We can do 5 out of 8 dungeons instantly (really 6 cause I hardly ever see Arah contested), so why should those 2 be special? The process of uncontesting it isn’t rewarding, it’s just an annoying speedbump.
On farming in general, there’s a sweet spot that combines good loot with fun, engaging content. I think Southsun had that going for it, especially before certain aspects of the content were isolated as optimal. As someone who’s actively working on upcoming Living World releases, I’m aiming to find that sweet spot and hit it in a big way.
Yeah, uh, that sweet spot doesn’t really exist at all in this game. I mean, I guess it depends on your definition of “good loot”. If your scale goes from 0 silver earner per hour to 50 silver, then sure, anything that approaches fifty silver/hour looks great because it’s maxing out your scale. But if you’re aware of the maximum gold return farms that exist (just to take an example, 5-6G/HR from CoF/1) then you have to adjust your scale, and the 50 silver doesn’t look so great.
I mean, are you guys even aware of how much people are getting from CoF*? If so, do you find it acceptable? If so, why has every other farm (that didn’t even come close to start with) been closed up by “bug fixes”?
*Note: this might sound like sour grapes, but it’s really not. I farmed my kitten off in CoF to get the gold I needed for my legendary and I’m happy I was able to do it. I don’t run it much anymore because I’m fine with the cash I have on hand and don’t really need much anymore. It would though be nice to bring it in line with other dungeons, though I’d prefer that the others be brought up rather than CoF/1 be brought down. And it would also be nice to have some open world areas to farm for comparable rewards as well.
3 war 1 guard 1 mes. p3 destroyer dies even before shield flickers
Do you even need the guardian for CoE? I feel like that could be speedrun just like CoF with 4W/1M..
Guardian w/hammer is a nice failsafe in PUGs, the constant -33% damage makes hugging alpha easy to the point that I just set the auto attack going then go on to the TP and sell stuff.
I know guardians can carry, which is why I almost exclusively play my guardian on PUGs. I was talking about speedruns through.
Another option would be to give the players an incentive for killing mobs, like stacking magic find and/or gold % each time you kill a mob.
That’s actually not a bad idea, but since MF doesn’t work on chests and you’d have to stack a ridiculous amount to even get a reliable exotic from the bosses I’d rather have it be GF. Also, it would have to be quite a large about of bonus available to make stacking it all up by killing mobs worth doing rather than still just speedrunning it to get it over with and start again.
Awesome I’d much rather have this than a new permanent dungeon or fixed traits and tooltips or PvE class balance or better pet AI or or or.
On the plus side an update this large will probably break quite a few more things with salvaging or profession skills, etc. It’s like an easter egg hunt every patch!
Ah another “People should play the way I want them to play” post complaining about skipping trash mobs. Never gets old.
The same could be said for people that are forcing others to skip content. I paid my money, I’d like to get something out of dungeons other than running. If I wanted to run, I’d go outside.
That’s cool, you can form a group and advertise it as a No-Skip dungeon run. In my groups we skip trash. If you don’t like it, don’t be in my group. Don’t tell me how to play. I missed the part where I literally forced you to join my group and stay in it when you find our playstyle unpalatable.
I’ve had bad experiences with pubs of every class. By your logic, that is why I should kick all classes. I don’t think you intended to use such a fallacious argument, but well, there you go.
You probably missed the statistical portion of my argument, where I said that (anecdotally, I’ll admit) I find it way more likely to see terrible players on Ranger than on any other class. I know Ranger players aren’t the most observant folk, but do try to R>C>P.
Just to add to the point I’m always making of it being way more likely to encounter terrible players on Ranger versus ANY other class, I just did a P1 run for SE and our awesome pug ranger, who was running shortbow/wrongbow (whoever coined that a few days ago, it’s hilarious and I’m stealing it) with bear/lynx, dropped back to 1200 range on Tazza with the longbow and just cycled through auto attack and skill 2. His bear died and retreated to master’s side and he left it there dead for almost the entire fight until I politely mentioned in /p that you can swap your pet out and the other one will join at 100% HP.
But why would you even want to, anyway? What boss encounter would be drastically changed if you could successfully interrupt every 3-4 seconds? I mean why knockdown when the knockdown skills are almost all fairly low damage, other than just for variety’s sake?
If you can just dodge the boss’s significant attacks anyway, I’d rather throw a dodge roll in (or a damage/evade skill) and keep my DPS rotation up. CCs just aren’t necessary for bosses.
another thread created complaining rather then the op taking the time to properly learn the strat, fights not even hard stop asking for nerfs n fix ur builds
In fairness, the ultimate blame lies on Anet for stressing “Play However You Want To Play, Everything is Viable” so much.
Of course, if all you do is use this then you’re leeching off of people who do complete the event chain. So don’t be a mooch, complete the dang event every once in awhile.
That’s one of those places where I’d definitely say it’s unintended and thus wouldn’t crycry if the devs closed the loophole, but I wouldn’t call it an exploit. The 3-in-1 run, now that was an exploit, but utilizing a simple and otherwise encouraged utility skill combination to hop over where the devs placed the scripted trigger event, ehhhhh not really feelin labeling that as a bannable offense.
3 war 1 guard 1 mes. p3 destroyer dies even before shield flickers
Do you even need the guardian for CoE? I feel like that could be speedrun just like CoF with 4W/1M..
It can be done, but the golem gets quite high protection uptime on that setup. Which slows it down a bit. Which is why my group still takes a guardian or we take a necro to compliment the mesmer boon stripping.
Yeah, but you can fight the boss without the turrets being activated. I guess if you were deadset on doing it “legit” the projectile block from SOTA is a good enough reason to bring a guard.
For PVE – Start with 6 Ruby Orbs because they’re a lot better than most rune setups and they’re very cheap. As far as surviving, dodge. If you’re in a team situation like dungeons, it helps to have a high-toughness guardian or warrior nearby to suck up the aggro leaving you free to melee without dipping in and out of combat constantly.
20-25-0-10-15 is the optimal stat setup so you can actually swap out of GS to Axe/Mace when HB and WW are on cooldown. GS has horrible DPS outside of the HB/WW burst combo.
If you feel like you need practice surviving, I’d recommend fighting one of the Champion Giants like Kol or the one in Naegling since they have slow, telegraphed attacks so you can get used to using your Whirlwind and dodges at the right time.
The CCs in this game aren’t designed to be the game-changers they are sometimes in other games, especially since interrupts don’t put the boss’s skill on full CD. So you interrupt them, then what? 2 seconds later they’ll use it again, and everyone can just dodge anyway.
I prefer to take the gate on PUGs because they’re usually way slow. But if I’m not in the gate, I usually pop signet of rage anyway on the brazier, then just circle around the center with axe 2 and auto, popping mace 5 if I need a breather. I think using HB there can be a little risky because if one of the flame legion is behind you they’ll be stacking bleeds without dying from the HB hits.
But yeah as others have said, in a berserker COF group more toughness will make you a target.
Can anyone explain something about the petrification? I was on my guardian when I did it, and popped stability when I was about to be petrified, but sometimes I’d get petrified a few seconds later anyway. I had volunteered to be a spark runner, but her constant petrifying me kittened up the runs until I finally realized someone else should take my place. Is the petrify part of an aggro mechanic that normally will focus on one person, and why couldn’t I avoid it with stability?
Uhh Broadicea, most players take any dungeon run under 1 hour to be a GOOD run. You have to remember that anybody who has come from another MMO expects quite a bit of time spent on a dungeon, since in most MMOs a dungeon run takes about 30 minutes to 2 hours to do, with 30 minutes being at the speed run standard. All the MMOs I played until now had the norm for dungeon runs at an hour and 15 minutes. So to me, ANYTHING under an hour is a good run.
Oh I fully understand why people do, and for the vast, vast majority of players in this game it’s because they have no clue what a well optimized group is even capable of.
Didn’t you just say you thought 30-45 minutes on a single CM path was really fast? lolol
No, I said 30-45 minutes was a good run because the difficulties were minimal. The speed run on my ele had us done with the 1st path in less than 16 minutes. There’s a difference between good and fast. A good run is minimum difficulties, but not very fast. A fast run is almost a perfect run, with minimum difficulties and enemies being curbstomped.
I can walk 26 miles in 9 hours but I wouldn’t call that a “good” marathon time.
And that Broadicea, is why you will never understand why Rangers/Necros/Engineers still bring them to dungeons…because they truly enjoy the class, and don’t care what people think. And those who bring them to dungeons and run with them the entire dungeon really don’t care about doing it as fast as possible. It’s more for enjoyment than efficiency.
Oh I fully understand why people do, and for the vast, vast majority of players in this game it’s because they have no clue what a well optimized group is even capable of. So they think they’re doing just great on R/N/E because they get a participation ribbon from everything, or the few times they actually fail a dungeon they feel like it’s no big deal because it must happen to everyone.
I uploaded a video of myself, a couple guildmates and two pugs running SE Path 3 in about 13 minutes to youtube. I know DnT’s video was quicker, but I enjoyed our run and wanted to show it to my guild with some commentary. The related videos are all showing 25-45 minute runs, and some of those say SPEEDRUN!
This game gives people no feedback on how well you’re doing compared to what your maximum efficiency could be, so people playing those crap classes have no idea. I’d say the proportion of people who bring R/N/E to dungeons because they’re clueless (and thus most likely awful players) versus those who know how much better the tier 1 group is but would rather play the other classes anyway is something like 90-10.
I have a hypothetical question for you…if they changed the meta somehow and made it so guardians/mesmers/warriors were suddenly the low-end classes for the dungeons, would YOU still bring them?
Absolutely not, because I play dungeons with a mind towards efficiency and speed. I have all professions at 80 in full exotics/some ascended, so aside from needing a little bit of practice on the best DPS skill rotations, I’m ready to pick any of them up if the class balance ever changes so that they’re even close to viable for speedclearing*. In fact, I can’t wait for Rangers to be viable cause I love the playstyle and feel of Rangers.
I’m not saying that people who play G/W/M are automatically better players than everyone else, but the point that all of us have been trying to make for months and months is that you don’t have to be a great player to contribute well on one of the tier 1 dungeon classes. And all else being equal, we’d rather have a good class join our group than an objectively subpar class.
*I could do this now with my Thief but I’m honestly just not good enough to play a thief well. Gotta be godkitten twitchy!
lol most rangers are fully unaware of the meta, or 95% of them wouldn’t bother bringing that class to a dungeon. Another reason I hate seeing R/N/E players join my dungeon groups is they’re usually bad players stuck in the “play whatever you want” mindset on top of being on a bad class.
The only metric of success and failure represented in the actual game proper is failing or succeeding to complete the dungeon. That’s the only thing that’s actually sitting in the code on somebody’s computer at Arenanet. The additional measures of success or failure you abide by is purely a social construct. It is not something that is actually sitting in the code on somebody’s computer at Arenanet. These are a system of values you and several other people who share your goals have defined amongst yourselves.
So, you’re correct, I am just saying these classes can go through the content. But I’m also saying that’s all it has to be for some people. There just isn’t any sense of success or failure beyond that, or their sense of success or failure is based in an entirely different system that can’t be measured by factors of time and deeps.
I think you’re absolutely correct here, but I’ll add that this is true to the detriment of the game and the community that plays it. Think about how much more self-evaluation and skill refinement would be going on if there were some sort of leaderboards for dungeon clear times, and you average G/E/R/R/N group was seeing that even on their best run they’re taking 3-4 times as long to complete dungeons as the top groups.
This game gives people no feedback on how well they’re actually doing outside of the binary success/failure metric, and it makes the playerbase horrible. Look at how much trouble people had with Subdirector NULL, for god’s sake.
It’s funny that the changes to AC made it easier for teams who are coordinated and bring high-DPS setups and harder for PUGs who have neither of those. Perhaps they’re trying to send a message…
Offhand axe is worthless because the fury generation is redundant with For Great Justice and Signet of Rage, and the #5 skill is less DPS than autoattacking unless you’re surrounded 360 degrees, which rarely happens. Axe/Axe used to be the popular offhand swap from GS only because there was no cooldown for gain health on crit foods, so you could go from 25% health to 100% in a flash by using Axe 5. Now that the foods have been given an internal cooldown, Axe 5 isn’t nearly as useful. Offhand Mace is a much more useful offhand with extra vulnerability stacking and a CC that increases DPS when used in melee range (it hits twice in melee, once from range) and can be used to strip Defiant.
20-25-0-10-15 with Greatsword and Axe/Mace on swap is the highest DPS setup, period. Drop the offhand Axe.
But you’re proving that point, with speedrunner examples and values.
This simply doesn’t resonate universally.
The only universal truth about the quality of rangers is that they’re the best at being rangers. For literally every other facet of gameplay in PvE, other classes are better.
We did one more run and this time decided to let the ranger do the door this time. This really was his time to shine! 20 seconds later, the ele on one of the circles died. We all left combat and went back in. After another 10 seconds, the ranger killed the door.
My Ranger clears the controller in 2-3s. It’s really not a good benchmark for whether a class is good or not because it cannot be crit, depends more on player skill (lining up your burst, not getting CC’d by the igniter while bursting it, etc), and so forth.
Can you upload a video of that? Not that I doubt you, just that I think it’d be really neat and I’m trying to learn my ranger a bit for the day (probably never coming) that they get a major revamp.
“Critical hits grant might to your pets.” One stack of might for 1 second on a 1 second cooldown. If rangers are “good” then everyone is good, and there’s nothing “bad” at all. You have to have comparison points, and you have to engage the full scale from awful to exceptional, or you wind up with the GW2 community where everyone is happy with their participation ribbon and the average skill level never makes it out of the basement.
One time pugging on SE Path 3 I swapped off my guardian when the destroyer was under 10% and I came back to a wiped team. I told them I was gonna do it beforehand, too. I wish someone had video, I would have loved to see what actually happened.
But yeah the big thing is to just ask when the dungeon starts and make sure everyone’s ok with it. I only mind on CoF runs since I’m trying to squeeze seconds out of every fight.
Well you’re saying that rangers are useless in dungeons, even though they have AoEs in the way of traps and healing spring. By that logic, then aren’t elementalists themselves useless in dungeons?
Those trap AoEs and healing spring are useless compared to the damage output from warriors. A car going 10 miles an hour is moving faster than one standing still, but you wouldn’t call 10 mph “fast” compared to the top speed of an F1 car.
war banner can only be dropped at slave drive and the final boss if you do 8 minute runs (4 minute cooldown on skill). is 4xFGJ (12 might) *2 (signet of inspiration)=24 + your first crit = 25 not good enough?
Sorry about that, you’re right. Been in too many slow PUGs lately. ^^
Last few weeks I was seeing more and more warriors bring GS and Longbow. Maybe they’re finally accepting as a group that GS to burst then Axe/Mace is the best way to go.
This is because F1 longbow creates fire field for banners to give area might. Only 1 warrior should carry longbow.
Not needed. 4 For Great Justices and a warbanner, mesmer pops signet, everyone is at 25 stacks and fury for the duration of the slave driver with time warp or not. Same should go for the effigy. You’re just wasting adrenaline on the F1 skill (and thus DPS because of the 2 traits) unless you pop surge, but then you have your heal on cooldown when you could need it. I’d rather someone stop DPSing because they’re using a heal than stop because they’re downed.
Also, I wouldn’t even really care if they equipped longbow from the bag to drop F1, then put it back for the proper weapons, but I’m seeing people have longbow on swap.
unfortunately yes the good rangers are few in number, but im glad i know what im doing with this class for once haha, but yes a good ranger can dodge like crazy and hit like a machine, using piercing arrows you hit through enemies a lot, for dodges use sb skill 3 normal dodges then lightning reflexes, then it regens so you can dodge again then sb is active again, rinse lather repeat, take almost no damage!
Hmm I notice a conspicuous absence of numbers from this post. Also, quite the emphasis on dodging. That probably comes in handy on all those bosses that you can dodge roll to death.
PUG warriors almost refuse to use their godkitten rush moves, and I beat them to the acolytes by like 5-6 seconds every time.
Yes, that sure is unfortunate.
That’s just one of many places you can shave time. It doesn’t matter there as much because only one person needs to get there quickly, but those same players that don’t know how to use their rush moves also don’t know how to shave seconds in all the other places in the run. Every little bit adds more time. There’s always downtime in PUGs with people leaving, entrance being contested, etc. Shaving that time when you can ensures you get as much out of your consumables as possible.
And really, why be content just going fast when it’s extremely easy to go as fast as possible?
Just to any PUGs who might be reading, take a spare warhorn and sword in your bag and swap to them for the run sections in COF. When you run up the bridge after the slave driver, pop warhorn for swiftness when the gate opens, use Sword 2 to leap, swap to GS for whirlwind, then GS5 plus an evade to rush through the first set of enemies if they’re activated already. Evade the turret fireballs then use Sword 2 again to land on the other side of the fanatics. And for god’s sake, don’t hit anything.
PUG warriors almost refuse to use their godkitten rush moves, and I beat them to the acolytes by like 5-6 seconds every time. Annoying.
Oh, another problem though is that most of them are still using Axe OFFHAND as well. I try to tell them “hey axe 5 is lower DPS than autoattacking, just FYI”. But they just. keep. on. using it. /headslamintodesk
