Guild Wars 2

My third toon was a human female thief, because at the time I wanted the cultural t3 “underboob” armor. When I finally had the money together to buy the full set, I played for one more hour, then regretted my decision and deleted the entire toon. Crazy as it sounds, creating and leveling her seems like a bigger waste than those one hundred something gold going down the kittenter.

I used to laugh at pugging rangers and kittentalk them, because I believed everyone of them would be as bad as a bearbow. Which was true for 90% of all pugging rangers at the time, but I still feel bad for doing it.

I used to join “zerk only” groups with one earring and one ring of soldier stats, linking the zerk ones twice. What a criminal mastermind I was.

Before that, I used to hate and kittentalk on zerks. Today I am a zerk, though I hate the stacking/LoS meta.

I now sometimes join “no zerk” groups on full zerks for sake of hilarity.

I frequently jokingly beg for high-value materials in /g and then send the arriving mails back because I feel bad about it.

I have a permanent running gag of stating that “I’ve never done this dungeon before” whenever I do Arah with non-pug groups. Sometimes even with pugs, if they seem decently communicative and humorous so I don’t have to expect a kick. (Yes, I’ve been kicked before for saying that, while standing in there in full Arah armor prior to the reward track update.)

After acquiring said armor, I portrayed it like an obnoxious show-off for two weeks.

I use orrian truffle and meat stew instead of butternut squash on my necromancer.

I sometimes kill ambient creatures laughing like an evil mastermind.

In non-pug runs, I sometimes intentionally do stupid things for fun, such as breaking the LoS strat on Kholer or popping a ton of spider eggs in Fyonnas lair, stating that “this was fun!” after the dust has settled. Most of the time my group has a glorious fight and people agree that it was more amusing than streamlining the section, but I also have been kicked from a guild because the guild leader was sorting their inventory out at the time, refused to participate in the ensuing battle and got really angry over dying.

Despite verbally hating on dungeon sellers/buyers, I sold an Arah path once after a 4-man run. I also don’t feel bad for buyers being scammed and think they deserve it for being lazy and agreeing to such risky trade. Despite all that, I feel bad for dungeon sellers being scammed and think the instance ownership system change was a bad decision.

First order of business, and this one’s gonna disappoint you, don’t start with Arah. I was in a similar situation when I started doing dungeons back in the days, so I feel your pain, but Arah is the most challenging dungeon, and dungeons are the most challenging part of GW2 PvE. You’re not gonna have much fun starting out in Arah, I’d assume. Another way to acquire the armor regardless, is to do the Arah story to unlock the respective PvP reward track and then play that for long enough to get a few pieces. That’s gonna be considerably faster if you are dead set on getting the armor asap, but I know nothing about your stance on PvP and still kind of urge you to give dungeons a chance, as they’re a ton of fun!

A great way to prepare for a dungeon is to read up a bit on gw2dungeons.net/ but that’s actually not the most fun way to learn them and won’t provide you with what really counts – experience. Finding a group of non-pseudo-speedrunners is much more important, which can unreliably be achieved by setting up LFG texts such as “path x everyone welcome” or “first timer requiring instructions”. Whatever you do, state that you’re inexperienced. Many people – like me – don’t mind newbies as long as they don’t just silently run along hoping to get carried. As for your physical preparations:

- exotic armor is not required but it greatly helps your survivability and damage output, regardless of stats. If you’re short on money, level-appropriate rare armor can do the job decently until you can afford exos with tokens.

- food, for a dungeon newbie, can be neglected. If you get some of the +10% damage/-10% damage food (potions of slaying) you’ll do noticeably more damage, but receiving 10% less is not really all that impressive considering the next bullet point. Health regeneration food might make you feel less likely to die, but that’s really only for moral support if you ask me.

- know that in dungeons, things hit you incredibly hard. You get bombarded with conditions (10+ stacks of bleeding), crowd control (knockdown chaining) and hard hitting attacks (some of them intentionally one-shotting everyone, some of them eating up more than 50% of your health but most of the time with a reasonable amount of visual cue that you’ll have to learn). Be aware that avoiding this damage (through dodges, invincibility, blocking, distortion, blur,…) is your best bet rather than tanking them. You’ll have to learn which dungeon encounter brings what to the table, and how to use your utilities against it. This point is important to understand.

- bring every weapon you have access to. Most of the time, melee will be the favored strategy regardless of stacking/not stacking, as it generally inflicts damage faster and has other benefits, such as area of effect healing and buffing. Sometimes a specific weapon has niche applications that you want to utilize, so for example bringing a focus for swirling winds on a staff-elementalist can be beneficial. Listen to your team if they suggest taking something specific for a specific reason, and get used to the idea of hanging out in melee range most of the time.

- bring level 80. I’m generally of the opinion that level 80 is not required to complete a dungeon, but despite the downscaling, traits make 80s much stronger even in low level dungeons. For learning the ropes, level 80 will take some more stress off you (and your team).

- be aware that condition stacking is greatly hindered by the stack limits, when groups of five people focus on one single foe. Being a pure condition build will not contribute much in the wrong team compositions – at least go for a hybrid if direct damage weapons don’t feel appealing to you.

- get some general dungeon experience before you start rocking Arah. AC is fairly easy but has a lot of knockdown/condition barrage, making it very intimidating until you get used to stunbreakers. TA is fairly newb-friendly once you realize volatile blossoms can be used to rally on the fly. SE has a few nasty bits, such as a knockback-friendly boss on a relatively small platform or a set of golems that is pretty devastating unless you reflect at the right time, but offers a good and balanced experience in general. I’d suggest doing CoE at some point – maybe not first – and then stepping up to Arah once you feel confident in your abilities to survive it.

Just my two cents…or in hindsight probably more like 20. kitten, that nutshell doesn’t look much like a nutshell anymore now.

I wish to be part of this movement as a mentor for EU \o/

Mentor name: Knives Chau.4863
Class specialisation: Necromancer, Mesmer, Elementalist
Active dungeons: AC, TA (forward or up, not aether), SE, CoE, Arah
(preferably 1 and 4, not as a mentor but I’d love to tag along with a
group to support the mentor)
Availability: CET+1, late evenings/nights on weekdays and irregularly on
weekends
Contact: Rarely on the forums, a /w or message in game will do.
Communication: party chat, voice chat is possible too if desired.
Message:
I don’t require any specific stat set/armor rarity/spec/level80, but an open mind
to consider possible improvements in armor/utility/weapon choice. I can adjust to all playstyles(kill everything/selective skipping/skip all and stack/no-stack strats) if the group can agree on one. I can give reasonable amounts of advice on all classes except for Ranger, and more detailed in all light armor classes. I tend to over-explain certain encounters, so clear times on teaching runs might be slightly longer than you’d expect.

-OPTIONAL-
Guardian Skill: [Wall of Text]
[spoiler]I’ve been on/off gw2 since launch, and been running dungeons for about as long. My first few dungeon runs were in a set group of people with zero clue, figuring stuff out was great fun. But now that there’s a common meta-approach to almost every dungeon path/encounter, the ‘playground’ for newbies without a consistent group is pretty rough, and it pains me every time when a 250p AP guy joins my AC pugs and gets kicked without further comment. Every now and then I do teaching runs
myself, so why not apply here?

I myself am proud owner of the earned Dungeon Master title, with a ton of Hobby Dungeoneering slapped on top. I frequently run everything except CM and HotW, pugged Arah daily over the course of two weeks once (just mentioning this to showcase my patience and the mental scars eyetwitch) and am currently starting to attempt solo Arahs (first failed run last night \o/). I have played all classes to 80 before, ran dungeons on the heavies/lights/thief and feel the most comfortable and entertained with the three light classes. I do absolutely and positively suck at heavies, but have acquired a decent understanding on how they should theoretically work in my feeble attempts to educate myself over them (and my current solo-Arah project on my warrior). While I have zerk or assassin gear on all of my toons and run on that at all times, I never join “gearcheck” groups and leave them if people force me to ping my stuff (usually after complaining and eventually pinging the desired stuff), because that – in my experience – is the trademark of copy/paste stack zerks who fall apart and collapse whenever more than spamming 1+2 is required. Or maybe I just have a problem with showing people my underwear.
I’m running a d/wh + a/f deathly perception necro, simply because it feels more robust for those pug situations where things don’t go according to plan. I know necromancer’s said to be the best PvE and dungeon class in the universe, but in a non-competitive, non-speedrunning-record setting the class can do okay for how fun it is. Currently building up a sinister necro for soloing Arah.
My mesmer was my first toon in gw2 and after going through pretty much all builds conceivable (including a healing support mantra spammer! …it was a sad day.) I arrived at a fairly custom phantasm-focused s/s + s/f (+s/p) zerker. Another full assassin “Brazil” meta mesmer on the sideline. Both highly enjoyable.
My ‘mentalist is a s/d d/f (staff) EA zerker permafury-donnator, also slightly off-meta but EA really makes the class for me. I switch to a meta glass-hammer when there’s another fury-buffing ele in the group, but EA remains the reason why my heart belongs to this class. Actually haven’t been on it as frequently anymore after the death of FGS (Rest in RIP), though.
My warrior is a pure berserker 6/5/0/0/3 with strength runes for maximum solo prowess (as suggested by – yet again – the wonderful Brazil), but I’m only just starting to enjoy the class, so yeah, wouldn’t exactly be confident in calling myself a decent warrior thus far.
Guard…let’s not talk about guard. I know when to pop WoR, but that’s about it.

I’d like to apply for a ‘job’ as a general dungeon mentor who can give decent in-depth advice for the light classes in both meta and relaxed dungeon scenarios. Possibly going beyond that and into Arah at some point in the far future. Special mention here, I don’t do fractals.
[/spoiler]

tl;dr
-Has too many character slots
-Is decently knowledgeable at necro, mes and ele
-Likes long walks on the beach
-Doesn’t understand why the spoiler function isn’t working
-Would like to mentor general dungeoning

I am now ruling out any sort of hardware issue. I’ve found a spot that reliably, 100% crashed the game six times in a row, so I’m tempted to say it causes a blackscreen every single time. It’s west of Mount Maelstrome, when approaching the Sootberme region from the south access road. Also, a character I liked very much is stuck in a death loop of load in – blackscreen now.

Tierce.5370:

I believe you said you’re on Win 8.1? To get to the appropriate folder:

Thanks a lot. Managed to find that file, and deleted it. Can’t quite tell if that helped much though…

…because todays patch happened. I have so far tried logging in on three different characters, in three different locations (Grove, Black Citadel, Rata Sum) and the game blackscreened out every single time within SECONDS. Yep, it didn’t even run for a minute. After working fine for about an hour without blackscreeningpre-patch, even in instances.

This, this is awesome. I would very much want to give this a shot.

IGN: Pew Pew Kitten / Selena Duskwell / Xsu The Elusive
Server: Piken Square
Playstyle: 97% PvE, 1% sPvP, 2% WvWvW
Role: Tester

My very first toon in GW2 was a Mesmer. By now I have three, two of them at lv80 and fully geared – one in zerks for dungeoneering purposes, one for experimental science on the field of open-world-content-suitable builds, one for RP purposes and some WvW roaming.
I’ve had and tried a wide variety of builds during countless hours, both in PvE open world content and dungeons. Loved exchanging experiences about specific and non-streamlined build concepts with a few friends back then, but they all sorta moved on (from the game or class respectively). Would be great if I could get this sort of theory crafty thingy back.
Disclaimer: I’m currently fighting a certain blackscreen issue with everything I have, can’t quite promise to stay active should the problem persist. Until my patience runs out or if I can actually manage to beat that old nemesis of mine, I’d love to participate though!

Reviving my own thread as the problem has somehow returned..

I came back to gw2 after quite a bit of hiatus, and now the issue is back. Downclocking doesn’t prevent it anymore, much like this guy described. It’s almost as if the game caught up with my attempts to fix the problem. Drivers are all updated, and the majority of the measures mentioned above have been re-attempted. The only thing I could not try so far is deleting that nefarious local.dat, as I don’t appear to have such a file in my Documents/GuildWars2 folder. I would very much like to return to Tyria more regularly, but this issue is not very motivating on the matter…

As little as my post is going to contribute or change, I’ll still give a +1 to the RP flag suggestion. Yes, being in a guild with people will help with the organized RP. But I for one just randomly bump into people and spontaneously start something more often than not, and the most interesting stuff has happened this way.

Chilli.2976:

not sure if this helps but:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Black-Screen-Fix-NVIDIA-NETGEAR/first#post3759899

I tried all this. It didn’t help in the slightest.

MrYoSo.7916:

i fixed mine with msi afterburner, turns out its a overheating thing.

Interestingly enough, it helped for me too. I monitored temperatures on my card, and they never actually hit the levels that were reached before my cleanup. YET downclocking the card by ~5% completely removed the issue, and I was able to run multiple dungeons and high-load content flawlessly for a few days now.

So now I’m adding
-display driver sweep + reinstall
-client repair
-windows event viewer checking

to the list. The repair got me nowhere, neither did the driver sweep. The event viewer is only logging the hard reset, and nothing else in the 15 minutes before that.

On another note, I can now reliably reproduce the issue by attempting to do the charr tutorial. It ‘worked’ three times in a row!

I’ve stopped playing GW2 back around the end of february, mostly because back then my PC kept getting real hot and I was getting nasty fps drops and such. Then I dismantled it (it’s a laptop), cleaned it up, but didn’t pick up the game again until recently – sunday to be precise. Since then, the only software changes I did were upgrading from win8 to win8.1, and updating my sound drivers.

However, I’m now experiencing the infamous black screen/no signal issue, where the screen just cuts off, ambient sound and/or music is still playing, but the PC does not react to any input whatsoever except for a hard reset. (F11/F12 does NOT bring up the logoff screen, so I’m ruling the router issue out)
This is baffling me to no end. I didn’t change anything relevant to the issue since before the cleanup, the PC is running at WAY lower temperatures than before the cleanup, yet I’m getting this odd random blackscreens, mostly inside instances (dungeons or not. I even got it in the ‘Dead End’ instance, where there are a grand total of like 6 other character models and no fancy effects.), in open world content whenever there are many character models around (the current Priory camp, or even just a small crowd of less than 20 people in the grove) or at zerg events – the only thing I could possibly understand. And I’ve tried google, even! Attempted pretty much any solution I’ve found so far:

-setting AA to application controlled, forced on or forced off – not the solution
-setting multi-screen mode to single screen performance – a nifty feature, didn’t know that existed until now. Didn’t help though.
-forcing VSync on or off, setting it to application controlled – nuh-uh
-rerolling my sound driver (it was the one thing I changed after all, worth a shot) – not helping
-completely removing the second screen – nope
-updating my video drivers to the most recent version – though the game ran perfectly fine on the old ones since release…and it didn’t help
-playing around with the sound quality settings – nothing
-deleting that folder with the black lion trading data – that only resulted in the game freezing for about 1 second whenever I open up the trade post, now
-praying to Tzeentch and Slaanesh

And so far nothing has helped. Game didn’t crash in open world content of low population yet, but that might just be coincidence thus far. Sometimes I can run two or three dungeon pathes all the way through, complete with fps drop sections when two engineers decide to throw those annoying nades – so I severely doubt workload has anything to do with it – and sometimes I can’t even approach a dozen Sylvari standing close to each other. And the most mind-blowing part is that I didn’t change anything major on my software, and that (while running kittentier back then) my laptop could play the game continuously before the cleaning. Also: Guild Wars 2 is the only game to cause this issue. Several other, more demanding games (through higher fidelity or kittentier coding) have been running on the machine, and nothing ever caused anything similar.
I’m all out of ideas. Please help me, interweb!

Though I doubt it’ll help much, I’ll list my specs too:
Dell Precision M6500
Quadro FX 3800M – Driver Version 332.76
i7 Quad @1.87GHz
16GB RAM
Win8.1 64bit

(I’m well aware that it’s not a “gaming laptop” and all that jazz, the argument is irrelevant because it was able to run GW2 for long enough until now.)

Just adding my post. The exact same issue. The moment I try to join my party in explorable mode, the game crashes/says it has no connection to the login server (?). Been like that since the patch today went live.