Guild Wars 2

For what it’s worth, here’s my feedback:

Friday: Logged in, did the first few steps of the scavenger quest and had fun; then hit the bugged NPCs and decided to logoff a little frustrated with yet more bugged content.

Saturday: Logged in at 2:50 PM; had to wait around 30 minutes then the event kicked off. Had fun fighting the Karkas, then the teleporter to Southsun took forever to pop up, once it did I joined the fun. Unfortunately my sound bugged out (This happens from time to time, all sound goes off, an alarm starts blarring and I have to restart the game to fix it). I relogged and got into an Overflow that hadn’t yet started the event so I did it all again from scratch and had a lot of fun in the process. I also tried the jumping puzzle and a few of the dynamic events in the new area, I had fun overall.

Sunday: Came home from my parents’ rushing to participate; logged in and jumped in the fight against the Ancient Karka. It was epic, lots of great team work, then right after the rockslide BAM! My game crashed and I was forced to relog. I logged into an Overflow that had already defeated the Karka, I kept porting out and into Southsun and no luck; the worst part was seeing everyone linking on map chat all these beautiful exotics I had put in 2-3 hours of work towards. I almost rage quit at that point, but I decided to finish the scavenger quest instead. Very disappointed with the reward…

After all was said and done I logged off, overall I was much more frustrated with the whole event than I had fun. I am very disappointed with the new area (I don’t care for the sea theme, which is why I hate Orr), I was frankly tired of fighting the karka even before the final event started, I do enjoy fighting the new reef drakes though.

I was also extremely disappointed that the events aroung the island are the exact same ones even after the final event; I look forward to The Fractals turning me around on this update, otherwise I think it’s the end of Guild Wars 2 for me for a while. I mean I still love the games and the mechanics but I have no sense of progression anymore and I feel I have nothing to work towards.

Hi,

First I’d like to say, very good topic! This is a concern of mine as well since I love doing instanced dungeons as well. In other games, I have always played a tank, and I do find myself missing it in Guild Wars 2. Anyway, I don’t have an answer to this question, but I’d like to share my experience in order to hopefully shed some light in the subject. I’ve only run 3 dungeons so far for a total of 4 runs as I’m waiting until I hit Lv. 80 to do the rest.

I play a Warrior.

1st Dungeon Run:

Ascalonian Catacombs Story:
- Mostly DPS group, including myself. I was a Greatsword and switching to a Mace & Shield when things got hairy. We got destroyed; we didn’t make it to the first proper boss and once the first person dropped out of the group everyone else followed.

2nd Dungeon Run:

Ascalonian Catacombs Story:
- Right after the previous run, more diverse group; this time we had a Guardian and I was rocking a Hammer with the same Mace & Shield as backup.

We cleared the entire dungeon, we wiped at almost every trash mob but downed every boss on our first try except for the king at the end.

The Guardian did a great job with using skills that healed the group slightly while he did damage.

We came up with a routine where one of us would mark a target (CTRL+T) I would then run into every trash mob encounter with my shield up first, blocking as soon as the MOBs noticed me. This would make the rangers shoot me, but thanks to the reflect projectiles trait the arrows would bounce right back to them knocking them down. At this point I’d have all the aggro so I would dodge around as much as I could while the rest of the group took the heat off me. I would then switch to Hammer and knock down, push back, and interrupt as much as I could.

Someone would go down every encounter, and in most encounters we’d take out one or two MOBs, wipe, then take out the remaining ones. We took down the King by basically respawning every time he killed us and running back. Our repair bill was huge, but we beat the dungeon and had fun.

3rd Dungeon Run:
- Calwhatever Mansion Story: Using the same build as before, we also had a Guardian. We wiped the floor with this instance, not a single wipe from beginning to end. It was a guild run, but it was the first time the 5 of us played together as this is a PUG guild basically. No voice chat.

4th Dungeon Run:
- Ascalonian Catacombs Exploration Path 1: Feeling kitteny from our CM run we decided to take a stab at this. It destroyed our characters and our spirits. We downed the spider fine; however the boss after that with the two adds in the room where the king used to be wiped the floor with us. Each encounter lasted less than a minute, I felt there was not enough warning for his whirlwind skill and he wiped the whole party with it every single time, first use as it caught up by surprised. His adds were horrible too, Rangers are the worst.

Conclusions based on my 4 runs:

- I feel that every dungeon run needs a Guardian which makes me very sad.

- CTRL+T is the single best weapon in a dungeon; use it, mark your target, make sure to focus fire!

- Story mode trash needs to be toned down. Sorry; but Story mode should be doable by a PUG without wiping on almost every trash encounter, leave that for Explorable.

- A little more warning on certain bosses’ special skills would be great. Until then, pay attention!

- CM needs traps set around the dungeon like AC has. Make the bosses a little more interesting instead of regular “tank and spank” (Without the tank part…), I loved that each boss in AC had a different strategy, a theme if you will. I didn’t get that feeling in CM at all. The trash was fine here, we didn’t wipe on any of them but we still had to pay attention.

- Because the dungeons are so hard, when you actually complete one the sense of accomplishment is great! Don’t give up, but get ready to spend a lot of money in repairs, you will die a lot! Also, don’t expect any good rewards; you get nice exp and a helm at the end of AC Story, but that’s it. Do it for the fun, not the rewards.

- I see absolutely no reason to do Explorable other than wanting to do it to experience it. It’s hard and the rewards are crap.