It pulses 2 seconds of stability 10 times. That means if you stand in it for the full duration, you’ll have stability for a total of 20 seconds. The same counts for your allies who stand in it.
This is actually not true since Stability only stacks in duration up to 3 times (at once). From personal experience the stability stays for at most 3-4s after the field despawns (probably varying on boon duration).
For the thread creator – Sanctuary would be very overpowered with a reduced cooldown or increased duration, at least for PvP. They allow for ridiculous bunkering (drop hallowed on point, drop sanctuary on downed teammates), and they used to be popular at some point in the stone age meta. You can’t make passive immune-type skills last too long, they will become very unfun. The 10-15s potentially party-wide stability is already the longest it gets outside of elite transforms.
I always range the Molten bosses. Gives me more time to dodge their shockwaves/fireballs that way.
If done right (especially at lower scales where they have less HP), they die before they do more than 1 shockwave. And fireballs are a non-issue if you have one of the four: mesmer/guard/thief/ele.
Mai Trin and Horrik no longer teleport away during cannon phase. Also cannons shoot during the whole fight (reduce their frequency if impossible to beat).
The weapons test doesn’t start (yeah I know, never run ahead of the npcs but pugs will be pugs)
1 – This actually isn’t a bug, or at least I’ve been able to fix it. It happens when not all steam wents in the drilled cave are closed with boulders, or when not enough mobs at the end of the tunnel were killed.
2 – I’ve heard rumors that this can happen when Frostbite (3rd NPC) is left dead behind.
Next time I’m going to use distortion from 3 clones and go INSIDE the ooze.
Try jumping inside the Ooze’s body when it shoots them – the projectiles’ origin point might be too high without jumping to bodyblock. Works with Subject 6, at least.
I use my mouse side buttons for dodging as well and just try to time it at the same time with a jump. It’s pretty unreliable for me, and I can’t imagine it working as consistently as yours without a macro. I have only a Logitech M510 laser mouse lawl
Thanks for the response
You should just do what I did:
E = dodge
Alt+E = dodge-jump (bound with AHK)
It is completely “legal” to ANET rules (2 buttons pressed for 2 actions = 1-1 ratio) and yet it’s a lot more reliable than Space+E. Why? Because you don’t have to press them exactly at the same time for it to work, you can hold Alt beforehand. You can use any [modifier]+[normal key] you prefer too.
It’s the opportunistic vet elementals which make it extremely punishing and annoying.
You get teleported into the aggro range of the elementals if you were meleeing when the storm triggers (instead of the “safe” spots it usually picks). This coupled with bad luck can get most of the area pulled onto you, and it hasn’t got any particularly good LoS spots near fires to stack-clear them all.
They could just remove all the ghosts and replace them with more gravelings or some LS mobs, there’s surprisingly few of them considering it’s their catacombs:
a random hidden event
Kholer
a pack before essence collectors
Grast
event at P2 end
They might need to revamp the plot of P3 if they were to remove ghosts, though.
What opponents would you put into the catacombs, other than gravelings and insects?
… must maintain composure through 600ap players asking if you have done this before
yesterday, a 700 ap BEARBOW, dishing out orders at COF P1, while everyone was 3k+ ¬¬
man, that was difficult to swallow, at least they let me do gate.
Sorry for off-topic.
I love those guys, I just let them go. I don’t know why but it’s just fun to watch on.
They are pretty predictable tbh. They usually open with longbow knockback or stealth then barrage, then when the monsters proceed to hit them, they start backpedaling and repeat the above process. Also throw in some random skills like Call Wurm.
“Ping gear and be meta” are usually people who don’t understand the game. They are just running zerk because they’ve heard it’s good, and just copy and paste a meta build and don’t read the skills properly.
You clearly have a limited perspective on this matter, so let me show you the other side of the coin. You are in a guild who wants to do some dungeons or fractals but you’re only 3 or 4/5. Now, you can either opt to duo/trio the dungeons and sell, which is mostly not viable (unless ac/cm/arah), or you can try to fill those 1 or 2 missing spots.
Asking people to link berserker’s gear with the meta upgrades filters a huge amount of players we wouldn’t want playing with us. The amount of bad players running completely meta builds is tremendously smaller, and even if they are bad, at least they contribute more to our dps indirectly (through team buffs like Vulnerability, Empower Allies or Spotter).
I can guarantee you that people who don’t bother getting the optimal equipment will usually not bother getting those traits and weapon sets, often not even banners.
Probably the wrong place to ask, but how do you solo Bloody Victoria in CM p1? She kept getting backstabs out on me from stealth or just going invuln when I tried kiting her.
As a thief I’d use Caltrops, or just stealth when she does? I’m not sure how long her stealth lasts.
The warriors are much harder, you can just LoS the Mages and walk out of their AoE.
The warriors spam an autoattack that does at least 7k, and occasionally use a Rush which has .75s cast time (in melee) and deals 22k damage.
Hardest to solo in melee fotm edition (silver and below), assuming no blindspam:
1. Ascalonian Warrior.
2. Lashtail Devourer(s). They have a channeled poison+cripple attack that CCs and kills my ele in 1s.
3. Sons of Svarnir (Bow and maybe Greatsword). Their barrage denies meleeing really hard and forces you to dodge out at least once or twice. You also constantly have to break LoS because of the channeled attacks. And if you give them ample time they summon pets which also almost 1-shot you.
4. Earth Elemental(s). Ring of Earth – 16k. duh.
5. Fanatic(s), when you cannot instantly burst. Their life-siphoning skill easily does 16k with only a few crits.
. Actually, I find Mossy one of the worst and most poorly designed bosses in the game. Still, he made me sweat quite a lot.
Couldn’t agree more.
Huge damage 180°+ spammy melee swings with very short cast.
Cannot remove or counter in any good way his stealth, just a time-gate (aside from getting hit to remove it, which is a roulette because you might get crit).
Mai Trin at scale 40+, really not much of a competition.
Lupi is probably up there, but he would be easier with his animation glitches and NPC-agroing fixed.
Elixir U (toolbelt recharge traits maybe) – wall? kills you
Static/Magnetic Shield – kills you
Gear Shield – thats a block just for the engi
Magnetic Aura from Kit refinement – kills you
turret reflection – kills you
Whirling Defense – kills you
Strider’s Defense – just for the ranger, small chance
Problem about belka is the stupid orb that instantly explodes in our faces for no reason. Reflection makes it bounce back to her, she reflects it again and it kills everything around her anyway. Only thing that heps is projectile blocking, of which elexir u with 50% chance for 8s is the only viable option.
She never fires it at melee range for me. She fires a single one when she teleports away but you can easily see and dodge that.
If you block her projectiles before anyone else gets hit (by stacking on top of her with Gear Shield, Strider’s), nobody will take damage, so they are not “just for one player”.
Strider’s Defense has a very vague description, does anyone know how the actual mechanic works? Is it like elementalist earth dagger #2? Or like an aegis proc? The difference could be huge.
Lupi Phase2/3 with reflect damage and wardens/clones only (will take a while)
Belka/Brie reflect damage and clones only, no reseting, no LoS tricks (too boring with wardens)
Ghost Eater reflect damage and wardens/clones only (this will be a huge pain)
Bosses:
Bloomhunger with no dodges or wardens
Kholer, cannot dodge or LoS the pull, have to interrupt so he does not spin (with reflects and/or other CC) – probably a guardian/mesmer/thief type challange.
Abomination with ranged weapon only, in aggro range of Inquest adds, don’t go behind the boss to avoid the melee swings
Cave Troll and champion graveling(s) at the same time
Misc.:
Armored Carrier (SE) with melee weapons only (or ranged bundles/conjures, but at melee range)
Bombs in CoF p2 (probably with thief)
Arah/TA-fw skipping without stealth, mobility skills (skills that give move-speed are fine, teleports are not) – extra points for no dodging
I feel like CM is a dungeon that desperately needs a thief to be run. With a thief, it’s a walk in the park, without it, it’s a nightmare; people will have no idea what to do and will get ganked by the huge amounts of trash patrols at every corner – after Arah, this dungeon has by far the most overpowered and ridiculous trash mechanics.
AoE 12 stacks of bleed, 20s+ poison from a single skill of a single mob
ranged knockdowns/blinds
blockspam
AoE bombs that can 1shot or CC
patrols that intentionally pull more patrols
Because it’s one of the few dungeons where you really, really need a specific profession (and an experienced player rolling it) to have smooth runs, pugs don’t do it as often, leading to even more inexperienced players. Hell, I haven’t got around to playing it for well over a year too – never felt like I was really missing out on the gold or tokens, it doesn’t offer anything special (boring skins, boring rune, no zerker stat gear).
Detha has a tendency to bug if you skip everything on the way to that last room. I stopped skipping that stuff a while back because it wasn’t worth the risk to me, and I have never had her bug since. Its just maybe two extra minutes.
No, that’s not it.
What bugs her in my experience is all party members being too far from her (say, at pillars or walls) when finishing her dialog with the ghost captain. I stand next to her until she finishes talking, then run to the trap, she always follows. Never had her bug since I’ve been doing that, in 20-30 runs.
It is pretty obvious that if the enemy cannot reach them, it will come closer so that it can hit them.
Not taking sides here, but there are plenty of game AIs which handle these situations so much more realistically. The game that comes to my mind is Path of Exile. The monsters stop chasing you fairly quickly and won’t consistently follow you (they will often just stop and wander around) if you LoS them, especially into small places.
Then there are other games where big monsters don’t go into spaces that are smaller than them (many bosses in Gw2 don’t even fit into the stacking spots visually).
… and they CHASE you. Why are the NPCs assisting the enemy mobs, hmm?!
#DownWithVarra
This is one of the worst parts. Seeing NPCs running towards you with mobs on their tail is one of the most infuriating things.
When they are engaged in combat with monsters, they shouldn’t “leash” and move/teleport to you until they are dead or an important event happens. Or, make it so when they “leash”, the monsters also drop aggro on them.
Another thing is, it shouldn’t be hard to detect when monsters are directly targeting NPCs. They should not facetank bosses and elites for 10s -60s (and some of them even heal themselves), it makes no sense for that to happen. Make them take big additional damage when they are the ones being directly targeted (which never really happens unless the players don’t want to engage in combat).
3. Going underwater removes all stacks if your underwater weapons don’t have stacking sigils (even if you don’t engage in combat and are only in water for a couple of seconds because it’s in your way). Incredibly annoying when you cannot avoid underwater areas (TA fw, Arah p2, borderlands).
A simple mechanic which wouldn’t have any of these side-effects would be:
When a player unequips a weapon with the same sigil type as the stacks, the buff is lost.
People who call their teammates by their profession instead of their names.
“Hey mesmer, can I get a portal?” or “Hey guardian, go pull those mobs.” or whatever.
I hate that. -_-#
Some people have really odd names to type out (characters like ü,é,á,ú etc.) , or their character names are often completely different than their account name. By which am I supposed to call them?
And then there are tons of guys who don’t react to their character name, but calling them by “guardian” usually gets their attention (if they are the only one in party).
That said, I usually avoid calling people out and just ask for stuff (ie. “please run both banners” or “wall of reflection here please”) – with varying success rates.
Not the right wording. The Carrier doesn’t have meshes now, meaning you can shoot and run through it (which also introduces the bug where you can’t hit it with projectiles).
So ANet is now literally forcing pugs to use melee weapons?
Haven’t tested with many ranged weapons, but Ice Bow and Fiery Greatsword seemed to miss with their autoattacks.
The only thing that’s obnoxious as all hell to me is how it gets a bouncing CC projectile with every kittening melee attack.
Afaik there is no “melee” attack, just the projectiles themselves. It has a ~0.75s windup so it should be easy to dodge, and if 1 person does, it won’t bounce.
Just did it now with a group, absolutely no problems whatsoever. You must have been with a really bad pug group or something.
From my experience, ~60% of the pugs don’t even dodge the most obvious and slow attacks in dungeons, I really don’t see most people dodging these cosistently.
Not the right wording. The Carrier doesn’t have meshes now, meaning you can shoot and run through it (which also introduces the bug where you can’t hit it with projectiles).
Is it copy of AC one? Then what’s the issue exactly?
That people never do the one in AC and that this requires actual personal-level skill, you can’t carry others at all (can’t protect them with aegis/reflection, if they don’t dodge, projectiles start bouncing).
I’m not saying it’s bad, but for pugs it’s going to be incredibly hard and unlike most other bosses in popular pug dungeons. It’s a great fight for a proper premade team though.
Run up to top bridge. Kill the dogs if you have thief/ele.
Stack might, drop fgs and jump down.
Use Fiery Whirl as an extra dodge.
Note that all its attacks are unblockable so don’t even try fancy stuff.
Without an ele, I’m not sure how it’s done, but you’re going to need condi removal for the weakness or you won’t have enough endurance to keep dodging. You just have to nail the timings and get as much endurance as you can, it’s completely doable if you can dodge every attack.
Dolan, the fascinating foreshadowing you use in your story would put some writers into shame.
From the shadowy depths the Dredge watch. They studied you, mastered your language, learned your strengths, learned your weaknesses. From the shadowy depths they watch… Waiting… They can feel your every breath, your hands are a little slower today, your eyes a little more droopy than usual, you strike the keyboard with more passion, your clicks unnecessarily strong. And silly you, you chose to do fractals in this mood?
They knew when to strike, right from the moment you rolled Swamp they were ready for you, the decision was already made.
As you climb up the thin scaffolding you feel yourself being watched, almost as if… Almost as if something was standing right behind you, the smell of permanent Protection and Blind Immunity wafts through the air-
“Wait what?” You spin around quickly, met with nothing but the darkness of your room.
The Proceed box opens up, and slowly but surely everyone readies up except you. You stare at the box, the cursor held above Ready. You try to click, but your hands are frozen.
“Omg rdy up hrry” flashes across party chat, that same Warrior from before.
Sweat runs down your body, that pungent smell stronger than ever, now with a hint of gunpowder…. Gunpowder?… Bombs. You shake your head violently as your brain puts the pieces of the puzzle together, as if you could argue the inevitable.
You take a deep breath, gathering yourself, retaking control of your fingers, you hesitantly click Ready.
I especially loved the bold part; just so … perfect. I can die in peace now, the dredge fractal has been encapsulated in all its glory and wickedness.
Since the nerfs to Infiltrator’s Return (not the main reason, just the last), I picked up on mesmer and warrior, and ended up never playing thief again in PvE (I think I played 1 dredge fractal with it in 3 months total).
As for WvW, the stealth and/or pistol troll builds are still possible to pull off in 1v1 situations; and you can try to play PW; but other than those, I don’t think there’s anything this profession does spectacularly anymore.
I’m having a hard time convincing some friends to drop AH on Guard.
I don’t want to be a nag so I try not to bring it up often but sometimes they say that they’ll retrait next time.
Or there was this one time where he complained how squishy he has been after retraiting.
This was on CoF path 2, spawning mob room. T\he reason why it’s difficult for him, and in effect, for the rest of us was because he was scepter-ing mobs and not having a stun break.
I’ve been bothered the same way. The thing is, I built my guardian for fractals and AH is marvelous at L49. And the only valid option I see vs. AH is sword-traits – I find the result incredibly bland and unentertraining to play – I feel like a warrior (or mesmer) with a crappier autoattack (I seriously loathe sword auto) and some aegis.
Sword auto’s 3rd chain is the worst design on a melee attack I’ve ever seen – it’s actually made from 3 piercing projectiles, which has implications:
It usually fails completely to hit objects, and when it does, it has to miss twice (or thrice) before the skillchain reverts, which is infuriating.
It doesn’t cleave the same way as all other melee autos do, instead it hits in a much smaller cone.
It can be reflected or blocked by fields and bosses, which again, is going to have to happen twice or thrice before it reverts to the 1st chain.
Yeah, I ought to make a post about [DD] in the Guild Recruitment section soon. It’s got an interesting back-story; here it is.
The guild I was in previously marketed itself as “elite,” but it lost a lot of its pro players to other guilds, and it also lost the “zerk-meta build-speedrun mentality” it had originally. It’s difficult to determine which was the cause of which; did it’s pro players leave because of the change in mentality, or did the mentality change because its pro players left? Probably a little of both. Regardless, the end result was that the guild effectively “went casual.” There weren’t enough members to support a 3-hour dungeon tour of 14-16 paths every night, so I ended up pug’ing a lot.
What I found was that there are a great many pugs who run zerk gear and something close to a meta spec, but who aren’t in dungeon guilds. Instead, they’re in PvP or WvW or RP or casual PvX guilds. Some of them liked their current guilds and just wanted to be part of a group with other zerk meta players for dungeons, then go back to PvP/WvW with their current guilds. Some of them wanted a pro dungeon guild they could rep full-time, but for some reason didn’t want to apply for [LOD] or [DnT], the two big NA elite PvE guilds. Some of them were a little noobish, but were amenable to suggestions on improving their performance. What they all had in common was the goal of fast dungeon runs and a dislike of pug’ing, and many of them also had a healthy hatred of bearbow rangers and staff AA spamming guards.
For the past few months, I’d just been adding these zerk pugs I met to my friends list. They’d added me too, and I was getting frequent /whispers asking to do dungeons. My friends list became too big to manage. So, a few days ago, I created a guild. I’ve personally played with every member on the roster, and can guarantee that every one of them is running the meta spec for his/her class, which includes zerk or assassins with either scholars or rubies. They all have double-stacking weps and the right dungeon potions/food. They all know optimal speedclear strategies for every dungeon except Arah (I’m still working with some of them on that. There are only a few of us in the guild who can solo Lupi).
We do 14-16 paths per night, starting the first dungeon 15 mins before reset and finishing it just after. The tour usually takes a little over 3 hours (unless we’ve got a new member who I’m talking through each encounter on TeamSpeak, in which case it takes closer to 4). As of yesterday, we now have a definite 2 groups running dungeons at reset; possibly a third once I trial a few new members. The only rep requirement is that you must rep the guild when you do dungeons with other guildies at reset.
PM me on the forum or ingame if you’re interested.
Moving, even a liiiitle bit, can start AoE poison damage which will immediately cause everyone to die. It’s really quite important to stack tight in that corner and not move.
That’s just some fairy tale told to pugs to scare them. As long as every target stays within a little bit more than melee range (aka. 180), she’s never going to use it. The only time you really strictly want to stack is when you have an ele who knows how to use fiery greatsword.
I run behind her back to avoid getting cleaved (if she’s in a spot where you can), and if she’s doing the “cone-web” attack you can just move to the sides and avoid it with ease.
Once the mobs are pulled into the correct spot, strict stacking isn’t needed anymore, you can often position yourself in a way that doesn’t move them and yet helps you avoid attacks (works with the Graveling champions too).
They do not kick and sell (well most don’t). It’s just so easy to take a thief-Shadow Arrow)/mesmer (Blink)/elementalist (Lightning flash), [Edit, didn’t see video] bug through the floor to kill the boss underwater… that kicking people is not necessary (I bet not even effecient, it’s quicker to skip about 55% of the path).
on arah p4?
On ACp1… That’s what the thread is about no?
Well you can do the same with Arah p2, that’s why there’s so many p2 sellers and the price is so cheap…
True, however that’s not 1g-1g5 like AC. + There is no way to solo AC the legit way so you know for sure that any seller has exploited.
Two things:
1) They could have had someone else help them then leave to maximize slots to sell.
2) How do you know it’s not possible to solo?
I’m not taking a stance on either side but I see way too many assumptions about things that are treated as fact.
He did solo runs before they changed the Howling King.
Since the change, you can no longer get it to low HP and sit around until the party fills (unless you use the underwater exploit). The only way to sell it legit is to get the party filled and then kill it 100=>0. That or be a god at kiting the boss and the crapton of gravelings it spawns.
Will you be able to play with it? Yeah probably. But most people prefer warriors with high damage and banners over that. If they need support-ish builds they tend to pick guardians, so don’t be too surprised if people kick you at 30+.
Sometimes when you wipe you restart at arena instead at the beginning of the fractal.
I think that happens when people revive at different times and not all of them revive in the same 1-2s time window.
I think I figured out where exactly those tripwires are, that re-trigger the agony with Mai Trin and the Molten Duo. Next time I get to them, I’ll make screenies.
Urban(8/10): incredibly trivial with one, can blindspam/pull all the trash packs on the way to the boss (stack behind houses to stack them up), average for the boss, can help a lot with rezzing and cripples.
Uncategorized(6/10): can stealth through all the harpies; pull all the golems together and blindspam them.
Volcano(7/10): 3rd/4th best profession (guard > mes > skilled thief = average elementalist) for this fractal, has a lot of cripple and CC for the first 2 parts, and has Smoke Screen and Shadow Refuge, AoE spam for the final boss (and also possibly Smoke Screen on downed trait).
Snowblind(6/10): convenient here, it can solo the bonfire part and blindspam the trash at the elemental; not too useful for the final boss though.
Underwater(2/10): awful, the ranged options and usable signets are all terrible, no access to blindspam or stealth
Dredge(9/10): obvious, very good for all parts of this fract (can even Basilisk the heal of the final bosses when they don’t have the aura!)
Swamp(7/10): good for running the wisps, and fairly good for Bloomhunger because of Smoke Screen and high melee DPS; not great at Mossman though
Cliffside(8/10): a skilled thief is incredibly good here, all the seal fights become trivial because of blindspam (at higher levels you could get crit for 3-6k), and it’s a lot easier to deal with the final boss’s adds too.
Maw(7/10): Blindspam and teleports combined with Shadow Refuge are very useful here.
Overall: ~6.5 -great to have a skilled one, but not recommended to have more than one or a pug, most random thieves don’t know the tricks that would make them decent in fractals.
Sometimes when I leave Gw2.exe loading in the background (usually alt-tabbed during loading screens), the game bugs out with its loading and won’t load certain textures/elements (_mostly UI elements) for one to ten minutes (and then everything just pops in suddenly).
This is incredibly annoying and I don’t understand why it is happening.
I think we can conclude this chain causes the bug:
Attempt picking up bundle
(Teleport away, or warp away caused by lag)
When finishing the pick-up animation, if the bundle is no longer in melee range or it has disappeared (ie. you’re no longer to pick it up), you get stuck in a state where you cannot use any skills
For the time being though, CC breaks it too (including the stumble from falling from heights)!
LF3m bearbows , ping cleric gear on join .
Stack=kick
Good dps=kick
Skip= kick
No wipe =kick
Pro = kick
Put this in your Lfg and those elitists will never join again .
Thank you. I’ve had the best laugh of this week.
But I agree with the previous posts, OP: make sure people understand the terms and respond. Especially if you suspect they are not native english speakers – mainly obvious [FR], [DE] and [SP] server and guild tags.
