Guild Wars 2

Are you sure that it actually deleted your witch’ kitten Try right clicking in the actual hero screen, as I don’t believe that town clothes show in your regular inventory:

If you take a look at my screenshot, you’ll see that the items show in the character panel but not in my actual inventory..

seems that a majority of the community is farming the MK dungeon at the moment due to the chest hopes —I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see dungeon groups spike back up after this Halloween event is over -- so don’t get too worried!

Crystal Desert — Queensdale — Event is currently at “Scholars are attempting to dampen the power surges” and the two escort events continually run, but the doors never appear. Hallllp!

Keeping the NPC from dying DURING her pathing point after killing the Jotun seems to be the key. We finished this successfully tonight — keeping really close watch on the NPC’s health and just wiping it if for some reason she died seemed to help. At some point after we all ressed, she just didn’t respawn at all and we decided screw it we’ll try killing him and seeing if she spawned afterwards, and sure enough she did. Finished up my achievement and all, but this should probably be looked at so that others can finish this path =/

Just a bit of an update on this — did this path (AGAIN) tonight hoping to finish it by whim, and I believe that I’ve spotted the issue. As soon as the final boss dies, the NPC immediately tries to jet to the door to play the final cinematic, but the ring of fire is still alive and up from the boss, and the NPC immediately dies. After ressing her – you’ll notice that by her actual chatter text, she actually thinks that she’s IN the observatory.

I haven’t been able to test this yet, but my theory is that if you ‘move’ the NPC to a safe spot that she can path through prior to engaging, and either
a) have her stand in one spot there
b) just have the person she’s following stand in one spot so that she doesn’t roam
c) have her die in a safe spot PRIOR to engaging so that after the fight when she resses it won’t be in some horrible spot that she can path through and die.

I will be testing this tomorrow to see if that’s the case – will update once I know, but repeatable issues are alot easier to track down, so if I can find the source of the problem hopefully you can fix it for others.

So, two days in a row that this has bugged out – the same way – and it’s the one path that I need to finish my dungeon master title. All of the bosses were killed legitimately, we cleared essentially all of the trash all the way throughout to make running back easier if necessary – etc, so I don’t believe that it’s that.

Is this something that you guys are working on and we should avoid running this path until a fix has been documented, or is it something sporadic and might happen and might not? Honestly at this point I don’t even mind beating my head against Arah with the chance that the door might work – but I don’t really have a ton of desire to beat my head against it if it’s 100% going to break after spending an hour and a half in the place.

I see the point you guys are trying to make as far as dungeon finders in regards to finding groups for things if you don’t have much time to play, but I am also in the group of people who don’t agree that dungeon finders are the direction that I hope the “lfg” system heads. I would like the LFG system to be a little more robust – but not to the extent of “your dungeon is ready, click here to enter!” from anywhere in the world then just porting you back to where you left off afterwards.

I saw the transition from actually finding people to do things with (ie: community) to the LFG system in another not to be mentioned game, and I also saw it literally destroy the community. People would leave after specific bosses, leave if they didn’t like someone, be a kitty-kitty-kitten-cat in general because there was no consequence. Worst case they just requeued again.

Back in the day, and currently the way that gw2 works, you’d find someone looking for more for a group – join – and then from there if things went great it’d be a “hey let me add you guys to my friends list and if you need a(n) <insert your class here> let me know, this was a good group” and you’d start to build a list of people you’d do things with, and eventually you wouldn’t even need mapchat anymore – at least not for your full group. It allows you to build a reputation as a good player (if you are one) or at least a nice person (again, if you are one) and then when people see that you’ve started a group and are looking for people, then they say “hey I ran with that guy (or girl) before, he’s good!” and they whisper you and join. That’s the social aspect of an MMO kicking in, and it’s one of the things that makes it great.

I’m on Crystal Desert and have pugged since launch, and continue to do so, even though I do have regular friends I group with, because it lets me meet more people and be social; this seems to be a sorely overlooked portion of the game that people these days just aren’t interested in – maybe it’s the mentality of developer provided content being the only focus, but there’s a whole metagame of making a name for yourself as well that shouldn’t be overlooked..and dungeon finder systems (at least in the sense that most people are referring to them) have the potential to destroy that dynamic.

I’ve said before and I’ll say again – if you guys are having trouble finding groups, send me a whisper in game and I’ll add you to my list and when I need people I’ll ask you, and I’m sure that there are plenty of people out there who feel the same way. My only rule is that I don’t cheese boss encounters. You start talking about how you can jump over a wall and skip the entire encounter and I’m either leaving or kicking you.

Thief doesn’t always need to be about burst for backstab to be viable either. I’m currently traited into acrobatics/shadow arts, and have tons of fun just screwing with people. Granted, I occasionally get a little HS happy when trying to close gaps or just do a decent amount of damage, but I can usually bait 3-4 people away from objectives and either clear them out one by one or get them all chasing me so that someone else can take the objective. I had a group last week trying to kill me at the supply camp and granted I got lucky a few times and misplayed things multiple times, including not knowing my shortbow was equipped instead of my dagger, I still managed to kill the thief that I was going after..

Keep in mind almost every class has some method of getting stability or something. Use that, it’s your friend! Obviously you should be trying to properly dodge it, but if you don’t, a backup plan is your friend.

While I’m no official response, there have been numerous posts about this issue and the answer is always the same — at this time there’s no sellback functionality or way to get the item exchanged. Suppose you could open a ticket through customer support but I don’t believe it’ll go far. Sorry brosef.

so in my attempts to test the effectiveness of stacking healing – pretty much all of my testing has had to be with watching green numbers pop up on my screen. The combat log seems to log damage done to enemies, but not healing received (or the source) for that matter. Is this something that’s intended or a bug? Halp. :-)

My biggest concern would be the performance aspect of doing this. As it stands now, dye colors don’t even have to be part of the consideration when rendering a bunch of characters. As it stands, the last thing we need in WvWvW are additional performance issues for the sake of dye colors.

The partial credit system is coming – so in that vein you should be fine. Your suggestion of a lockout system though I wholeheartedly disagree with. There are times where I run dungeons (the same path) multiple times a day just to help people. I don’t need anything really from dungeons on either character at this point, but I enjoy doing them. A lockout is a very hardline approach to ‘stopping’ you from doing something. Take away the rewards all you want, that part doesn’t bother me – but locking me out of content I’m not onboard with.

On a personal note, generally the people who are on here saying “don’t suck” aren’t the ones who exploit(ed) anything, those people are in the “WAH WAH DUNGEONS ARE TOO HARD NOW” threads.

so I’ve recently rerolled from thief to Elementalist and finished up the gear that I was going for – and noticed this amazing particle effect (at least to me) on the Nightmare gear from TA. It pulses! I originally had my dyes a darker red so I don’t believe I noticed it, but went to a blue scheme last night and saw this ..screenshots really don’t show the effect so I frapsed it – here’s the video:

no. no we don’t.

hrm, I’ve rerolled elementalist, so I’ll play!

Report the player who did it. I think that they’ve mentioned that a fix is in the works for this, but right now about all you can do is report people who do it.

Arintal.8792:

Devs said they desigend to be completed in 45min. Try that with arah. Avarage pug does it in 4h-6h. Too much hp on bosses and trash mobs seriously.

average pug isn’t the intended demographic or the metric that 45 minute mark is designed for. Organized groups can do pretty much any of them well within that 45 minute mark, if not under.

and here’s the shortbow on my thief.

I’m pretty sure that it’s just the physical size…the staff glows great on my elementalist and the shortbow does well on my thief..lemme see if i can find screenshots.

Elementalist:

Skipping trash is nothing new to MMOs and ‘raiding’ or dungeons – I think it’s more the manner in which it’s being skipped – and particularly the boss fight cheesing. I’ve yet to get into a TA group that’ll do the spider boss INSIDE the room.

As someone who has rerolled from Thief to Elementalist (at least from a PvE standpoint, I will still play my thief in PvP primarily) you’d be surprised how many thieves are absolutely awful, and do nothing more than try to Pistol Whip you down and run away if it fails to oneshot you.

That being said, pistol whip is not a productive playstyle except for that fact that it’s a psychology thing. The same thing applies to most stealth based builds….if – as a thief – I can draw 4-6 people away trying to chase me down (which has happened numerous times in WvWvW) instead of playing the objective, I’ve just created a pretty good advantage for my side.

If the thief is kiting you and running away, perhaps you should consider not chasing him. If you want us to fight against you, don’t chase us. You’ll lose.

edit: as far as why I even mentioned Elementalist, I do feel like the skill requirement for being ‘decent’ and extremely annoying is pretty low as a thief. A well played thief will almost never die. A mediocre thief will still kill alot of ‘good’ professions (not great, but people who are better than average) just based on class alone. There’s more room for error because alot of your abilities have inherit side effects that help you out (blind/stealth/condition removal, etc)

Most games don’t have a PTR AT launch. Also, you’re all nuts if you think a lockout system is better than this. You’re assuming a lockout system would be bug free. What would you do if the lockout system bugged out and wouldn’t let you in every couple of days? The issue is not the system.

Spawn.7014:

afflaq.3947:

(Supreme from another thread) This is the sequence of token I received for completing Arah(warden path) 30-10-10-30-5-10.

That’s wierd, when I do it 30 + 10 + 10 + 30 + 5 + 10 = 95!

How is the current system (bugs aside, that’s been acknowledged numerous times and a fix is coming we’re told) stopping you from grinding dungeons in succession? Once it’s fully in place, it may diminish the rewards a bit if you’re too fast, but let’s consider the alternative:
wake up mid morning in the AM, HMM I WANNA DO ME A DUNGEON!!!
“HEY GUYS LFG AWESOME DUNGEON!”
receive/accept invite – do dungeon, collect yourself 60 badges.
“HEY GUYS LETS DO THAT AGAIN!!!”
This instance resets in 23 hours, 28 minutes, 32 seconds.

Is that the system you’d prefer? And maybe while we’re at it we can cap the number of badges you can obtain weekly too. The current and even previous systems were more generous and better than other games. Shush up before you get that put into this one.

edit: couldnt quote properly sorry

I dont want instance lock outs. i just want the systems they in place to work. is that so much to ask for?

Not at all, and I want it to work too – I randomly got 45 badges last night when everyone else in my group who’d been together for all 3 paths of CoF got 60, regardless 165 was alot more than I’d have gotten had I done 3 magg runs pre-patch, so I was fine with it. It’s also been acknowledged that there’s a bug in it that’s being worked on, another 9048589549084 threads whining about how it sucks isn’t necessary or constructive. If it was a scenario of no response or acknowledgement of a problem, I could understand the hundreds of threads about it, but it’s been both acknowledged and responded to…multiple times.

(Supreme from another thread) This is the sequence of token I received for completing Arah(warden path) 30-10-10-30-5-10.

That’s wierd, when I do it 30 + 10 + 10 + 30 + 5 + 10 = 95!

How is the current system (bugs aside, that’s been acknowledged numerous times and a fix is coming we’re told) stopping you from grinding dungeons in succession? Once it’s fully in place, it may diminish the rewards a bit if you’re too fast, but let’s consider the alternative:
wake up mid morning in the AM, HMM I WANNA DO ME A DUNGEON!!!
“HEY GUYS LFG AWESOME DUNGEON!”
receive/accept invite – do dungeon, collect yourself 60 badges.
“HEY GUYS LETS DO THAT AGAIN!!!”
This instance resets in 23 hours, 28 minutes, 32 seconds.

Is that the system you’d prefer? And maybe while we’re at it we can cap the number of badges you can obtain weekly too. The current and even previous systems were more generous and better than other games. Shush up before you get that put into this one.

edit: couldnt quote properly sorry

Jaha.2840:

Can anyone confirm if the necromancer ability Well of Corruption works to counter his regen buff and turn it into conditions?

I can confirm that bountiful theft didn’t rip the regen buff from the boss and give it to us. Not sure about Well of Corruption though

We did this path last night – it’s not that bad really. We went with 2 dps (myself [thief] and a mesmer) on the boss, and 3 people on crystals. I did keep poisons up the entire time to minimize his healing, but there are thresholds that you can get to as well so it’s almost staged. Once you get to certain percentages, it’s almost a checkpoint.

The feeling of spending more than you make certainly goes away as you get better — but approaching the dungeons (or really any of this game) the same way as you approach(ed) wow definitely makes things much more difficult.

Regarding dying – there are a few tips that I can give you.

• Watch for telegraphed abilities. This particularly plays true with Lt. Kohler in AC, he has an AOE scorpion wire that he telegraphs extremely noticably, when he throws the wire, dodge.
• In general, start dodging appropriately. If you have a talent tree that allows you additional endurance, until you’re comfortable with two dodges, maybe you should spec into it from a learning perspective. Don’t waste your endurance just because, you’ll need it at some point.
• Look into utility abilities / skills that prevent damage. Rangers haunting your AC group? Have a thief run smoke screen or your Elementalist stop projectiles from coming in.
• Heal liberally. You have a heal skill. Use it when you get low enough that a heal would top you off if you need to.
• Spec/gear for vitality / toughness for now. There are very few pure DPS checks in dungeons, and dead men do 0 dps. When you’re more comfortable later on, you can go back to a more powerful spec.
• Learn the abilities of other classes. This generally holds more beneficial in PVP but a majority of the PvE NPCs in this game seem to have a base profession at their core. Learn it. Learn what does the most damage. Know your enemy!
• Stop watching your actionbars and watch the screen. This is the biggest ‘wow’ mistake and something that has killed a number of ‘seasoned’ players that I’ve been playing with for years as they get used to the combat mechanics of gw2.
• If you’re not comfortable with melee dps, as it’s definitely more risky, switch off to a ranged weapon for dungeons. As far as I know every class has a ranged weapon or two at their disposal, use it if you need.
• Remember that you can adjust major traits AND slot skills ANYTIME that you’re out of combat. If a fight is going to be more risky and you don’t want to take chances, maybe switch your major traits to be more survival based.
• Conditions are EXTREMELY powerful. Thieves can pretty much chain blind a slow swinging PvE NPC, and Mesmers can confuse the hell out of them. Both of these are very powerful.
• Don’t forget your food buff and potions! Things die quicker when you’re using potions, and they’re super cheap on the TP.

It’s nice to see a post actually asking for some suggestions instead of whining about how difficult and impossible it is. The way that I’ve been running my groups and calling targets, and the logistics behind those calls is as follows:

Mobs that you NEVER focus as a priority unless nothing else is alive:
* Shadowsworn: They just run around and hit you. If you can’t move from them / kite them you should brush up on that.
* Stalkers: They don’t hit hard enough to be a concern, and used to be ‘normal’ mobs with low HP that a single player could take down in ~10 attacks. Since the change these mobs have been buffed so they don’t logistically make sense to attack. Their attacks are projectile based and there are plenty of classes with counters to this.

Kill Priority!

• Smokelords: #1 DPS Priority due to a few reasons.
  * They have an AOE based ability (the lava font looking thing) that explodes for enough damage to kill a player, and in the heat of the moment it’s very easy to miss and die to.
  * They have a projectile based attack that is thrown, hits very hard and is very hard to see even when there’s one of them alive, and next to impossible to see when there are 10 mobs running around the area.
  * They’re relatively stationary. This makes them relatively easy to kill since you don’t have to chase them all over the place.
• Fanatics:
  * These are #2 (notably due to the sheer number of them and desire to weed them out, and the fact that Hellstorms can be controlled relatively easy)
  * These mobs are also relatively stationary, and don’t have any attacks other than the flame line that hits too hard, so they’re not as high of a priority as Smokelords.
• Hellstorms
  * You should most likely have one person with alot of interrupts (I’m a thief, so I generally do it with pistols for this fight) handle this guy primarily if you’re dpsing something else. If you have the free time to kill it, go for it, but the biggest source of damage from these mobs is their flamethrower. They pull you in, run at you with it, and generally wreak havoc with it. Fortunately, it’s a channeled cast with a huge visual and easy to interrupt and control, so these mobs don’t get huge dps priority.

Keep in mind that the initial pack is only 3 mobs, 2 shadowsworn and one smokelord – and if you have someone who can pull all 3 in together and such, you can AOE them down pretty quickly so that there’s nothing up for the second pack.

Realistically by the time the 4th/5th pack arrives, you’re in survival mode, but it’s definitely doable, and good luck!

Spoon.3826:

You went into fullkittenmode once you hit the WvW part. Aside from the fact that it isnt a proper comparison at all (30 minutes of WvW play can be both fun and rewarding, whereas a 30 minute incomplete dungeon run is not) you are comparing a PvE vs a PvP situation.

I don’t get where your sense of entitlement comes from that you want to deny people that don’t have hours upon hours to spend on grinding and/or social engineering the ability to get cool stuff. That’s being elitist alright.

Explorables take roughly 30-45 minutes once you learn them, and they’re both fun and rewarding to some players. Again, you’re asking that something be changed based on your preference. I’m not asking for anything to be changed. I like things the way that they are. I’m not the one making demands actually, sorry to disappoint ya

So what’s so cool about it? Does it give you an advantage somewhere in the game? What if the dungeon gear didn’t look different, would you still do it then? If the answer is no, (which it is, 90% of you wouldn’t do dungeons or be whining if there was no aesthetic based reward) then your issue isn’t the difficulty of the dungeons or the time investment, your issue is with the fact that you can’t hack it. I don’t recall seeing any whining or crying feedback when CoF took 20 minutes to do by people who could run around in circles for 90 seconds successfully. The crying came into play when things were buffed to their intended difficulty and half of the egos were bruised.

Considering that dungeons offer purely cosmetic rewards, I don’t understand the attitude of “we are being PUNISHED because we can’t do dungeons!!!” It’s simply not true. If your perception of ‘punished’ is because you can’t obtain the same gear (as quickly) as folks who are able to put the time, coordination, and effort into making themselves look different, then it’s your perception that is flawed, not the design of the system. There is absolutely NO statistical advantage to dungeon armor, period. ArenaNet has said from the beginning that explorable mode dungeons and corresponding gear was designed with the player who wanted difficult content that required time, effort, and coordination to finish. The reward for that time, effort, and coordination is gear that is intended to separate them from the rest. Unfortunately a few of the paths were susceptible to speed running and were undertuned, so people got the gear quickly and it doesn’t necessarily have the same ‘prestige’ (which honestly who cares as long as you like the way that your character looks.)

I’m not sure where this sense of entitlement comes from that so many of you have when it comes to armor skins. You either put in the effort, or you don’t – no one is forcing you to do so, and you don’t NEED it to have a stat based advantage over anyone else.

Should the WvW armor skins be purchasable with dungeon tokens just because I don’t like to do WvW? (which isn’t the case, I love wvw, but theoretically)

Should I be able to purchase all of the skins from the HoM rewards with gems so I don’t have to invest all of the time that the GW1 folks did? I bet that alot of the folks who invested HUNDREDS of hours into GW1 wouldn’t want the titles or armor purchasable.

Based on your logic there should be a way to buy a buff for wvw that gives you 8000 extra health and 4000 additional attack power, so that you can get badges to buy the wvw things you want and get the kills you need for your wvw achievements.

Ultimately no one is forcing you to do dungeons, you don’t have to do them unless you want the skin, and all of you need to stop feeling so entitled. They’re optional content. If you have the time, effort, and social aptitude to put together groups for them, then do them. Don’t try to ruin them for people who like playing the game as it was designed and intended just because you don’t like it.

And before you say that I’m being elitist and wanting things my way just as bad as you want things yours, keep in mind that the difference is that I am supporting keeping things the same. As they were designed. As they were intended. I’m not the one demanding changes.

If this is anything like the butter/chocolate/etc that were migrated from soulbound to non-soulbound, try putting them in your inventory on your main character that they ARE soulbound to, then putting them back in your bank. If that doesn’t work, the next time that you do a dungeon and obtain a token, add it to the stack that you already have, and see if it doesn’t convert the whole stack. That’s how it worked for me back when cooking mats were changed.

Skyrant Kangaroomouse.7458:

Come on afflaq, there have been a lot of suggestions on how to fix this mess of an event.

Agree to disagree sir, I’m sorry. The approach the developers have is that of a 5 year old stomping their foot saying, “But i want you to do it my way”. Even a focused group has a hard time killing one of the mobs in first wave before 2nd wave spawns. That is just bad balancing and design.

As opposed to the approach of the players who are saying "I WANT MY DESSERT NOW AND I DON’T FEEL LIKE EATING MY PEAS, AND YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT’S BEST FOR ME EVEN THOUGH YOU’VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR MUCH LONGER THAN ME,’ right?

Skyrant Kangaroomouse.7458:

1. Extend the time to X minutes (whatever it needs to kill the waves)
2. Balance Mobs so they can be killed before or close to next spawn.

If it was intended to be a wave event, or the intention was to kill EVERY mob, it would have likely been something along the lines of “Diminish Flame Legion Morale defending Baelfire’s Sanctum” – then you would have had to kill <X> mobs to finish the event, then the two smokelords would be the only thing guarding the gate, or something along those lines.

Skyrant Kangaroomouse.7458:

3. People will be happy because they achieved something by actually fighting and not dying and kiting.
How the frak is that so hard to understand or implement?

It’s fun if you can beat something, its NOT FUN if you barely make it or fail 30% of the time because you have to get lucky.

Some people are happy when they don’t have to work for anything, or when they’re used to being handed things for free without effort. I don’t know about you, but I get my sense of accomplishment from doing something that isn’t easy. It’s perfectly controllable in an orchestrated group. You skate by in a pug if the players are decent. I don’t see how that’s imbalanced. The problem is that if it’s nerfed heavily or whatnot, then there’s no challenge and nothing to look forward to. Then you run out of content. Then you whine. It’s an endless cycle.

People are overlooking that the game has been out for LESS THAN A MONTH. There are many people who aren’t great at this game yet. Do any of you remember how long it took for people to understand and master the concept of Line of Sight for Firemaw? People need time to learn – and then content gets easier. People are still learning their classes, learning when to use the right abilities, learning NPC abilities. For some people, this is a lot to take in. For others, it’s not. There’s a gap in player skill, the mechanics of the content are a static.

I agree with ya Evil, I’m sorry if I’m a bit defensive about CoF, but of the dungeons that I’ve done, I like the story/environment and in general like Fiery places (hell I did heroic firelands for months just for fun because I liked the place.)

I do think that the goal should be to kill as many mobs as possible, but too many people are putting emphasis on “THE DEV SAID YOU HAD TO KILL EVERYTHING!!@@!” When I did this last night we were able to kill the smokelord + 1 shadowsworn prior to the 2nd group, then we were unable to keep up 100%. We killed the Fanatic in the 2nd group a little after the 3rd wave spawned, which put the bomb timer to around ~60% I believe. At that point we started in on another fanatic, then I broke off to CC the Hellstorm when the 4th wave spawned (Ambush trap + dual pistols is great for interrupting the hellstorm’s flamethrower – and if you interrupt the flamethrower the hellstorm is essentially a nonissue.) By the 4th/5th wave we’re generally in survival mode, dpsing down fanatics / smokelords as we are able to, but focusing much more on living.

The video that Cotillion linked was my video doing this in a PuG the day of the original buff last week (hence some of the dying and such.) Since then it’s gotten much smoother, and I’ll do my best to record another video tonight.

Evil.9061:

afflaq.3947:

Robert NEVER said that the intention was for you to kill every mob that spawns. He said that the intention was for you to FIGHT them

Sorry, stopped reading at this point.

Cool. Maybe you can read this, it’s from the original post by Robert:

“2. I extended the time from 100 seconds to 200 seconds at the Door Buster event. I intended for you to fight those guys, not circle strafe them and aggro leash chain them”

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/The-CoF-Buff-My-opinions/page/2#post158017

because the shortbow glows at night! (sometimes)

I’ll take people who were jumping over the wall and avoiding the encounter but can’t do it anymore for $200, Alex!

Seriously, the actual mechanics of this encounter haven’t changed in the patch – the only change that’s been made is that you can’t jump over the wall anymore and avoid it, so now people are having to actually DO it and all of you are coming here crying about it?

Robert NEVER said that the intention was for you to kill every mob that spawns. He said that the intention was for you to FIGHT them – there’s a distinct difference. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again – Smoke Lords, Fanatics, Hellstorms. Kill those, kite/avoid the others. I’ve done it with pugs (which I posted the video of the day AFTER the buff patch) and I’ve done it with friends – with pugs it’s always a closer call but I’ve never had to give up or GY zerg it. With friends no one even goes to a down state normally unless they let themselves get too low (like I did in my original video.)

I’m in the office right now but I’ll be more than happy to record ANOTHER video if it’ll shut half of you up when I get home tonight.

The problem is not with the difficulty at all, the problem is that too many of you set your expectations based on CoF and not the rest of the explorable modes. Unfortunately this set a precedent in a lot of your minds that the content was supposed to be as easy as the original Magg runs. If the Magg encounter had been the current difficulty @ launch, then none of you would be complaining about how undoable it is – you would have figured out a way.

I’m really not trying to be that condescending but post after post is whine and moan, and it’s really not constructive. Very few of you (not none) have offered any sort of constructive suggestions other than “MAKE IT EASIER!” or “THIS IS TOO MUCH OF A GRIND GIVE US MORE REWARDS.” Well, now you’ve been given more rewards, and you’re still not happy. The biggest gripe prior to today was “THIS ISN’T WORTH THE EFFORT QQQQQQQQ” so now that that’s been fixed you have to find something else to cry about? It still baffles me why none of you want to be challenged and would prefer to have everything handed to you on a platter.

edit: One comment that I do agree with is that it would be nice if some of the encounters had different abilities — which I believe the devs have said is coming. As it stands now, unless it’s something like the Magg protection event, a majority of the boss fights are move from the red circle and dodge when he’s winding up, which isn’t too difficult. Things are in their infancy though, I’m sure changes will be coming through the pipeline at some point.

and Male Charr (my character)

Here’s the way that things look to me at least…

Human female…

I keep seeing this “they’re not WORTH doing” thrown around, and I’m confused by it. No one is telling you that you have to do them – if they’re not fun to you, then go do something else for christ’s sake. If you want the dungeon gear, then you do the dungeons. There are two reasons to do dungeons in GW2:

• Aesthetics -Sure, everyone wants to look cool. The dungeon gear looks amazing. Great. If you care about your aesthetics that much, then do them. It might not be easy. It might take time. The game has been out for less than a month, you’ve got plenty of time to obtain your gear if you care about it that much.

• You like doing dungeons – Hey look these people DO exist, and they’re finally starting to show up on the forums a bit. For the most part these dungeons are perfectly fine if not a bit undertuned for good players. There are some small issues, but they’ll get sorted out. If you’re the type of person who REALLY likes doing dungeons, you’re probably the type of person that doesn’t care if it takes you 8 hours once you start, you’re going to finish thekittenthing.

Unfortunately CoF’s Magg option set a standard in some people’s mind for how easy dungeons should be and how great of a moneymaker they were – I don’t believe that either of these things (profit or ease) were the intention of explorable modes, and then they got fixed.

If the 13 minute Magg run had never existed, and Arah Shard farming had never existed, I wonder how many of you would still be here whining? If the standard across the board with ALL explorable modes was set very high and they took time, and people wiped, and people died, and people had large repair bills while they learned the encounter and learned to get better at this game, I don’t think that there’d be the amount of QQ that there is.

Unfortunately you can’t change the past, and so be it, COF was originally a little undertuned. It happens. The problem isn’t the content, the problem is all of the lazy, entitled jibberjabbering that’s going on because some people would prefer to have things handed to them instead of working for it.

Crucible of Eternity is a LOT of fun in story mode – the whole thing is pretty action packed with all of the screen shake and stuff going on; but I have a special place in my heart for any dungeon packed with fire, so I’ll go with Citadel of Flame, post-buff.

Ghost pepper poppers can be great for dps, Garlic bread works well for fights that have alot of stuns/knockbacks – and I’m sure that there is some power/vitality food or something along that nature out there as well. I personally use Raspberry Peach bars simply for the additional money.

Keep in mind there are also potions for each respective dungeon that drop or can be bought with tokens that increase your damage against the respective mobs in the dungeon by 10% and allow you to take 10% less damage. That’s the equivilant of ~200+ power for most players, as well as the equivilant of having an additional 10% in your health pool.

I’ve done this a few different ways – there are some strategies out there that suggest a specific kill order and pacing for the burrows, but the way that I’ve seen works fairly consistently with pretty much any group makeup is to kill the first few burrows, then when things start getting a bit hectic you get to the point where you’re doing protective things to stop the mobs from getting to / damaging the NPC. If you are lucky enough to have a thief in your group, have him switch his trickery trait to Uncatchable and dodge around a bunch for caltrops, as well as running caltrops as one of his slot skills. If you’d like a thief to come along with you who has experience doing it, yell at me in game. I don’t really need or want anything from AC, but I’ll be happy to help.

edit: What Penguin said is absolutely true — Breeders are always a high priority and interrupting their telegraphed cast that looks to be the one that summons more gravelings is very important.

This isn’t a bug. On the male model, the medium armor does not show the shoulders – I suspect that it’s due to the fire shoulder harness that “counts” as a shoulder slot from a visibility perspective. If you read the tooltip on your shoulders, you’ll see very clearly that it says “This item is currently obscured by another.” You’d have some wierd issues with the shoulder strap conflicting with the shoulders. Personally my preference would be for the male armor to have the same chest/shoulder layout as the female one – I personally think that it looks better, but that’s just my $0.02!

Gies.3824:

When they drop the shard rate on the first two bosses to 1 and load the end after Giganticus with more shards, know that it was your fault and that I am a happier man.

This. A hundred times this. This can’t happen soon enough.

I’ve touched on this a bit before in response to some comments about my HP, but I do love me some theorycrafting, so here goes.

My gear is a mix, I prefer the valkyrie/berserker based things and try to keep everything balanced fairly well. I’ve attached an image of all of my stuff. The superior runes of strength/Orrian are sorta placeholdes, I was debating whether I wanted to try 2pc Orrian + 4pc Ogre or just move on to the 6pc Ogre, still deciding that.

Fire/Air sigils don’t seem to share any sort of ICD, so I think they’re pretty powerful personally. I like the Sigil of strength/bloodlust but the fire proc looks cool, so I’m sticking with it

As far as a trait loadout, I keep going back and forth between Shadow Arts / Power based builds (25/0/30/0/15) and Acrobatics builds (0/0/25/30/15) and I’m undecided on which I prefer yet. I really like both and will probably continue to play both – the damage output seems relatively close as long as you make sure you dodge often to keep your endurance down, and having an additional dodge is very nice as well – but something about acrobatics makes me feel like it’s a better focused spec for PvP and a shadow arts/power based build works better for pve. I seem to do okay with either though.

As far as helping the group, Thrill of the crime is huge and helps burst scenarios a ton – I prefer to melee so that i can cloak and dagger + backstab often which keeps things chain blinded.

Both shadow arts/acrobatics builds will give you solid survivability due to the toughness/vitality in their respective trees. If you spec Deadly Arts / Critical Strikes you can probably plan on dying alot – glass cannon builds aren’t going to be high survivability, if it was designed that way the profession would be ridiculous.

The problem with your theory is that eventually all the “elites” are going to stop doing them. And then what? If they are not meant to be done by casuals and the upper elite portion of the players has no interest in dungeons because they’ve either got everything they want or they no longer consider it a challenge then what is the point of the dungeons?

Content that no one uses is wasted dev time. Content that only a small portion of the player base can use is just as wasted.

I love hard stuff. I love challenging stuff. But making it so only maybe the top 5% (being generous) of the population of the game can do it is stupid and wasteful.

What Anet should have done was have each path of a dungeon be a different difficulty and adjust rewards for each path according to difficulty. That way the casuals and pugs can get the gear they want and it might take longer sure, but they’ll have it even though it takes them twice as long as the harder paths. And then the elite super hardcore coordinated guild groups could do the harder paths and get their stuff in half the time. Everyone is happy and rewarded appropriately for the effort they put into playing the game.

I’m not saying I want the dungeons to be come so easy you can just auto attack your way through it while watching Jerry Springer on tv. But if you don’t give all the people playing the game access to all the content in the game (if they are willing to invest the time) then the game is going to bleed players and die a slow death for lack of interest. And that is in no ones best interest, Anets or the players, hardcore and casual alike.

I do agree that multiple difficulties would be ideal, but there may some technical limitations to this or time limitations, or a mixture of both. Not everything can make it into the game immediately, and there’s always a chance for something like this in the future. As far as the elites being the only ones to do the content – maybe they’re the only ones doing it RIGHT NOW. Again, the game has been out for less than a month. Over time people will get to the point where they’re good enough to do it. I also don’t think that the upper tier of players are going to stop doing it. I’ve had all I’ve wanted from CoF for over a week — admittedly all obtained prior to the buff, but I’m still doing CoF daily because I enjoy it. Top tier players generally do things in this order:

• Get geared sufficiently to beat the content
• Get all of the “best in slot” gear that you want to complete your character
• Get all of the gear you want from an aesthetic standpoint for transmutation
• Finish off achievements (Dungeon Master achievement in this case)
• Get alternate sets of gear (off-spec sets, pvp sets, etc)
• Start leveling alts
• Rinse/Repeat.

So to say that the elites will eventually stop doing it is probably not that true. There will be some players that stop doing it, but those are the same ones that will bumrush the content and then whine about how there’s nothing to do anymore.

I think there are absolutely different demographics playing the game and I believe that there are enough different things going on that all of those demographics have something to do in the game. I’ve been “max geared” for over a week and a half now including multiple weapons, and I feel like I’ve only seen or participated in about 10% of what the game has to offer me – I have multiple dungeons left to do in both story/explorable mode – hours and hours of wvw ahead of me, tournaments that I want to participate in, zones that I haven’t explored yet because I was saving them for alts but I’ll eventually go back and do on my thief, and tons of jumping puzzles/etc to just “find” so I’m just not agreeing :\

There seems to be a lot of entitlement and general QQ in this thread and it’s honestly probably to the point where it’s about to turn into a flamefest and should probably be locked, but I’d like to give my views on some of the opinions a majority of you seem to have. Wall of text inc.

• You shouldn’t need to be in full exotics to do explorable mode content
  I don’t personally believe that you have to. Does it make it easier? Yes. Is it 100% required? Absolutely not. As someone earlier said, a group that communicates well and is good at their profession could easily do this event in level 80 uncommons/rares without an issue.

• I shouldn’t need to be in a guild or have a group of people that I play with regularly to do explorable mode content
  You don’t – that’s what my video was posted to prove. My video was not posted to boast about how good I was, because I certainly don’t think I’m amazing. The game is young, I’m new to it, and I’m still learning. The intent of the video was to show that a complete PUG WAS capable of doing the encounter as long as they were decent and laid out a plan prior to starting. Was everyone dead at the end? Yep. Does that mean we got lucky? No, not really. It means that it was our 2nd pull and people did good enough that pull to win. Our first pull was a wipe, the 2nd pull we scraped by and did better. If we had needed a 3rd pull, or I went back with that same group today, it would most likely be even easier and cleaner. I’m pretty sure that all of you think that everything should be a one-shot, but I don’t believe that’s the case. I think that there are a lot of people spoiled by another game, which I’ll address later.

• It’s not possible to kill all of the mobs
  I agree, and I don’t think that it’s intended that you do. I think that you’re all interpreting Robert’s comments incorrectly – the quote from Robert’s original post says “I intended for you to fight those guys, not circle strafe them and aggro leash chain them.” — that does not say that the intention is for you to kill every single mob. Pick your high risk targets (Shadowlords, Fanatics, Hellstorms) and kill those, kite others. There’s a pretty big difference between aggro leashing and kiting mobs. Cripple/kite shadowsworn and kill the ones that matter. If you let the mobs that have low damage output kill you, you’re just not good at dodging/moving. Shadowlords, Fanatics, and Hellstorms have very high damage output and a large portion of the attacks that Fanatics and Shadowlords do are either ranged or AOE with pretty severe consequences for not moving/handling them appropriately. If you notice what I died to in the video, it was from a mixture of hellstorm’s flamethrower and the fanatic’s fire wall. Kill what matters and kite the rest.

• This content should be accessible by everyone wah wah wah
  Why? Why are you so entitled that you think that because you’re not good enough to do it, it should be easier? Maybe the problem is you. If you spent half of the time trying to get better that you spend whining on the forums, a majority of you would be savants at this game by now. It has been said for months, and potentially even years, that explorable mode content was not intended to be easy, not intended to be something that everyone was capable of doing (particularly in the first month of the game), and 100% not something that was “required” for you to do. It’s intended to be for people who want to be constantly challenged, that don’t mind communicating or making changes to their abilities/traits if required, and want to do something above and beyond. It certainly feels like a lot of people in this thread have come from another game where the standard was addons doing all of the work for you and you just moved to the blue marker when the timer counted to 0. This isn’t that game. Stop trying to turn it into it. Some of us came to Guild Wars 2 looking for the challenge that stopped existing there.

• Everyone on my server is exploiting the gates now and skipping the event
  I do hope that this gets fixed soon. I think that when you have a bypass like this that so many people start using it creates a divide in the community, and players who don’t want to bypass encounters should not be punished because the majority – that really shouldn’t even be doing explorable mode most likely – want to cheese something. I don’t think that I agree with banning players, because in some instances people get roped into doing something or just assume “well that’s the way it is, if I want to finish I guess I have to do this or have everyone hate me.” and it isn’t really fair to them, particularly with global character names and such. I do however believe that the people “leading” those groups should have some kind of infraction imposed upon them – maybe they should be locked out of the dungeon altogether for 10 days or something if that’s possible.

Loe.6351:

Crucifer.2831:

afflaq.3947:

and here ya go.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpcTsYEQJSg

You did not clear the event the intended way:

The intended way is to kill all the mobs before the next wave spawns – Per Robert Hrouda.

Furthermore you are in pre-patch full CoF gear. You need to go buy some level 70-74 greens/blues and re-attempt the fight as if you were a new person running explorable.

Then post a video of you getting your faces smashed in by the ridiculous damage.

Because that is the issue right now.

Agreed.

How can someone brag when actually you ended the event waiting for a ress is a unknown mistery.

I wasn’t waiting for a res, I was recording the end of the event as it’s pretty obvious there’s not a chance that I would have had time to run back and re-engage prior to the event ending. And for what it’s worth, I did actually run back all by myself after the event was over.