Guild Wars 2

So my guild and I have run Teleporter and Submarine in the past 2 days, we’ve yet to do front door. In sub alpha uses that damnable earth spike cone crap yet everyone is talking about just simply dodge it. Well, my problem is between trying to run from adds and destroy crystals I cant see it coming. On tp of that, even when I’m staring straight at him I see little to no telegraph, then boom 4k hp gone (if im lucky enough to only be hit once). That f’ing move travels at mach 3 and despite my best efforts dodging only works like 1 out of 5 times.

Seriously, need some advice from some of you CoE vets on how to see this thing coming. I know he alternates between attack 1 and attack 2 regularly, but even with that knowledge I cant get a good prediction on my dodges. Am I missing something?

Several classes have a teleport move. Also some utility skills can be used, but ranged burst is the best. As an ele, I brought lightning flash to make sure my group didnt get tied down with trying to free me, and also brought my frost bow which I kept off CD till I needed to free someone else. The ice storm pretty much 1 shots crystals.

So the mountain of HP → working as intended?

Not complaining, ran teleporter my first time yesterday and good Lord it was a lot of fun, but it was LONG….and not in the “lots of content” way. Many of the bosses were rather boring with masssssive amounts of hp.

Personally I think the 1st 2 encounters with Alpha need a bit less hp and the last one needs better telegraphing for his essence spawns….or perhaps a trigger. We were thinking killing all the tendrils would trigger him to use the spawn, but weren’t able to successfully replicate it. If its random, then please give him a channel and telegraph, if it’s triggered then please make it reliable.

I really dont mind long, interesting encounters, but the most fun I had here was the naked laser event, many Lols were had in ventrillo that day.

Our warrior: “Watch, I’ll do this with my armor on”, Ignore Pain, Leap, dead xD

The dungeon feels about right, just a little bit padded. I hope this gets looked at, not because I want things handed to me on a silver platter, but because I want to be engaged with the activities I’m doing.

Hehe, yes ALL the boulders!

Dont open all the coffins at once at the beginning. Just…dont. You will regret it.

Well for starters our staff E4 creates a line AoE that stacks cripple as long as an enemy is on top of it. E5 sends out a projectile which cause immobilize and bleeding. E3 gives projectile reflection (groupwide if traited for it) which can negate Kohler’s pull. W4 creates a huge AoE chill and ice field. A3 is a single target push and A4 is group swiftness and condition removal and A5 is an AoE daze.

Also, seriously check out frost bows on those burrows. Our group used the #4 ability on one and barely had time to see the health bar before it was gone.

Meh, why make it ‘harder’?

Why not just add more ‘depth’?

Sure, some people can find depth inside painful, frustrating experiences, and some people, especially those woefully unprepared, can find painful frustrating experiences inside of content with depth, but a correlation is not a cause.

I find that many dungeon encounters I’ve experienced so far, do have a lot of depth, especially those that I have entered into blind. I love the challenge of figuring out the mechanics and adapting to the fights and events. That being said unfortunately oftentimes figuring out the mechanics means reading up on something someone else has discovered (e.g. Hodgins burrows order).

There are two things I think remove depth from an event.
1) Absurdly high HP pools: (“This boss is dead, he just doesn’t know it yet.) and,
2) Unblockable, reflectable, AoE spamming skill rotations (”I came to fight, not to dance.")

These things have their place, few and far between, but what I’m starting to notice is that they are often used as a crutch for a challenge or depth. Maybe it’s to lengthen the dungeon, maybe it’s to give the illusion of difficulty.

I think a good design would better reward creativity, timing, and coordination. For example, try fighting 3 nightmare court knights at once (TA F-F). I’m sure a few groups with specific skillsets and professions could do this encounter in one go by popping well-timed rotations of slows, interrupts, stability, blocks, and heals. The rest are relegated to pulling one at a time which results in a slow arduous drawn out battle, and while that’s a perfectly valid way to defeat the encounter it seems so shallow in comparison to going toe to toe against 3 or 4 at once. IMO opinion, an ever so slight tweak in the cooldown of the knockdown combo could make the encounter tough, but enjoyable to face head on.

Don’t misunderstand, I rarely wipe during dungeons, even on rumblus when my team wiped I was the one surviving and kiting his fat kitten around. In fact when we dont have a guardian, I play full time tank/CC on kohler and the graveling zergs. I’ve just found the telegraph to be way too short on Rumblus’ scream. I’ve had the best luck with getting in his face with stability and protection and dodge rolling through him when he screams. It’s definitely not a L2P issue, but thanks for your reply.

I think this post in some ways applies to all of us, even the OP. I know that usually I do a good job of swapping up my utilities, weapons, utilizing combo fields and communication, calling targets, and reading enemy telegraphs, but I know that there are times where either through inexperience, or absent-mindedness I continue to use skills or weapons or tactics that simply aren’t as effective as they could be.

So take the post with a grain of salt. Experiment and learn as much as you can.

That’s great and all but sadly that’s one area in AC where Ele’s fall short. We’re ranged, but usually not far enough away to avoid the scream, you can’t move to the side of it, we have no block or aegis, 1 interrupt.

However I was just using it as an example of an attack that has huge range, instant effect, 1 shot capabilities, and little to no telegraphing. Still never had to waypoint during the fight.

Kiyoki, exactly. My first time in AC we wiped 4 or 5 times in the first room because everyone was opening coffins. We had NO CLUE how to play it right and pulled tons of mobs without being prepared.

Now we can run every Ex path with very few wipes. Dont get disheartened, just learn from your mistakes.

Awesome, awesome, awesome video. The best I’ve seen, seriously. The only thing I can add is that having a smart ele is invaluable in this dungeon. A good staff ele can save you from every one of Kohler’s pulls, use meteor shower and frost bow for the burrows, apply group swiftness, can tank the Detha trap event because of so many aoe slows, cripples, chills, etc.

But I’m biased because I’m that ele for my guild xD

Unfortunately, blind is useless against bosses :/ And some 1-shots cant be avoided, reflected, or dodged. Collosus Rumblus cough

He’s hard and fun, but that scream is a bit absurd. Huge range, huge cone, 1 shot downed.

Not what he said, it’s how he said it.

And I LOVE how he said it. I got a big ole grin on my face while reading that because it perfectly summarizes what I want to yell into the faces of the whiners, difficulty complainers, and people raging about aggro and the dynamic role system.

+1

" I guess there might’ve been a point to it if dungeons were actually fun to play, and not a dull, monotonous chore."

And that’s my point, these things are fun once you’ve mastered the encounters. Even once your running things with no wipes and sub 1hr times you still see room for improvement. It’s all based on communication and group synergy, dont expect to nail it first or second time.

I’d like to point out to you, at least in my experience, in life things are either a guided learning experience, or the they are a frustrating mess that makes you want to quit. Those who didn’t quit gained a mastery of the material never to be achieved by those who were guided to it.

Let the frustration wear down, and give it another go later. Look at all the tools you have at your disposal (hint: boulders) and formulate a plan with your group.

Yes, and you get 1, you have to set up the fields, so its not an emergency heal. If you screw up you have a 40 second cooldown before you can attempt it again, and to top it off its still pretty much useless if it only heals you. Gotta have a group working together to get any massive use out of it during a fight.

Also considering 8k hp is like….3 hits maybe.

“I understand there should not be a multiple combo from one finisher like stacking a water, fire and light for 3 might, heal and retaliation at the same time.”

And……WHY not?

OP? Please, to make something like that op your group would have to have very high degrees of coordination. Hell, I’m even in favor of having stacking of the same types of fields

e.g. water (2) + blast = area heal (2)
water (2) + blast (2) = area heal (4)

Would open up so many more possibilities and actually give people a reason to lay out plans and communicate during fights.

Yeah, I used to have this problem, until I started running with competent people. I’m an ele, a staff ele at that, arguably the squishiest class in the game. Yet still I take aggro more than anyone except our guardian, and I survive. Why? I block pulls, I evade, I cripple and slow and immobilize, and my allies do the same. Gives me tons of time to channel up my heavy hitters. If you’re running like a chicken, you’re either in an overtuned area, or you’re doing something wrong.

Neat idea. It would certainly bring an interesting change to dungeons.

My group tends to run every AC path in <1hr times, but we know the mechanics and never reset an encounter.

“I haven’t run CoE but this fight sounds very similar to the fight with Kudu in Sorrow’s Embrace story mode. Three golems in a row, and smaller bouts with Kudu himself inbetween. Any chance that the Kudu fight in SE (particularly the fire golem of doom) can get the same treatment?”

I liked the golem fight. Probably too hard for story mode, but that was another battle that made my team think and rely on one another. I was a magnetic reflection rezzer and would pop reflection as I went to revive someone so we wouldn’t get hit by the laval fonts. That fight required good prediction and timing, if only we had a guardian or another ele with us :/

Positive post whoo! Internets to you, my friend. I feel the same way.

I completely agree, I just don’t want to see them caught with their pants down with no money coming in to fix bugs or smooth out gameplay.

And I think we all want to see expansion material, greater dungeon depth and revemps on bosses to improve content and immersion.

Since you’re operating on a micro-transaction market, you need to take a hint from Valve and TF2. Town clothes, cosmetics that are tradeable. Standard form is buyable with gems, uniques (particle effects or just cool stuff) only found in crates.

Right now, your crates suck, no one cares about being able to turn into a deer. However, if I could get one of15 different elementalist specific hats or apparel I could wear in towns that did cool stuff like change based on attunement you don’t think I’d lay down $10/month for keys?

Furthermore, make sPvP tourneys broadcast serverwide. Let players be rewarded with shiny medals they can wear on their armor, and make tourney tickets available only through the gem store or randomly in sPvP, not everytime you open a new box.

Also, guild halls. I don’t care if they cost an exorbitant amount of gems. My guildies and I will gladly pitch in for one.

Your microtrans market is severely lacking, and I WANT you to get paid so I can benefit from ever-fresh content.

I’m all for anything that adds even more depth and immersion to an already great game. The chance for exotics on dungeon depths would seem a suitable reward, but even if they started implementing this today it woudn’t be done for a while. So buy some kitten gems and support those devs.

When I hit 80 I had greens and yellows from around lvl 65-79. Lvl 80 rares are easily craftable, and greens can be found in orr. Everything I needed have a guildie craft my exotic set was found in a matter of a few days of casual playing, including the gold needed to buy the stuff I didnt have. I didn’t grind for hours on the most efficient money/mats making scheme I could find, I PLAYED the GAME.

Yeah I know, tough concept to truly grasp. If your one goal is to go get your hardmode armor, then strap in and prepare for a grind. Just know that there are others who are actually enjoying the game, and will pick up their pieces of armor after they’ve enjoyably run enough dungeons.

Christ how whiney can you be, AN has effectively doubled the rate at which you can gain tokens if you’re willing to do something other than (insert easiest dungeon path) 92387423 times.

“You might as well uninstall if you are a ranged DPS gearing for defensive stats.” -fixed

I’m a defensive traited staff ele, but dps is one of the last roles I take. AoE slows, cripples, and stuns as well as defensive boons and the ability to res people without taking damage is what makes defensive training a good thing. It’s not so linear as some may think.

Vote to sticky. It’d be nice to have a compendium of dungeons and these videos havent really divulged much more than general strategies so I don’t see them becoming the end all be all.

Wrong, they never said there was no grind for prestige sets. There is no grind for lvl 80 max stat gear. And really you have the gall to complain about a system that allows you to get full exotics from the dungeon of your choice in 12 days assuming you aren’t willing to run on DR? And that’s on top of the 26+ silver you get for completion and gear you can vendor or salvage. Plus, in AC there are at least to graveling champs that drop 5 silver a piece, 7 with the omnomberry buff and 15 (buffed to 21s) from the boss. Drop your run time to 45 minutes and you’re getting 61s +gear +tokens in 45 minutes, 3 times a day.

Seriously, stop whining about grinding for prestige gear, do the dungeons you find fun, learn to master the encounters, or go play Skyrim and use console commands to hack in a million plus damage daedric greatsword, it makes no difference to me, or anyone here.

It’s not just TA, this is a rare bug which has affected part of my group on the Tsark path of AC. Try another dungeon, or this same one and see if you can isolate the issue to better help the devs fix it.

Same with all my guildies, even the ones that were getting perma-dr.

The best tank is one that doesn’t get hit often. If you have a tank, it is your teams responsibility to support the tank with blinds, cc’s, boons etc. A fully traited, exotic-geard guardian tank will still get shredded in any dungeon if the team isnt pulling their weight.

Also, aggro is hard to predict, so dont expect the mobs to always target your tank. Make sure each member has enough survivability to kite/flee/control mobs while still focus firing the target.

You HAVE to work as a team it doesn’t matter if you get 5/5 mobs down to 10% hp if your team wipes you have to do it again.

All: DO NOT SPEC DPS EVER

….now that that’s out of the way.

Story: Focus fire trash by control clicking, and be cautious of how many mobs you pull. Avoid AoE’s and use boulders on the lover’s fight.

Explorable: When it comes to gravelings, scavengers have to die first, no exception. Lt Kohler has a visual cue for his pull, it can be neutralized with stability, aegis, blocking, reflection, line of sight, or a well timed evasion.

Be very aware of traps and dont progress until the group is ready.

Two of the graveling zerg events are dps races, one of them has an ideal order to kill the mounds in.

The one that isnt a dps race is arguably the easiest, but it requires timing, and a very tough member to kite, dodge, cc, and interrupt hordes of mobs.

Not all trash has to be fought, its at your teams discretion to decide whether to engage, or run through.

The cave troll is neutral-aggro and will aggro with Kohler.

If you have an ele: Staff + Ice Bows
Ice Bow #4 skill has a 20 second CD and will drop a burrow by over half its hp and you get 2 of them for a minute. You can literally trade off using the #4 ability until the bow is gone. With the staff the ele has access to meteor shower and a slew of aoe slows, cripples, stuns, etc. Makes the whole thing so much more manageable.

@rickets Agreed, and AC path 1 arguably is too because there are no events with a minimum constant time to complete (i.e. Defend for Detha while she repairs the cannons) and the graveling zerg is done as soon as you down all 6 mounds.

The 3rd path would take the longest as it has the time constant defend event and the toughest boss to kill, but I could see that being done in around 40 minutes by a very skilled group.

No, you are assuming quite a bit. Like I already explained, if 3 people can run a dungeon legit in just 2 minutes over the speed clear threshold, then 5 could do it drastically quicker. As, I gain mastery of the paths in a dungeon I want to see how fast my group and I could complete it, and I don’t think that speed running is something that should be punished, especially since it doesn’t punish exploiters, because they’ll just wait 10-20 minutes before triggering the final event.

So stop with the assumptions and re-read what I wrote with the intention of understanding it, or simply leave the thread.

Didn’t have a frost bow ele…shame.

Just messing, but that doesn’t resemble my experience at all. I’m traited into survivability with mostly healing, toughness, vit, attunement recharge, and cond damage. When I did it we had to toy with our utilities a bit, but once we hit that sweet spot, we did it with ease.

Make sure your allies weren’t getting that hitbox bug, many ranged attacks will simply miss the burrows and its a real pain to deal with.

Umm, who is complaining? Is your reading comprehension really so poor that you are incapable seeing that I was asking what ArenaNet was trying to accomplish with the second part of the DR algorithm? As it stands, your response is irrelevant because it doesn’t come close to addressing anything I wrote in the topic.

Allow me to start off by saying I am NOT opposed to the idea of a diminishing returns system, just to get that out of the way. I am, however curious about what ArenaNet is trying to incentivize or discourage through the implementation of this system.

To my knowledge there are two parts to this system (when working correctly):
1. DR upon running the same path twice in a row within a 24 hour span.
2. DR upon a well executed speed run.

1 seems to be encouraging players to learn and master all the paths if they want a full token reward. This discourages people from farming Magg’s path in CoF and Detha’s path in AC etc. I see no problem here, except in certain dungeons where other paths may be a tad overtuned. The only suggestion I can offer is that this DR resets upon a full completion of all explorable paths in a given day, allowing people to run 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3…etc until their heart’s content.

2 however, doesn’t really seem to encourage anything. For the life of me I can’t grasp what the goal of this device is. If people are adept at running a few paths then it only encourages idling near a final boss or even until people are reasonably sure they’ve passed the threshold.

For example, there was a video on here of a 3 man group running hodgin’s path in AC in 32 minutes with no wipes. With a very skilled group who knows the path extremely well and having 5 people, I see no reason that couldn’t be reduced to a sub 30 or even sub 20 minute run. After all, Kohler is cake when you know the mechanics, the graveling burrow event takes all of 90 seconds if you know how to do it. Recovering the scepter can be done with no combat minus popping survivability cooldowns and interrupts, and a good team could skip much of the trash on the way to the boss. The only thing left is having a flawless handle on the boss fight and not being downed all that often.

Detha’s path has less running around the dungeon, and only one constant time event (repair the cannons) so the same applies here.

Should very skilled and very prepared players be punished for their own competence? Especially when exploiters or whatnot are barely harmed by this aspect of the system?

In summary, the first part of the system encourages players to branch out and experience more content, the second seems to have no positive aspect except to delay and drag out content which could be completed swiftly.

Ele exploit has to do with their utility skill Glyph of Renewal. More than that I won’t divulge, but it’s a rather ingenius way of countering the door event. I haven’t done it, and it will be fixed soon, hopefully along with detuning that specific event either with enemy health, damage, or the event timer.

If you have an ele in your group make sure to mention how EXTREMELY susceptible graveling burrows are to the frost bow #4 skill. My group beat Tsarks zerg event as soon as we startd coordinating my frost bow CDs lol.

0/0/20/30/20 here.

Put 30 into water so I could get powerful auras which is invaluable in dungeons for reflect projectiles. In many dungeons it gives you 5 seconds of immunity and was arguably the turning point for the fire golem in SE. Def worth trying out.

Great stuff, but leave eruption alone. The delay gives us an extra blast finisher in any combo field of our choice.

If you’re expecting an elementalist to be able to stand alone in one attunement, you’re kittening yourself and your party. My lvl 80 ele is the only profession I’ve leveled past 10, the only one I’ve done dungeons with. It is my bread and butter. You NEED to learn all your attunements and utilize them for their full effect on every weapon set. Otherwise, you’re standing around mashing the same 5 weapon skill while your team carries your weight.

“Why have us able to gear our player towards a certain element if we have to play with other elements first?” Like I alluded to above, you should never spec towards one element. I sincerely hope you can break this mindset or you wont find the class fun to play whatsoever.

“random group of 5 dps”

There’s your problem. It’s your whole mentality.

Doing away with the trinity does NOT mean there are no more roles, it means that roles change as the situation changes. Your role is dynamic and can change in an instant. If you are spec’d for nothing but dps, you are the groups weak link.

I agree with your #2 and #5 suggestion, but ive seen 3 people run hodgins in 32 minutes with no wipes. If it’s broken, there’s no way on earth they could do that graveling event. There is an order to the burrows, and specific burrows spawn certain types of gravelings. For instance, the one in the RHS corner spawns two scavengers and should be taken down 5th, right after the one beside the entrance. The first 3 can be destroyed before a breeder even spawns.

It is doable, but tricky.

Gray.9650:

Ender.3508:

I think it’s sloppy to patch in a system like this without proper testing, and hopefully AN has learned from the experience. I just feel the torches and pitchforks are being raised too early and pointed at the wrong aspects and problems.

ehr.. gw1 was released when? and they’ve been working on gw2 how long? I’m always fascinated that people take “well.. uhm.. it’s complicated” as an excuse. especially regarding a company that should know better.

ehr.. gw1 was released when? and they’ve been working on gw2 how long? I’m always fascinated that people take “well.. uhm.. it’s complicated” as an excuse. especially regarding a company that should know better.it doesn’t matter if the pitchforks are pointed at the symptom or the cause, but there is definitely a problem.

ehr.. gw1 was released when? and they’ve been working on gw2 how long? I’m always fascinated that people take “well.. uhm.. it’s complicated” as an excuse. especially regarding a company that should know better.it doesn’t matter if the pitchforks are pointed at the symptom or the cause, but there is definitely a problem.EDIT: forum likes to repeat one paragraph, it works as well as the DR…

Yes, they know there is a problem. They made a mistake by releasing a dungeon overhaul without proper testing, and now they are working on fixing it. I’ve spent the past 3 years of my life programming, and I know just how bad it can be. A simple missing parenthesis can have you searching for 6+ hours. A mislaced decimal, even longer.

AN screwed up, yeah, but people are blowing it way out of proportion.

Our guild has 2 lvl 80 Guardians. one of them was a pro-leet WoW vet who still has to resist the idea that he is some sort of unkillable tank and that there should be someone healing him always while he has aggro. The other is constantly experimenting with his traits, his utility, and his weapon abilities to find a synergy which benefits the entire group. You can guess which I’d rather have in my party.

It’s the same with ele. There are two ‘bad’ ones for dungeons. The back range fire/meteor/“dps” glass nerf gun, and the guy who thinks he can trait into water, stay in water and play “support” ele.

My guild never thinks that I don’t contribute on our runs, and even though I have little experience with some higher level dungeons, I’ve been complimented on my leadership and planning and adaptation for fights. I main my staff, but always carry a scepter and dagger into dungeons for the added utility. Unless it’s my first run of a dungeon, I’m usually coordinating the fight and facilitating communication.

We did our first AC run the other day with 0 team wipes and 0 resets, and it was my first time not wiping at all. We had a random (who had never done an ex dungeon and later joined our guild) who told me he felt prepared for the encounters, and in fact they felt a little easier than expected. I can’t take all or even the majority of the credit for this, but I know that on at least 3 occasions in the Kohler fight I saved 2 or more allies from his pull, and during Defend Detha at the turrets I was main caller and kept those kitten rangers from CC-locking us to death.

People who turn away ele’s are kitten plain and simple. A bad ele is no worse than a signet warrior or HS thief in dungeons.