Guild Wars 2

I just can’t seem to get it down… I am currently level 58 warrior using primarily greatswords and despite constantly spending all my money and karma to get as many pieces of leveled yellow/green gear as I can, I still die almost instantly in any dungeon fight…

Especially in explorable mode… The beginning of each fight against a boss in there usually consist of me hitting the fifth greatsword ability which is a charge/attack… And before I am even on them I am either most of the way dead or already down…

Even trash pulls like groups of 3 ghosts and the likes… I charge, do one auto attack and then I am dead instantly.

Then another issue I run into on boss fights is that if I somehow miraculously survive more than the first few seconds, a lot of bosses do abilities that don’t make a noise which entirely depend on you looking at the boss to see it… Well it is kind of difficult to do this considering most boss fights in these places take place in some small room or corridor and my camera constantly gets stuck on things as I turn and the likes, not to mention that 9/10 times I am not even looking in the direction of the boss I am high tailing it out of there with dodge and my back to them.

The Champion Lieutenant Kholer in explorable Ascalonian Catacombs for example… We go in and try to kill the adds around him first (monk and mesmer) and while I am looking at them, trying to avoid EVERYTHING as almost everything any of the three of them do one shots me, he does an ability that has no sound and sometimes didn’t even make an animation when he was moving where he would pull me in and one shot me… Not to mention that on a lot of these fights the boss is just a normal sized humanoid… So when there are 2 full sized melee Charrs and a Nord standing on top of them, I can’t even see the boss and then all of the sudden I am dead. Even if I am the only melee I have trouble seeing the boss when I am on them as there are circles all over the floor from my allies, explosions all around me and on the boss, dozens of bright exuberant flashy animations everywhere I look, etc… And I just can’t even see the boss raise his sword over his head because at that moment he was engulfed in 5 different ability animation that completely covered him…

So please, can someone give me some helpful advice to get past these problems I have…?

Thank you.

Some possible suggestions:

(up to you if you want to explore them)

1- Raise your toughness stat.
2- Use more ranged weapons, and swap to melee when you see an opening.
3- Use dodge more.

Btw it is norn, not nord.

Bel Geode.8129:

Some possible suggestions:

(up to you if you want to explore them)

1- Raise your toughness stat.
2- Use more ranged weapons, and swap to melee when you see an opening.
3- Use dodge more.

Btw it is norn, not nord.

I do dodge, but a lot of the time that doesn’t even do anything… Kholer, for example… A few times I actually would see his animation and actually dodge to get out of it and he would yank me through my dodge… And a lot of the time anything we fight has ranged attacks so even when I survive the charge, hit them once or twice, and then run away with dodge, the second my roll ends I get hit with some ranged attack and die… Or have dots on me that continue to kill me…

And I am stacking as much toughness as I can… I have 20 points in the defense tree, as well as a few tanking type armor pieces with toughness+vitality… Every single utility spell I use is defense oriented, I don’t even use any offense ones as I can’t even use them since I am dead… Increased toughness, armor, defense banner, health regeneration, etc…

I am at a loss…

Even though I’ve only played through AC story and CM Story I agree with Bel Geode here. I used to die CONSTANTLY exactly as you described, Charge in, hit the boss/Mob pack a couple of times, dodge, die. I didn’t even OWN a longbow back when I was doing AC but man, when I got a longbow and started efficiently swapping between my dual axes and the longbow a whole new world was revealed to me. You can sustain a pretty decent dps with your ranged and you can cripple and blind with the longbow, and also aoe so I usually use all those three abilities until I swap back to melee and charge in, then when I see I’m starting to get in a tough spot again I roll out and swap. It really multiplied the fun factor in dungeons (And WvW) for me. Hang in there fellow warrior, you’ll get the hang of it

My melee experience so far is daggering on my Necro, so as a squishy squish, I have to watch myself a lot.

• having an immobilizer to keep the mob in place can save you when you need to heal… root them, get out of their range, heal, then get back in. Of course this will only work if they don’t have any ranged interrupts.
• whenever possible, pull groups apart before charging in, so that you have as few enemies as possible on you at a time
• only dodge the biggest attacks, or else you’ll run out of endurance at the wrong time. For bosses, that means you’ll have to do some research on which of their attacks do what kind of damage.
• if you are in a party, ask them to drop healing and damage mitigation fields on you whenever they can, instead of doing it somewhere away from you and your target (for example Rangers can drop a healing field that pulses condition removal, really useful)

I’m sorry that I can’t give any better tips, melee had survivability troubles since day one.

My general suggestion is stay at range until you see them use their bigger skills, blow your mele cd’s, run back out at range and repeat. This is what I do on my thief and it works very well, swapping weapons is more core to this game than most people think.

As a warrior who prefers melee and is currently specced glass cannon(though longbow is just awesome in dungeons…),here’s my thoughts.

-For Kholer, the dodge timing is about midway through his channel (he pulls back and starts “charging”. If you dodge after about 1 second, you’ll still be in invincibility frame by the time he toss his grapple at you). We’ve done this fight several times, and no one ever gets hit by it anymore in our group.

-For melee. This is purely my opinion, but i feel greatsword is TERRIBLE in dungeons. Dungeons require extreme mobility. Greatsword is much more in tune with overworld PvE, because Hundred Blades is extremely powerful but you can’t move while using it or you cancel it. That will get you destroyed. More interesting options are hammer or mace (for the stun spam, against non-bosses or bosses who can be stunned repeatedly), sword (the burst skill has the same issue as hundred blades, but you have better cripple and root options, which helps a lot), and my personal favorite, axes (you can move while doing pretty much anything with axes).

-The trick here, is to move. By default the strafe buttons are Q and E. You pretty much never stop holding those down. Strafe circles around your enemies while smacking them and never stop (thus why stuff like hundred blades will get you killed…). Enemies will almost always miss you. You can take on 3-4 enemies without taking a hit if you strafe around and dodge when you see attacks coming your way.

-If you’re having trouble, offhand a horn. The #5 doubles stamina regen, lets you dodge more (bonus point for getting the trait that makes horn converts debuff into buffs, if no one else has a similar skill such as well of power around).

-When all else fails, switch to range. Every class in the game have some form of ranged option, and its for a reason. Especially as a warrior, you are expected to weapon swap. ALL THE TIME. (For that reason I put points to get faster weapon swap cooldown, but thats optional). Longbow’s great for the AOE option, but you have to spec it to get better range. Otherwise use rifle. Swap to range whenever you get in danger.

Melee is overall way better for a warrior (damage is far higher), and it is perfectly viable in explorable mode. I do get downed a few times when i get reckless, but i almost never die, even though I’m melee 75%~+ of the time

When using sword in main hand watch out with the charge skill cause you can overjump the target and end up falling off the platforms.

To be able to stay in melee for any length of time in PvE or PvP for that matter your really need a lot of group support. Typically in the form of a support spec;d guardian feeding you boons at the right time.

Knowing which abilities to dodge roll, and running a higher vitality setup are important but the backing of a good guardian can actually make melee viable in a lot of situations. Aegis block boons to cover you when your out of endurance, protection to soften hits that might otherwise 1-2 shot you, healing and regen to top off your health pool, and a whole other host of buffs.

Doesn’t have to be a guardian though a ranged thief or an engineer can chain blinds on a lot of bosses to prevent their attacks from hitting to allow melee to have a safer time of it.

But there are some bosses you just can’t do in full melee, and the easier option tends to be to stand around and pluck a bow for most. With group support though melee can be viable and in most cases melee will do better damage than ranged if they stay alive.

The core of any dungeon group I make tends to be a Guardian / Engineer or Thief