Guild Wars 2

At least for CoF and HotW you can run the entire thing for one of the paths in about twenty minutes that give you money as well as tokens. I get about 30 silver after vendoring and reward for CoF. That makes the math a little more friendly, giving 20 tokens per run (30 for the first of the day), for about a token per minute. 3 hours worth of speed runs for an armor piece isn’t too bad (3.5 with downtime.)

Those reasonable times are unique to these dungeons though.

Asura warrior master race reporting in! (Level 80 crafted armor set)

I second Arcturus. Once we loaded up some more condition removal and I went full condition removal with my support warrior (shake it off removes a condition in an AoE and 2 warhorn skills that remove conditions and turn them to boons and grant vigor and swiftness) it was a long slog but under control. I spend the fight putting other players out, rezzing, and only occasionally doing damage and had a blast doing it. You can rez in this fight pretty easy if you have a thief do the safety dome or if you just don’t stand in the lava fonts if they appear under you. You just have to have some kind of regeneration going.

The lovers in AC story really aren’t terribly difficult. We usually use a combo of boulders and running away when you have aggro to get them to break up (pun intended.) Especially late in the fight there tend to be a million boulders lying around.

Is your method an exploit? Maybe. I call it clever use of the dungeon to overcome a problem that shouldn’t be a problem in the first place.

Basically, the reason to use greatsword is 100 blades. This ability does obscene damage and has a really low cooldown (a little over 6 seconds when traited, 8 otherwise.) If you’re built right, 100 blades + the 3 skill kill most targets when doing solo PvE, producing the lowest time to kill of all the weapons, and IMO the lowest TTK of all weapons and all classes. The rest of the greatsword is built around mobility, with a mediocre but decent auto attack. You can use just the mobility skills and auto attack to do really good melee damage while keeping yourself out of harms way and on the move.

Is the greatsword good for PvP? No. Self-root means 100 blades is useless there. Is it good for dungeons? Reasonably so, as the self-root is sometimes a problem, sometimes not. I find I need to dodge fairly often so it loses some of its usefulness.

The way to trait the greatsword is to take the passive adrenaline traits and the greatsword traits. You take the passive adrenaline traits because the adrenaline skill blows on the greatsword. Especially since you can get 100% fury uptime with signet of rage and ‘for great justice’. So an extra 12% damage from the adrenaline trait, then 10% damage from the greatsword damage trait, then 10% damage against bleeding targets and bleed opponents on criticals, then 9% extra crit chance from adrenaline, and might on crits. Some of these are minor traits, but those are the essentials. If you do hundred blades on a group of enemies, you’ll go up to 25 stacks of might and pull off over 10,000 damage on all of them at level 80 with a 3 second channel, which is pretty impressive considering you can do it again in 6.25 seconds and do plenty in the meantime.

prophet.3461:

runeblade.7514:

Story mode in AC is harder than explorable? What a laugh.

²

Thirded.

It has the same trash enemies, except you get to fight them 4 at a time sometimes instead of 2 or 3. Add to that bosses that can wipe your whole party instantly and brutally hard events, and story mode, while hard, is nowhere near as hard as explorable.

I love the difficulty, it really makes me feel like I’m achieving something. Is that bar too high? Maybe for some particular encounters, but we won’t be able to really say until the community has had a chance to formulate and standardize strategies. With the right strategy, any encounter should be doable and so far that seems to be the case.

I think composition is all about role coverage. Most classes seem to be capable of filling many roles, and some can fill multiple roles with the same spec and can swap traits/skills as needed for particular encounters to fill those roles better. I agree alrgely with zencow’s analysis, but here’s my take:

Necessary roles are:
Condition removal
Healing
DPS

Also sometimes:
CC
Rezzing

DPS: Self explanatory. Everyone needs to be able to do this to some degree, but some events require maxed DPS on everyone to succeed (graveling burrows in AC colossus for example.)

Condition removal: Not needed for every encounter, but useful for most and absolutely vital for some.

Healing: Every encounter is a balancing act between the party’s ability to avoid/recover from damage and the rate at which damage is being dished to them. This has to stay in the player’s favor or equal while they kill the boss, or else they lose unless their damage on the boss makes up for it (those fights where everyone is almost dead but you get the boss down.) It’s much better to be in control of the fight rather than a DPS race against the boss because the players rarely win that way, and that’s where healing comes in. Having someone able to increase the rate at which your party recovers HP is really helpful for the long haul fights, and this person frequent doubles as a condition remover. GW2 doesn’t really have big heals, but it has plenty of worthwhile long-term recovery you can apply to your teammates. For instance: my banners heal for 6,000+ over 30 seconds, which is 1/2 to 1/4 of a player’s max HP.

CC: Cripple is useful for staying away from a great many enemies and even bosses, and some enemies require you to interrupt them to prevent really bad things happening to your party. Many bosses, however, are practically immune to hard CC like stuns and immobilize, and so most difficult encounters do not require or benefit overly much from CC.

Rezzing: Some encounters call for someone to just go around getting people up. (Kudu in Crucible of Eternity where he just one shots people with a poorly telegraphed attack every 10-20 seconds.) There’s no good way to spec for it though, as the best you can get is 10% and some minor bonuses. Some classes can put down a stealth field or protective barrier to prevent harassment while rezzing. Most classes can rez just fine for most encounters, so it’s not really necessary to specialize.

Specializing for something besides DPS does hurt your raw DPS, and support-specialized characters are usually more effective supporting max DPS characters than they are other support characters. So it depends on what level of support you want vs. what level of DPS, as each character will usually take something to help their own survivability to some degree, and can take things to help everyone even if they’re going for DPS.
So my optimal group is 2 hybrid support characters (who can spec deeper into support as needed for encounters but have 30 points in their support trait tree) and 3 DPS characters with some support abilities.

For example, my guild groups usually have 2-3 warriors (myself included.) I like the group with me specced into support/healing, 2 DPS warriors with an AoE buff and an AoE condition removal, an engineer specced into support/healing, and our DPS necromancer with his combo fields and control abilities. Once more people get some levels in our guild we’ll get more diverse groups, but we do pretty well for ourselves. We have yet to fail an instance as a guild group except when we hit bugs.

Whitewolf.9736:

Ballamore.8092:

ArenaNet, please just make one global token currency for all the dungeons, that atleast should ease the grind for armors.

The problem with this method is that if you add one currency then people will find the quickest dungeon to run and constantly do that leaving all of the others pretty much unplayed which I’d imagine is something they don’t want to do.

I disagree. I think people who regularly group together, like a guild, will put a value on doing fresher content. Some people will only do the msot efficient, true, but most of us would rather spend an extra 10-20% time on something for fresher content. The thing I really want a universal system for is to incentivize me to do content that I would never otherwise do. I only want the CoF armor, so I’m going to be forced to run only CoF. SE, TA, and the rest of the dungeons will have no rewards for me except for the glyphs I want from one dungeon, and maybe a weapon from another. That’s 3 out of many.

Now that I’m more attuned to explorable mode difficulty, story AC is really easy by comparison. It is harder than CM, but much easier than some later story mode dungeons. Actually, pretty much every story mode dungeon is harder than AC except CM. (I have done them all except Arah.) Some of the trash in AC story is vicious, but there is no brutally hard encounter or boss to get through. All 4 are really easy. Explorable will make you long for how easy story mode was.

tl;dr If you think AC story is hard, you have significant room to grow in skill, build, and coordination, before you will be able to do later instances or explorable difficulty (aside from CM story.)

We fought that golem today, and it was definitely harsh. That fight is all about condition control. Your party needs to minimize conditions they put on the golem, and needs extensive condition removal themselves. I really enjoyed this fight as my support warrior because I just ran around putting other players in my group out because it’s the burning that really kills you.

I slotted a skill that makes my warhorn abilities turn 1 condition into a boon, and used ‘shake it off’ to also remove conditions. I threw on another couple shouts and a trait that makes my shouts heal and just went around rezzing, healing, and putting out burning players while the 4 of them focused on killing the boss. Another warrior also had the ‘shake it off’ shout, and some of them had some personal condition removal.

It’s vital to dodge the flames when possible, and having someone in melee to trigger the easily dodged PBAoE fire is really helpful. You have to get each other up too since the run back is so long.

When done this way it takes awhile but is very doable. If you don’t have someone who has the tools to be dedicated condition removal, then everyone really needs to get good at dodging and carry a lot of their own condition removal.

Good luck!

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