Guild Wars 2

I might be able to make an engineer stealth guide. (I’m not an expert on other classes or optimal might stacking rotations though.)

Hery Einherjar,

[Arch] is a small community with a mostly dungeon focus (but people do other PvE things too). We have several people who have been through every dungeon in the game and are happy to help out newcomers, and many who are newer to dungeons.

We don’t require 100% rep or server transfer (we’re based on Devona’s Rest), although you would have to guest to Devona’s Rest for guild missions, if you’re interested in those.

More info at http://litteroflions.shivtr.com/forum_threads/1467044

Feel free to PM me in-game (Delia Hale) or on the forums and I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have.

This forum isn’t dead, even for dungeon-focused guilds. I’m a leader of a dungeon-focused guild, and read through almost every post that mentions dungeons in the title. However, I don’t think I can offer what either of you are looking for, so I wouldn’t ordinarily post. I think RagingDragon also has a good point – the more hardcore or large guilds generally aren’t going to need to actively recruit, you might have to seek them out.

Hope you both find what you’re looking for!

JustTrogdor.7892:

HAHA, you and the others in this thread inspired me. I decided to rename my Guardian who has 23 deaths in 15 hours of play time “Mr Dies A Lot” Then I put the Combat Healer title on him because of the contradiction. I’m using it more as a tag signaling for healers.

If 23/15 deaths/hour is a lot… uh oh! Most of my characters have a deaths/hour of about 2, and my engineer has a deaths/hour of about 4 (I blame the journey to the gates of arah at level 46).

I display Dungeon Master on all of my characters. It’s the only title I have that took effort to get, it reflects what I spend most of my game time doing, and I feel like it gives me a little bit of credibility in PUGs (whether or not it actually does).

Not my guild, but I have friends in Our Sanctuary [LGBT] on Tarnished Coast, and they seem pretty cool: http://lgbt.enjin.com/

Hi panther,

I’m a leader of Litter of Lions [Arch], a smaller, casual, generally dungeon-focused guild. Most of our core group of members run a couple dungeons a night (depending on how busy they are), and our runs are generally friendly/casual but successful (we’re not a hardcore/speedrun dungeon guild like you’ll see in the dungeon subforums). We don’t have specified paths we run (most of us have run all of them at some point), but are open to suggestions (including fractals) depending on what people want to do. Your approach to mistakes in dungeons is pretty close to my own, and I’d love to have some more friendly dungeoneers like you in guild.

We’re mostly based on Devona’s Rest [NA] (with a smaller contingent on Tarnished Coast), but as long as you’re okay with guesting if you want to join us for guild missions, nobody cares what server you’re on.

We’re most active in American evenings (roughly 5:30pm to 11:30pm Pacific Time), although we have a few people who you can find on at odd hours.

A more comprehensive about page can be found here: http://litteroflions.shivtr.com/forum_threads/1467044

Feel free to PM me here or in-game; I’m happy to answer any questions you might have. If we seem interesting to you let me know and I’ll send you an invite.

No comment on which style is better, but: the white space thing seems to be dependent on your setup. On some browsers where I don’t have any ad-ons to block stuff like that, I get embedded youtube videos. On my primary browser, I get a big white space. When rendered, some people may prefer the embedded – it gives a preview of one frame of the video, anyways. I happen to not prefer embedded, but my tastes aren’t the same as everyone else’s.

Also, last time I tried, not putting the link on its own line also caused it to not embed (can’t promise this is still the case)

Dub.1273:

Edit: What necro mechanic zogyark used has been nerfed?

The death shroud damage overflow and minimum traited death shroud recharge time (traited used to be 5 seconds, now 7). Checking his video again he didn’t use the former as much as I expected, so I’d expect he could still do it (I used to use the overflow all the time for Lupicus, but I’m not as good a player as Orochi).

Anubarak.3012:

Holy Socks.3195:

Because i’d rather kill myself than run Arah with pugs.

so run it alone^^
path 2 is possible with every profession, path 3 only with mes and thief

Orochi/Zogyark actually managed this as a necromancer: http://youtu.be/kziEjoTqMQI

However, the main technique he used for lupicus was nerfed to the ground last patch, so I’m not sure if the Lupicus fight is doable anymore (Orochi was the only one to do it pre-nerf).

Of course, for the vast majority of players, trying arah solo probably isn’t worth it only for the reward, even if it is 3 gold now. For most players, arah with pugs is better than arah solo.

I almost always have a superior sigil of energy on both weapon sets (1 per pair of mainhand/offhand) in PvE (dungeons). Dodge is such a core mechanic and necromancers have so little access to it compared to other classes (especially since last patch).

One neat trick is that if you put this on an offhand and only equip the offhand as the secondary weapon set, swapping weapons won’t interrupt your autoattack. I.e. you can use dagger/focus and nothing/warhorn, with superior sigils of energy on the focus and warhorn, and you can swap between them without interrupting the dagger auto attack chain. Of course, you don’t get access to a secondary mainhand weapon in that case, but it could be quite useful for quite a lot of bosses that are melee-heavy.

This is pretty awesome Wethospu.

One thing I would have found useful when I was learning dungeons would have been a concise summary of what “type” of skills to bring for each fight, i.e. reflects, condition removal, revives, blinds, stability. Especially when re-running a dungeon that I’ve forgotten a bit, reading the whole fight summary can be a bit time-consuming while in a group, but a quick “bring these types of utilities” would allow one to go into the fight prepared. Adding enough class-specific tips could incorporate this too, but right now non-guardian tips seem pretty lacking.

I have a ton of necro and engi tips if you’re interested; I’ll PM you the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

Marrond.1385:

So if you are capable and want to earn more gold/day and you’re interested in Dungeon running this change will hurt your playstyle.

If you are capable and interested in running dungeons, doing a daily run through several dungeons will make more money than it would have previously, and probably similar money to CoF. This is a buff to anyone who runs different dungeons.

For most people who like dungeons, running multiple different dungeons is more interesting than spamming CoF p1. This change will make the more interesting activity more profitable than the less interesting activity – I think that’s a good thing.

Vashoom.8512:

hmm.. did i miss anything off?

A gem currently on gw2lfg: “PING GEAR WITH EXPERIENCE”

I guess “experienced” players weren’t enough, better bring your experienced gear. Or does that mean you have to be experienced at pinging gear?

I went the two sets on my necro as well. You’re correct in that condition duration > condition damage as far as I’ve heard. Zerker armor is always good for dps (especially with the range on grenades). If you’re interested in mixed stats I think the celestial armor/trinkets tend to give better mixed stats than manually mixing gear, but both are quite time-gated unfortunately.

Nay of the Ether.8913:

Sagramor.7395:

Might want to use a current calculator like qw2skills or intothemists.

aren’t those pvp only though?

One or both have PvE calculators now, although I still prefer the out of date gw2buildcraft because the interface is a lot faster (and it shows more stats).

Nay of the Ether.8913:

Well, what i’ve ended up with so far looks like this:
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/engineer/?2.2|a.1o.h5.e.1m.hd|0.0.0.0.0.0|1g.719.1g.719.1g.719.1g.719.1g.719.1g.719|1c.62.1d.9a.1d.9a.1d.9a.1d.9a.1c.62|u378.0.k17.k2a.0|2m.d|2b.2e.2v.7.30|e
My reason for doing it the way I did was to allow me to still dual spec like I did on my necro. With this setup I can do hybrid dps as well as swap for support on the fly (as well as swap out bombs for grenades and appropriate traits for nades). I love the eliver gun because it has the combo field as well as a blast finisher. The reason I chose to do elixers was because I have virtually no other condition removal (I know I could just use elixer C, but unless I’m doing wvw I doubt it will help me much in pve). So far I’m just melting things like it’s nothing and even tanked a few champs on occasion. Most fun I’ve had in a while lol. Let me know what you guys think and offer constructive criticism if you see something I overlooked.

As far as traits/utilities go:
While cleansing formula 409 is awesome if you run a lot of elixirs, elixir gun and healing turret also both remove conditions inherently (2 and 1 every 20 seconds, respectively); it’s not a ton but it’s good enough for most PvE, and elixir C can make up the gap otherwise. If your only elixir is elixir H, healing turret is a far better skill for healing and condition removal, in my opinion.

If you have 30 in explosives, it’s probably not worth swapping out of grenadier almost ever. Reduced cooldown is not very useful for bombs, since your bomb damage is all from auto-attack, and a 20% cooldown on the aoe blind is nice but not huge (and it’s already on a shorter cooldown than well of darkness untraited). Reduced cooldown does help grenades, but grenadier helps more. Feel free to swap this up of course, I’m just not sure the time investment of swapping it for most ranged fights will be worth the slightly faster cooldown.

I’m not a huge fan of your gear, but I’m guessing you have a method to your choices there which I’m unaware of.

timidobserver.7925:

Necros barely received any significant nerfs. You can’t throw yourself off of cliffs now. Suck it up.

If insignificant nerfs make you rage, you certainly don’t want to roll an engi. When we get nerfed, we really feel it.

I have a ton of empathy for engi nerfs, but just because you don’t understand the significance of the death shroud PvE nerf doesn’t mean it’s insignificant. It’s a huge nerf to high end necro play in PvE.

Bas.7406:

Nay of the Ether.8913:

I never thought this day would come where I have to hang up my necromancer, but I think it’s now. They are going in the exact opposite direction from where our class needs to go. With this new DS obliteration, I have no need to play necro anymore. It’s a sad day for me and many other necros in this community too. My final straw was last night when I was asked to wait outside a boss fight because the group “didn’t want to spend the whole fight rezzing the necro” <—- exact wording. I don’t really blame them. I’ve tried using DS like I used to, and the difference is staggering. Either you go full LF or you don’t bother and just eat the dirt. I’m not arguing that the other nerfs were needed, I know they were. But this one baffles me beyond belief. Farewell necro, maybe we will meet again in the future when you get your cahones back.

This is what I was trying to explain to Bhawb and some of the pvp guys. This nerf to DS is massive for anyone who plays pve or wvwvw. It’s a nice change for tpvp where you face bunkers and condition spam, but in a boss fight where you 20k damage hits are dealt out more often then 10 seconds, you get destroyed now. I don’t know how many times I used DS because I had already dodged twice in 30 seconds which means with no block, invuln or way to disengage, ds was it. This new change essentially killed us on certain boss fights.

Completely agree with both Nay and Bas.

Hi Nay! Fellow [support] necromancer refugee here; we ran together on one of Bas’ early all-necro runs. I’ve basically switched to engineer as my main and am enjoying it a lot. Here’s what I’ve figured out so far, although admittedly I know necros far better than engineers:

Healing turret is your best heal – if you double tap it you can get it to cast the group heal + water field at the same time as you drop the turret (rather than 3 seconds after). Then use the 1st toolbelt skill to detonate the turret for a water blast finisher. At this point I usually use shield 4 or elixir gun 4 as a second blast finisher. Load up a blast finisher or two in here and you can heal a party well even in zerker gear.

For damage in dungeons, grenades or bombs seem to be the best option. Grenades do more damage and have much more range, but can be a pain to play. Unfortunately, grenades don’t do good damage unless you have the grandmaster grenadier trait, which is a 50% damage boost. Bombs don’t do quite as much damage, mostly because they lack the conditions and only hit once (meaning they don’t proc vulnerability/bleeds as frequently), but also offer some support options via a fire field, a smoke field which also acts like well of darkness, and a blast finisher (just be careful to only use it when a boss has defiant so that you don’t knock back all the nearby enemies).

Elixir R’s toolbelt skills is the awesome AoE res skill. Elixir U’s toolbelt skill is a projectile blocking wall – either the guardian’s wall of reflection or thief’s smoke screen. It has a long cooldown, but coming from a class with no projectile reflect, is amazing.

Shield 5 is a 2 second long block, but the tooltip text is a bit confusing and doesn’t seem to indicate that. Toolkit 4 is a 3 second block on a 20 second timer, which is great for skipping.

You can group stealth using bomb kit 4’s smoke field with lots of blast finishers. I usually go: Big Ol’ Bomb (bomb kit’s toolbelt) → Bomb Kit 4 → detonate healing turret → detonate thumper turret → thumper turret’s toolbelt skill → double tap shield 4 → rocket boots. This combination gives between 11 and 13 seconds of stealth if you get through it quickly enough, which can make a huge difference for the couple dungeon runs that are short but really hard (TA, Arah p3, probably the end of CM).

Pistol 3 acts similarly to necro dagger 4 as far as blind goes, which is useful.

Elixir gun acts as a weak AoE heal (about the same as well of blood’s AoE portion without healing power), a condition removal (on the aoe heal), a short cooldown (15 second) blast finisher, and a stun break (on the toolbelt skill). You can cancel the jump backwards on the blast finisher (skill 4) by swapping weapons immediately after activating it, giving you the blast finisher but less knockback. If you’re in danger of knocking yourself off a cliff though (such as in SE p1), it’s safer to just avoid elixir gun 4 altogether.

Tool kit 5 is a pull, sort of like spectral grasp but a lot slower.

Supply crate is pretty much the best non-racial elite. Personally, I use Avatar of Melandru (human elite) on Lupicus for the stability.

Benji.9203:

necro was not nerfed to the ground

In dungeons, yes, they were. It’s not really fair to comment on this if you haven’t played a necro in high-end PvE, in my opinion.

cesmode.4257:

@DelOnasi: You drank too much meta coolaid.

Haha yikes! I’m generally pretty anti-meta and I’m surprised the post didn’t come off that way. Well at least I might not get assaulted on the forums for it then.

For the record, the current meta disagrees with most of this post. If you’re interested only in grouping with extremely good players or running dungeons as fast as possible, feel free to go with the meta builds.

For most dungeon groups there are other viable builds than pure damage. My non-meta runs are often smoother than my meta runs. If you’re DnT or LOD, or otherwise in a really hardcore group, go ahead and put everyone in full zerker gear – it works smoothly if the whole team is really good. If you’re doing more casual runs and aiming for smooth runs rather than fast runs, there are other good party builds. This becomes more the case the less perfect the rest of your group is.

This doesn’t mean every build is good, or that every armor type is good for every build – far from it (although I’m sure you could complete every dungeon with good players in random builds).

There are three main aspects to dungeon encounters:
– dealing damage as a group
– not dying as a group
– encounter-specific mechanics

The third aspect (things like bringing pulls/immobilize on the first boss in the grawl fractal) seems to mostly come from utility selection rather than build. If everyone is good enough, the second aspect can become irrelevant, which is why people claim DPS gear is always the best.

I think that long-term you’ll want to focus your build on one or both of the first two aspects. This means choosing group damage or group survivability over individual damage or individual damage. Choosing something like P/V/T in most situations isn’t a great long-term choice because it focuses only on your survivability, which is another reason a lot of players bash defensive gear. However, group survivability through boons such as protection/aegis, or heals through dodges/symbols/mace can be useful to the whole group especially if your group isn’t perfect.

I’d say start out playing dungeons how you’re comfortable playing them, and over time a lot of players gravitate towards berserker gear (more players have always preferred the DPS role in MMOs, so this wouldn’t be surprising even if there were a more optimal group setup). If/when you feel that, go for it; having multiple gear sets and knowing when to switch between them can be really useful.

Bhawb.7408:

DS needed the change. Its an issue of too much power (absorbing infinite damage in one hit every 10 seconds) being invested in very niche scenarios (only single hits, only when it finishes LF pool). If they remove that power, they should give it back to more healthy setups. For example SA+DS now makes you stupidly tanky for the duration.

Now, I’m not saying I love the change, or that it isn’t a nerf. It is a big nerf especially in PvE. But it should open the way for more ways for us to eat big hits and not drop instantly.

This may be reasonable on the PvP side of things, but that’s not a very niche scenario in the PvE side of things (Lupicus and many other bosses that had their damage built into large single attacks – the first boss and the Destroyer of Worlds in SE p3, the second to last boss in the dredge fractal, the last boss of AC p3, the champion wolf in CoE, mossman, the ettin in the uncategorized fractal, the berserk abomination in arah p2, risen berserkers in arah p2, etc).

“Absorbing infinite damage in one hit every 10 seconds” is something most classes in this game have. Death shroud functioned quite similarly to aegis, and most classes have access to more than one of: vigor (1 extra dodge every 10 seconds), +50% endurance regeneration traits (worse, but 1 extra dodge every 20 seconds), blocks, projectile reflects, or invulnerability skills. We’re now the only class that has just natural endurance dodge to fill this role. I think eventually ArenaNet will probably realize how important this is and improve necromancer’s access to these important skills, but in the mean time it is hard to justify bringing my necromancer into many dungeons.

If necromancers were generally wanted in dungeons it might be arguable that nerfs were justified. But as it was necromancers weren’t particularly good at dungeons.

Cogbyrn.7283:

Also, are there really so many attacks in PvE that you don’t have enough dodges without Vigor? The number of people I’ve seen just dodge randomly for no net gain is so high that I have an intensely hard time believe that.

This hurts a lot in several high end PvE fights such as Lupicus. It’s not really fair to comment on the PvE aspect of a necromancer change if you haven’t played a necromancer in a lot of dungeons. Necros were never one of the “best” dungeon classes, making this all the more painful.

In general, are there so many attacks that you don’t have enough dodges without vigor? If you time everything perfectly, probably not – this game’s PvE is pretty easy in general. But every other class gets some form (usually multiple) of avoiding single spike hits: vigor, +50% endurance regen traits, block, invunerability, aegis, evade skills, and projectile reflection. Necromancers have none of these, and previously could make up for the difference with skillful use of death shroud. Now the skill cap has been lowered, and necromancers are the only class to have none of those defenses against large 1 hit attacks (other than natural dodges, which every class has).

Roe.3679:

You really thought it was intended to tank infinite damage when DS is drained? This change was coming for months. If it caught you by surprise, I’m really not sure what to say. Perhaps if you wanted blocks on demand you should have rolled a guardian.

Most classes have several ways to mitigate infinite damage – vigor for dodges, +50% endurance regeneration traits, blocks, invulnerability skills, aegis. A large portion of PvE as it is currently implemented revolves around avoiding spike damage through these abilities. Removing this from necros without adding other sources of spike damage mitigation is a huge and unwarranted nerf to necromancer viability in dungeons.

I’ve said this in another thread, but: nerfing this reduces inter-profession diversity, lowers necromancer viability in dungeons, and reduces the skill cap of playing a PvE necromancer. I don’t think any of those three outcomes was desirable.

Personally, I may be shelving my necro in PvE for a while – challenging with a high skill cap was fun; more challenging with a lower skill cap does not sound fun.

The death shroud damage overflow feels like another PvP-oriented change. It is a huge nerf to necros (and necros’ skill cap) in dungeons. Without this necromancers are at an even larger disadvantage to classes with vigor or increased endurance regen.

Nerfing this reduces inter-profession diversity, lowers necromancer viability in dungeons, and reduces the skill cap of playing a PvE necromancer. I don’t think any of those three outcomes was desirable.

Fall damage already goes through a lot of other forms of damage mitigation, such as aegis. Removing the infinite fall jumping from death shroud would be fine; removing the spike damage mitigation from death shroud altogether is a drastic over-nerf in PvE.

Seconded.

For the posts claiming this is a nerf: this would keep grenade DPS the same with the grenadier trait, and increase grendade DPS without the grenadier trait.

Engineer builds are quite pigeonholed into grenadier right now, which is unfortunate, and this idea is one small step to remedying one of the underlying causes.

While I agree that it sucks to be kicked at the end of a dungeon, there isn’t really anything that ArenaNet could, or should do about it.

It is impossible for guildwars2 to automatically determine whether or not a kick is fair/justified. It is also a ridiculous burden to ask ArenaNet to be a judge whenever someone is kicked – I doubt the game could survive financially with a need for such constant manual intervention. The real-world cost of such intervention would be drastically more than the in-game value of the dungeon tokens/silver.

Given those two factors, there are always going to be times when people are kicked when they shouldn’t have been, as well as times when people were kicked when they clearly deserved it. If you put artificial limits on kicking, you’ll end up with a system that prevents some illegitimate kicks, but also prevents some kicks that should have happened.

What metric do you propose for whether or not kicking is allowed? If you want to prevent people from being kicked on the last boss, then that opens up the party system to abuse during the last boss fight – there are some last bosses where a single person could prevent the party from completing the dungeon.

The fundamental tradeoff here is between the right to kick someone and the right to not be kicked yourself. Guild Wars 2 has a system where everyone has a right to choose who they play with. I wouldn’t want to play dungeons without that right, and if it were actually implemented, I would be surprised if you would either.

I agree that kicking people on the last boss is often a kitten move. But implementing a naive system to prevent it would be a solution that is worse than the problem itself.

Aside: I do think the 2-person vote is obviously silly, of course, and ought to be a majority vote (i.e. 3 people must vote to kick someone before they get kicked).

aophts.9862:

Don’t communicate with others. … Don’t listen, don’t read the party chat.

This is the number 1 or 2 problem with most bad groups. If your group won’t respond to your party chat after repeatedly asking them a question, just leave (and join another group). I had a really bad group get dredge the other day and try some new “escape the dungeon” exploit and refuse to explain what they were doing in party chat, so I dropped and found a new group, which also hit dredge, but talked through it and did it the normal way, and we were already done with the panel by the time I had left the first group.

aophts.9862:

I don’t have any friends and my guild don’t ever give a kitten about helping me on dungeons and things like that, so i’m doomed with PUGs.

If you mean your guild’s attitude is that they do fractals/dungeons but don’t help you with them, you should find a new guild. If your guild just doesn’t do fractals/dungeons but you like them anyways, this might not apply (but if you want to do a lot of dungeons and fractals, you should find a guild that will do them with you, it’s way more fun). There are a lot of nice guilds out there that are happy to run whatever their members need (if you can’t find one, feel free to PM me and I’d be happy to invite you to mine).

Syfin.6875:

Ok, thanks for the input. The reason i chose staff over the dagger idea is for more aoe options, but will i not need more aoe?

Piercing life blast from death shroud, along with well of suffering/well of corruption + death shroud 4) will do a lot more aoe damage than staff in a power build.

But

You can switch out your weapons constantly. Its a good habit to swap weapons and utilities for different situations. Dagger provides the highest single target damage with its auto attack so its worth having one (with a warhorn).

This is entirely correct – you should switch weapons and utilities for whatever is best for the current situation (I also switch armor, but most people don’t). Staff is a great situation weapon and has some very good utility for some fights (and is great for running and kiting).

While axe has more burst life force generation, dagger has more sustained life force generation and more sustained damage, as long as it’s safe to get into melee range. I almost always have a dagger as one of my mainhand weapons in PvE.

Hi phoenix (and oogabla),

You seem to have gotten a lot of replies to this, so if you’ve already found somewhere, feel free to ignore this and have fun in your new guild.

If not, I’m one of three admins of [Arch], and I think we might fit your playstyle, especially if you and your friend are looking to get more involved in fun, casual dungeon runs.

phoenix.1862:

We’re looking for a guild that does dungeons regularly, is fairly active, and friendly. We don’t want a guild that has minimum weekly hours or anything like that – we’re both active, but sometimes life gets in the way.

We run dungeons regularly – we usually run several dungeons (whatever people are interested in completing) between 8pm-12pm PST (which aligns pretty closely with my usual active window as well). We currently have a core of about 4-7 regular dungeon runners who are online most days.

Our dungeon runs are pretty casual – nobody is going to ask you to play a specific class or build, or get upset if someone does something silly and causes a wipe. Our group is pretty experienced and has completed all of the dungeon paths (and still enjoy them).
We’re happy to bring new people through dungeons (and would love to teach some people and get some more regular dungeoneers for groups ^.^).

We also like to occasionally have fun/silly dungeon runs with special requirements – lately we’ve been doing some “survivor” dungeons, where you start with no armor, weapons, or trinkets, but you can use armor/weapons that drop for you or other members during the run.

We don’t have any weekly hour requirements or anything like that and are pretty friendly.

Most of our members are on Devona’s Rest, but we don’t mind having members from other servers, you can still join dungeons from any server, and can guest for guild bounties. The only real reason to transfer is if you want to do WvW on a different server (we don’t do much WvW right now, but a couple members dabble).

We also have our own teamspeak server, which a lot of people use for dungeon runs (but is not required, of course).

If you’re interested, feel free to send me an in-game mail, a PM on these forums, or whisper one of:
Delia Hale / Oriana Onasi (myself)
Gruilty
Leo Umber

I’d be happy to answer any questions you have or shoot you an invite so you can see if we’re a good fit. You can also check out our website at http://litteroflions.shivtr.com/forum_threads/1467044

I’m assuming you’re aiming for a build focused on direct damage (i.e. not condition damage, sustain, or support), so the following advice is for that.

30/0/10/0/30 is a good power build for PvE, but I would recommend Dagger and Axe mainhands rather than staff; you have death shroud for 1200 range now (and most encounters don’t need 1200 range). Obviously you can switch for encoungers where you want 1200 range, such as if your group is ranging Lupicus.

My personal recommendation on traits (but you don’t have to use exactly these of course):

in spite:
(first one has a lot of options: focus recharge, life blast grants might, or signet recharge for signet of the locust and signet of undeath)
axe mastery
close to death

in death magic:
lose a condition on entering death shroud – this skill is amazing in certain encounters, especially with reduced death shroud cooldown.

in soul reaping:
life blast pierces
death shroud recharges faster
+50% crit chance in death shroud (change to stability for fights that need stability)

Since this is a pretty traditional direct damage build, you should probably go for exquisite ruby jewels or ascended berserker accessories. Armor depends on how comfortable you are with using dodges and death shroud to absorb damage; it’s possible to go full berserker in this, but starting out P/V/T (soldier’s) will give you a lot more room for mistakes, or T/P/P (knight’s) will give you a good amount of room for mistakes while doing significantly better damage than soldier’s.

If you can’t afford berserker trinkets, valkyrie or cavalier’s (available from the temples using karma) is a reasonable choice, but you should still put exquisite ruby jewels in them.

Hey Xehanort,

If you still haven’t found a guild that suits you, [Arch] might be a good fit for you. We’re a small-medium sized guild and run a lot of dungeons/fractals, and are looking to expand the size of our dungeon-running group.

Our dungeon runs are pretty casual; everyone runs the class/build they are comfortable with, and we aim for fun runs not speedruns. Most of us are pretty anti-exploit and anti-elitist (I hate the AC exploits too, the stairs for Howling King are especially annoying because it’s normally a fun fight).

We also sometimes run “survivor” dungeons: start the dungeon with no armor, trinkets, or weapons, and only use what you pick up during the run.

We have our own teamspeak 3 server. Most of us are on during EST evenings/nights; we have a few members on during EST daytime, but we might seem a bit sparse then. We don’t have any requirements about when people are online (real life first).

We’re located primarily on Devona’s Rest, but welcome players from other servers (you’d have to guest if you’re interested in guild missions).

You can check out our website at http://litteroflions.shivtr.com/forum_threads/1467044 , or just PM me on the forums, send me an in-game mail, or PM me in game if I’m on, and I’d be happy to chat more.

I’m an admin of [Arch] on Devona’s Rest. We’re a small to medium sized guild – we have 130 total members but only about 5-20 people online at once (20 being weekends), and less than 10 members who are on frequently.

We do lots of dungeons and fractals, and have weekly guild missions. Our dungeon runs are pretty casual; we have both veterans and newer players. We also have our own teamspeak 3 server (nobody is required to use teamspeak, but it’s fun for dungeons).

Most of us don’t WvW much though, so if you’re pretty interested in that (based on your signature), we might not be the best guild for you.

Feel free to send me a forum message, in-game mail, or in-game PM and I’d be happy to chat more. Alternatively, you can check out our website and forums are at http://litteroflions.shivtr.com/forum_threads/1467044 (link to the about us page)

You might want to clarify what types of dungeon runs you’re interested in. If you’re interested in speed runs, you should have a zerker guardian, warrior, or mesmer, even if you want to experiment with other classes/builds.

If you’re just interested in fun, easy, successful dungeon runs, then most professions can bring plenty to runs if played and built well. You won’t bring as much support as a full support guardian, or as much damage as a zerker warrior, but there are plenty of builds that can bring a mix of useful damage, support, and utility in random dungeon runs. A great player of a non-meta class will still bring more to most PUGs than an average player of a meta class.

Andele.1306:

Yep, just got to it, its just since i was in a low level zone degen took most life force of it (so it always fell to around 5 seconds), but another thing, if you are in DS for more then 10 seconds, it seems to reset from time to time? (Was in AC tanking the gravelings, ton of em died just as i got hit out of ds, it had a 9 second cd). This stuff really needs testing (that im too lazy to do), since i know it just used to be 10 seconds no matter how you exit since they dropped the cd on DS.

It doesn’t make sense from an implementation perspective, but I think it might matter whether you are hit out of death shroud or it degens to 0 naturally.

Softspoken.2410:

Ahaha oh my gosh. I figured it out, I think.

When you enter Death shroud, it puts F1 on a 10 second recharge. When you leave Death Shroud, it does the same thing again. But if you’re forced out of DS, it won’t reset the recharge to 10 seconds, instead it’ll just be whatever is left of that first 10 second duration. And yeah, the lockout is consistently just whenever you’re forced out of DS.

This means that if you stay in DS for 10 seconds before being forced out, it won’t be on recharge when you leave, you just need to generate the requisite DS first.

How have I never noticed this before.

This is correct as far as I’ve seen – it has been like this for months, and I’ve considered posting, but haven’t because it’s a neat trick and I didn’t particularly want it “fixed”. Great for surviving in PvE, and one reason to sit in death shroud rather than popping out of it.

(A lot of skills in the game seem to work like this – the activation triggers are tied to certain UI buttons/keys, not the event itself. For example, engineer medkit unequip it counts as a heal skill if you press ‘6’ (or your heal-mapped key), but not if you weapon swap to unequip it.)

“Survivability” in dungeons isn’t as bad as it is made out to be on the forums. A large portion of the very experienced playerbase has moved to a very heavy DPS based mentality, and when they see someone/some group doing poorly in dungeons, it is often assumed that he is wearing “survivability” gear, when the performance is probably better attributed to dungeon inexperience.

Full DPS parties work really well for most of the content in this game if everyone in the group is very experienced at that content, since unfortunately a lot of the content (especially the more frequently run content) boils down to what utilities to bring and which attacks to dodge/reflect. There are also many dungeon paths with fairly hard DPS checks, but few with hard survivability checks.

However, in groups with less organization, experience, or party-wide dps, support builds can be very helpful to keep the group moving through the dungeon at a reasonable pace. However, to be useful to the party it’s important to focus on the party’s survivability, not your individual survivability. Preventing the party from taking damage through aegis/blind, reducing part wide incoming damage with protection/weakness, taking aggro [without dying] so that the rest of the party can focus on damage, healing the party from damage they receive, and reviving downed players can all help turn a crazy pull-gone-wrong into a successful dungeon run. However, doing these things usually involves building for party survivability rather than personal survivability. If you’re concerned about personal survivability, practice will help much more than gear in the long term.

Whether or not you should build for support or DPS depends on a lot of factors, group experience being a very important one. It also sounds like you’re ranged most of the time, in which case fewer enemies will even be able to attack you, so dps gear is probably more beneficial.

Some of the information getting thrown around in this thread is also ridiculous:

colesy.8490:

Survivability is inefficient, yes. If you down you can normally rally off a mob if a boss spawns weak adds, and their attacks are normally extremely lethal so damage mitigation is pointless and you should just roll out the way.

Although there are 1-shot downed attacks in the game (Arah’s Crusher), most individual attacks can be mitigated by armor/healing/vitality, although you definitely can’t rely on those to take all attacks. It takes 4 of Lupicus’s ranged attacks/AoE hits to down a high health/high toughness character, and some classes can heal most of that health back. If you are wearing all zerkers, many attacks are less forgiving.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

If you get downed in a dungeon, you’re pretty much toast. Mobs and bosses are unlikely to change their target, and will hit you when you’re down to finish you off. (thus often making the down state itself pointless in dungeons)

I have noticed that toughness does reduce the damage you take by a lot… but unfortunately it also draws aggro. So either way the system is broken.

If you’ve got a good team, getting downed in a dungeon shouldn’t usually mean getting defeated. If people are getting defeated in your party, it would probably become faster if one of you geared for strong support and helped keep everyone else alive.

As to toughness and aggro, the system is not broken: it’s actually good that toughness draws aggro. If it didn’t, building toughness would only increase personal survivability, not party survivability, and would become pointless if you were experienced enough to survive without it. By drawing aggro, a character can take the focus of enemies off of party memebers so that they can concentrate on damage without worrying about dying. If your character/build isn’t able to survive taking the aggro, you’re right, you probably shouldn’t build for high toughness.

iFocus.3781:

Should I roll a necro once and for all?

Yes, you should try any class you’re interested in, you might end up loving it.

iFocus.3781:

Are necros welcome in dungeon groups?

I’ve run every path of every dungeon on my necro. While I don’t think PUGs are particularly happy to see a necro join, I generally play decently and it’s not a problem. My guild group definitely welcomes me on my necro, even though I also have a guard (which I rarely bring). I’m more effective on my necro than on my guardian, because I’m much better at playing a necro than playing a guardian.

iFocus.3781:

Needed and wanted in wvw groups?

I hear necros are great in WvW groups (I haven’t played WvW for a while, and mostly fail solo roamed when I did).

iFocus.3781:

Charr or human?

For PvE, none of the cultural abilities are very valuable. For WvW, different people like different racial skills; some people like asura for pain inverter (confusion for condition necros); I like norn for snow leopard to make up for necro’s utter lack of in-combat mobility.

iFocus.3781:

Is there a particular build that is fun, engaging and good (weapon, utility and trait-wise)?

Figure out what weapon you want to use. I really like dagger main hand, and if you trait for it, death shroud can be pretty fun.

Hey,

I’m an admin of [Arch] on Devona’s rest. I also strongly prefer small guilds and the community around them, and consider us a small guild, with a core group of 10-15 players who are on frequently (although our guild roster is technically at about 130, that’s not actually a representative number of active guild members). I’ve never seen us have more than 25 people online.

We run a lot of dungeons (I do at least one dungeon almost every day), but not as many fractals right now, although we have several of our core dungeon group who would like to run more – our guild leader is level 46, I’m level 28 but have run 48, and we’ve got a few others at 20+. I’m also a (newer) dungeon master and enjoy helping people through new dungeons.

We’re a pretty casual/friendly guild, and our runs reflect that – our goal is more to have fun with each other than to complete dungeons as fast as possible. However, while we certainly wouldn’t set any speedrun records, we do have a pretty solid group of competent dungeoneers.

Anyways, PM me here or in-game if you’d like to chat; you and your friend sound like you look for the same things in a guild as I do, and I’d be happy to answer any questions about [Arch] and whether or not we’re what you’re looking for. Also, our website is http://litteroflions.shivtr.com/ if you’d like to see more about us.

Cempa.5619:

DelOnasi.6051:

Molch.2078:

A minionmaster is able to kill the training dummys in LA by himself. Not as fast as an elementalist, but at least he can. Mesmer cannot. Warrior cannot. Minions dps is nice…

…but as others have said, they die. Realy fast.

For proof, in clerics gear:

What build do you use? I see a massive amount of healing.

As I alluded to in the post, I usually run with all cleric’s gear currently (and Spite 15 adds more healing power, although I’m really only taking that for the minion damage in Spite 20). Well of blood, dagger 2, and staff 2 (when necessary) are amazing with a lot of healing power. I find this works especially well in less experienced groups, and it gives me a lot more control over the big picture in most fights than dps-heavy gear would.

I wanted to see if you could still kill the practice golems in LA with minions and a non-dps focused build (hence, the screenshot). Turns out you can (and this is why I bring minions to CoF p1).

Molch.2078:

A minionmaster is able to kill the training dummys in LA by himself. Not as fast as an elementalist, but at least he can. Mesmer cannot. Warrior cannot. Minions dps is nice…

…but as others have said, they die. Realy fast.

For proof, in clerics gear:

XelNigma.6315:

Thanks, the video and the math behind healing is really showing me how pointless trying to be a necro healer is.

The video was great as showing that, he was more focused on healing than I am and his healing amount was not impressive. Despite him talking it up the entire time.

Maybe i’ll try a tanky necro that lives off syphan health. Now that I know it doesnt scale I can freely stack on the vit and toughness.

Edit: Hmm… So my problem is I’m too busy trying to stack bleeding with the scepter when I should be focusing solely on healing. I have Cond>Healing when I need Healing>Cond. I did want a different play style than what I’m use to. But the low healing numbers still has me wondering if its worth it.

Being a healer necro is far from pointless! That video mostly shows trying to just heal players, which, as you point out, is pointless in gw2. That doesn’t mean that you can’t heal players (a lot) while doing damage. A healing power built necromancer can heal for about the same as a full-heal specced guardian (except for the guardian’s elite heal), but when doing so gives up far less damage (because you don’t have to dodge constantly to heal everyone). Well of blood is an amazing group heal when people are stacking (which is also a time when everyone is likely to take a lot of damage together), and I like waving my constant regeneration in the face of my guardian guildmate when he talks about his 7 second regeneration from shouts.

I play a healer/support necromancer and spend most of my time in dungeons. It can be a very rewarding spec to play, and makes you both a strong healer and a strong tank.

Here’s how I would personally modify your build: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQUQNArYWjQaR7haub87JApCPP9obyHP6BxDnMA-jgyAItAi4goFA0nImHLiGb1sIas65UruxUrCReFhIA-e

Note that we’ve pretty much given up on criticals (the 30% chance meant the on-critical procs only had a 10% chance before), but have got higher condition damage and healing. I also switched to well of blood and signet of undeath, which is amazing in dungeons (and will help a little with scepter’s difficulty in generating life force). I kept the trait trees the same (they look like a good choice to me), but swapped up a few of the individual trait choices. There are several good choices in the master slot of curses; any of – ground targetted wells, lower cooldown on corruption skills, chill on blind – would all make good choices.

Loyo.8526:

Before you go about healing, you should read this post: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/10wgz2/how_healing_affects_necromancers/
Its old, but still applies heavily.

Edit: I will also note that Deathly invigoration last i checked had no scaling on Healing Power, of it it does, its very poor compared to Consumed conditions and Well of Blood.

Great link! Deathly Invigoration actually scales reasonably with healing power (0.4) but has such a low base (152) and is so hard to use effectively, that it’s rarely worth taking in my opinion.

Vayne.8563:

I run lowbies through fractals fairly regularly. But then, that’s the kind of player I am. I don’t mind the fractals, I still get good drops and it’s a good thing to do for the community.

Find a guild of like-minded players, not just for the fractals. It will make the entire game much better for you.

+1

Finding a good guild is always a benefit. If you’re already in a guild but it doesn’t feel like “home”, try a different one. If you join a nice guild and ask to run low level fractals, someone will probably say yes (although you will probably have to wait longer than for a pug).

I also run intro-to-fractals about once a week, mostly for my guild, but I’ll post on gw2lfg with an explanation saying newbies welcome. These same sort of posts from other people were how I just recently started to learn Arah. If you check out gw2lfg often enough, you’ll see a few groups that explicitly say newbies welcome, although most <10 fractal runs should expect new players to join. Alternatively, if I’m online feel free to PM me and I’d be happy to do a newbie fractals run (I’m not on for very long on weekdays though, and only late at night).

JonathanSharp.7094:

Thanks guys, we’ll fix it.

-Chap

Thanks to everyone at ANet for the quick fix!

On builds, I completely agree with Bhawb; I particularly enjoy how our builds are relatively balanced, so there’s a lot of room for original though in necro builds. The other classes have too much synergy between some trait lines and too little synergy/usefulness in others. Our trait lines aren’t perfect, but at least they’re all mostly viable (though blood magic is lacking for a lot of builds).

As to balance, I agree with Lucas that part of the trouble we face for certain content is the imbalance in the current meta – reflection is overpowered in PvE, vigor is a critical boon, cleave is important for killing groups of enemies, and mobility is critical in PvP/WvW. Some of these should probably be toned down on other classes (reflection in my personal opinion), while some of these should probably be available to all classes (vigor, cleave, mobility in my opinion). Although ultimately I’d be happy if they made some changes to balance them regardless of how they did it.

Check out http://gw2lfg.com/ ; it is a great place to find groups (whereas I’ve never seen a looking for group on the dungeons forum get filled; people don’t go here that often).

I find my necro quite fun. Some people don’t. Try leveling a couple classes to 10 and see what you enjoy.

I prefer my necro over my guardian (my only level 80s at the moment) in part because I find the necro mechanics much more reactive; you have to watch the fight to see what skills to use. However, some builds probably don’t play like this as much as others.

9) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjRdBD3NSYk

laokoko.7403:

DelOnasi.6051:

People are so obsessed with damage in this game that sometimes they fail to see the forest for the trees.

AC p1 is doable without high DPS (obviously, if you want to farm it, high DPS is still better). I usually play a support role in dungeons, so I take the role of protecting hodgins, and can keep him alive for a very long time while the rest of the team whittles down the burrows. A while ago we were bringing a new level 33 guildy in for the first time, and had a second party member disconnect, and the four of us, none of us elementalists, did the burrow room just fine by having me kite around all the gravelings.

I’m not implying the dungeon to be too hard or too easy. All I said is many pug from gwlfg does fail. Actually a high percentage of it.

And you don’t need to tell me how your l33t group did it so easily. I’m sure there are solo or duo or trio video on youtube.

Sorry if I offended you; I agree with a lot of what you said. I wasn’t trying to “tell you how my l33t group did it so easily”; my point was that we didn’t have a “l33t” group. I was just trying to point out that there are alternative strategies that can work in non-standard group compositions. To be fair, pugs don’t often try out different strategies, but if things go poorly once they are often open to new suggestions the second time.

I guess I was surprised because I haven’t seen many pugs fail AC, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot that do fail that I haven’t seen.

laokoko.7403:

colesy.8490:

I’ve been doing runs of AC paths 1 and 3 and it’s insanely easy. I’m not sure what the problem is, and when people realise how farmable it is they’ll start coming back.

I actually failed quite abit of AC. Really need to use my elemental to up the success chance.

How do you go about your teamate being bad. For example picking up 4 low level people with like 300 achievement point.

Anything is really easy if your groupmate is good. If you randomly go by the pug from gwlfg I can honestly say it’s not always the case.

If not for my elementist, I’d say most of the people I pug from gwlfg have no chance of getting the burrow down in AC path 1.

People are so obsessed with damage in this game that sometimes they fail to see the forest for the trees.

AC p1 is doable without high DPS (obviously, if you want to farm it, high DPS is still better). I usually play a support role in dungeons, so I take the role of protecting hodgins, and can keep him alive for a very long time while the rest of the team whittles down the burrows. A while ago we were bringing a new level 33 guildy in for the first time, and had a second party member disconnect, and the four of us, none of us elementalists, did the burrow room just fine by having me kite around all the gravelings.