m going to try my luck here. I asked for some tips in-game and got nothing but a bunch of people calling me an idiot, telling me to press “V” and being trolls. I know /how/ to dodge, I just suck at the timing.

Any tips you guys can give me?
I think it is easier when you know the enemies really well, and know their timing, but going up against stuff I havent spent a long time killing, I never do it right.

if you need to dodge it for daily try ettins, their animation for attack is really long
other then that just practice

Go fight the earth elementals and use an ability that instantly refills the endurance.

I get near them they do the ground channeled attack, I dodge twice while in it, then use my ability that refills my endurance, and I usually get one or two more dodges in before the spell ends. Sometimes I can get four out because the elemental is standing near me when i do the final dodge.

It’s usually the best way. Their punches are really easy to time for me as well when they aren’t doing their channeled ability.

Practice practice practice. I think that’s why they put that as a daily. To get us trying it. Here’s what I did.
Go to Wayfarer Foothills at the Grawlenfjord (sp?) waypoint. Tag a Grawl Hunter and just let him shoot at you. Try the double tap q or e practice the timing, you’ll start to see when he’s getting ready to shoot at you. Not long after you’ll find yourself doing it in real combat and saving yourself a lot of damage.

Don’t bother trying to get dodge credit on attacks without long-ish windups. Better to just use them to get some distance.

Other than that, it’s just learning the timings really, sorry. If you’re just looking for dodge credit, I suggest Drakes or Moas, their frontal cones let you get several ticks at a time.

Personally, I have mine set to the mouse wheel click. But that aside, watch the ground for AOE circles, and learning the mobs. Keep your distance if possible because the larger the gap, the more reaction time you have. But it definitely will be easier if you know the mob and watch them.

Many harder hitting strikes will have a sort of wind-up animation as they are preparing to let fury loose, that’s your cue to prepare to dodge, or preemptively get out of the way (the best solution in my opinion). Those AOE circles on the ground? Those can be very early (or very late) warnings that you’re possibly goin to be slammed so move ASAP. Otherwise, it just takes practice and playing the game. A lot of the game is visual so watching what’s happening often will give you a warning to what’s to come. But remember, endurance is limited, so don’t dodge more than you need to. It’s almost an art that takes practicing, double dodging in a boss fight when you need to only dodge once could leave you vulnerable to a second strike.

If you’re looking for a good enemy to get your daily dodge with, try finding any wurm that spits rocks at you. The projectile is fairly slow and easy to dodge, and the windup for the attack should be long enough that your endurance bar should recharge in time for the next rock.

Go ahead and do something people never do: watch your opponent.
Look at their animations, their moves, look at what they are doing. Don’t look at your skills, the UI, or whatever.
Are you fighting a wolf? Good, it’s raising its head and howling. That’s the moment when you have to CC his skill. Are you fighting a spider? It’ll spit venom 1 second after he stops and charges with a golden animation around its head.
Keep an eye on them all the time, you’ll ALWAYS see a tell of some kind, even for autoattacks. They’re freaking slow. After a few seconds you should have learned what the opponent can do and dodge the animation accordingly. And I can’t stress it enough: look at them all the time.
Although if it was that easy, there wouldn’t be people complaining about Kholer all the time.
Focus on your opponent. And don’t dodge too early. All PvE attacks are stupidly slow and telegraphed so you have time to react at the last possible second.
As an exercise… Kholer or graveling scavengers to start. Give it a try. Maybe alone :P

I agree its hard to dodge some baddies if you dont know their mechanics.

Just keep at it, and try to dodge their big skill.
fumble around a bit with your timing,
like dodge a bit later when their animation is almost done..

Your not the only one with this problem. i got it to
In the end i mostly get it if i keep trying.

I like the shooty bandits or centaurs, they are very predictable. Usually I can dodge the first two shots before I run out of steam, if you get two dodges for each bandit it’ll be super quick to complete!

Although I completed all the other aspects of the daily today with my mesmer, the dodging was going so slowly I finally gave up and finished up the dodging with my thief instead.

Bind your dodge to your middle mouse button and turn off double tap to dodge.

Roll thief.
Lure a bunch of mobs to your position underwater.
Use shadow assault (spear 5).
Get dodge daily done in 10 seconds.
Profit.

Turn off your autoattacks, they bug your dodge sometimes. The animation goes off, but you’re not actually dodging. And get Combat Mode.

Easy way is to find a deer.
learn the dodge with them but don’t kill them.
also you can get two dodges in,when they rear up to kick you.

Dodging is also heavily based upon you’re internet connection. In my case, I’m currently away from home on travel and my available internet pretty well sucks, so for daily farming I have to use things with a predictable attack pattern like the centaur archers that I can basically pre-dodge to get the credit.

Funny enough, the rest of the game is more than tolerable with a high latency, just nothing that requires you to dodge like traps or the dodge daily.

bind dodge to Ctrl.

Find drakes, wait for their fire attack roll through fire, profit..

Do not use Poison ones they are auto hit…

The easiest way to get the dodge: Find mobs called Ember (you can find them in most of the Charr areas I think, or any place with fire. They are bird looking fire elementals.) They drop a bunch of aoe fire on the ground that sits there for quite some time. All you have to do is roll/dodge right through their aoe and you get dodge credit. No timing to it at all. If none of the other suggestions work for you, I highly recommend you do this. The only part about it that would be any work at all is finding where some embers are.

I find an easy dodge to be in Kessex Hills, underwater, Krait Nimross. They lead off with a spear cast that does a stun, and moves at about the speed I’d expect a spear to move. There’s none of the long wind-ups you see with ettin charge-ups, and once you get the timing down the first time it’s easy to replicate. There’s also a lot of them in Viathan Arm, and you can also get UW Kills at the same time.

I would recommend the Flame Igniter at Fireheart Rise.
Stand in front of it, and start dodging when it executes its flamethrower skill.
It should provide you 6-8 evades, just roll backward and then forward and you have completed the daily dodger in less than 10 seconds.

Karka. 4 sets of blasts with two dodges… dodge 4 karka and you’re done.

If you need to learn to dodge, remember that you’re invincible through your dodge animation; dodge pre-emptively. If a wurm is about to slam its face on the ground, dodge before it lands, not as it lands.

My favorite place to practice dodging was the Giant event at Nageling Waypoint in Diessa Plateau. AC Explore is a great place to get better at it, too, as deSade suggested.

I suck at dodging, too. However, if you go to somewhere that has unstable ice cores and hit the dodge button just as the sound effect for its attack triggers, you will achieve foolproof dodges every time. Takes me less than 5 minutes to do it this way.

I hate dodging. I just don’t do it unless it is for the Daily. Totally stupid mechanic.

It’s more about knowing “when” to dodge, and intuitively reacting to charged attacks. I was horrible when I first started too (and still am!) but once you get your butt kicked several times you’ll go “oh, so that dash is knocking me down” and you’ll start dodging it out of instinct.

Also latency has a big impact, but you’ll cope. You have to be “in the air” while the skill is hitting you to dodge it.

You could go find some jotun. The ones with greatswords will use Hundred Blades and you can get several dodges in the same dodge against one. And then dodge again through it to get a few more.

If you don’t have a thief for underwater dodging, there’s a near constant event in northwest Caledon with Nightmare Court attacking a Warden outpost. You don’t have to time anything. Toss a multi-mob aggroing attack and dodge forward through the group a few times. Then clean them up and go to the next group, there are 8 waves of them. I confess I do it on my Thief since he can dodge 3 times in a span of time others only get 2.

There’s also Lt. Kohler in AC explorable, he telegraphs his yank-in with a white glow and a raised white arm. Dodge that and you’ll get a ton of the daily done.

I am able to dodge, i never get hit, but the game does not count the dodges unless i wait until a certain time to dodge… that’s the annoying part

i cant just dodge and not get hit for the daily, i have to dodge and not get hit at only a certain time in order for it to count for the daily

I tend to pick fights with the ice elementals the norn starter area, northern section of the map. Their projectile attacks are slow and give plenty of time to dodge, as well as their ground based attacks.

How do you guys survive dungeons, wvw or even open-world pve without dodging? o.O

penatbater.4710:

How do you guys survive dungeons, wvw or even open-world pve without dodging? o.O

As stated previously, it’s not that players don’t dodge. It’s that we don’t always, or even often, dodge in the exact nanosecond required to get an evade. I dodge all the time and my survivability is great regardless of my profession, but I rarely get evades.

It should be called “Evade 15 mobs” instead of dodge, as evasions are all that will move the count.

You can dodge all the time to avoid damage, but it seems only near misses count as evades. I get hit more timing the evade chance for the update rather than just dodging normally

Not really a tip to help you learn how to dodge, but for your daily, I go to Ashford and dodge the Ascalonian Ghost Archers for it. You can dodge two arrows at once, cutting down the time needed to wait for your stamina to recharge. Being a thief also helps with Feline Grace.

Majora.6028:

Well, I’m going to try my luck here. I asked for some tips in-game and got nothing but a bunch of people calling me an idiot, telling me to press “V” and being trolls. I know /how/ to dodge, I just suck at the timing.

Any tips you guys can give me?
I think it is easier when you know the enemies really well, and know their timing, but going up against stuff I havent spent a long time killing, I never do it right.

Remember, the server has a different sense of what’s happening when than you get on your screen. The server is looking at when it thinks you hit dodge vs when it thinks a given attack was going to land, and gives you “evade” credit based on that perception. Things could easily happen at the server a second before or after they happen on your screen. So what you’re doing is optimizing to get credit for the event, not trying to play well. (And yes, there are classes like thief and ranger for which getting credit seems to be a lot easier than in the classes I play).

So don’t even bother trying to get evade credit against a melee mob which swings fast. There isn’t any relation between what you see on your screen and when the server sees that swing land. If you have a well geared 80 with a lot of toughness you can go pull 10 or 20 mobs in a lowbie zone, wait for them to all be swinging at you, and then dodge.

The best I’ve found is mobs which do a channeled cast exceeding a second long. Then dodge in the middle of it and consistently get credit. The Moas have such a channel which they use once during a fight (but I don’t think it resets if some jerk doing the daily runs away after the channel instead of killing the mob).

Others have found that circles, like the moa breath, have a long enough life that dodging through them is consistently counted by the server.

The people calling you an idiot might be myopic or provincial because they play a class that’s dodging all the time, or they may be fanbois, but they are certainly neither correct nor helping the community by their response.

…and ArenaNet needs to stop testing features like this with the client and server both running on the developer’s computer. That is an invalid test model for any action which depends on the client and server perceiving time identically the same…because in this test setup they do. What the developer will have experienced is a perfect ability to get evade credit for dodging fast melee swings based on what was rendered on their screen. This is not the experience of customers in the live game.

I’d like to know if the OP is asking because they are dying from failing to dodge or if they are failing to get the Dodge daily in a effective manner?

If it’s the latter, my advice is that it is possible to successfully dodge and not proc the Evade message.

This can happen if you dodge too quickly. I’ve seen this on lower level mobs and I’ve tested it for melee, ranged and AoE attacks. Higher levels mobs seem to have less delay, or at least the seem to proc the Evade message more consisently, perhaps because they were meant to be more challenging.

But it ends up that if you’re a low level character or going back to a low-level zone you may need to deliberately alter your timing. Or find low level mobs that proc the Evade more consistently. I’ve been told those undead arms sticking out of the ground in the Sylvari starting zone work well.

On the other hand, the OP is dying from not successfully dodging then the suggestions from previous posters should help.

Hmm.. a good advice imo is to gather a group of mobs you can tank comfortably (meaning you don’t die, go to lower level maps), then run around them and dodging everytime you can. Chances are, with 5 mobs hitting you, when you dodge probably some mob would’ve hit you and you can proc the evade.

Some people are comfortable with it but, let’s think about it. If you have yet to map a key for dodging, you probably should. Pressing a button once is faster than pressing it twice.

You can’t rely entirely on the full arm swing animation. Latency plays a part here. Whilst the edge of the sword might be in half swing, on server side it has already tasted flesh. The invincibility frame/window of a dodge roll is pretty long, so dodge ahead of time.

Make an effort to know your opponent. Being able to anticipate a move hastens your reaction time a lot more. Most deathblows involve long animations. The most common of which is raising an arm or leg with a glowing animation. It’s usually a good hint to dodge or not be near the enemy.

Hope this helps.

Sorry for the late reply, guys. I was at work.

I don’t ask this because of the Daily. I can get that done fairly simple with some Grawl Archers. My issue is just day-to-day PvE. I don’t “die” often, I can usually kill stuff before anything too bad happens, but I have major issues with dodging. I guess I just need to learn he mechanics of the mobs I’m against.

I have the problem on my Engineer because I have Bomb on dodge and use it as an attack, together with glue AOE, not an evade.
What I do is go to Harathi Hinderlands and run into a random centaur camp, make sure there are many many of them and then just dodge trough the attack towards the enemy.
Works pretty well

Majora.6028:

Any tips you guys can give me?

Create a thief, go underwater, use spear skill ‘5’. Get your dodges filled on 3-4th mob.
There are other skills for other classes as well (ranger GS autoattack mentioned above, in example) – this one is just the best for this purpose of all i can think of.

Assuming you want to practice, and not just complete your daily…

Always remember the five rules of guildball – Dodge, dodge, dodge, dodge, and dodge. Don’t try to watch the timing too much. Dodge when your intuition says there’s a hit coming in. You’ll eventually get better at it. You’ll see if you get hit before you tap V, you’ll see if you get hit after, you’ll see how many Evade! floaty texts pop up. You’ll learn which attacks do a lot of damage and which ones aren’t worth dodging. You’ll learn which fast hitting mobs can still be dodged to mitigate some of their damage. You’ll learn against which mobs it’s a really good idea to figure out the attack pattern, and you’ll learn about which ones you don’t need to care. If you just stand there waiting for the swing, you’re wasting time you could have spent learning.

I usually tell people the best place to get the dodger daily is Jormag . Dodge sideways through the wall and the air attacks you’ll get at least 2 evades if not more per dodge and the air attack is super easy to dodge .

Count to 2 and dodge for the spikes 1 and dodge for the wall for anything else i its a red circle skedaddle

Dodging is a hotkey on my mouse… it’s assigned to the scroll-button. I find this to be most effective. Also, I find that dodging creatures with ranged attacks (like the ascalonian ghost rangers in the Charr starting area) are the easiest to dodge.

penatbater.4710:

How do you guys survive dungeons, wvw or even open-world pve without dodging? o.O

My pet needs to dodge, not me. :p

please see this instructional video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZXHsNqkDI4

Also follow deSades recommendation (8th post up there): watch what you opponents do, and learn the rhythm of their attacks. Due to latency, you often cannot react to a mobs animation, by that time it’s too late. It’s not that hard to anticipate the attack though, since the mobs tend to keep to a certain sequence of attacks that makes their actions very predictable.

Forest grubs…

Slow, low level mobs who raise up their “backs” with an effect surrounding them a few seconds before they spit their goo towards you. You can even wait to dodge until you see the spit.

Easy way to practice dodging.

The best tip I can give you is:

Do not react, but anticipate.

I know its sounds basic, but it’s actually quite complex because it depends so much on how and how long animations of the mobs you face, play out.

This is where you just need practice to spot the kind of animation that will be performed and the breaking point when the animation will begin to play out. You want to anticipate that moment and dodge slightly before start of the animation.

Sometimes it is enough if you dodge while the animation plays, but this depends, again, on the length of the animation: longer animations give you more leeway to react (naturally).

Example: a mob begins an attack animation that makes it raise its arm. Now, through trial and error determine the breaking point.

Will it be enough to anticipate the arm reaching the top of the raise? No?
Will it be enough to anticipate the beginning of the raise? Yes?
Good.

Now each time you see that animation (and trust me, you will begin to see re-used animations) you know what to anticipate.

The second best tip I can give you, is:

Never spam your dodge hotkey. Keep an eye on your endurance bars and avoid spamming the hotkey when you see the bar almost filled up, as this can actually cause delays even though you maybe had enough endurance.

Perform dodge counters as calmly as you possibly can given the situation. Your hit-miss ratio will improve.

Dondarrion.2748:

Forest grubs…

Slow, low level mobs who raise up their “backs” with an effect surrounding them a few seconds before they spit their goo towards you. You can even wait to dodge until you see the spit.

Easy way to practice dodging.

I wholeheartedly agree. The grubs have been the best practice for me along with the ettens. I was directed to a cave in west Queensdale (Altar’s Windings) that is filled with forest grubs. After a few days of practice, I finally have the hang of it.

I’m getting a new mouse and will probably follow the suggestion to keybind dodge to one of the buttons.

It really depends what your fighting, a lot of the things you’ll be dodge uses the red circle system and really just involved moving out of that as soon as you see it, be it via dodging or often even just walking out.

Dodging other sorts of attacks gets a bit more difficult, most the big attacks that are designed to be dodged will have big wind up animations and mostly can be avoided by dodging away from the from of the mob (as in to the sides/behind the mob NOT directly backwards as many of these attacks have a large forward range) beyond that it comes down to dodging whats generally going to be the mobs auto attacks which can be tough and debatable on worth of dodging, this is the times where timing is most important.

It basically comes down to learning the delay between attacks rather than learning the attack animations and dodging on that timer.

Very rarely have I encountered an issue of dodging too early once I see an attack coming, it can happen (though can’t think of any examples right now) and in those cases it should be a simple matter of learning why you still got hit, is their attack homing? (as in did they turn after you dodged) in which case learn there delay and dodge just before the end of it etc.

Of course if its just daily dodger your trying to get done, and your at least level 40 head to lowland burns in blazeridge steps (where shatterer spawns) find a branded plant, wait for the circle to appear around it, step in and get hit then wait half a second and dodge twice in a row, then step out recharge endurance, repeat.