Guild Wars 2

Mazreal Blackknight.1564:

I keep reading this, expression I guess to call it. People keep saying that GW2 is not alt friendly? How can that be? If the game was friendly for your “main” how is it not for an alt?!? Call me a noob, idiot what ever. Just someone explain this to me. I have 14 characters…. The game is just fun on each of my 13 “alts” as it was on my first character.

Maybe I don’t know what Alts are. I’m gonna go with that….

I don’t know how well your main and alts are, but try gearing all of them in Ascended gear – trinkets, rings, amulets, armor, weapons.

For me, it’s not even the cost of mats. Yes, it’s expensive, but I make enough gold doing dungeons so it evens out. My main bottle neck is 1) having to level up EVERY crafting profession if you have light, medium and heavy alts and 2) dragonite. I kittening hate farming dragonite. I hate open world events with a passion, and I hate that being forced to do this so much so that I stopped playing my alts altogether.

J Eberle.9312:

I hope this guild is formed and that they record/stream all their runs.

I would definitely be entertained by this.

Paul.4081:

Think like Anet, “How can we make money”

You show them a way to milk players, you’ll get your capes

Exactly. Best way to have phrased it would have been, “ANET, I’ll buy($) capes if you up them on the gem store!” rather than simply asking for capes.

Just like how those of us in the Dungeon Forums should be saying, “we’ll buy($) Hard Mode if you release it as an Expansion Pack!”

Edit: Seriously, though, I’d buy HM and additional Hrouda-style dungeon paths in an expansion pack. Just no more Aetherpaths.

Anet has demonstrated that they can, indeed, design interesting mechanics if they tried. However, I feel that not every raid has to be open world. In fact, please give us some instanced raids balanced for 20-30 players, so single guilds can just go at them and do world record runs on.

LittleLepton.8915:

Purple Miku.7032:

Pretty pathetic that they must’ve downsized to the point of having hardly anybody doing anything other than recycled LS content.

Sigh. I wish they’d hire more staff then.

It’s not actually that they downsized, it’s actually worse than that.

They actively disbanded the dungeon team and placed them on the living story team.

They abandoned the dungeons of the game.

#RIPInPeaceRobertHrouda

To be fair, it was mentioned that we’d see changes or addition to dungeons should they coincide with the LS. So yeah, we can all cheerfully wait for more Aetherpaths!

a t s e.9614:

Berserker was my first lvl 80 exotic set and I found it rather effective and easy since there are so many ways to avoid damage , that was my point
There is nothing skillful about using the highest DPS gear while avoiding 90% of the damage.

Now you reasoned out for yourself the point that everyone you’re arguing against has been making. When it’s so easy to avoid the mechanics when you know the dungeon encounters, why would anyone want to or need to kitten themselves by gearing up for more Vitality or Toughness at the expense of DPS? It simply isn’t necessary and a downright waste of time.

Purposely prolonging the fights by equipping PVT gear is a waste of time and akin to artificially inflating the difficulty by gimping yourself through self-imposed gambits such as fighting naked, with the lowest DPS weapon, or blindfolded, etc.

A year ago, I was very surprised that not every open world zone had a day/night cycle or weather. Seems like they just didn’t have time to implement it everywhere. In a perfect world, I’d love weather and day/night cycles from “The Witcher” series. When it randomly rains, NPCs (all of them, including vendors, quest givers, and random wanderers) will run to find shelter, then return to their spots when the rain ends. This made the zones feel so much more alive and organic.

WTB a “Robert Hrouda: Never Forget” one.

Urque.6837:

My cleric guardian doesnt do much dps at all but I keep my party alive. There is more to the game than DPS, to say otherwise is ignorant.

The rest of us are talking about Guild Wars 2, what game are you talking about? This isn’t how we necessarily wanted it to be, but when ANET abolished what they considered the “holy trinity”, they designed the current classes to all be self-sustaining and generally survivable in any encounter. Nobody needs a cleric guardian to keep them alive, unless you’re accustomed to playing with very bad players who refuse to dodge out of red circles or evade obvious boss mechanisms.

It’s been demonstrated through countless video evidence that a party full of pure DPS builds with pure DPS gear (read: berserker) will out-perform anything else. Just look up the good meta builds and watch some speed runs of skilled players can accomplish. Insisting otherwise is tantamount to just admitting that you and your teammates are so bad that you need every crutch you can get to plod through content.

For what it’s worth, I’d love for ANET to note how the developers at SOE designed dungeons in Everquest 2 and incorporate the use of neglected aspects of the game such as proper crowdcontrol and positioning. However, until this happens, most of this game is currently designed around just DPSing down the mobs as quickly as possible.

Given the history of “updates” to Fractals, I don’t think it would be unreasonable for us to be afraid that whoever is in charge of Fractals is reading this thread and nodding his head in agreement to all of these points.

For anyone interested solely in Rewards vs. Time for the Effort, there really is no reason to do Fractals over dungeons. After a 49, I come out with about 2g, which is about what you’d get for running one dungeon path.

Clearly OP is from the future where they have servers that can handle the load of hundreds of thousands of concurrent players.

This has been said ad nauseum, but people just don’t seem to get it:

If you wish to run low-level characters and/or non-meta builds, no one is forcing you to join zerker-only speed run groups or path selling groups. Make your own group detailing that all levels/classes/builds are welcome. The end.

ConntectToReality.5926:

This may be a troll thread, but doesn’t the fact that things like “optimal build” and “substandard build” point out a very deep flaw in game design? I mean, shouldn’t GW2 have a greater build diversity instead of everyone sort of settling on one build per class? Why can’t we have a condition built warrior that deals devastating stacks of bleeding?

That being said, I usually use a greatsword on my gaurdian. I use scepter/torch when I need ranged dps, but usually use a staff for speed boosts and buffs.

By definition, being “optimal” means that it is the best build out of all the other potentially viable builds. When taken in general, this game has more “viable” builds than most other RPGs that I’ve played. Just because one build is optimal, does not mean that every other build will not work. This is why we see things like shout heal warriors and minion masters running around.

This brings us to the next point about why you would wish to settle for anything other than optimal. Does it not churn your soul knowing that you could potentially be so much more useful or powerful with a simple change of your traits or gear? Why would anyone be content being inferior?

Then, on the flip side of the coin, to address your other statement about having a number of equal builds, wouldn’t that make you just “average”? If your build was just as good as 7 other builds, you’re just the same as everyone else. A game like this gives you only the illusion of choice when any trait or stat selection you make results in the same outcome as all the other possibilities.

LittleLepton.8915:

Vatlaaw Fierceshot.5713:

What’s wrong with people wanting to run Cleric’s or Sentinel’s? Can they not “F*** s*** up” with said gear?

Short answer: no.

Long answer: noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

+1 for the Ele if you’re going to be doing a lot of pugging.

In my experience, pugs are finally utilizing the awesomeness of the FGS and will welcome most Eles. However, Rangers still have a stigma about being all bowbears and will generally get kicked before they can say they’re not bowbears.

tl;dr they can both be useful classes depending on the build, but go with Ele if you want an easy time pugging.

Why does this even need a PSA? While I agree that everybody could also be a little nicer to each other in general, who are you to force people to group together?

Certain playstyles just do not mesh well, so just let everybody find others with similar playstyles, rather than forcing the lowbies and newbies onto the speedrun groups. By doing so, nobody is going to have a good time. kitten ing both groups of people off is not a good way to expand the dungeon community, if that’s what you’re going for.

Don’t know how often you ran fractals before your break, but if you were pretty comfortable with doing the old daily 48s, just level up doing only 49s. Skip everything else. Just some friendly advice.

I think very few people argued that AC can be done with only 80s. Like others have mentioned, most prefer 80 because why would you settle to take unknown lowbies and most likely have to carry them, when you can just take fully geared 80s?

It’s the difference between a 10min AC run with no deaths/wipes versus 30+ mins of wipes and ressing. Play how you want and all that, but the first option sounds more appealing to me.
EDIT: Looking at your screen shots, the first one was at 4:36am and you killed the boss at 5:19am. In the time it took you guys to do 1 (one!) path, a group of fully geared 80s could have run 2-3 dungeons in their entirely (read: all the paths) with no wipes.

ellesee.8297:

and if they were random what’s to stop them from rolling for instabilities?

Too much work to roll for both swamp AND a good mistlock. Or they could just give us a different random mistlock for each fractal shard.

khani.4786:

I love having different situations to work through and hope that at least one of the levels is a random instability rather than X Level is X instability.

Should have been random from the beginning, with higher levels having a larger list of mistlocks to use, and maybe even multiple random mistlocks at even higher levels.

Didn’t Anet realize everybody would just naturally skip the harder or more annoying levels with preset mistlocks?

Master of Timespace.2548:

Darthaemos.6370:

Master of Timespace.2548:

Darthaemos.6370:

Paponzi.1637:

Darthaemos.6370:

Paponzi.1637:

rozcinana.7249:

wait… what’s wrong with stacking?

It trivializes combat, for example

Have you considered not stacking then?

Rather than remove the option to stack, how about you exercise your option to not stack?

Feel free to run around in circles around mobs and spam whatever range weapon you prefer. Just make sure to do it either when solo, or in groups specifically advertised for it:

“LFM AC Path 1. NO STACKING! Have at least 1 hour!”

Let me guess: LF3M ONLY WAR ZERK NO NOOBS is a good thing for the game.

Not really. If you’ve seen any of my guild’s dungeon run videos, you’ll see that we’ve moved past the 1mes/4war comps long ago.

Why though, when all you need to do is stack 4 warriors? Ironically ""LFM AC Path 1. NO STACKING! Have at least 1 hour!"" applies to this as well :P

Because it’s about choosing the option that is most optimal. Depending on the dungeon/path/fractal, we’ll always switch around our various alts as needed to make the run faster and easier.

Most optimal on what measure? If I can watch emmerdale while zooming through content, well I don’t think things can be more optimal than that. Perhaps there is a way to make the dungeon a few minutes faster by using some other comb. But that’s not worth it if it takes more effort.

See that’s the beauty of it, and this is my interpretation of the meaning behind “play how you want”.

I and my like-minded guildies can do our daily dungeon speed clears with respect to the least amount of deaths, downtime and overall time to make the most gold per hour, all the while having fun (yes, this is fun of some of us). On the other hand, you and your like-minded friends can also clear content at your own pace, while multi-tasking activities outside of the game. I can understand that this is fun and relaxing for you guys. Either way, both of our groups have fun in our own way.

What really gets my goat is when people from either style of play joins a group comprising of the other and then refuses to leave or adapt, while touting “i play how i want”.

edit: accidentally some words

Master of Timespace.2548:

Darthaemos.6370:

Paponzi.1637:

Darthaemos.6370:

Paponzi.1637:

rozcinana.7249:

wait… what’s wrong with stacking?

It trivializes combat, for example

Have you considered not stacking then?

Rather than remove the option to stack, how about you exercise your option to not stack?

Feel free to run around in circles around mobs and spam whatever range weapon you prefer. Just make sure to do it either when solo, or in groups specifically advertised for it:

“LFM AC Path 1. NO STACKING! Have at least 1 hour!”

Let me guess: LF3M ONLY WAR ZERK NO NOOBS is a good thing for the game.

Not really. If you’ve seen any of my guild’s dungeon run videos, you’ll see that we’ve moved past the 1mes/4war comps long ago.

Why though, when all you need to do is stack 4 warriors? Ironically ""LFM AC Path 1. NO STACKING! Have at least 1 hour!"" applies to this as well :P

Because it’s about choosing the option that is most optimal. Depending on the dungeon/path/fractal, we’ll always switch around our various alts as needed to make the run faster and easier.

Paponzi.1637:

Darthaemos.6370:

Paponzi.1637:

rozcinana.7249:

wait… what’s wrong with stacking?

It trivializes combat, for example

Have you considered not stacking then?

Rather than remove the option to stack, how about you exercise your option to not stack?

Feel free to run around in circles around mobs and spam whatever range weapon you prefer. Just make sure to do it either when solo, or in groups specifically advertised for it:

“LFM AC Path 1. NO STACKING! Have at least 1 hour!”

Let me guess: LF3M ONLY WAR ZERK NO NOOBS is a good thing for the game.

Not really. If you’ve seen any of my guild’s dungeon run videos, you’ll see that we’ve moved past the 1mes/4war comps long ago.

Paponzi.1637:

rozcinana.7249:

wait… what’s wrong with stacking?

It trivializes combat, for example

Have you considered not stacking then?

Rather than remove the option to stack, how about you exercise your option to not stack?

Feel free to run around in circles around mobs and spam whatever range weapon you prefer. Just make sure to do it either when solo, or in groups specifically advertised for it:

“LFM AC Path 1. NO STACKING! Have at least 1 hour!”

(Yes, if you can’t tell yet, I’m very bored)

Is this what endgame has come to?

They’re just terribad players. At this point, you either keep them around for some amusement and/or daily reviver achievement, or just boot them. You should already know what kind of skill quality to expect from the type of armor they wear, so if you’re surprised that they suck, it’s kinda your fault.

Since launch, I’ve spent around $50 in gems.

When I first started playing, I had wanted to spend much more on gems. I had considered spending at least $15 a month on gems to support ANET, as if this game was sub-based. However, I have not received any updates or content that are geared for me and my style of play. I really enjoy dungeons and fractals and we have never, in my opinion, received any positive updates in either category. Instead, we have gotten that terrible TA aetherblades path, and FOTM got royally screwed over by what I imagine to be a team with no dungeon experience.

Hence, I have been forced to no longer support ANET and their Living Story updates. I, like everybody else, vote with my wallet and until I get well designed dungeon and fractals content, I will not be buying any gems.

Every one who says that beginners and lower level players can’t handle a challenge are merely patronizing and looking down on them. Just because they are new doesn’t mean they are unskilled, unable to learn, or likely to give up easily.

There might be some that would give up after their first encounter with a vet or two. Good. Let them quit. Why coddle such people? Do you really want these whiners and quitters in your dungeon pugs at 80?

JMar.3254:

Yes it’s a waste. Your level will be reset next year.

This.

I’m also afraid knowing that ANET is willing to reset our progress at will, with not so much as a reasonable explanation. Any progress we make in anything can now be reset at any time they feel it’s convenient for them.

If there’s an expansion and character levels are raised to 90, will all our level 80s be reset to 50 so we start on “equal footing” with people who never bothered to level to 80?

New items released! Reset everybody to 20 gold so they’re all on “equal footing” in their quest to acquire them.

New karma items! Reset everybody to 100,000 karma for “equal footing”!

Down with Scarlet!

Ventrue.5731:

Kain Francois.4328:

If you’re running PVT in Dredge Fractal, that’s a player issue, NOT a design issue!

“Learn to play”.

You don’t need insanely high DPS, but a least run something with an ounce of damage, like Knight’s.

I am a guardian with knights, I also leveled a full zerker warrior and thief that I run other dungeons with, friend I do stuff with is zerker warrior with 0 defensive talents. How do I learn to play to a point that turns my party members into knights? I was not complaining that I don’t do any damage because I have no offensive stats, I am saying there too many defensive people in this game, and you often get groups were they are all in put together in 1 group. I had runs with out my friend, as a knight guardian I don’t even compare my dps to zerk warrior, and I had people in my group who were full defensive. There is no inspect element or dps meter, there is no way I can LEARN TO PLAY this part of the game except to stop puging. But I can’t, all except one of my friends who tried this game quit.

This is the point when you realize that you have outgrown the quality of pugs. You wish to hone your skills further and tackle more challenging content, but low quality of the average pugs hold you back. I’d advise you to find more dungeon oriented guilds who are more on your level and share your goal of clearing harder content more quickly.

Some of the Ascended weapons with useless stats have some really beautiful skins. The ones with the +Heal is celestial white with gold trimmings and looks absolutely gorgeous. I would just craft Zojja’s and then transmute the prettier skins over it.

It seems like you’ve already answered your own question.

This is one of Anet’s time gates that force you to really just put the time (laurels) and effort (tokens) into it. The good new, though, is that merely doing fractals will help you complete a lot of the dailies: fractal runner, condition remover, kill veterans, aqua slayer, etc.

Waiting for punctuated version of what OP was trying to say…

Please nerf open world champions. My guild of 4 PVT rangers should be able to take them on ourselves. I play how I want. You elitists and your zergs can’t dictate how I play.

I predict that just 4 of you will fail CoF path 1.

rhapsody.3615:

I always post “any welcome” in my lfg, so I usually get newbies, but that run was just nice and easy for a change.

Now, what if I told you that it’s possible to get those superb runs every single time?

champ.7021:

anyways everyone gets kicked like this. No need to make a thread about it especially if its just ac p3.

No, not everybody. Just bads who refuse to follow the rest of the party.

I don’t understand how this is such a difficult concept. If you don’t like the established way of doing encounters, start your own group with a description of how you intend to play. It’s been over a year since release, and I don’t get why people are still surprised they’re getting kicked for going against the grain.

Player Character.9467:

Anybody remember the preview for TA new path? That dev’s mesmer had like 25khp and was camping scepter. Anet so gud at dunguns.

This. Just remember that these types of guys are the ones tweaking all the encounters.

Knighthonor.4061:

IMO, Raid Dungeons offer a different level of challenges that these open world fights simply cant do.

Why like the Zerg but hate the Raid Dungeons?

You just answered you own question.

Raids are traditionally very organized affairs that involve coordination, skill and gear checks. The average joe running around in GW2’s Champion zergs will likely not meet any of the three criteria. Think of the Teq fight, but more difficult and balanced around way fewer people so that every person involved will have a larger role that everyone else will depend on. You think the average Champ zerger can be trusted to that degree?

Therefore, Raids just mean a complete brick wall for the majority of the people in this game. Whereas in a Champ zerg, any scrub can follow the zerg and press 1 until it drops, and then get some nice free loot.

I think a lot of people objected to having to work to learn the Raid mechanism – as well as the skill checks, gear checks, organization, etc – as they knew with certainty that they would never be able to complete Raids and be perpetually locked out of ever attaining the best gear. However, like I mentioned, if it only involves running around in a zerg that involves almost no skill, and get rewards still, then they’re all OK with it.

swiftpaw.6397:

I get my fair share of idiots there too, but I have to agree there are less of them compared to the ingame feature. Still a lot though T_T

It’s not perfect, but it’s all I got at 3:30am on a Wednesday.

P.S. Insomnia is a hell of a drug.

Not sure how updated it is, but look at the stickied post about dungeon help in this very forum.

New to dungeons and want to learn?

Just use the gw2lfg.com site. People too dumb or too lazy to read generally do not use that site, so you’ll have a better selection of players.

Paulytnz.7619:

Ranger:

Rifle. At the moment we all know (if you don’t you should be ashamed) that Engi’s play with rifles like a shotgun so that’s short to mid range. Warrior seems to have a slow shooting rifle with mid to long range. What I envision for the ranger with access to the rifle would be the equivalent of a sniper. That’s right, very long range with accurate high damage, bring on the pain baby! Rangers are and should be the long range specialist class so to me this is the obvious choice for them to be the sniper-ish class.

Yes, because we need to give rangers even more incentive to max range every encounter and not stack with the rest of the group.

ITT:

People who come from other, more traditional, MMOs and just can’t wrap their heads around GW2’s different mechanics.

I played a year of vanilla WoW back in the day, and extensively did hardcore raiding in Everquest 2 for a long time. Yes, in those games, the bosses, the dungeons and the various classes were designed to benefit from having different armor with different stats. In a nutshell, only rogues and dps casters went for glass-cannon dps, while all the tanks and utility classes had their own stats. It worked because everyone had a very specific role to fill.

In GW2, because of the lax role specification, any class can fill almost any role – or at least be more versatile than the classes in the traditional MMOs. This includes being a damage dealer. However, because of the way GW2 scales difficulty (more difficult in this game equates to mobs having more HP and dealing substantially more damage), you’ll get to a point where the only viable way to survive is to out damage the mobs – really, really fast. Crowd-control and stuff like that begin to mean little as bosses are resistant to such utilities. The only thing they’re not resistant to is damage.The longer your fight lasts, the likelier than someone will miss a dodge or get snared and cause the group to wipe.

This brings us to Berserker gear, which is currently the gear that lets us achieve this -t he gear that all classes are recommended to use.

So why is it so difficult to understand that GW2 plays drastically differently from other MMOs. In their original vision to simplify a lot of the “complex” class mechanics of other MMOs and to not force classes into pre-defined roles, ANET inadvertently shoehorned all of us into just one role – DPS.

Good or bad, that’s the state of GW2 now. We can either deal with it and use all zerker and optimize for DPS, or we can be stubborn about it and insist that running healer builds are/should be just as viable and bring kitten leecher builders into dungeons.

coronaas.4362:

This is all brought along by the statement “play how you want” which is by far the most detrimental statement I have ever seen used by a playerbase

I could understand what ANET was trying to say when they made that statement a year ago, and it made some sense -within reason – at the time. However, everything went downhill really fast when the bads (read: the majority of players) either took the “play how you want” concept out of context or they took it quite literally.

This is why you see so many threads about how Fractals are so hard and that they couldn’t get past the Harpy shard without a reflect class. Well, no kitten. You already know you have a chance of getting a shard where reflects are extremely useful and almost necessary, so if you opt to roll a 28 with 3 necros and 2 warriors, then it’s your own fault if you repeatedly wipe on the first 3 harpies.

But I digress…my point is that people think that they can literally play how they want and get angry or upset when they don’t do as well as people who min/max both themselves and their party composition.

Chessrook.8643:

As for people talking about my build… it may not be your ideal Hundered-Blades-And-Rifle-Kill-Everything build, but screw that. It gives me some decent damage and interrupts and movable AOE that can make use of combo fields for the mace/axe, making me fairly effective against groups of trash mobs or individual targets that need to have heavy attacks interrupted. Which is mainly what I use it for. Bosses in dungeons and other high-risk targets (Like Aetherblades or the like) I generally use my rifle on. A pretty good amount of damage output from that that I like.

Courtesy of this “Stacking and Exploiting” thread.

EDIT: Also,

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Repost this if you are a strong mace/axe warrior who dont need no stacking
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Looks very much like the Bazaar of the Four Winds. Won’t be shocked at all.

The Living Story crowd also needs to properly read the descriptions in the LFG tool. Don’t just randomly join any listing under Twilight Arbor, or any dungeon path for that matter.