Welli am only lvl 47 and tried CM for the first time yesterday. I am only a casual player and love the world and the way everything is structered.
I’m a guardian. Mace/Shield and Sword/Focus with shouts and lots of toughness and vit for suvivability.
One hit and knocked down so many times i forget how many. Had to fully repair several times. Didn’t even finish the dungeon cause the 2 high levels i was with quit before the end.
Is this how it’s spose to be? I certainly don’t want to ever try another dungeon.
Guardian here, been doing explos since I hit level 35 and level all the way to 80 doing mostly explos. Still have to complete 2 paths in CoF/CoE and left Arah and HotW for later since I’ve been doing the earliest ones but I’m going after the Dungeon Master Achievement so I have in mind to take these ones I have left soon (others I’ve done all the paths, several times).
I always play with random people, without voice coms and most of the time (if not always) I’m the one explaining the strategies for encounters or events, and have developed/found out most of them myself (only in CoF was taught the path since I joined a run group and they want to hurry up so I just follow them) or found them as long as playing with others, together.
Since difficulty is something relative to the person having the experience, it’s not wise to say that something is “hard” or “easy”, people have different levels of tolerance and different backgrounds. But it’s just a matter of time and effort to learn how to play better and be more helpful. I haven’t had much problems in any explo, you just need to keep in mind: Use dodge a lot, learn monster patterns, use weapons/utilities that help your party with crowd control or damage mitigation (as a guardian, most awesome ones are “wall of reflection”, “shield of the avenger” for range damage encounters since it neglects most of them).
I run explos with damage build (power, prec, vit) using mainly greatsword and changing my other weapon set depending on the situation I have to face.
My advice to you, as a guardian: Mace isn’t right now as worth it as other weapons are, Toughness/Vit gear is for pvp mostly, not for pve since you can neglect or mitigate damage with your utilities. Pve is best to run full damage gear an just dodge as need (also with right traits you can keep a vigor buff on you when doing crits, so dodging it’s quite easy, also using energy seals for when weapon swapping recovering endurance).
You complain a lot about difficulty, but most of you have only tried a couple of times to do explos, I’ve done more than a hundred explos until now and also my background is different than yours, so just either keep on trying with different people and different strategies, find someone that can teach you, or hope that Anet puts other difficulty modes so you find one suitable for you (I wouldn’t like that to happen though).
My only complain about last patch was the money reduction, since it was being a really great income for me, but I couldn’t try to play some yesterday so I don’t know how is going to affect me yet.
Only hope you guys find out ways to do things that satisfy you when playing, or make you have fun. Otherwise playing is pointless, I can give you advice or tell you what I do if it helps but in the end, it’s best if you find out your own answers and ways to play the game.
Hope you have fun with anything you do! Cheers!
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