Guild Wars 2

This might come across as a bit of a rant. I am a newish player to the game but a veteran to MMOs. I played AC story mode at level 35, and it was fun. Now I am 43, and I run dagger/dagger with 20 in arcane for quick swaps and vigor on crit. I understand the mechanics of the game quite well and can take on groups of vets no problem.

Here is the problem. I am trying to run the manor instance, and everything one-shots me. I am told, “dodge more,” but I fail to understand how to dodge a during a group pull when one mob, among five, with a gun, behind me, out of line of sight, can one shot me. I spend the entire encounter with my eyes glued to my health ready to smash spacebar as soon as any damage shows, yet I have no recourse against being ranged one-shotted. I see other players with health bars at 3/4-1/2 full. My health bar is either full or red. There are no in-betweens. What gives?

There is no learning curve here. I tried staff, but then I did worse. Most of the abilities root you or require ground targeting, forcing me to stop dancing and, you guessed it, get one-shotted immediately. My gear is completely up to date, and I use food.

I am also told to try warrior or guardian. I did. I fell asleep. Warrior: charge, hundred blades, repeat. Guardian: the aoe pull and silly-looking spin move. Booooooooring. Please, anet, just give me some health. Let me absorb at least one hit before being downed.

I am no mmo noob, and I always favor the complex classes: WoW warrior tank, AoC barb control pvp, SWTOR operative heals. However, here there doesn’t seem to be any class that even comes close to the complexity of the ele. It just stinks that the ele seems like a waste.

Best advice I could give you is get a second armor set with defense. Utilize your updraft, shocking aura, earthquake, if enemies get too close. Learn to kite.

A lot of this is experience and not knowing the mechanics of this instance.

1. All riflemen put a target marker on the target they are going to snipe. So if you get a target maker around your feet, you have to count to 2 then dodge (or break LOS, or switch to earth and fire Magnetic Aura to reflect).

2. Many encounters in this instance are based around projectiles and Reflect is amazingly awesome in this place. Mesmers and Guardians can really make it face roll since they will reflect all of those heavy shots and then some as people stack up. This is why Mesmers/Guardians/Warriors are often considered the holy trinity for PvE in this game cause they are all tremendous survivability, utility and don’t need to sacrifice DPS output.

Really after a while the most dangerous part will actually be the thief style mobs that do death blossom (where they flip mid air) and put 6+ stacks of bleed and a poison on you at the same time. Few of those and it drops anyone who doesn’t have condition removal handy.

D/D is not optimal for most dungeons. Outside of speed-runners (who would use lightning hammer), you will be better off with S/F of staff.

In CM, with the nasty projectiles, /F is really good. The reflect (earth 4) and projectile block (air 4) are very strong and appreciated by your party. Staff also has magnetic aura, but that is more limited.

CM is a terribad starter instance, really. You should persevere and try the next dungeons. I have so many people telling me how they got disgusted from GW2 instances and never wanted to do them again after being introduced to the death grind that is CM.

I, myself, went from CM to level 80 without touching another dungeon on my first character after the whole experience of dodge once, dodge twice, try to line of sight, gets mobs following anyway and kill in two hits.

Regardless, dagger playstyle is melee range. With elementalist’s HP and armor melee that is pretty suicidal, especially in the low levels without the full back up of our traits, gear and utility skills.

Stick to main hand daggers, you are on the right track.

The trick with big packs on enemies is control. You can provide a lot of this (blinds, weakness, area denial, etc), also you can use the off-hand focus for more survivability and control, but it will certainly not be enough just by yourself.

Many dungeons require group coordination. If your group does not output the necessary control then there is a good chance you will suffer because, as an elementalist, you have low health an armor, while your team mates can usually withstand several hits.

This is why people will advise you to go for more defensive gear, but I say nay. Go for better team mates

If you see that the your hp dropped too fast, then you are probably in the right track. Ele by far can dish tonnes of burst damage when you have done your rotation. (Also you need to rely on dodge for survivability, no other way round it, unless you take mist form).

Since you are running with pugs, it’s not that unheard of if they are not doing what they are supposed to do. Just last night, I run AC p1 with 3 members of the same guild. Ele who don’t know how good conjure weapon, guardian who don’t know how good staff is and a mesmer. Sometime even you telling them what to do, they just don’t want to listen. End up 30 min stuck at the hogkin and everybody QQ.

Projectile canceling/reflection is incredibly helpful in this dungeon. Unfortunately, projectile canceling exists on the focus and reflection exists on the staff-both have one skill out of many that performs the functions. It may be a good idea to not only have defensive armor, but also to have utilities such as arcane shield to help out.

Focus has projectile absorption for the group, projectile reflection for yourself, and invulnerability.

Zelyhn.8069:

This is why people will advise you to go for more defensive gear, but I say nay. Go for better team mates

If only I could buy those on AH for 2-3g each….
Sometimes I miss gw1 henchmens, at least their frailty was predictable.

biggerthanthesun.2397:

… Here is the problem. I am trying to run the manor instance, and everything one-shots me. I am told, “dodge more,” but I fail to understand how to dodge a during a group pull when one mob, among five, with a gun, behind me, out of line of sight, can one shot me. I spend the entire encounter with my eyes glued to my health ready to smash spacebar as soon as any damage shows, yet I have no recourse against being ranged one-shotted. I see other players with health bars at 3/4-1/2 full. My health bar is either full or red. There are no in-betweens. What gives? …

Dodging after the fact won’t help. Don’t stare at your health bar, watch the mobs for attack animations and the ground for red circles. Use some defensive skills (auras) and traits. Stand where those who are alive stand. Learn the mechanics of your enemies. Those snipers deal a ton of extra damage to moving targets. So don’t move, reflect, or time a dodge.

I have a guide to the Ele for dungeons: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/elementalist/Neko-s-Comp-Guide-to-the-Dungeon-Ele/

The Ele really does suffer without full traits. This is, sadly, by design. The Elementalist has low base stats and low base damage, but some of the strongest traits in the game (able to achieve some of the highest damage if it traits for it, or able to achieve substantially higher survivability if it traits for it). This is unlike the Warrior which has high inherent base defensive stats or the Guardian whose core class design seems to be well put together and strong weapon skills.

A lot of it really is just knowing the encounters, having a good group, and controlling the enemies properly. An Ele is often the first to go down because of a bad group because of low defensive stats. My suggestion, for dungeons, is to look up DnT (even Strife’s old videos) and Define [HC] on youtube, and look at how they handle boss encounters. If you’ll notice, a great deal of handling dungeons in an efficient and timely and non-headache enducing manner comes not from highly defensive traits or gear, but from properly controlling and pulling enemies while using simple techniques or skills (such as Aegis or Reflects) to mitigate damage. For Ele, I definitely feel that these are a few good ways to go:
-Dagger/Focus (Fresh Air, or even one with lots of points in Arcana if you want more survivability)
-Lightning Hammer with Scepter for Might Stacking
-Lightning Hammer with Dagger/Focus for flexibility between the two (since Scepter itself actually has pretty terrible sustained damage)
-Staff sitting in Fire attunement spamming Lava Font and Flame Burst off cooldown

These are all pretty fine ways to play, and the most important thing I would point out is to put 10 points in Arcana for Vigor on Crit. This helps a ton, and despite what detractors may say, I feel it is by far the most important trait for staying alive for us mere mortals.

Don’t be discouraged you’re dying easily. It’s pretty normal. Dungeon content in GW2 is a huge step up in challenge compared to dungeon content in other games or from open world in GW2. It’s also an interesting experience, because it really reflects a lot about the kind of gamer you are, based on how you react to it. Some choose to gear up super defensively to simply endure all the crazy antics thrown at you, while others do what I feel is far better and spec very aggressively in full Berserker gear and try to beat the content faster than it can beat you.

The pulls are by far the most important thing. Learning how to ball enemies up into corners with LoS, and learning the various tells of each enemy, and knowing how to creatively use your own skills (Focus on the Ele in particular has a lot of ways to mitigate damage and is really underlooked by the community) are all parts of learning how to do dungeon content in GW2.

OP,
I have never talked to someone or read on forums that players like this, but GW2 strongest PvE play is to coordinate abilities while remaining is the smallest circle possible. Have a banner warrior and an ele to maintain combos and boons. You literally stack for every fight, and just take turns using finishers to face-tank as a group. It’s horrible. To compensate for this they had to make the mobs over-the-top powerful, which pushes players to use such a boring tactic.

I quit playing dungeons after they revised CM when they didn’t like all the profit players made from it. My Ele was getting one shot with nowhere to hide, too, but I refuse to play like a bot. I want to use the fun movement skills. That is not what the PvE design supports, though. I quit not long after that CM revision. I didn’t do another dungeon, except FotM for like 8+ months. I have no care to anymore. If you want d/d, then level up and play FotM all day, every day. It good for dps + healing in close quarters without static play.