Guild Wars 2

The way things are, I don’t think I can trust my network for dungeons, which is pretty unfortunate. It isn’t normally this bad when I’m just playing through regular maps, which is the real kicker….

So, on a lark today I joined a group running TA explorable. This is my first dungeon in a while, since I typically run with my guild and for the past month+ I’ve been busy with irl things and they’ve been busy with other games.

This is also my first dungeon since I got a new router, and (spoiler alert) not the first time something bad has happened to me running explorable mode on a dungeon. Last time I did, it was AC, and the dungeon refused to end after my group beat the final boss on our path, resulting in us having to unceremoniously leave without a reward or a conclusion after about an hour of waiting around for an event to trigger.

So today, I notice that I get hit by several seconds of lag occasionally in combat, my character running around, failing to execute attacks as friend and foe stand eerily still before a sunburst of numbers and effects explode onto screen to make up for what I assume was a momentary hiccup in my internet connection. But I don’t disconnect, right? No big deal.

Then during a fight with a mob right before the last battle of the dungeon, my internet cuts out and I get dumped back in character select. I go “no big deal”, log back in, jump back in the dungeon, and tell my group that my internet crapped out, can they wait until I catch back up with them. When I try to teleport closer, game says I can’t- they’re in combat, which means I can’t teleport at all. So I hoof it back to where they are, because I think “gee, maybe I can at least help them with whatever enemy is making it impossible for me to get closer”.

Which is fine and dandy until I run into a mob that they didn’t kill on the way to the end of the dungeon and the lag hits again, followed by another disconnect. When I log back in and get back in the dungeon, my character is dead, and they’re still in combat (at the other end of the dungeon!!), so I cannot respawn unless I log out, log back in, decline the prompt to enter the dungeon, and respawn at a waypoint in Caledon Forest before getting back in the dungeon and running to them from the start.

By this point, my party is fighting the dungeon’s boss without me, and not answering any of my messages.

I die again on the way to them (really, guys, thank you for skipping the mobs, that was really thoughtful), have to log out to respawn because they can’t send anybody back to rescue me (or won’t), and by the time I get back into the dungeon, they’ve beaten the boss and completed it without me. I get no event, and no reward while everyone else is patting each other on their backs for a job well done. All I’m left with is a sense of frustration and disappointment, wondering why I even tried to catch up with my party after the first disconnect.

I’m not really looking for advice, since I know half of it will just be “lol get a new router”. I just wanted to vent and share a story of how the new dungeon teleportation rules screwed me over unexpectedly (and how the group I ran with didn’t help, either.)

As of today, I’ve completed all of the game’s PvE maps! Cursed Shore was a surprisingly easy jaunt compared to the grueling struggle that was Malchor’s Leap, and I was all set to be done my personal goal of map completion. I was happy. The world was smiling on me.

Then I realized that I still had to complete the WvWvW maps.

I’m kind of a casual player- I don’t play every day, and sometimes I can go weeks without touching the game due to real life obligations or just due to having something else that’s caught my fancy more. It’s taken months to just get this one character through the entire PvE world, if that gives you a sense of my pace. And I’m far from a competitive person. Not once have I touched PvP, and though I’ve dabbled in WvWvW, I’ve come to discover that my main talent in it is dying.

To make matters worse, I’m not on one of the best servers for WvWvW in general. Holding a modest corner of the map is pretty typical for us, which means that if I want to explore the map safely without having to watch out for players from another server coming to wreck me, I’m confined to a small area. I can’t really see any solutions other than to start spending long periods of time in the Eternal Battlegrounds and Borderlands either waiting for new areas to open up or to improve my skills fighting against other players and in a larger-scale tactical sense if I want to complete these maps, or hope that rematches shuffle around the location of my team’s home base enough that I can get the locations I need over a longer period of time.

But I’m not keen on that solution. Tell me, forums, is there a way I can plausibly explore these maps as fast as possible without getting dragged in to long-term WvWvW participation?

@Diabolicus: I do not have the money. I reeeeeeally do not have the money.

@Srebrna: You know, you might be on to something about the respective difficulties of areas. My elementalist is a human, and getting through the human areas with him has been slow going (especially with centaurs!), but when I went over to the norn, charr, and sylvari starting areas, I had a much more reasonable time. I think I’ll take a break on human zones while I level and finish more of the starting areas.

Wow, I am super-pleased with the feedback I’m getting from you guys! I can’t say any one answer is conclusively the solution to my problem until I try to put this advice into action, but basically everyone has put in some very helpful data for my perusal.

@Leiloni: I really appreciate your comment here. You don’t tend to hear a lot of encouragement in this vein when playing games, especially not MMOs. I’m definitely going to respec with more focus in Arcana once I hit level 40, and I’m going to try to stick with dagger/dagger like Kthr recommended. As for the mouse, I can’t really go out and buy one right now, but I will see if the mouse that came with my tablet is anywhere and isn’t as buggy as when I tried to play Mass Effect with it on my old computer. Anything’s better than nothing!

@Kthr: As luck has it, I was planning on going with D/D for the next few levels or so. Now I’m thinking I’ll keep the set on me longer, so I can really get the hang of things. And on the note of testing out other classes, I actually am trying now to play more on my mesmer character, since the traits of the class seem better suited to feeling out playing a squishy character while still holding on to aspects I’m more familiar with on my ranger.

@Baladir: I’ll try to take it more easy. Sometimes I forget I’m still supposed to be getting the hang of things.

Alright. I’m currently playing a level 35 elementalist, and it’s been nothing short of a rocky road. My traits are all over the place, I still can’t settle on a weapon set to fight with, and I die a lot. A whole lot. I feel like 1/3 of my levels are actually from crafting, rather than from exploring or doing events. Because this character isn’t my main, I’ve still been enjoying the game, it’s just that it’s taken two months to get him where my first character took a few weeks, and it hasn’t really been all that fun getting here!

I know the easiest route would be to delete my character and start fresh with a profession I haven’t tried yet, because the elementalist isn’t for me, but I’ve gotten attached to the character himself, just not playing as him- and I really don’t want to get rid of 350+ levels in cooking. So, I pose the question once again: how do I make the elementalist work for me?

I almost entirely play solo PvE. WvWvW and PvP aren’t really my thing, and I feel like if I can’t handle playing PvE well at all with an elementalist, it’s completely pointless to even try the other two. Solo is because A) I am not a very social person, especially not in MMOs, and I feel like trying to make friends or form parties is very pushy of me and overreaching, because I play at very odd hours for a player on a US server, and C) because I am in a very small guild made up of people I know from outside Guild Wars, who never play the game when I do.

Other than this elementalist, I play a ranger, a mesmer, a warrior, and a necromancer. The latter three are all in their low teens in terms of level, so I’m still feeling them out, but I just this past week hit level 80 on the ranger, my main, and have played extensively on him. With said ranger, I’ve had fun with almost every weapon and combination of weapons, but I tend to go with greatsword/shortbow as my weapons of choice. I also like sword/dagger with him, but I am not as adept with them. His traits are almost entirely geared towards power/beastmastery, and I tend to stick to pets that apply bleeds. With the warrior, I still haven’t tried every weapon, but I enjoy greatswords and hammers a lot so far. With the mesmer I am in much the same boat, but I recently stumbled onto using sceptre/torch and switching between that and a greatsword to great effect.

I’ve tried fighting with daggers/dagger, dagger/focus, scepter/dagger, scepter/focus, and staff. The first three combinations were where I had the most success, but they just felt “off”. I’m also not very well-versed in keeping mobile while fighting/switching up elements on the fly. My crappy laptop with no external mouse doesn’t exactly work wonders for anything like kiting, and I think I’m just not very good at playing the game like that.

Anybody got any advice?

I was part of a party attempting to complete the Ascalonian Catacombs dungeon on explorable mode tonight. We took the first path, the one which pits you against the [spoiler=graveling patriarch] Howling King[/spoiler]. It was a full party of five (human guardian, charr elementalist, norn ranger, sylvari ranger, and sylvari necromancer), and we managed to get up to the final boss of the dungeon, and defeated him along with the crowd of minor enemies that are in the area along with him.

When we defeated this boss, our dungeon objective did not update, no chest was spawned, and the NPC who was traveling alongside us did not have any new dialogue or actions triggered. Our party was presented with an empty arena. At first, we suspected that we had perhaps not killed enough of the secondary mobs prior to this boss, so we entered several side areas and killed all of the mobs there, to no avail. After a while spent with no results or change to the dungeon objective, we broke up the party and left the dungeon with no reward.

pownguin.9205:

This is very nice. ;-)

Thank you!

This is my Sylvari Ranger, Lygodium~ Just sort of banged out a painting of him last night for the heck of it.