Guild Wars 2

The fact that the system can actually punish you for being good at dungeons is beyond me.

If the route is being cleared too fast, don’t penalize the players for being good at it by taking away their tokens and wasting their time. Fix it.

Seriously. You don’t need vent to clear Arah or kill Giganticus Lupicus. Don’t even need full exotics, depending on who is doing what. There’s a lot of small tricks you can do in general to make the fight easier on your party.

Why run Arah? Because the armor will actually be somewhat prestigious now. Because it’s long, and challenging, and overcoming challenges is one of the highlights of a dungeon experience.

I don’t get to run it often due to timezone differences, but I relish the opportunity to do so.

Because there’s a boss fight in the dungeon that completely wrecks most pick-up groups and is generally unbearable. Nevermind the horrible optimization the dungeon has in general, chronic issues with meatwalls and too much trash, on top of dredge being extremely irritating enemies

There’s three Cryo-Lasers around the room. Put a person on each of them.

Count down – 3, 2, 1, FIRE. Everyone hits F on Fire. Then they immediately begin the jump down the floating red platforms as soon as all 3 beams are visible.

Everyone lands in the middle as the shield goes down, unloads on the boss.

Once the flame shield starts flickering back up, run/jump back up the red platforms to safety.

Protip: The red platforms will flicker red when a lava shard is about to land on them. Move if you’re on a flickering platform.

And the one thing preventing this from being an extremely enjoyable boss fight (assuming the bugs such as teleporting through the platforms into the lava on KD are fixed) is a closer waypoint.

The fight is really fun and fairly creative, which is more than many other dungeons or routes can boast. It makes people want to participate and try their hand. It’s better than pretty much all the world bosses thanks to the acrobatics involved. But it overly punishes you for failure, a huge disincentive for players actually wanting to try the jump down to the boss. If you die, you face a minute and a half runback, and if your party doesn’t have 3 survivors at the end of a run, it’s just wasted time.

Please put a waypoint closer – such as in the Destroyer Crab’s room. There’s not much reason not to – it’s not like the boss naturally regenerates health, making spawn-zerging a troublesome tactic. And with three Alpha encounters, on top of the other boss fights, it’s not like the dungeon is in danger of becoming too short. If this would be fixed, this’d by far be my favourite route in the dungeon.

Thief’s Infiltrator Arrow used to cross gaps. Engineer’s rifle jump still does.

Aside from that, the lack of passive movespeed (One with Air, the Thief signet, etc.) really hurts. It’s not terrible given how much uptime the Temporal Curtain can have, but it still sucks.

Super easy to perform well in PvP.
Struggles to keep up in PvE, unless you’re in a dungeon, at which point you’ll fall asleep at the keyboard.

Necromancers might have bugs, and they may sometimes be boring, but there’s no denying that they’re effective at what they do.

Elementalists are pretty good if they didn’t cut their damage in half over the BWEs.

fellyn.5083:

No one is asking for easy mode. If that’s all you get out of the complaints then perhaps reading comprehension is something you need to work on.

Attacks that can 1 shot with no chance of dodging them and mobs that have huge hp pools does not make a challenging dungeon.

Can you give examples of mobs that are one-shotting you? I agree on the health thing, but I’ve ran into very few mobs that can immediately down a player. Most of the ones that do have really telegraphed or otherwise obvious attacks. Hell, sometimes I can survive supposed one-shot hits…

It’s obnoxious when you run into a mob that appears to exist solely to slow the players down. It has high health, high damage (that comes out slowly and only targets one player) and heals itself. You can’t skip it; killing it is your key to continue, but it doesn’t give you any decent reward, dialogue, challenge or backstory. It’s just there.

It’s frustrating when you realize the entire first half of the dungeon route is built on the backs of meatwalls. That you earned your first loot chest by spending 10 minutes killing trash and champion mobs that were basically trash on steroids.

It’s depressing when, even if you stop counting the normals, one route has probably triple the mob density of any other route in the dungeon. That the penultimate fight is literally trash that summons more trash. I wish I had an image of the mining chamber with the crusher boss, but that will have to do.

None of this stuff was even challenging. The times we wiped, it was because our willpower had run out, we stopped caring, slipped up and made fatal mistakes. There’s not even any major bugs to contend with; it’s just terrible at a base level. The word “trash” describes everything that was wrong with this dungeon.

The potions you get from the chests are fairly useful.

I’m our group’s chef, so I always bring along trays of food for everyone to eat from. But we honestly haven’t run into any dungeon we couldn’t get past just by eating omnomberry or raspberry-peach bars.

Drudenfusz.2971:

I think it is legit that many think he is stealing the show.

I disagree with the sentiment, mostly because I think there’s no show worth stealing after 50. The show died with the player’s Order mentor.

Not a warrior player, but I’ve found 5sig warriors put out a lot of damage if the rest of the group can cover them on support.

But even then, warrior support is pretty good. The best warrior I’ve run into was using a supportive shout build. 5sig gets really bad rep because it, simply put, is a selfish build, and it’s often used by selfish players as a result.

I’m not using “selfish” in some sort of judgemental or moralistic way. 5sig is an effective build that excels at solo PvE play. It has its place in dungeons – if your group is willing to work with it, as I said – but if you try to just walk into a pub group with it without asking if they need you to mix in some support skills, it just comes off that you’re not really bringing anything to the group beyond a warm body that deals damage. Bringing even a single banner or a warhorn or whatever indicates that you’re willing to work with your team.

It’s like those players that go into dungeons without having at least one of every weapon available, or refuse to use a ranged set, and all that jazz. Gotta be flexible.

I don’t really care how this matchup goes, I just want it to last. Against DB was awful, I quit early into the first day. I heard they were exploiting, though. Something about Mesmers?

Either way, awful, awful matchup.

Please, based god, please.

Anything to get rid of the sceptre.

Working as intended. The Defender grants the buff to nearby allies, as well, and benefits from things that increase the health of your illusions.

In a dungeon environment, it is invaluable.

http://i.imgur.com/8aeAz.jpg

It’s the only set on all the dungeon vendors that seems to follow this pricing scheme.

Fergg’s route is the fastest, but it requires the most coordination/finesse. The recent bandaid fix broke the grenadier spawns but it’s still doable with a party split. Challenging, sometimes tense, requires constant focus, at least for the first half of it. But seriously, was the grenadier fix even tested?

Koptev’s route is the most balanced of the two in terms of time and difficulty.

Rasolov’s route is horrible. Never again. The first chest section is basically 20 minutes of trash on steroids. The bosses are just vets promoted to Champion status to give them more health, with no meaningful mechanics. The Crusher boss is okay, but the amount of trash in the room is certainly not. Shukov’s fight is just agonizing to go through.

There’s a PoI you can’t access in any of the routes, and the NO NO NO – I mean the Koptev route has an alternate side path with destroyers that don’t seem to serve any purpose, making me wonder if the place is finished. Especially since half the pathway is covered in invisible lava.

Finally, the whole place is an unoptimized mess, all the lava and steam cutting the framerate of my group into halves and thirds. I want the Furnace set – I’ve got two of the pieces already, even – but I can only tolerate the place once a day, given that most pick-up groups don’t have the coordination to do Fergg’s route. Really holding out for some form of token exchange.

How is the sceptre at all good for shatter builds?

You can generate clones considerably faster by slotting Deceptive Evasion and … using just about any other weapon. Slot Mirrored Images if you want to be especially “bursty”. Shatter builds are already mediocre – why would you kitten yourself even more by relying on the Ether Bolt attack chain?

The only time I’ve used the sceptre is during boss fights where melee is too dangerous for me, yet not so dangerous that I can’t get decent mileage off of Warden’s Feedback. Yes, offhand weapons are carrying the mainhand ones.

As I hear it, it’s supposed to be stylized as a ‘defensive’ weapon.

I don’t think we need yet another defensive weapon. Just about everything we’ve got, save for maybe the Greatsword and OH Sword, is “defensive”. All of our traits, plus the clone mechanics in general, really amp up Mesmer survivability. We don’t need more help playing defensively.

Rework it or ditch it for a mainhand (pistol, anyone?) that doesn’t spend thirty seconds killing something on its own. While we’re at it, don’t make it the starting weapon for Mesmer players. That was an awful idea and plays a fair part in driving so many people away from the class at the door.

Nretep.2564:

In my eyes, it looks like the warden is bugged.

If they touch any of that I can pretty much kiss the only good reason to bring a Mesmer into dungeons goodbye.

I was kinda hoping people would keep assuming the Duelist is somehow better and that nobody would ever find out how broken it is, but we all must wake up eventually. ;_;

I’ve yet to run into the drastically reduced results as of yet, in four consecutive CM runs.

We went: Seraph, Butler, Asura, Seraph
Seraph gave us full rewards
Butler gave us full token rewards, but half XP (89k for 170k or so)
Asura gave us full rewards
Seraph gave us full rewards, but only 5 tokens from the endboss

Aside from a few routes, I think dungeons are alright. Challenging but not overwhelming, though some mobs have far too much health. My only complaint is that I have hundreds of tokens I will simply never use. I’ve helped my friend get his CM vanity set, and I’m sitting on 400 of the tokens, but neither the look nor stats appeal to my class. They’re just going to sit there rotting in my bank.

If I could transmute them in the mystic forge into tokens for just about any other dungeon – even at a 50% loss – I would leap at the chance.

The forums are breaking replies and eating posts for some reason, so I’m sorry if this comes out as a duplicate. I understand what you’re saying and agree that the duelist is easier to use (and some fights demand it over the warden), but you lost me here:

Since you can use both the question becomes which to spec for.

If you spec for the focus, you get:
200 Vit, 200 Healing
20% Focus CD, Reflect, Phant regen, Phant retaliation, and 20% CD on glamours.

If you spec for the pistol, you get:
250 Precision, +20% crit damage
20% Pistol and Sword CD, huge duelist range, bleed on crit

This choice seems like a no brainier to me seeing as the pistol spec will way, way out DPS the focus spec, even when you’re using the focus.

You’re speaking as though these specs are mutually exclusive. With 25 in Dueling and 25 in Inspiration, I can get everything you’ve listed here except for the duelist/pistol buffs. Am I missing something?

Rhyno.7084:

Ehh, what dungeons are you doing where you can drop 3 iWardens? It stands still and pops like a balloon.

What you have here is a DPS build without decent crit in exchange for the focus trait which in my opinion is way outshined by the pistol, which gives you ridiculous range and way, way more reliability.

The (good) mesmer’s support capabilities almost entirely come from utilities which are awkwardly separate from build choice.

I’ve done everything but explorable TA and the Warden has gone the extra mile for me every time. Even compared to the Duelist. That extra range does nothing for you, since it only impacts the phantasm and trick shot. In my tests on dummies, the duelist was basically a single-target Warden, sans reflect, with half the damage, that attacked at a slower rate.

Just don’t summon the Warden on melee mobs unless they’re already engaged – be it by you, a Leap clone, or one of your fellow players. If a melee mob isn’t opened, it completely dominates ranged because of their terrible AI. Most ranged NPCs don’t have melee attacks, so they basically stare at the Warden all day and kill themselves.

There are points in some dungeons (CM comes to mind with the scattershots, snipers and riflemen) where I can just summon a Warden on the mobs and have everyone leave for a bathroom break. By the time they get back, nobody’s hurt, all the NPCs are dead, we’re good to go.

Want a boss example? The bomb guy in the farm on the Asura route. Drop a Warden on him, have your party stand in/behind it. You’ll see the mass of red circles everywhere, but nothing happens, because your warden reflects them all into his face. Kill the riflemen on the upper ledges (easy), sit in the warden, go afk for a bit. The boss will kill himself every time.

Kill the Elementalist first. The monk is annoying, but it doesn’t have AoE on every attack like the Elementalist does. If your party has skills that reflect projectiles, use them. They’re invaluable in AC.

You’ve basically stumbled on what I’ve found to be the only genuinely successful dungeon build for Mesmers. It’s not quite there, but I’ll spill my own secrets.

• TRAITS
  • Trim Illusions down to 20, remove the +bounce trait, swap compounding power for the +confusion duration trait (you’ll see why soon), and keep haste. Staff autoattack is just generally bad and should only be used as filler – I’ll elaborate on this later.
  • Cull the points in Domination. I’m fairly sure that trait only impacts clones, making it useless.
  • With these extra 20 points, bring Dueling up to 25. This makes your Wardens apply bleed at a much faster rate than five Staff mesmers put together courtesy of Sharper Images. The 25th point makes all your stuff cause confusion on death, adding further to your damage output (in addition to the Warden comboing off your own ethereal fields). Finally, Deceptive Evasion just ups your survivability in general, as well as providing shatter fodder in the rare instances you’ll want to actually use your class mechanic.
  • With the remainder of your culled points, bring Inspiration up to 25. This boosts your Warden’s damage even further.
  • Swap out the Glamour recharge trait for Medic’s Feedback. Immunity to projectiles during revival can make or break a fight.

• UTILITIES
  • I find that Mirror’s reflect and shorter cooldown still don’t manage to outweigh the bonus heals on Ether Feast, but your mileage may vary.
  • Null Field and Phantasmal Disenchanter are too situational for long-time spots on your bar. Boons on enemies in PvE don’t show up too often, and there are better forms of condition removal out there, usually brought by your party.
  • Mirrored Feedback irreplaceable, as you already figured out, but I’d recommend slotting Signet of Illusions and Phantasmal Defender almost full-time.
    • Why? Little-known secret: the 50% damage transfer on the pDefender applies to all allies in a 600-unit radius around the Defender. When I add the bonus health from Signet of Illusions, I measure my own Defender’s health at around 10,000hp. If you summon it on the right mobs (non-aoe, focusing on other players) and account for innate Phantasmal Regeneration (and other party-sourced healing), it can almost double your potential health pool.

• GEAR
  • I disagree with the stacking of condition damage. I’ve found that Mesmers cannot into conditions as a whole in a PvE setting, save for a few specific instances involving super-fast attacks and confusion. Staff is just too slow and unpredictable – any attack you or your clones make risks being diluted by vulnerability, which can be applied much more efficiently by most other classes.
    • With this in mind, just about any other class will out-condition you. They can simply stack on the DoTs better than do, especially considering the investment you have to make with phantasms. The only time this doesn’t hold true is when the enemy is stuck between three of your iWardens, which is a disgusting meatgrinder of death and agony so potent you can safely go walk your dog until the mob dies. All in all – while you benefit from condition damage, it should not be your focus.
  • The build site you linked doesn’t account for the different stats used for PvP/PvE prefixes, so I can’t really link what I use. I can tell you that my gear is usually Rampager (Power/Prec/Condi), Berserker (Power/Prec/CritDmg) and Valkyrie (Power/Vit/CritDmg).

Assuming I linked it right, the finished product looks like this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/en/?fgQQNAW8dlwzKonUzqGa9IyZGK3yhSx15dlZgbXIA;TMALRGCsXA

Your damage isn’t hot unless you manage to get your phantasms up – and some boss encounters make that reallykittenhard to do, though I find it to be solid in general PvE as well. Still, the support you bring, when used right, is invaluable. It trivializes not only specific boss encounters, but often entire dungeon paths, given how ridiculously powerful the Warden is. I expect it to be nerfed at some point, so use it while it lasts.

Even when traited, I find it’s not worth it in 90% of the circumstances. Mantras in general are just dead skills – the three-second windup is just asphyxiating, especially considering the lack of (untraited) passive benefits and underwhelming active effects. Instant cast times after the channel don’t really balance this out, at least in a PvE setting.

Hell, now that I think about it, the best way I can summarize mantras is by saying “they’re basically signets except they suck even more”.

Sword/Focus + Staff

Leap to summon a clone
Illusionary Warden
Swap at the end of the cast time, rooting the mob in the AoE
Blurred Frenzy
Swap to staff
Phase Retreat at end of BF channel
Illusionary Warlock
Chaos Storm

They’re usually dead by then – if not, Chaos Storm is giving my clones aegis, so they’ll survive a decent round of hits until the mob dies.

You should only bother killing the Protection totem – the one standing on its own, I think. Just take the time to burn it down when it comes up, then go back to the boss. It’s a flat 33% damage reduction and really draws out the fight. All melee has to really watch out for is his spinning attack. These totems do nothing than apply a boon to the boss.

He’s very easy. The regeneration is negligible, as is the damage from retaliation. If your party is having a tough time (often dying to him in melee, for example) you should bring along more immobilizes, chills and cripples.

In response to this post by Colin, I figure it’d be useful to have a general feedback thread for bosses that players think have too much health to match their few (or simple, or unthreatening, or uninteresting) mechanics. In particular, the idea was thrown around that too many bosses amount to “tank and spank”, generally being sacks of health with little bite.

If others wish to contribute, feel free, I may update the OP in my spare time. It’d be easiest if you followed a similar format. (Edit: Hey, it’s kinda wordy on my part … I should trim it down a bit.)

• Caudecus’s Mansion
  • Butler Route
    • Vallog: Stands on the dock the entire time, flinging spells or reflecting player projectiles. Nothing engaging. Frost (asura path) would be a good example of a fairly challenging yet enjoyable end-boss in the same dungeon.
  • Seraph Route
    • Tulaire: Unclear that he’s a necromancer sort of character, given his default bandit skin. The fight is okay, but the fact that he goes completely invulnerable when in his plague form is more irritating than it is enjoyable or engaging.

• Sorrow’s Embrace
  • Inquest Path
    • Tazza: Has no mechanics listed next to her portrait, but she seems to summon clones of the players. She doesn’t do this very often, and I can’t remember what the clones actually do because the most threatening thing they’ve done is get in the way of my projectiles (to which they die very quickly). Possibly the least threatening mob in this route despite being the final boss.
  • Rasolov/Free the Miners Path
    • The Overseers: I think these are the first bosses? It basically amounts to killing off four Dredge champions that happen to be on more steroids than their fellows. They don’t offer anything new or exciting in terms of mechanics – this section felt like 15 minutes of grinding through walls of HP, a problem that plagues this route in general. (See: the metric arseload of mobs near the Crusher boss, the unnecessary mortars around War Minister Shukov).
    • War Minister Shukov: It’s unclear that you have to bring down both of his war golems at the same time, lest they recover. Also, Shukov randomly drops dead once you kill both golems. Unsure if that’s working as intended or not. Bit of a let-down if it is.

• Honor of the Waves
  • Zealot Path
    • The Zealot: The boss seems to only have two mechanics: freezing clouds and explosive jellyfish. He takes forever to take down since it’s an underwater fight, and underwater balance in general is all over the place. It was rather boring and unpleasant, and the trash before him was especially awful, having to keep track of aggro in three dimensions while your camera is backed up against a wall. (When I put it this way, I actually hope he doesn’t get touched, at least until underwater skills are polished a bit)

• Crucible of Eternity
  • Submarine Path
    • Bjarl the Rampager: A decent boss fight implementing one of the many cornerstone mechanics of action games: baiting the bull into charging into a pillar so that he lays stunned and vulnerable to damage for awhile. Easy enough that it feels like it’d be better off in some story mode dungeon. Nonetheless, it’s unclear when he’s using his “run at you to slice your legs off” charge vs. his “run at you to hit a pillar and get stunned” charge.

Most people aren’t going to want to try to pug Arah. You need to form a group of friends, do dungeons together, and build from there.

Plus everyone’s busy spamming Citadel of Flame speedruns for easy tokens/cash. Unless they have a special interest in other dungeons, they won’t do them.

veritech.1048:

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

I need specific information to know which story step to look at.
- Your current story step
- Your current objective
- Your character’s class and level
- Any specifics on the issue (too many enemies at once, tough boss, confusing objective, etc.)

Every mission.

Every single one.

Absolutely this. If you want specifics, everything involving Risen past level 50.

The Vigil/Priory/Whispers mobs are terrible allies that seem to generate little to no threat. They only have one ability, it looks like, which they can barely use well. You’re carrying almost all the weight, and it’s no fun. If you aren’t playing a class with heavy AoE abilities, or something tanky like a Guardian that specializes in taking on multiple foes at once, it’s nightmarish.

Please, improve their damage output and threat generation, or at least lower the health of personal story Risen in general. As a Mesmer, I try to blank out the latter half of my personal story due to the trauma it caused.

Saboten.9340:

You could also look for exotic grade Acolyte gear with the desired prefix in front (if needed). The pieces range around L62-79, depending on the prefix, but the ones near 78-79 are pretty decent and should cost less than the named L80 pieces.

This guy’s got the right of it. It’s 70-80 exotic gear, usually acquired from completing Frostgorge or one of the Orrian zones. Acolyte, I think.

Not to interrupt our sensationalist thread titles and conspiracy theories, but I hear a lot of talk about how sylvari can’t be corrupted. Is this ever mentioned or explained in-game? If so, by who? I never ran into it.

While we’re at it, I want to point out that there’s a sylvari in Orr that becomes one of the Risen during an event in the Arah chain, complete with a line of dialogue and everything. It’s this guy: http://i.imgur.com/nCUle.jpg

I don’t have a picture of him as a Risen character (and part of me suspects the work of bugs given a typo in the new mob’s name), but I can try and get one.

I pretty much agree with the above poster (where the heck did the quote/reply buttons go?) – given the overall activity in Orr, I would say there’s enough time for Dwayna to have given birth to Grenth via Malchor, and then for Grenth to have ascended to Divinity while getting a statue. It all depends on the specific dates.

There’s no saying that Malchor even knew he was a father, if this was the case, nor are we sure how divine conception works as a whole. And even if it’s not true, it still adds a touching (if tragic) aspect to why Dwayna sought Malchor out.

Life Siphon has a shorter range than its tooltip – either that, or the little red bar indicators for distance are bugged. Move close enough to a mob that the red bar disappears from under Life Siphon and try to use the skill. It’ll miss until you walk a fair bit forward.

The second Chaos trait, Descent into Madness, spawns an old version of Chaos Storm that still applies boons such as regeneration.

Fourth spear skill, Slipstream, will sometimes manifest on the ocean floor below your position rather than in front of you.

The effects of the Illusion trait line doesn’t show as a reduced cooldown in the shatter skill tooltips.

Zarkson.1346:

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

Aha, I finally got my GM tag added, so this should up as an official post. Anyway, we’re currently looking at the issue, it’s definitely not intentional. Thanks!

Any chance that the fix will include those who already opened their loot bags?

Or, for that matter, will it affect those that knew about the bug beforehand and so chose to just hold on to their loot bags, leaving them unopened?

(continued due to text limit)

50-60: Your mentor is killed off and Trahearne fills their role, only somehow managing to be even more useless. You spend much of your time trying to figure out how fix the screwup you made at the Battle of FPS-Death Island. Trahearne is given a magical sword, Saladbolg, and is revealed to be the Chosen One destined to cure Orr of its corruption. Don’t be alarmed, he’s still useless – his autoattack just has electrical noises, now, and he has a spin attack he’ll only use at max range away from the enemies.

The Pale Tree’s avatar asks you a question that causes just as much trepidation as the Order one, but this time because it feels like you’re handing the writers a loaded gun to kill off another character you like. Fortunately, this doesn’t seem to happen, if only because the chapters from here on out are stonking broken.

60-70: Your “I have no AoE and must kill Risen” story is briefly interrupted, having you kill Flame Legion instead. This whole chapter is spent frittering about doing productive activities befitting the commander of a multiracial dragon-fighting militia, like tripping balls and nuking your own troops into the ground.

This culminates in the Battle of Fort Trinity, which makes no sense at all, because while you did recover an important magical artifact at level 69, it definitely wasn’t this one. After dying to gargoyles and suffering even more FPS death you realize you can glitch out the whole mission in order to actually get past it. For your ingenuity, you’re rewarded with a beautiful, mosaic-like cinematic regarding the Pact’s entrance to Orr. However, it doesn’t actually have any audio or dialogue – the game only shows the word “Trahearne” in the subtitles for the full minute and a half. You will eventually look back and realize that, no, you aren’t going insane, it’s just the game revealing the plot of the rest of the story to you, boiled down into one word.

Also, at this point, you’ve pretty much given up hope of ever seeing anyone from your Order again, or being recognized as a member of such in any meaningful capacity.

70-80: You spend half this chapter mourning some chick you’ve never met before because everything after the Battle for Fort Trinity is broken. You eventually get over your awkwardly-timed angst to go do some missions in Orr. Chances are if you like a character in any of these missions, they get killed off. To their credit, this is sometimes pulled off very well. Many characters show up from the 1-20 storylines, but they don’t remember you. You can, at least, learn some interesting lore regarding Orr.

80 (middle): Fight a bunch of mega-Risen, culminating in Trahearne completing his life’s work in a flashy-but-poorly-made cutscene while unfitting music plays. Congratulations, you’ve finished Trahearne’s personal story! At least Kormir had the decency to sound slightly inspirational when she took all your glory. Now all that’s left is to kill Zhaitan.

80 (end): PROTIP – Press “2” repeatedly to kill the Elder Dragon.

Chances are you didn’t keep up on the local gossip and opened all your loot bags from finishing the personal story. If you’re ever feeling masochistic, you can now deck yourself in a fresh, new set of level 30 blues. In other news, Zojja spontaneously develops a harelip, the music hasn’t worked for the past five missions, and the epilogue reveals that Trahearne and the Pact stand ready to leap at the opportunity to ruin any upcoming expansions.

I’m just going to break down the personal storyline by chapter. I suspect that many also have a personal point where it all went terribly wrong. As stated, spoilers are going to be entirely unmarked, so you should probably stop reading if you hate those sorts of things.

1-20: Intriguing, personal, often amusing storyline. Great introduction to your chosen race and the world of Tyria. Many of the characters just drop off the map between chapters, but this doesn’t do much to dampen my enjoyment of the story.

20-30: Your character is moving up in life. Not only are most of the Order quests fun, but the decision of which Order is one that genuinely requires a great deal of thought, often accompanied by an hour’s worth of second-guessing, before actually making a decision.

30-50: Working for your Order. Your mentor is a charming deconstruction of the archetypes you expected to run into when joining the Order in question. I found them to be one of the most enjoyable characters in the game. The missions are all fairly entertaining and varied, full of visiting exotic new locales and getting into trouble with your superiors. You rise in rank and fame despite some of your misadventures. This was, to me, the high point of the story.

If I knew what was next, I’d have asked for the rest of the storyline to stick to the status quo it had during the Order section, because it goes so downhill from here it’s depressing.

50: You go through a mission that can be paraphrased as “Someone you like gets killed off so Trahearne gets more screentime while you fight alone through waves of 9,000 kittens Risen because your allied NPCs are useless hunks of flesh with little HP, damage or threat generation.”

You can apply this loose paraphrasing to almost every mission from here on out – you can dub it the “Golden Rule of GW2 Story” if you want – but we’ll continue anyways for the sake of elaboration.

And in short it is very, very bad. When I reference “open-world PvE” I’m mostly referring to dynamic events taking place in the overworld in zones like Frostgorge Sound, Malchor’s Leap and Cursed Shore. Many characters rely on these events as their primary source of income – not from the event reward itself, but rather from the loot dropped by the copious amounts of enemy NPCs fought in these events. Without a sizeable head start in damage/tagging, Mesmers can hardly grab a scrap of this loot. This can apply to dynamic events of almost any size, from 2 players to 40, depending on the build of your fellow player.

So what’s the problem? AoE & damage are king, and the Mesmer has none of it.

You can easily point to half a dozen skills with AoE components to prove me wrong, but only half of those work with any effectiveness in this context. In fact, in my experience, the sword is the best weapon for getting loot in end-game dynamic events. And that is depressing.

The staff is often billed as the AoE weapon of choice because of Chaos Storm. But that’s all it has, on a sizeable cooldown. Winds of Chaos isn’t worth jack. By the time the granny-gear projectile actually reaches the enemy, they’re dead, and you’ve done 500 damage compared to the greatsword warrior who sneezed on his keyboard and did 15k in Hundred Blades crits. You get no loot. And shame on you if your Winds of Chaos bounced to allies instead of enemies (it always will); not only do you still get no loot, you’re just helping their contribution over your own, because support means (as with many Mesmer skills in this part of the game) very little.

But hey, if you’re lucky, Winds of Chaos bounced to your clones. They’ll deal 12 damage instead of 11, now, thanks to the Might buff.

What about phantasms? They’re one of the other forms of AoE damage, primarily found in the Berserker and Warden. And they work. They can burst up to 4k or more in a single attack. But they have so many caveats it’s frustrating:

• You have three seconds to find an enemy NPC among the swarm that is near full-health, so it doesn’t die mid-cast or attack.
• You need to spend another second and a half to actually summon the phantasm.
• The phantasm might drop dead before even finishing an attack. It’s guaranteed to drop dead once its target is down, and by the time the next wave of Risen hits it probably won’t be on cooldown.
• You may eventually come to the sour realization that you need Phantasms to deal any damage – damage that other classes can perform in their autoattack chain and then some.

Having the Mesmer be the only class that has to meaningfully invest in any given fight is making most end-game stuff highly toxic. While the class performs fantastically against dungeons and bosses, it gets beat out by the many Elementalist bots standing around near Penitent Camp or Shelter Gate to auto-farm events.

This is just one of several problems with the class in PvE – it just happens to be the most concerning to me, especially since dungeons have stopped working on my server. Again. So I’m stuck either giving up and playing an alt until the next server reset, or working mykittenoff in DEs only to receive little for it.

I’m not sure if we’re just doing something wrong – and if you happen to know better, PLEASE tell me so I can get my story finished – but it’s getting extremely frustrating for us. There are a number of bugs that just stop the meta events dead in their tracks, and given the amount of “difficulty” being piled in the zone it’s hard to tell where a bug begins and an intentional feature begins. I don’t recall the exact event names, so I’ll describe what they’re like.

Secure Jofast Waypoint – After escorting Warmaster Jofast to the third outpost on the north side of the Cursed Shore, she unloads her cargo from her dolyaks and an event starts to ‘secure’ the outpost by clearing it of Risen. The problem is the Risen don’t stop spawning. The only way to win the event is to zerg it so fast and hard you reduce the ‘remaining Risen’ counter to 0 faster than they respawn.

There is an additional bug I can’t trace; I came across the place in a half-finished state. The waypoint was contested, Jofast and her dolyaks were there, but no event was going on. I was able to even walk through the walls surrounding the camp.

Assault Shank Anchorage – We assume this is the next part in the chain, only after you control the three northern waypoints. If you fail to help Warmaster Chan take the Anchorage, he runs back to the Meddler’s Waypoint and just despawns entirely. The event will never restart until the next server reset, essentially locking Arah.

Help Crusader Angria call in reinforcements – Crusader Angria gets stuck during her route, or won’t do anything when reaching her destination.

Assault the Promenade of the Gods – This event asks you to kill a Champion Risen Giant, as well as giving you a meter for ‘Remaining Risen’ or something to that effect. Problem is, that meter will never move, as no Risen actually spawn alongside the giant.

Capture the central platform on the Promenade of the Gods – Part two of the former, basically. It might not be a bug, but if a single Risen so much as sneezes on the designated square, progress stops entirely. This includes the Risen Acolytes (and their ridiculously inflated aggro range) that naturally respawn in the area. If it’s not a bug, it’s still extremely frustrating.

North one is fine for my server.

The south ones never escort because after breaking down the Lasciate Gate, the camp there is eventually contested in a risen “attack” that doesn’t actually spawn any mobs to defend from.