Guild Wars 2

I used to do a daily leveling run of AC p3 with my ele (a lot of the path’s duration is not governed by DPS, making it ideal for lowies).
The spider’s melee attack can be quite an issue for a group of lowies and first-timers (not to mention people who will not quite do what they agreed to do and get everyone killed). Killing it in the open was easier most of the time. If everyone melees, she still doesn’t use her ranged attack. If she does, people who cannot dodge the circles die alone, which isn’t really a problem if we’re talking about that lvl 37 thief who is in a dungeon for their first time.
So next time when you’re in AC with a lowlvl pug, be open minded and let the newbies see the actual mechanics instead of memorised exploits (if you don’t understand it, it’s an exploit), if you see your party wiping due to insufficient dps/cleanse/protection/heal or people running around.

btw, I didn’t know the Collosus’ boulders wouldn’t hit you in the corner. I thought it was just to counter that annoying knockback. That said, I enjoy when he decides to stand behind the corner instead, so we can exploit my Fiery Greatsword rush

Alpha was hell back when pugs didn’t do stacking (when you still could WP and run back to the fight when you died).

I think it is a little sad that there seems to be no really good choice for the 10 remaining points in 30|x|x|x|30+10 builds.
As I only play in more or less random groups, I like to bring some support. The odd heal and condition removal really helps when you can’t be sure someone else will do the job. Also well of suffering + 100% DS crit chance really helps in buffing our miserable AoE/cleave damage.
I would really like to see the 20% well-CD trait being moved into the adept tier.
Classes you take for support and utility all have the relevant CDR traits there: Guardian has shout and consecration cooldowns as adept-tier traits, the mesmer has his glamour cooldown trait there.

(yes, this post might not be applicabe to organized group play. I know. I don’t have an organized group. Also I know that other classes can do support better. That is why I often play guardian in any not-utterly-boring dungeon.)

Maybe it was just rumor and wishful thinking, but I thought there was a build/trait swap option on the horizon?
(meaning being able to swap between two sets of traits/builds in PvE when out of combat, much like swapping weapons in combat now)

The Instant Trait Reset now available in the gem store seems to more or less fulfil that role, though it’s far too expensive to use on a regular basis. (~60ct or 2.5g)
Does its existance mean there will never be a trait-swap?

If the game designers want support or condition builds to become more viable (in random dungeon groups), I need to be able to switch to/from that build, depending on my groups needs.
Nothing is more useless than 200% poison or fire uptime in your group. And no change in condition dmg scaling will change that.
I don’t want to be the 3rd Altruistic Healing Guardian in my group in an easy dungeon.
But I would like the option of switching from full egoistic berserker-Necro to something more supporty if necessary (I might actually start playing my necro again).

disclaimer: I’m not complaining about the instant trait reset. It would still be useful if build swapping should ever be implemented. I just really want to have 2 builds available at any time
please do not complain about instant trait reset here, go somewhere else

Removing rez-rushing was a good thing to do. A better way to do it might have been to make it unnecessary instead of just banning it, causing severe collateral annoyance. But whatever.

important suggestion:
The biggest problem I have with dungeons is: skipping groups of mobs. It just sucks. It is boring, and when it goes wrong, it is extremely annoying.
Where GW2 really shines is it’s very adaptable, spontaneous combat system. And this shines most versus multiple enemies on which crowd control actually has any effect. In AC and TA the most difficult encounters actually are those where you face groups of small mobs (AC: defend Detha’s cannons, TA: groups of Nightmare Court Knights). It’s a shame that players skip groups of silver/bronze veterans wherever they can.
The reasons are:
1) Its not rewarding.
2) Skipping is very much possible.
3) And players think the optimum time to complete a dungeon run is about 30min and don’t want it to take any longer, if possible. Dungeons would take ages if you killed every mob in your way. Arah already takes far longer than 30min, even with skipping wherever possible (which is fine with me, but the skipping sucks).
ways to fix this:
1) wrong: make skipping impossible/very unreliable by adding more knockdowns, roots etc. to trash. This would mean dungeons taking ages and being less rewarding per time.
2) right: just remove trash mobs. make some of the veterans normal mobs. Killing them would be fast, maybe not challenging, but still better than the status quo of trying to run past everything.
3) right: make trash mobs rewarding. The best way would be to add a chance of dropping dungeon tokens. Now that bosses have a chance to drop 3 of them, why not loot a total of 5-10 tokens from trash mobs per run?

I realize that this is probably a bit late in the development process.

praise:
I really like GW2 dungeons
The difficulty in the explorable dungeons in general scales well with dungeon lvl (AC < CM = TA < .. < Arah) with few exceptions (like CoF being easy and now the farmgrounds of packs of mindless warriors).
The story modes can be a bit frustrating though. They should be an entry point for all the story/exploring players, but quite often they are more difficult than the easier explorable paths (like AC back in the old days. I think Sorrow’s Embrace story is still fairly OP (I’m talking about the fire golem summoned by the evil guy) for people not usually into dungeons).
Nobody wants to ever fail to complete a dungeon. Please keep this in mind when making changes. Nobody wants to get frustrated. Good groups already get big rewards for playing well (like only taking 20min for a TA run, instead of 1h), so thats fine. There is one challenging dungeon in the game (Arah), and uber-pros can do high lvl fractals when they are looking for failure.
I only join random groups and have so far only failed in: AC story back in the old days when Ralena and Vassar felt mostly immune to knockbacks, SE story (have completed it in the meantime), Arah exp p1 (haven’t done any arah since then, playing for almost an hour and then failing at lupicus sucks. I don’t have time to play computer games for an hour and feel bad afterwards). The total times any dungeon got bugged and had to be restarted were maybe 2-3.
Overall this is a very good balance. I love your dungeons (as Necro, Guardian, Mesmer).

oh, and:
more waypoints please! now that we can’t abuse them anymore, please make us able to regroup quicker. running is boring