Guild Wars 2

Hey guys, I played GW2 when the game first launched, I found the dungeons to be awkward. What I mean by that is people would just run in and kill as much before they died then rinse and repeat. There was no tank or healer role to support a smooth dungeon experience. This was my experience as I played my level 80 warrior.

Now I am back after quite a break and I was wondering if dungeons and endgame PVE content is the same as it was before.

So a few questions:

1) Do support roles play a bigger role rather than the whole team rolling as DPS and just wiping again and again?

2) (follow up to above question) Do dungeons seem to be smooth while providing the expected level of difficulty?

3) Are there raids or raid equivalent content for endgame?

4) What is a general balanced group composition for doing dungeon/raid level content?

5) Any other general information that you may find relevant to this topic that I did not think of.

-Thanks for your time.

1) All classes are expected to bring support oriented builds with dps oriented gear. That’s what the meta is about.
2) Dungeons difficulty is really reliant on your knowledge, so it seems fairly hard at first and too easy after a few runs.
3)No. There’s braindead afk farming in open world, though.
4) The “fit everywhere” comp for a full tour would be ele, ele, guardian, thief, warrior. Mesmers aren’t used much in casual runs because portal strats are more stressful and risky and you miss half the loot.
5) Sorry, I’m lazy.

1) They’ve fixed the problem, but not in the way you expected. Not long after launch they changed the way dungeons work so that you cannot use a waypoint unless your entire team is dead or out of combat. Which meant constantly dying and running back was not an option any more and players had to actually learn the encounters to progress.

There still aren’t designated tanks and healers but everyone is expected to provide some support: sharing boons, removing conditions, creating fields for combo finishers, and healing is part of that. Likewise everyone is expected to know how to avoid or mitigate damage by dodging, moving out of AoEs and using appropriate skills.

2) Yes most dungeon runs are a lot smoother than you remember. Many people complain that they’re too easy, but that’s largely down to playing knowing a perfect strategy for every part so they can do it quickly on the first try.

3) No, but ‘challenging group content’ has been promised in the expansion. There’s also Fractals and the new Twilight Arbour Aetherpath which were added after launch and aimed at people who had already completed all the dungeons.

1) Support was always a really important part of dungeons, right with DPS. And that’s how most meta are build toward today. Things like the FGS and waypoints in combat were limiting the importance of support, but those two are gone for a long time now. Support is usually what differentiate a good to a bad group. Good group make excellent use of both offensive and defensive support. They make sure they have vulneriability, might, fury, reflect, blind, aegis, stability, etc at the right time. Bad group, not so much.

2) They are smooth, smoother with a good group, but it’s 3 years old content and we learned them by heart. Fractal 50 is a little bit higher in term of difficulty, otherwise we now solo/duo most dungeon if we want some challenge. We are craving for some challenging content and they announced that it will come with the expansion, but no info on that yet.

3) No, but we have hope for the expansion.

4) You always want 1 warrior because he’s the best buff kitten of the game. If the content need some defensive utility bring a guardian, if the content need some stealth/blind bring a thief. The rest should be elementalist. General purpose group would be 1 Warrior, 1 Thief, 1 Guardian and 2 Elementalist. But Ranger, Mesmer or Engineer can all replace 1 of those profession. Ranger is decent to buff DPS, Mesmer with portal can do some nice trick in the right hands and Engineer is the jack of all trades. Necromancer is the only one that doesn’t really have a good position in dungeon.
5) We just had a big update that changed how condition and trait work. We have people left and right saying that condition build are good or still bad in dungeon. But as more people do testing and result that we can trust we’ll see what will happen with condition in dungeon. In my opinion in the next couple of months we’ll see a lot more condition build becoming meta or at least very good alternative to more traditional power meta.