It doesn’t correlate with hours played. I almost only do dungeons. I run, breath, live in dungeons. My achiev score hasn’t moved from 4K+ for months. It only started to get close to 5K+ because I’m finally bothering doing the extremely boring and dumb map completion because I finally made the decision to build a legend.
The only thing 5K+ shows is that you love the crappy content in this game enough to have ran it as much as you did dungeons or PVP.
I know not all hours played are equal in terms of granting skill and experience. But I’d be willing to bet that /age and achievements have a (Pearson) correlation coefficient of at least .5 and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it much higher. Got a weekend coming up, maybe a quick survey is in order.
I’d say you need to revise all of your numbers up by 1500 or so. Especially with all of the easy cheesy living story garbage out lately, achievements have been flying around.
You really don’t see rock-solid players until over 5000.
Because all competent players have high Achievement points?
I know I don’t give a crap about achievement points… I’ve got like 4.2k points.
Judging people by achievements is a terrible standard.
Why does everyone take such offense to the idea that it gives you a rough idea of how well a player might do? It correlates roughly with hours played, and people use that as a yardstick all the time…
I played ranger for ages. 600+ hours. It was the most depressing class I have ever played in a dungeon. As fun as it is, you work 10x harder to pump out subpar dps and crappy group utility. Pls don’t say I’m a bad player though, I realized it for what it was. It’s the people who stay on their rangers, and lie to themselves about their effectiveness that I would bring into question.
That’s exactly it, I mean I have one of every class at 80 so it’s not like I haven’t tried them. I don’t blame anyone else either for trying out a ranger or necro or whatever in dungeons. But when you stick with that class after several hundred hours and several thousand achievements, you’re either completely unaware of how kittenty and awful your class is in a dungeon group or you just like being carried. Either way, I don’t want that person on my team!
Also I agree with you that playing ranger is fun. I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s just something that’s really neat and fun about the core gameplay of the class. But until they receive a massive overhaul I won’t bother using mine outside of the occasional open world MF farming.
And misuse of the terms ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’ are also the mark of an ignorant player.
Rangers can output quite high dps, as can most classes. They can’t match a full glass cannon warrior—no-one can do that other than by using projectile reflects—but they can still provide a very appreciable amount of damage while remaining safer at a large range than warriors can do.
Sorry to hurt your ranger feewings, but me making a typo doesn’t change how badly they suck compared to real DPS classes. And again, my scientifically accurate assessment is that the ranger class attracts the worst players in the game, period.
…
You really don’t see rock-solid players until over 5000.
You will never be invited to my party again until I get to 5K achievement.
I was around 4K for 2 mos and just got to 4.8K lately because I have to run w/ my relatives who are new to the game so I ran alot of wrongbow events and exploring maps w/ them. And I really don’t know how that improves my skill.
Oh you know you’re an exception! Yeah, it’s not a completely useful guide, but if I see a thief with 5K points join my dungeon party I don’t automatically cringe the same way I do for a thief with 2K.
Just curiously, based on achievement points, what do you consider new vs vet?
0-1000 is new. I wouldn’t do any fractals or arah with these types. Most people in this range are on their first char, will have substandard gear unless they have outside help. They will most likely not have experience with most dungeon runs.
1000-2000 is moderately new. Most likely have gone through story mode once, probably not fully geared and moderately knowledgeable about some of the dungeons. If they listen to feedback can get through any dungeon without much trouble. Probably not high fractals since they probably won’t have enough agony resist.
2000+ is experienced. Probably ran most of the exp dungeons a few times, fairly experienced. Should have at least full exotics on one of their chars at this point. As long as they listen to feedback on encounters they haven’t done any dungeons can be done easily.
4000+ is vet. Probably ran all dungeons and maybe even have world completion. I very rarely see any bad players in this group. Everything these people do is like clockwork, they rarely if ever need to be told what to do since they already know what to do.
The above is my estimation of how people are according to their achievement points.
I’d say you need to revise all of your numbers up by 1500 or so. Especially with all of the easy cheesy living story garbage out lately, achievements have been flying around.
You really don’t see rock-solid players until over 5000.
Your group should be grouping up mobs and cleaving them. Rangers have single target dps which adds little value in that scenario which consists of half or more of a dungeon.
Thats so wrong…
Piercing shots trait is the most important ranger trait, bar none.
also longbow 5, greatsword 1 2 3.
I wont comment on other ranger weapons because I havent used them in a long time.
My ranger does excellent aoe damage. I prefer when mobs get clumped up. All those numbers from a quickening zephyr + rapid fire through a crowd… so nice.
“My ranger does excellent damage” is the mark of an ignorant player who has no idea what numbers real DPS classes are capable of. You can tell by the lack of qualitative data, and the over-reliance on feels for the measure of damage output.
It’s not mandatory if you don’t care about being completely sub-optimal.
Someone in the dungeon forum put it well, playing an average Knight’s/PTV warrior compared to playing a full zerk well isn’t even comparable. It’s like a totally different class.
Making this thread wise fwom it’s gwave so I can vent about the Ranger who was just in my 38 fractal who:
-was running shortbow/wrongbow with drake/lynx
-didn’t know you had to stay in shadow refuge until the duration is over
-was constantly downed
-didn’t understand that the NPCs in Ascalon needed to be pulled up so they engage the groups we pull
-left their pet dead almost the entire time
-let their pet run up and aggro dredge on the wrong side of the clown car instead of having them be pulled back behind it
-was constantly downed
-couldn’t make jumps on the Maw
-got hit by almost every tentacle attack and laser beam
-was constantly downed
After 3 minutes it was apparent they were total kitten, but before voting to kick I asked who created the fractal. It was the ranger. :/
Rangers are the worst players in the game, bar none.
P.S. Of course the ranger got a fractal weapon skin from the chest. No one else did.
Warriors are not the strongest class by far for applying Vuln and while it’s certainly nice to have (particularly since you can’t always rely on a team comp when PUGing) it’s not the be-all end-all. I can put out an instant 25 Vuln on my Mes every half minute and keep it at around ~15 just on my own while waiting for the main cooldown.
While those other classes are maximizing their application of vulnerability they’re doing less than half of a good warrior’s DPS. And at the same time, the warrior is achieving, what, 50 or 60 percent of the vulnerability while maximizing damage.
Folks still don’t understand, warriors are about the total package. Personal DPS, group damage buffs, and vulnerability application. Other classes can do some lackluster combination of those things. Warriors can maximize one category and do the other two comparably as well as anyone else.
Not that this will ever be addressed by devs because they don’t care about dungeons, but my question is whether this was an unintentional side effect of some other tweak or was in an intentional (and undocumented) change to the spiders in the TA room specifically.
And they wonder why more astute players and readers of the forums don’t trust them.
I prefer dungeon running as my end-game, and if they actually gave good loot I’d feel an actual reason to log on and do some every day. Sorry to burst some bubbles, but the temporary babby content is really disappointing. Presently I’m only still playing because I have nothing better to play. As soon as that changes, ciao baby.
What is this fabled MMO that didn’t feature LoS pulling and spiking with AoE damage as the quickest and easiest way to clear mobs? I haven’t played them all, but I’ve played a lot of them, and it’s pretty much how it’s done in everything I’ve ever played.
Swear I’ve spent like 5-10 minutes just waiting for him to stop pacing back and forth.
I’d like to introduce you to Agent Spire…
I feel like after the SS update, they gave her a lobotomy or something. She was pants-on-head-kittened from the start of the game, but it’s like they started hitting her AI with a bat, just to make sure she will never graduate from kindergarten…
I just did a full CoE run last night and I swear you’re right, it feels like she’s even slower now.
Well no one cares about how fast you can do your whole setup for a single run of path 1. Like Bright said, the point is farming it for an hour or more, so how fast your team is at getting to Ferrah and having the gate open is integral. I’d say at the very least the standard should start at the first gate opening, but even better I’d say it should go from Point X in run 1 to Point X in run 2. Preferably after the slave driver so discrepancies from having/not having TW get smoothed out.
p2 can be done in <20mins if you know it really, really well and you run with a group of people that does so as well…
Unfortunately, no one does SE p2, so no one cares about it. But yeah, with a decent group of individuals, that path shouldn’t take longer than 25-30mins.
The thing that always kittens up my p2 time is the NPC getting bugged all to kitten after you kill the 4 bosses. Swear I’ve spent like 5-10 minutes just waiting for him to stop pacing back and forth.
P1 is under 10 minutes in a barely competent group, and down on like 6-7 minutes in an organized speedclear. P2 is pretty long even with a speedclear group, maybe 25-35 minutes? Last time I went in with a PUG I think it took us about 40. P3 is like 15-20 in an average PUG but speed groups should be able to do it in 10-12.
A lot of that is organization, but a lot of it is also group composition and gear/builds/classes.
Not when you have FGJ and Signet of Rage up all the time anyway. Fury from Axe 4 is totally redundant and would give you a net drop in DPS compared to having offhand mace and including Mace 4 (vulnerability) in your rotation while GS attacks are on cooldown.
That’s the thing about RNG. It’s random. You might get 100 skins a row, or like me, not have any skin at lvl 48 for 19 times in a row. I did get a ring last night, woohoo -_-
Anyway, it’s random, so it might feel like an increase, but it’s just chance.
While I agree with you in spirit that there probably hasn’t been a change in the fractal weapon rate (though I can’t say personally because I don’t do a lot of 48 runs), just because it’s “random” doesn’t mean it’s not constrained within a specified rate. A clean six-sided die gives you a random result on each roll, but it’s still a dependable 1/6 rate for any given number. In this game, that rate can be changed behind the scenes which will affect your results.
TL:DR “Random” doesn’t mean “it could be anything and there’s no way to estimate”.
30-25-0-0-15 if you have 3 buffs or less. 20-25-0-10-15 if you have 4+ buffs.
this agreed ^. since 4war/1mes teams have fury/might basically only, i run the power build.
tinyurl.com/dpsgw2
notice the boons
for 4 war/1 mes (cof p1/coe) i had 30/25/0/0/15
Unless you run 5 wars or w/ a class doesn’t provide boon’ support, how could you get less than 4 boons w/a mesmer?
Edited: I use excel to confirm Puandro numbers. The difference of power base (60s duration using SoR, 3 boons by war) between 30/25/0/0/15 & 20/25/10/15 is 1485.6, adv to 30s build .A total of 1% better for the entire of 60s duration. If 4 boons are provided, 19.2 adv for 20s build. Unless my math is wrong, it’s not worth it to go 30/25/0/0/15 for the difference is so minuscule. If any class can provide 1 more boon outside of the warrior’s 3s, 30/25/0/0/15 is not an efficient built.
Your math seems to be correct, either way the 20/25/0/10/15 build is universal to all dungeons and not just cof P1 farming noobs that believe they are dungeon masters since they ran every other dungeon 1 time.
Actually, having a zerker guardian isn’t that bad in cof P1 as long as they run the correct build etc, and if the 3 warriors are running the more efficient boon build they will have way more than 4 boons, thus having much more damage than the 30str build.
Though 4 warriors are an easier way to fill the group, it can be a viable option. But again that’s only if you don’t have ignorance filling the rest of the group.
Off topic, but do you have a link or quick guide to the accepted zerker guardian build? I’d like to grab a second set of armor and try that out.
The deal with CoF farming community is that there are people who are content just getting it done, people who like to get it done quickly, and then people who want to get it done quick as humanly possible. And every group hates the other two.
And every month that goes by without something being communicated on the dungeon front it’s just a worse and worse feeling if you’re not totally gung-ho about the casual fluff and gem store RNG parties. That Snowcrash dev says “they will be continuing to work on them”, yet here we are in June with the Dragon Bash (ugh) event and data miners picking up info on the future release which will be more gem store garbage for late June/early July.
How long can we go without something concrete happening to dungeons and fractals? Without us even being told that something is actively being worked on?
At this point I’d be willing to bet large real money amounts on nothing in 2013.
I PUG SE, TA and COE occasionally and I’d be a rich man if anyone ever took my bets on whether or not guardians we pick up do any party condition removal or utility at all. I think a majority of players can play an acceptable warrior. It’s a minority that understands how to play a decent guardian. I pretty much won’t play my warrior or mesmer at all unless there’s a proven guardian in the party, cause typically they’re just random-kitten builds with no focus on group utility whatsoever.
But yeah, honestly, don’t listen to anyone except 20-25-0-10-15 folks. Going otherwise in the first line can be marginally more useful for CoF farming, but why bother.
Can you (or Dub, haviz, whoeva) explain a bit on the best way to get to Lupi for a solo practice setup? Obal mentioned just having a guardian help you get to him on p2, but I personally haven’t seen it done and would like to start practicing this on my warrior.
The work→reward mechanic is a core function of MMOs and pretty much all video games since like, forever. It’s why there’s celebration music when Mario touches the flag. If the game just went to black and immediately started the next level, those reward centers in your brain wouldn’t light up and the work you put in during the level wouldn’t feel like it was paying off.
I mean, what if a particularly grueling round of Mario Party ended with a screen that said “ALL PLAYERS WIN!” It wouldn’t be very appealing. This kind of new agey nonsense about the pleasure being in the journey and not the destination is acting like one of the foundations of MMO design doesn’t exist. It’s marginally fun and entertaining to kill a group of monsters and see your xp bar tick upwards one tiny notch. It’s a lot more fun when you kill the last one you need and the huge flash of light goes off and you knock everything back and LEVEL UP! appears on your screen. Reward is integral to the process.
That’s…really not that fast, and you have a lot of problems with your setup. There’s no point in pinging gear or having 4 warriors in that run because a rando group of classes and build could do it just as fast.
Yeah I mean the point of this would be how to elevate the game of most PUGs, so if we were going to teach them a way to do things, we should teach them the best way. If you don’t understand what we mean by “best way”, then congrats! This guide is for you!
Do you folks realize that if they’d throw us a single new permanent dungeon on par with the other 8 in the first 12 months of the game how happy the more “hardcore” crowd would be? But no, we get Molten Facility, an interesting albeit cakewalk dungeon that only has one path and was temporary. We get Canach’s Lair, which can only be called a dungeon if you’re having a laugh. And even then…temporary.
I’d be ecstatic with a new dungeon that I can throw in the rotation with all the others. Or even just new fractals, which you think would be a no brainer every couple months, considering how small and simple they should be. Or hell, even just fixing the dungeons and fractals that are already in the kitten game.
But we don’t get that. We get Quaggan backpacks. And dragon fireworks. And How To Dance, Volume 1.
I’d rather have an option for something like 5 custom profile sets. You could equip all your zerker gear, save it to profile 1. Equip all your WvW gear, save it to profile 2. Equip whatever mix or naked and save it to profile 3 and so on. Then changing to your desired set is just the click of a button.
I’d also like to see this for traits and skills, and be able to name them. Tis but a dream…
It’d be really cool if you could press a button to link the entire set up in chat for people to mouseover and see. Could you imagine a game doing that? I wonder what that game might look like…
Pretty funny post honestly, Little bit of boasting and flexing… haha. As long as it makes you feel like a boss though.
On point though, post this answer in many threads but this game does seem to be trending towards casual, giddy content that is more for the family, than the “core” gamer. Maybe soon, this game can be a personalized version of Sims. Cosmetics, homes, susie homemaker.
How do you define casual content? What do you consider a challenge?
I agree that much of the living story has been “meh” at best, although the dungeon at the end of flame and frost was cool.
My personal view is that ANet is trying to mix it up. You get some challenging content such as the Halloween jumping puzzles. You get dungeons like the flame and frost thing and the super adventure dohicky. They also throw in a lot of diversion stuff like crab toss.
The idea is to make the game generally entertaining.
Only in Guild Wars 2 have I ever seen a call for more challenging PvE content met with “well you got a hard jumping puzzle for a month” as a serious response.
I agree with the OP. For players like him, there’s not enough challenging content. As a result of that, he should go find a game with more challenging content. Guild Wars 2 has no sub and if something really challenging comes out, he can come back, finish it in 5.2 minutes, and be on his merry way again.
Some people CRAVE challenge in a game. Some people have enough challenge in life and crave different things in games. Watching this game develop, I was sure it was targeted at a more casual audience, and that’s fine by me.
I do hope, OP, that you find a game that’s more challenging to you. My son, however, played Neverwinter for a couple of weeks and he’s already done with it. And he plays much like you do.
I think for me, it’s not so much the lack of new (or any?) challenges in this game, it’s that there’s no reward matching the challenges that already exist. I can’t even be bothered to do the practice and work necessary to get up to fractal 48, because the reward is so low compared to just logging in and completing whatever boring achievements are in new in the temporary content, then walking around and doing daily bosses. As far as dungeons I’m still working on getting to what I feel is a “master” level on all paths, but the only reward for reaching that level of competency and skill is a self-generated one. The PvE game simply doesn’t reward you for being good.
If this is a thread explaining why you are moving on, I wish you well in whatever comes next. If, on the other hand, you are fishing for more challenges to keep you interested, I suggest you try using one or more of the classes on the other side of the power curve.
You do realize how sad it is to say “well I know the game gives you zero reward for completely obliterating all of its difficult content when you optimize yourself and your team for it, but maybe you should try doing it with one hand tied behind your back?”
I mean, the game is in big trouble if we have to start imposing handicaps on ourselves to create artificial difficulty. Doubly so if the handicap is as simple as playing a trash-tier class.
Saw thread title, said “AW HELL NO” and rolled up my sleeves. Then I saw the thread poster and knew what it would be saying.
Yup, 100% correct. The game offers no reward for being good at it. The only thing keeping me in is that I have nothing better to play and I’m keeping myself entertained with projects to help other players be good at the game.
Nothing wrong with guardians using scepter/focus and staff as their sets, its safer than melee, provides good group support and with the right build hits hard.
Be careful not to assume that your playstyle is the right way or the only way.
This is to train newer players to not be such kitten so that overall PUG quality improves. A Guardian that stays at range is a worthless teammate. Staff can be nice in the swap slot as well as S/F, but they should never be the primary weapon (with maybe like, 3 exceptions in the entire game).
Everyone else: Great suggestions so far! Swiftpaw, I usually tell people the exact same thing, that if you rely on the training wheels of PVT armor it will make you a bad player, in that you’ll feel comfortable standing still and tanking everything an enemy has to give. Then if you do switch to Knight’s/Zerk, you’ll find yourself taking much more punishment than you should. Not to mention some attacks and AoEs should be avoided regardless even if they don’t hurt, such as the graveling champ in AC that gains evasion when he burrows.
Advert, excellent list. Reflections should probably be covered in their own topic since they’re so important and a large reason why the Tier 1 trinity actually exists.
-for a guy in my party during a CoF run (The Hunter from the CoF/1 acolyte chest)
-for a guildmate in Southsun Cove (The Hunter from an instigator chest)
-for a guildmate from the Mystic Forge (Howl on the 5th try)
-for my SO from the Mystic Forge (Howl on the 3rd try. Oh and she got Dawn from the finale event back in Lost Shores)
Now, I do have my Twilight so I can’t complain too much, but I only got it because I was able to grind the everloving kitten out of CoF/1 and buy Dusk straight up. So as far as running more challenging content, the game isn’t really giving me any incentive.
Hey folks, I was chatting with some friends in game and the idea came up to make a text or video guide to introduce newer players to the tactics and strategies that are used for optimizing dungeon runs. I’m talking starting from the most basic of the basics here, things like general combat positioning and dodging, LoS pulls, and so forth, into more advanced topics like maximizing damage through trait synergies, skill rotations, and team composition.
Think of it as a primer to get people up to speed so they can better understand the things that are going on if they were to watch dungeon speedrun videos. I’m only in the rough outline stages at this point, so I thought I’d solicit the forum for ideas on what topics would be best to cover in addition to the examples I mentioned above. All comments and ideas welcome!
I rolled all 8 classes at launch and had them all sitting between 5-30 (ranger being one of the highest) before I settled on getting my guardian up first. Mesmer followed, with Thief and Warrior right behind. Doing the last 4 classes up to 80 was painful as kitten because I knew that I’d never play them. I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed elementalist, but the party utility just isn’t there so I don’t bother. I can’t imagine I’d have stayed with the game if I ran the trash tier classes up to 80 first and tried to get into dungeons.
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