Guild Wars 2

Voting with your feet is always an excellent means of making a point about a product you like or dislike, and if you’re actually going to stick to what you’ve said then good on you for sticking with your opinion.

However, broadcasting your decision on the discussion boards is pointless and pretty childish. You could have achieved so much more with a well thought out and constructively written email to a-net instead. You could have chosen to highlight the aspects you thought they did well, discussed the points and changes you felt were poor and made suggestions on how things could have been made better for you. A well written email like that gets noticed, printed and discussed in the office. Flame bait on the other hand, wont get much more than a pained, knowing nod of acknowledgement that the day’s trolling has begun again.

By posting here you just open up the daily means for rage quitters to vent and trolls to react to your flame bait. It’s not constructive, does nothing for the community, and will only be noticed by the staffers if it descends into enough of a flame fest for them to need to lock it and ban people. In all honesty, its just the kind of thread I used to ignore as a community manager and leave for the mods to clean up. These threads are all about egocentricism – how many people will agree with you, how many will ask you to stay, etc etc.

Like I said, it’s of negligible benefit to the community, its not big, and not clever. If you are determined to leave for pastures new, and feel you have something to say, do us all a favor and email Anet direct. You never know, they might respond, they might even give you a call and chat you about what they’re doing and why. If you come across well they might even invite you to help with some Q&A or implement some of your ideas. Maybe they’ll just explain the situation well enough to talk you round and leave you feeling good because they took the time for you, after you took the time for them, and the community.

Either way, enjoy legend of ripped off disney films or whatever it is, it’s clearly something you consider more suited to your play style and I hope it fulfills all your expectations for it.

Gigantic one eye’d giant named Gort is a good one. (Film reference to The Day the Earth Stood Still)

Tried every variation of Klaatu Veratta Nicto at him, didnt do anything, but I helped myself to the contents of his chest regardless.

just for refor reference, i recommended memtest for its ability to test ram for physical faults, nt for use in overclocking a system, precisely because its not the kind of test thats going to fry your cpu but will still generate data that can actually be of use (particularly because faulty physical memory has caused blue screens as described in a number of games ive supported)
You clearly know a little about supporting a pc, but please do me the service of both assuming you are not the only person who does, but also reading what I actually wrote and noticing the fact that clocking as never mentioned with regards to troubleshooting his issue. It’s
always dishearting to find someone trying to prov
de support whilst making crass assumptions and ignoring what they are told, particuarly on forums like this where they’d very likely be the same people to complain that the official support techs are overly reliant on scripts and email templates.

Moot point regardless, given his distinct lack of a response since, I suspect the issue has already been resolved or they’ve given up on it.

Tbh, I’d rather that disgruntled players just email their complaints to anet and leave the forums clear of it.

In around 15 years of playing and community managing mmo’s I can still pretty much count the number of leaving posts that were designed to do anything but ego boost the author, and after experimentation, you’d be surprised by how many people were happy to “rage quit” and “never play again” only to crawl across broken glass to recover their accounts after I’d taken them at their word and perma-banned the accounts to save them the effort of “leaving”.

If you need to leave an exit review as the epitaph to your presence on a game, make it constructive and useful to players who might want to join the game. That means including an equal measure of what you liked or what drew you to the game, not just a page full of hate, spittle and bile.

Just my 2 penneth worth…

Every bot is another paid for account, funding the dev’s, fuelling new features, financing the support team and paying for the site, forums and wiki resources.

Sure, they’re an annoyance, and the spam is unpleasant, but they’ll get banned soon enough, pick up another acc and through the money they plough into a-net probably do some good things for the game long term. They aren’t so parasitical as all that

Just report them and move on, and smile inwardly at the fact that they’re inadvertently funding their own destruction.

I’ll +1 on this, I much prefer png files to jpg.

o.0 we’re only like 3 weeks in to the game… I mean that’s the kind of time frame that most would consider re-rollable, and if you store all your gear you don’t even have to worry about a lot of the expense?

That aside, I believe you do get a chance to change your mind part of the way through the faction quest line.. If you made the same choice twice, without considering your options, I think we’re more in to the realms of “well you blew your chance” than “anet need to fix it”

If they do, at lvl 80, I’d suggest the cost to a character to do so be pretty vast in all honesty.

I mean seriously if this was IRL its like asking your boss to give you the nice well paid job with the car after you turned it down, twice, to work as the cleaner.

Argh, this ones a tough one to call… I for one love exploring, and have run through several of the jump puzzles and things just to see if I could do them.

That said, when I do get rewards from chests and exploration quests.. it does rankle that the rewards are very rarely even usable by my class. I guess it helps promote a bit of trade, or in my case, provides a couple of extra crafting mats.

Best suggestion I could think of would be to weigh the loot tables in favour of a players class, but not to the exclusion of all else….

After all, if a reward item is absolutely phenomenal, I’ve got guildies or alts that might be able to use it…

Meh, I think I’ll just remain on the fence

Sure its not the be all and end all. A lot of people play for the social aspects of the game, and a lot are genuine, normal, hobbyists who just pop in from time to time in the same way they might head to the cinema or read a book, and these players probably have the best time of all.

For me, my addiction never really stopped. It was countered by a change in life circumstances, mitigated somewhat by learning a bit about why I was addicted, how, and how it was done, and mostly held in check by re-evaluting my priorities in life, and working to ensure that I kept up with my responsibilities to my family, my home and myself. It’s an ongoing struggle, as I’d still love to play more, but these days I’m proud to consider myself, and be considered a casual gamer.

For reference, and to address the rest of the OP’s post, I’ve not rushed the game yet, I’m lvl 46ish (if i remember right) and still enjoying what I find in game a great deal. I also know, from experience, that if I didn’t log in for more than 2 weeks, I’d probably never log back in at all.

Don’t know if this really helps, or if I’ve gone off on a major tangent, but gonna post it anyway as its taken a little while to write, and it’d be a shame to waste it. Sorry for the wall of text.

My point of view on this subject is probably biased, as I’ve been both what I would consider an addict, a developer and I’ve studied the psychology of addiction (including to computer games to some extent) – I started as a gamer, became an addict to the point where I spent up to 22hrs a day on SWG, sleeping only when the servers were going through their daily reboot, and as an escape from an abysmal life at home. Then I became a pro for a bit before I escaped, by moving to undertake a job as a dev, and then several years later did my 2nd degree in Psychology to learn about a lot of the stuff I’d seen, done and experienced.

The first thing that you need to accept is that games are written to be addictive. All of your interactions in the game have been predicted and catered for on some level, and regardless of how aggressively competitive you believe you are or are not, they rely on drip feeding you rewards in much the same way as a Skinner Box in exchange for completing actions, challenges or even for just spending time in game.

It doesn’t seem like much. Anyone who’s been on the receiving end of some anti-farm generated piles of junk trophies would probably assume its almost negligable or a non-existent consideration, but its worth remembering, in lab tests, wiring up a rat to a lever designed to stimulate its pleasure centers every time its pressed, will continue pressing that lever until it dies of starvation/dehydration in a happy haze of messed up neurochemistry.

Believe it or not, MMO’s work on the same principle, and every gain in levels, skill point gain or new thing is another slap in the brain stem with your favorite neurotransmitters, driving you towards your next hit, whilst at the same time a developing tolerance to the same hormones means that you need to do more just to get the same “high”

It’s in the developers best interests to encourage the process. Getting you hooked means you continue to play, and by extension, pay. The process of developing a leveling and “item gaining” curve in a game is big business, too steep and people get bored, too low and people very quickly run out of ways to generate the same buzz. Ever had a “just one more level” or “i just need to do this one thing” moment before logging out? That’s the process at work right there.

That said, having a “just one more level” moment doesn’t necessarily make you addicted, please let me make that clear. For most people it’s no different to that “just one more chocolate” or “quick pint before you head on” moment that many will have had at some time or another.

Going from experience, however, I’d say that a significant proportion of the player base of any MMO is addicted to some degree, wether they’d admit it or not. Phrases like “I have to log in because of my guild/ this raid / i need to get that item/ etc” tend to come up a lot and make you wonder. A quick acid test for most is “at some level would you resent someone/something that cut into your game time to do something mundane irl” – even if only for a second or two and not necessarily in anything more than a mild passing manner. As others have said, sneaking off for 5 mins levelling or neglecting yourself or your responsibilities in order to game are really good indicators that the mmo industry has got you hooked on a line and is slowly reeling you in.

It’s not all doom and gloom however. I’m sure most of you know, or are, an oldbie player, and you may have noticed in such people a growing dissatisfaction with the games you play now. Some of you actually smash the nail right on the head at the outset with comments like “They just don’t hit me the way they used to”… or to be a little more technical “I just don’t get the same hit from games like I used to”.

Truth is its probably not the games, its probably us. After around a decade of quality online gaming, a lot of us have desensetised ourselves enough to the endorphin rush of a good raid to the point where we can start to shrug it off. It’s probably the same reason that a lot of people swarm to a new game at the start, and leave under the same cloud the OP mentioned in his post. Addicts, swarming the potential source of a new high, only to find its not high enough to cut through the biochemical tolerance they’ve developed to keep them hooked like it used to.

Lol, the holy trinity hasn’t been removed from the game at all. The roles are still there, and will always be there.

What’s changed is that you don’t have to chose a specific class to fulfill a specific role any more, and that change has been building gradually for years. SWG did it ages, ago. Lotro, on the other hand, gave you classes that leaned towards a mixture of roles and let you equip items and skills to make you as efficient as possible in that role. More recently guildwars 1 and Rift (for example) have let you mix and match classes to build a character to fulfill the role you choose for yourself. The secret world has done away with the idea almost entirely.

Guildwars 2 borrows from all of the above. Classes very loosely lean in favour of one or more aspects of the trinity, and you can be as focused, or as flexible as you like.

Sure, it changes the game. It’s encouraging emergent gameplay, new styles of play that people are experimenting with, some good, some bad, some the same.

What I think is fantastic is a warrior being able to throw away the sword its been cursed with for over 20 years of gaming and being able to pick up a gun, and be good with it. Its the thief that doesn’t have to sneak, back stab and attack from shadows, and can be in your face with a sword and a smile. Or the guardian that can think “I’m sick of healers being so squishy, pass the band aids and the heavy plate armour”

The “pick this character to do this role” thing is a paradigm from a less sophisticated time when it wasn’t so easy to build a game that allowed you much room for variety or diversity of play styles and choice. Guild Wars 2 is another step along the road to allowing players more freedom and flexibility to handle how they approach fulfilling the roles prescribed within “the holy trinity”, and wether they go all out on just one aspect, or balance between several. It also allows them to chose wether they tackle the role with steel, sorcery or something else..

The trinity is still there, it’s just grown up over the years, and to be quite honest, its about time…

i agree, as a newb trying to learn the area its pretty disheartening to keep getting reamed by both the more experienced players AND the repair guy

ahh apologies to anyone on the mod queue, reported the post to get the link removed, only to find the link was removed as i did it lol

apparently it is possible to change, but its difficult to do.

CPU – AMD Bulldozer FX-8 Eight Core 8120 3.8Ghz (Clocked)
RAM – 16Gb 1666mhz ram
GFX – Gigabyte GTX 560 OC 1024Mb
HDD – 2x 2TB WD Caviar Black 32’s

Laurie, without knowing more about the error message you’re getting when you’re blue screening, its hard to be specific in troubleshooting the issue,

buuut….

as its happened a few times, there’s a few things you can do that “might” help you identify the fault, may correct any issues that have come up because of it, and at the very least, shouldnt make anything worse.

First of all, especially as the system has been forced to close a few times now, its worth checking your system files are all running ok.

A nice easy way to do this is with the built in system file checker.

Open an elevated command prompt (right click the command prompt icon in your file menu and select run as administrator) and simply enter the command
SFC /Scannow.

What will happen now is your pc will begin verifying that all your system files are all intact and working as expected (much like verifying the game cache on a game in Steam)
Depending on the speed of your pc, this process will take a little while, and I’d recommend doing it in safe mode, if you can, although its not essential.

If everything is fine, great. If not, SFC will attempt to replace fix any issues it finds. If corrupt files are found, reboot your pc and perform the scan again as more corrupt files may become visible once others have been fixed (as a rule of thumb, if you find a corrupt file, keep rebooting and scanning till you have a good run of 2-3 scans with no errors).

Once this is done, grab a usb disk or blank cd, head over to memtest.org and snag the latest copy of the memtest iso, burn it, and then boot from it.

As your system bears all the hallmarks of being a custom build rather than store bought, its worth running memtest to ensure that your electronics retailer of choice didn’t send you some dodgy ram. It doesnt matter if its the latest Ocz Ultramega ram of pwnage, or value ram from the thrift store, occasionally memory sticks have physical errors, and they may only show up when a specific application (like GW2) accesses a dodgy sector on the stick that normally doesnt get touched.

Needless to say, run it through a basic scan. If errors show up, you’ll probably want to consider replacing the ram. Experienced users can sometimes even use the info from the tool to make an educated guess as to which stick of ram is faulty, and I’m sure someone here, if not myself, would be happy to help if it came to that.

Whilst there is a lot more I could suggest beyond that, in all honesty the best thing I could really do is ask for the actual error text you’re getting when your pc bluescreens. If it makes no sense, or you’re not sure, don’t forget to have a look in the system event log (control panel – admin tools – event viewer) and see if anything specific is failing around the time your pc crashes in the system logs.

i thought the only dye colour was “Wasabi”… I mean seriously, I’ve had it so often I’ve run out of alts and have started giving it to guildmates..

Seriously tho, as others have confirmed, blacks definitely in the game, as the crazy prices on the TP for it were the source of much discussion last night…

If its reasonable quality, reasonable price, and ships to the UK without the usual “this item now costs twice as much, because of crazy international delivery prices… and it’ll still get stuck in customs till someone remembers to ask you to pay import duty” then I’ll take several

thanks for posting that May well use it in future as jump puzzles were on my to do list for next time im on.

Out of interest though, how do you know when you’re actually near/on/within sneezing distance of a jump puzzle?

I’ve achieved one by trying to get to a vista, but were it not for the vista, i’d never even have known about it o.0

only managed 28hrs in game last time, though I was probably up for around 36+

Can only imagine how zombied you were last time… did you rift it? Being turned into random animals by staffers was really brain melting at 20+ hrs lol

I keep looking at this thread and thinking, I really need to get round to posting on it.

So anyhoos, after much getting side tracked, I’d like to add my +1.. Thanks, both for your efforts and dev work, and for your support when its been needed.

Having worked in the same situation myself, I can honestly say grats to the team for a very smooth launch, great communication, and all round job. If we’d done it half as well, I’d probably still have a job in the field lol.

Thought it was just me recently… I’ve been waiting for my charr to get a “high cholesterol” debuff.
On the plus side, my chef alt will never, ever, run short…

Ahhh wasn’t sure if it should go in here anyway, much obliged!

Hi folks,

Was just wondering if any players (or even better, staffers) were planning on taking part in the Extra Life charity 24hr gameathon event on Oct 20th this year?

I’ve taken part over the last couple of years, and plan on doing it again this year, on GW2 and was wondering who might be around, and where, to take part, as anyone who’s done it before will appreciate how helpful it can be to have a little company through the wee hours when you’re hitting the red eyed wall of doom.

For those that haven’t heard of it before, Extra Life is a gaming event where gamers ask friends, loved ones, random strangers, etc, to sponsor them to game, non-stop for 24 hours, and all the proceeds go to Childrens Miracle network hospitals. Further information is available on their site at www.extra-life.org

On top of doing it again this year, I’m probably going to do a non stop live feed on my twitch.tv channel (assuming the staff don’t object, I’ve submitted a ticket to check) so that people can watch the slow steady decline into sleep deprived gaming madness.

If you’re not taking part, but like the idea, feel free to sponsor me

Mod’s If there’s any problems with me posting this, or linking to the charity site, etc, please delete this post, I don’t want to cause any unnecessary hassle!

I’d have to agree with Banana and Crusher, the SSD will only really reduce your load in times. You might gain a tiny (as in completely unnoticable) increase here and there as textures take a tiny bit less time to load into memory, but mostly, no difference.

That said I suspect the fps drop when swinging the camera is more likely to be with your gfx cards. Whilst pokey enough, it sounds like they’re bottle necking when trying to render a larger portion of the environment. Could you try dropping the shadows to a lower setting and see if this makes much of a difference. Sounds dumb, I know, but the change from 3d shadows to 2d or none represent a big change when you’re trying to render a lot of new objects quickly (like when you swing the camera) and would help to indicate if its a GFX issue, or a more general system one as banana is suggesting.

here’s mine, another generic charr

its possibly a corrupt texture within your client, might be worth removing the client and reinstalling if you have the media, or a suitably fast connection (to make it relatively painless)
Unsure if there’s a means to get the client to check/replace the cache files for you, but i’m sure staffers will be able to point one out if you raise a ticket with them.

ReinoudM.5931:

Cytheria.2867:

i believe this pic pretty much sums it up for you

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-70zw_E_j-4g/TjahEmKJcKI/AAAAAAAAIb0/wyuHJX3di_Y/s1600/magic_bow.png

That just hurts my eyes..

I’m sure the dungeon master forgives you

Op, I concur 110%.

I appreciate the button to pick up the banner is the same as the one to loot a corpse, but seriously, 95% of people that pick it up by mistake just run off with it rather than putting it back….

Seriously, that skill takes time to recharge, and the people I dropped it to support/buff/etc are missing out while you run away on your stupid jolly with the shiny thing.

The option to recall (or even cancel it if you’re getting trolled a persistent flag thief) would be great, even better if doing so reduced your skill timer a little so that you can use it again. One person irritated me to the point where I actually found myself wishing it gave the carrier a persistant, and particularly virulent debuff.

Sigh

i believe this pic pretty much sums it up for you

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-70zw_E_j-4g/TjahEmKJcKI/AAAAAAAAIb0/wyuHJX3di_Y/s1600/magic_bow.png

i cant really comment on the WvW battlegrounds specifically, I’ve not PvP’d yet in GW2.

However in faction battles on GW 1, and to a lesser extent PvP in general, having to run back from respawn made a real difference to warzone balance, if a side pushes too far forward, the “supply lines” (ie your recently ressurected character returning to the fight) become stretched, making it progressively harder to maintain pressure, whilst the defending side with less distance to cover, become comparitively stronger as players can return faster affording them the chance to recover, or at least gain a few extra points before they get steam rolled into oblivion.

Whilst having mounts in these area’s would no doubt make the process of running back less of a chore, on the downside it’d make it far simpler to steamroll an opposing team before they had a chance to get organised, and I know from faction battles in GW1 that some teams really needed the extra time to really gel, and some of the most interesting matches have been ones where the dominating side flip flops purely as a result of the time it takes for players to get back to the action.

I grant you, both sides would gain the same benefit, but I’m sure you’ve seen enough action to know that the right returning mounted player in the right place a second after team member “x” drops the right snare/trap/bind/condition/skill/etc is going to do far more to the opposing team because they could get back faster than team member “y” having to try and hold on to that skill and try to survive while they wait 5-10 seconds for the right player to get to the right place….

Or to TL;DR it all, if you reduce the time it takes to return to a fight, you limit the ability of the opposing team to capitalise on the loss of a couple of players. As travel times decrease, you progessively change the game from a somewhat fluid, and potentially very rewarding tactical challenge, to essentially a clickfest excercise where the team with the best coordinated “spike” damage is going to walk all over the other team.

I hate to resort to a sports analogy, but the battlegrounds are team area’s after all, where you play to a teams strengths and capitalise on their weaknesses much like in sport. Football (or soccer if you’re from the other side of the pond) would be pretty rubbish if you could essentially teleport (or to keep the mount analogy, ride a motorbike) with the ball to the opposing net, and where the only challenge was could you “kick” the ball faster than the goalkeeper could “save” it. Reduce it down further and all pvp would become is a count down timer where the team with the lowest aggregate time clicking their collective mouse buttons at the count would win.

Sorry to stomp on another of your posts Ganadorf, please believe me I’m not out to get you lol.

To be honest though, I love the dynamic feel of the in game environment. Things should change and become easier or harder depending on the player interaction with the area at large. Most devs recognise that for most players, a great way to keep players interested is to provide changes to the environment like this, ranging from world building changes in Atriarch over ten years ago, to city sieges in games I worked on like Mir, to “faction” areas in Guildwars and DAoC all the way through to semi-random invasions like those we see in Rift and GW2 today.

It gives players a reason, away from the levelling/item grind, to band up and work at something together for a few minutes, and whilst a truly realistic and dynamic system hasn’t been created yet, its an excellent work in progress.

The mounts thing has been done to death in the GW community. The sides are balanced and the community should by now have realised there is no point arguing the point, every thing that could be said has been, and there’s never been an overwhelmingly clear enough community desire for them for the devs to need to change their stance.

Besides, if you had spent so long developing an environment like the one we have in Guildwars 2, would you really want people skipping past it on their horses of +200% movement speed, or would you want them to interact with it and make the most of your work.

It also functions to add an element of risk to exploration for any player too, another challenge to be met through luck, skill and perseverance.
Many of us will remember paying for “runners” to help us make it to droknars forge, in the original game, way back when, so that you could make use of a valuable waypoint early on in the game campaign. I’m sure others will remember times when they have desperately tried to force their way through an area just to reach a distant waypoint, and the sense of achievement that comes with passing through a fresh swirly gate with only one companion a bad collection of conditions and 30 health to go.

Mounts bypass all of that. Hell I know from pushing a lowbie character all the way through moria without doing any more than the essential quests to get through the door back when that xpac was released on Lotro, that even ranged attacks aren’t enough of a threat to hold you back if you’re determined and crafty. What you gain in a little extra speed, is almost complete detatchment from the environment around you, and a little convenience devalues the game a great deal.

I’m sorry that you find being able to teleport within 5 minutes reach of anything you want to get to (assuming the spawns are amiable) is too slow or inconvenient for you, but for a lot of us, and clearly the players the devs currently choose to cater for, it’s all the more enjoyable and challenging, even if it does get a little tiring from time to time.

Guildwars always gave you slightly less character slots than available classes, I’m not surprised they’ve done it again.

Ultimately, further development of any online game relies on some kind of income, wether via subs or micro-transactions. This title, like its predecessor opts for micro trans, and as a result, needs to provide a viable reason for people to keep paying.

It can be a bit of a pain, but to be honest paying for the odd extra for my account here and there is far more appealing than feeling like I have to keep paying a sub on the off chance I feel like logging in during the course of any given month, and I still feel like I’ve gained something if I don’t play for a few weeks.

If you think about it, its kind of absurd to think that after all you’ve paid just to install and run the game initially, that you should continue paying just for the privilege of being able to continue to do so.

Whilst you are still, ostensibly paying for a virtual item, a character slot on a server, with all the stigma that goes with doing so, it’s an optional purchase that you are free to make, or not, as you choose. But, in my eyes at least, you’ve “gained” something, rather than just “retained” the right to access it at all.

Warrior is definitely one of the easiest classes I’ve played. Extreme versatility with heavy armour and a large pool of health, for PvE its well worth a look.

Can’t comment on theives as I’ve not tried one, but my engineer got old VERY fast lol.

Not had any problems with my system and the latest stock drivers, so I’ve also been a bit confused by the AMD/NVidia doesn’t work posts that I’ve seen… (for reference AMD Bulldozer FX-8 Eight Core 8120 3.8Ghz (Clocked), 16Gb 1666mhz ram, Gigabyte GTX 560 OC 1024Mb)

That said, my system is a relatively clean build, and I make a habit of trawling through background services and applications to ensure the only things running are the things I want running.

If you are having problems with your system, regardless of who made the parts, there’s some good advice in the post there. Some of the systems I help performance tweak at work have so many random extra applications running on the side, it’s a minor miracle they manage to start the same day they’re booted, and access to do much to those is restricted by domain policies!

As an addendum to what the op said, I’d also recommend running an app like CCleaner regularly, just to clear out the trash your system will build up with update patches and basic usage. Make sure you run the registry scanner as well as the temporary file scan, and tick the box to clear your prefetch and update uninstallers too

Using a greatsword I go for max possible Power/toughness/vitality in that order (depending on available points) to allow for a large, steady amount of damage, with some decent longevity behind it, because up close, I’ve got to expect to get hit. In my experience, consistent heavy damage is better than occassional, if I’m really lucky uber crits.

With a rifle I’d swap that to Power/Perception/Crit to really bump up the long range spike damage whilst ensuring you hit heavily and don’t miss very often. Longevity shouldn’t be so much of an issue, because you shouldn’t be taking so many hits; provided you keep moving.

Sorry, I know that’s one build you didn’t even ask about, but I figured it might give you some idea’s about how I build what I do and why.

Hard to say…. on my ug-bash-thump warrior, i’ve mostly found that I generally only “struggle” with the bosses, but tend to come out on top (as it should be, as it feels like an achievement when I succeed)
The few times I have been taken out, a quick res from checkpoint and leg it over to the boss and I can usually polish them off ok.

On my elementalist, on the other hand, using the right elemental spells with the correct choice of weapon (staff, or scepter + focus) can radically alter an instance, taking me from an easy mode slay-ride of death, destruction and debauchery to an up hill struggle of perseverance and endless respawns…

Cant speak for other classes, but I do think they could do with a little more tweaking or something..

i concur…. at the moment all my alt’s seem to do is store stuff and “unlock” duplicate dyes.