Guild Wars 2

Nar.8327:

If there’s been any sort of decline in AC’s popularity, it’s been for one or more of these three reasons:

Reason #1: AC tokens cannot be converted into rares that salvage for ectoplasms. This makes them inherently less valuable than, say CoF or HotW tokens, which provide tokens that can.

Reason #2: AC does not have a unique crafting material associated with it. TA’s tokens cannot buy rares that salvage into ectos, but TA remains popular because of onyx cores and lodestones – something AC has no real answer to. Garlic bread doesn’t count.

Reason #3: AC’s recent changes may have made the content more interesting to established groups, but in the process have made the dungeon extremely unfriendly to lower level characters. Low level characters running AC to level up while still getting some dungeon tokens for gear – once a common practice – are now practically nonexistent.

So why run AC? Because of the low-level tokens and item drops, it’s less profitable than any other dungeon run. Because of the lack of a unique crafting material, it’s unattractive to anyone looking to test their luck. Because of the rebalance, it’s a terrible place to try to level up. Really, the only reason left to run it at all is for the unique skins or the Gift of Ascalon.

—

Now some people (myself included) enjoy doing it just for fun and for the mechanics, but if I have a monetary goal to reach for or a character to level up, AC doesn’t provide the kind of rewards that I can get in the same amount of time elsewhere. Not even close.

The developers need to make up their minds on what they want AC to be – if it’s meant to be level 80 endgame content, the rewards need to match up with that. If it’s meant to be an instance for lower level characters to learn, level, and practice, it needs to be doable by characters without exotic gear and full skill/trait loadouts in a reasonable time frame. Right now, it’s trying to be both and succeeding at neither – which is a shame, because brain-dead Warmaster Grast aside, it really is a fun encounter.

I agree with all your reasons as to why it’s not run. The thing is that if you design a dungeon around it being profitable to run for cores/lodestones then eventually people stop running it because: 1) they don’t need those materials anymore or 2) the market changes and the items are no longer need. Sure, the market is favorable now for Onyx, Destroyer, and Charged Lodestones/Core, but Crystal Lodestones are pretty much worthless on the TP. Effectively the dungeon becomes no different than a zone in open world where those materials drop often and the player base that farms tends to be very volatile.

I think making the tokens buy things that would be useful to people that don’t want the skins wouldn’t be an awful idea though. I enjoy running the dungeon, but I’ve got the armor, gift, the weapons I want and 500+ tokens with really nothing to spend it on. It’d be nice if they could be unique crafting materials or for unique recipes for gear. I actually really liked the unique jewelry recipes that the bosses drop now. Having exotic recipes that drop off of mobs (not just bosses) would be a nice improvement to the replayability of a dungeon.

Also, I’m probably alone on this one, but I find that if people are running a dungeon just to use the tokens to by easy level 80 rares to salvage for Ecto then you may have a problem with your design. I view dungeons as being something that should be separate from open world. When people are farming a dungeon then it ceases to be any different from a zone.

Ayrilana.1396:

IamDuddits.1692:

Ayrilana.1396:

Khal Drogo.9631:

A dozen posts = half the player base and being called elitist is an insult as compared to “whining”.

Since when does a dozen posts means that’s half the player base. Where are the facts to back this up? Are you monitoring every single server’s map chats? Are you accounting for the time of day as well?

Khal Drogo.9631:

Mods can we get an ignore option as we do in other forums? Otherwise flame thread in the making here. Then again its in some people’s best interest to get this topic shut down and deleted.

Which you’re one of the primary offenders.

I still fail to see at what point I’ve made a personal attack but I think Khal has at least removed all doubt that he is just a troll. There have been a few constructive posts that bring up some problems with AC that most people would agree need fixes/improvements, and none of them have been from him.

I never said you did. I just used his argument against him which he happened to refer to you.

Yea it was more directed at him than you. Poor wording on my part.

Ayrilana.1396:

Khal Drogo.9631:

A dozen posts = half the player base and being called elitist is an insult as compared to “whining”.

Since when does a dozen posts means that’s half the player base. Where are the facts to back this up? Are you monitoring every single server’s map chats? Are you accounting for the time of day as well?

Khal Drogo.9631:

Mods can we get an ignore option as we do in other forums? Otherwise flame thread in the making here. Then again its in some people’s best interest to get this topic shut down and deleted.

Which you’re one of the primary offenders.

I still fail to see at what point I’ve made a personal attack but I think Khal has at least removed all doubt that he is just a troll. There have been a few constructive posts that bring up some problems with AC that most people would agree need fixes/improvements, and none of them have been from him.

I’d recommend taking “Save Yourselves” instead of “Retreat”, unless it’s a WvWvW build and you are trying to be mobile, in which case I’d suggest “Save Yourselves”, “Stand Your Ground”, and “Retreat”. However, in PvE “Retreat” is on too long of a cooldown (for what it offers you and the group) compared to other Shouts, especially if you are running both Pure of Voice and Soldier Runes x6. In addition, the Condition pull on Save Yourselves can really help your allies out while the boons it applies synergizes nicely with Altruistic Healing.

Also, if you are running Support and Altruistic Healing, I really recommend you consider taking Staff. Empower heals for about 2-3k base to allies and you (depending on healing power), and the boons it applies heals you for another ~4.5k from Altruistic Heal. That’s not to mention the stacks of might it gives. It’s just an amazing ability all around. I’d dump Sword/Shield for Staff mainly because running Sword/Shield with Two Handed Mastery feels like a waste, but also because Sword offers very little as a supporter, in my opinion. If have really want to run two one-handers, then run mace + shield or sword + focus and swap Two Handed Mastery for Empowering Might. Sword + Shield in my opinion is fantastic if you are fight a lot of ranged, but it pigeon holes you too much, the option I listed gives more diversity with a lot of useful protection that isn’t limited to projectile absorbs.

Greatsword is fine if you want be more damage oriented. If you want to offer more CC and protection as well as a blast finisher, then go Hammer.

I’d consider dropping Pure of Voice and taking Empowering Might. With 43% Crit Chance it’d seem like a waste not to take it. The Grandmaster Honor Traits are very lack luster, and Pure of Voice combined with Soldier runes seems redundant. Soldier Runes with Hold the Line and/or Stand Your Ground are great for removing one or two conditions, if the party has more then just pop Save Yourselves instead.

Gear in my opinion is perfectly fine for a frontline support, but the traits just needed some tweaking to really make the build shine. Good work.

Ayrilana.1396:

Khal Drogo.9631:

Ayrilana.1396:

There are over 20 people who have have done the dungeon in the past 30 minutes and that’s not counting those that deleted their entry. You cannot say a dungeon is dying just because it doesn’t have a constant inflow of whatever you consider new listings. The ONLY dungeon that has that is CoF for Path 1. All of the other dungeons have considerable less people attempting them on gw2lfg.

Only Anet will have the stats on AC. If you compare the number of entries pre and post nerf, it is very obvious.

The other dungeons were never popular to begin with, except probably for CM until a few months after launch and about the same level for TA.

I didnt declare AC to be completely dead, I asked a question that would reveal people’s inclinations and a bit of “We told you so”.

Dead implies nobody does it. I can still get a group in under 10 min. AC is still the 2nd most active dungeon. My argument has been that it is not dying specifically be aide of the “difficulty” but because of other factors such as event chest farming and now SAB. I made a comparison of Orr when FotM came out.

What I see from people that don’t like the new AC is that it’s too difficult for them. They want the dungeon to be so that they can zerg through it without any effort. They want to be able to facetank everything. They hate any form of challenge that has you work out a strategy even if it’s a very simple one. They are unwilling to learn the mechanics to determine proper strategies to defeat obstacles nor are they willing look online. They may or may not be using the proper build (glass cannon doesn’t always work unless you’re experienced).

Exactly. If people find these mechanics and strategies too complicated or inconvenient then the devs are going to struggle to find mechanics people can handle.

Imagine if they released a boss fight that can only be damaged using Combos or relied on Combos to defeat. Half the population would ask what a combo is. This would actually be a good use of Combos that the Devs couldn’t incorporate because people would whine too much.

LordByron.8369:

@sacrai
Hotw1 gives badge. Twilight arbor Up/Up gives badges, cof2 gives badge

Why on earth should ac be more difficult?

Do you really believe that they are going to revamp the difficulty/mechanics of AC and leave all the other dungeons as is? Is it really that difficult to extrapolate that other dungeons will get similar revamps? Believe it or not this stuff takes time and man power.

zamalek.2154:

Taught explo to two PUG noobs last night. The run took 4 hours (which is fine, I guess). Here’s the thing: I doubt they are going to go back.

1. By all means make it challenging. However if you can’t guarantee that 90% of playthroughs aren’t going to experience a bug you are going to have to tone it down until you can make that guarantee.
2. Knockdowns are fine as a mechanic. However, more than 2 enemies with knockdown is cheap and shallow game design: the endurance mechanic guarantees that eventually an extremely competent player will get caught.
3. One-shot-kills are also cheap and shallow (scavengers come to mind), yes, you can dodge them but if there are enough of them around eventually you simply don’t have enough endurance/abilities to survive.
4. Fear is pretty useless. It doesn’t add challenge (nor does it get you killed). It’s just frustrating. Especially with the troll, he is dirt easy to kill – but the constant fearing just artificially increases the length of the fight without actually making it more challenging.
5. While I am a massive fan of the random nature of bosses (which punishes players who are used to brainlessly repeating rotations a. la. WoW), they need to have certain restrictions. For example, the spider queen should not be allowed to use the AOE DOT for a few seconds after using the immobilize. Maybe scale the event a little more dynamically (e.g. if everyone is over level 50 in AC the restriction does not apply).

I appreciate that the dungeon should be challenging. At the moment it just hopelessly frustrating, especially for someone like me who really doesn’t mind teaching noobs. No matter how good you are having to continually res will get you killed as well – and those downed players aren’t necessarily bad, they are just getting killed by dirty tricks/mechanics.

Evidence of this is that I am seeing more and more “LF*M AC Level 80”, where previously players were generally a lot more helpful. You are destroying the community you worked so hard to foster by using these cheap mechanics that punish not only students, but teachers as well.

It got so ridiculous that I had to eventually send the poor players silver just so that they could WP and repair.

1. Games have bugs. I’m guessing the bugs weren’t discovered until after the patch went out and it would seem like a silly option to revert back to the old AC seeing as they likely want valuable metrics on what people like/dislike about the patch changes.

2. Everyone agrees this is poor design

3. One or two one-shot kills isn’t bad, but with as many knockdowns as there are in the dungeon it becomes difficult to come back once the chain stuns start.

4. Agree and disagree. It’s a fine mechanic when it has consequence. On troll it’s currently artificial fight length.

5. The immobilize into the AoE is fine. It’s what makes here dangerous. What needs to be tweaked is the duration of the AoEs. Having someone get immobilized and then downed from a poison AoE is ok. However, getting downed in those AoEs is almost guaranteed to kill you and anyone brave enough to try and rez you in it. I do feel like this fight goes from being difficult to straight forward simply by switching from ranged to melee. One or two melees can pretty much face tank her because she never AoEs at PB.

Khal Drogo.9631:

AlietteFaye.7316:

I would say maybe 20-30 minutes. It’s not bad at all if you know what you’re doing.

If 3 of you know what you are doing + high enough dps / bring an ele. That was the same as old “effortless” AC.

AC took long because the mobs and bosses had tons of HP and took forever to kill, but the dungeon was effortless because there were very few instances where you ran the risk of wiping.

Xavori.3768:

IamDudditts,

Kholer isn’t a learning curve. He’s a learning brick wall. “Hey, newbie, that Spider Queen is what’s called a boss. It wiped the party because most of you kept trying to dodge out of circles to big to dodge out of that last too long anyway which is why I kept telling you to quit dodging. Now, this guy Kholer, he’s also a boss. If you don’t dodge, you’ll be dead in a couple seconds…”

I think most would agree here that Queen Spider needs some tweaking. In my experience I expect to wipe on her more often than Kholer or any of the other bosses just because of the duration and damage output of her AoEs combined with the number of adds. A wipe is almost guaranteed if it’s a groups first time and they don’t spec properly (and aren’t that experience).

That aside, I would be disappointed if back to back bosses had the exact same mechanics.

Xavori.3768:

Again, not a problem for me. (side note, I didn’t learn to dodge by dying. I learned to dodge by practicing in open world until I could make ‘EVADE’ show up almost every time without having to consciously time it anymore. Then again, I’m wierd in that I’m a KESA player type…

If more people learned the game like that then I’d be willing to bet there would be fewer complaints on the forums about it. People are more likely to say something is broken, overpowered or poorly designed than to admit that they aren’t as good as they think they are. It’s not that they are necessarily bad, but rather that they are too rigid in their play style to adjust and adapt. It’s simply easier to complain that something isn’t balanced than it is to give up your Full Zerker Glass Cannon build.

What does KESA mean? Also, DnD ftw.

Xavori.3768:

Kholer got skipped pre ‘interesting’ because frankly, the risk-reward ratio was out of whack. If players are skipping your content, you know something is wrong. You should fix it. You don’t fix risk-reward skewed too much to heavily towards risk by increasing the risk. Yet that’s exactly what ANet did.

I think his risk-reward was fine. The reason he got skipped is because people ran AC for tokens and the dungeons end-load the token reward. Some tokens, karma and 15 silver plus vendor trash for a fight that can take a few minute is not that bad. However, if you are speed running, that 5 mins becomes a significant fraction of time on the overall run and people would rather get the ~160k exp, ~2k Karma, ~25 silver and 60 tokens that much faster.

Xavori.3768:

Oh, and this is a good place to make it clear I’m not complaining about difficulty. I’m usually pretty good at using ‘risk-reward’. Difficult content with good rewards would be a welcome addition to GW2. I enjoyed the clock tower at Halloween. It was difficult, but if you finished, you got an exotic. I ran the winter jump puzzle as a daily. I’m working towards trying to solo all of Arah using not-warriors. I’m all for difficult.

What you are saying here is a contradiction. Based on what you are saying about soloing Arah, you are admitting that “reward” goes beyond the rewards dropped in game. You find it rewarding to solo the dungeon, not for the drops, but just because you can say that you’ve solo’d the dungeon. This can translate to the Kholer changes. His drops didn’t change, but his mechanics are more satisfying to overcome because it simply has more depth (I use this term loosely) compared to pre-patch.

Xavori.3768:

But I’m pretty opposed to Requires Nearly Perfect Gameplay Out of Low Level Players as that’s counter-intuitive. And I’m even more opposed to Requires NPC’s and Luck Rather Than Player Skill because that’s not difficult…that’s luck.

Won’t argue about luck, it’s always a bad design choice unless you are designing a casino. NPCs isn’t bad because it adds a random element that you have to react to. This is more along the lines of Hodgin’s AoE choice rather than with Grast randomly not doing his job. Grast needs to be fixed and the fight in general could have more to it, I won’t argue that. Near perfect play I think is a bit of an exaggeration.

Xavori.3768:

Kholer is pretty simple to dodge…for you and I. But a new player…not so much. One, you have to pay really close attention to his hand, all the while fighting and dealing with adds and whatnot. It’s also not as simple as seen glowy hand-dodge. You have to time it. Again, experienced players do that without thinking…new players…notsomuch.

This is called a learning curve. This is how I learned to dodge it and I’m going to guess it’s how you learned to dodge it. I died several times before I got the dodge down, and I still admittedly miss it when I’m not paying attention, but at least I know enough to realize that it’s my own fault for failing it and not the fault of the mechanic. Is it really that much to ask someone to pay attention to the screen? Are the devs really expected to cater dungeon design to people that consider “paying really close attention” to be too difficult?

Xavori.3768:

Kholer’s mechanics would make sense in any of the dungeons after Sorrow’s. Most players by that point are really familiar with how the game works, dodging etc. But try to imagine this being the second boss that you ever faced? Or heck, just try to remember how many times you used to die when fighting him? And then add in all the frustration of the new spider queen right before this. How many players exactly do you think just give up after that?

Am I really expected to believe that people got to level 35 and beat story mode AC without learning to dodge? Actually more importantly, am I really expected to feel that a dungeon should cater to such people? I’m sorry you feel the way you do, but people need to learn to play the game, play their class, and understand the mechanics of the game at some point and the earlier the better. When dodging becomes an advanced mechanic saved for being learned at level 60 then we have a bit of a problem with the mentality of the player base. Also the glowing hands = “you should dodge this” is a mechanic that is introduced in early level zones: Drakes, Ettins, etc. all use this mechanic.

Dungeons don’t have to be for everyone. Just like sPvP and WvWvW aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. Just because the dungeon offers rewards doesn’t mean that it should be at a difficulty level accessible to all. Dungeons should challenge the player to improve, but it’s the players decision if they want to improve and overcome or just give up and run World Bosses instead.

mesmer days.3289:

I think AC is dying cause now its harder to find a pug group or a guild group especially at low levels. There has been a ton of ragequiting in AC since the revamping in the update. Most pug teams that I do AC dungeon with are filled with ragequiters so you have to find new players in order to finish the dungeon even if your at the very end of the dungeon against the final boss. Sometimes the whole team leaves the AC dungeon cause of the death count and repair bill which makes me have to find people to join before the dungeon resets. If this was a solo dungeon I would easily finish it myself but it involves teamates which you have to depend on other people in order to finish it. Doing the AC dungeon at lower levels is ragequiter heaven. I think they need to lower the difficulty or find a way to make people not ragequit so much in this dungeon.

I think you must be having tough luck. I realize I encompass a small sample size, but I rarely have teams split in the middle of a dungeon. If they are quitting then they at least hide it well and wait until the path is finished. Most of the groups I pug in have at least 2 sub-60s and I’ve run it with people that just finished story. Some people just don’t have the patience or will to improve and there is unfortunately little you can do before hand to prevent. My best advice would be don’t assume that all sub-40s will RQ at the first wipe, there are people out there that are really willing to learn, improve and just enjoy the content.

IndigoSundown.5419:

IamDuddits.1692:

Xavori.3768:

The reason people skip Kholer is that after you’ve killed him once, maybe twice, you learn the risk/reward is horribly out of balance. He was a high risk low reward fight previously. Now, he’s higher risk with the same low reward. He’s also an absolutely-does-not-belong-in-a-newbie-dungeon kinda fight. If you miss a dodge, you’ll likely die. That’s not what players new to dungeons want to go through. Sure, I have a few toons that can survive being blended, but that’s because as soon as I get yanked, I know I have to throw up my bestest defenses while dodging out. Anything less than that, and even tanks get dead.

It’s a dodge-or-die mechanic, you aren’t suppose to tank it. The point of Kholer is to teach the importance of timing your dodge against powerful, and often highly choreographed abilities. Generally, game designers design later dungeons/levels on the idea that their player has a decent understanding of mechanics from earlier dungeons. If you don’t design an introductory dungeon to hammer in something as basic as dodging (which from my pugging experience is something that people still don’t fully understand) then it makes it difficult to design later dungeons around this concept, as you can’t be sure the player understands dodging yet.

Kholer has quite possibly the most basic boss mechanics in the game, second only to a true tank-n-spank (pre-patch Ghost Eater).

I agree that Kholer is fine in an intro dungeon. His Scorpion Wire is not that hard to dodge if you’re paying attention and know when to dodge. However, Xavori was using tank as a noun, meaning someone specced for T/V, not tank the verb. It is quite possible for a high health/defense character to survive being pulled in if they’re quick getting back out and can dump the conditions.

The adds do complicate the fight a little. Those not used to the fight can and do take their attention off Kholer to deal with the adds. That can be a fatal mistake.

Thank you for the clarification.

The adds are meant to complicate the fight and I think the patch changes make it apparent that that is how the fight was originally intended.

I’m not sure what you mean by take their attention off Kholer. My understanding is that you definitely want to focus the adds down when they spawn, as they will quickly overwhelm the party with CC. However, I’m gathering you mean that people tend to get tunnel vision once the adds spawn and forget to dodge Kholer. I agree it makes the fight more complicated but complexity isn’t always a bad thing.

Overall I think Kholer, Ghost Busters, and Howling King are all really good fights. Troll and Queen Spider have good mechanics but I think could use some fine tuning in some areas. Colossus I feel isn’t an awful fight, but I think that they could do a little more with it.

And as mentioned, I agree that the knockdowns need to be reworked off the mobs, it’s just way too common and makes the adds just frustrating overall.

Aberrant.6749:

IamDuddits.1692:

With skills like “Save Yourselves”, “Hold the Line”, Stand Your Ground" and “Retreat” I’d venture to believe that Guardians were designed to be first in, last out. If you’ve distracted the enemy long enough for 1 or 2 of your allies to get away then you have done your job right.

I’ve come across several people that have thought this way… but I totally disagree…all of the roots/knockbacks/warding/teleports plus the many damage mitigation skills makes it hard to down before the guard is able to get to somewhere safer… it just depends on what you want your guard to be able to do and what role you want it to play.

Most of their teleports are “to nearest enemy”. The two exceptions that come to mind are Hammer 2 and GS 3 and the range on Hammer 2 is very laughable. Shield 5, Staff 5 and Hammer 5 all are good if you place them properly, but anything running stability and you are pretty much out of luck.

I’m just saying that you are more likely going to cause your enemy to back off than you are to actually run away from them. Unless I’m running staff at the time in WvW, I usually just try to last as long as possible if I’m caught out and hope some reinforcements arrive to clean up.

Khal Drogo.9631:

IamDuddits.1692:

Also, having run old AC enough times to get the full Armor Set, Gift, and two 2-Handers, I can only describe old AC as tedious and unsatisfying, but quick and easy, kind of like McDonald’s.

Funny I could say the same thing about new AC as well. It was somewhat challenging for the first run though (* with an experienced party) Fun? Not really. If devs keep catering to the people looking for a challenge (the same “elitists” running dungeons as guardians and not pugging), then it will be a nonstop whinefest of “I need more of a challenge”. And I am sure these guys completed AC P1 in under 10 minutes when they were low level and starting out in the game as well.

As it is, the “elitists” got their way and no amount of insults are going to bring back the playerbase to AC. But go ahead, let these guys dictate game design.

Funnily enough not many asked for a nerf for the end dugeon, Arah P4, because ppl know it was going to be a very hard dungeon and people pick their fights based on their respective skill level. I think they asked for bug fixes instead (which the nerf had appeared to only have partially fixed). And the elitists didnt complain that it was no longer hard, well not as much as campaigning to keep new AC.

Define what you mean by elitist, I’d like to have a better understanding of the insult that you are flinging in my direction? What level of challenge is acceptable to you, if any, for a dungeon? From the looks of it you want a dungeon that is basically an afk face tank.

I still fail to see how people can argue AC was better before. As I recall, a majority of AC groups were looking to do speed runs, would generally require level 80s only, and would almost always skip Kholer unless Troll spawned. So basically farmers. A good chunk of the bosses in this dungeon could be face tanked and you could usually stand in their AoEs. So sure, old AC was a fine introductory dungeon if introductory equates to effortless.

I’d be interested in discussing what you think pre-patch AC provided as an introductory dungeon that post-patch doesn’t and how you think AC can be improved in a manner that encourages people to run it without it being an area that gets farmed like CoF P1. Please give specific examples.

Xavori.3768:

The reason people skip Kholer is that after you’ve killed him once, maybe twice, you learn the risk/reward is horribly out of balance. He was a high risk low reward fight previously. Now, he’s higher risk with the same low reward. He’s also an absolutely-does-not-belong-in-a-newbie-dungeon kinda fight. If you miss a dodge, you’ll likely die. That’s not what players new to dungeons want to go through. Sure, I have a few toons that can survive being blended, but that’s because as soon as I get yanked, I know I have to throw up my bestest defenses while dodging out. Anything less than that, and even tanks get dead.

It’s a dodge-or-die mechanic, you aren’t suppose to tank it. The point of Kholer is to teach the importance of timing your dodge against powerful, and often highly choreographed abilities. Generally, game designers design later dungeons/levels on the idea that their player has a decent understanding of mechanics from earlier dungeons. If you don’t design an introductory dungeon to hammer in something as basic as dodging (which from my pugging experience is something that people still don’t fully understand) then it makes it difficult to design later dungeons around this concept, as you can’t be sure the player understands dodging yet.

Kholer has quite possibly the most basic boss mechanics in the game, second only to a true tank-n-spank (pre-patch Ghost Eater).

VoiceOfUnreason.5976:

Isslair.4908:

Crossplay.2067:

If they guaranteed a rare in every large chest, all dungeons would be run a lot more.

A nice idea, actually. Much like the world bosses change.

A daily account bound bonus chest per dungeon path would stimulate a lot of people to run some long-forgotten dungeons.

All those ideas encourage is speed running, which really isn’t a concept you should be designing dungeons around. Honestly, they should just look into having unique RNG drops in the dungeons. Weapon/Armor skins that you can’t get elsewhere, each boss has a unique loot table, and then the remaining pieces randomly drop from trash pulls. And before you ask, yes, this is in fact how WoW does it. It’s a tried and true method of keeping people replaying dungeons.

What separates GW2 from that is the fact that WoW’s items were required for progression (leading to increasing frustration when items didn’t drop and you couldn’t move on to other things until they did), whereas GW2’s would simply be cosmetic and would be sought after as end game prestige.

I agree. I don’t want people running the dungeon to get to the end ASAP. I want people that run the dungeon to do full clears and, hopefully, enjoy the dungeon. I actually thought that the unique Exotic Jewelry Recipes they added to the AC bosses was a really nice touch.

I read your wall by the way. I agree with pretty much all of it. Some notes:

Graveling Stalker: Bug: Make the evade proc only on PCs. Currently it can proc on pets and NPCs which will make no effort to dodge.
Suggested Mechanics Change: When the evade procs, he does a leap knockdown into a channeled DoT (basically the previous mechanic stalkers had). The evasion drops after the leap. The idea is the leap is uninterruptable, forcing the group to interrupt it after the channel starts. At the very least it’d make him do something rather than just sit there.

Ghost Eater: Bug: He does nothing after his Ghost Armor comes back up (usually for a few minutes, enough time to charge up another trap).

Colossus: Yes, he need something more. The other two paths use what you get to help beat the boss, power of the scepters and the traps. What does being a ghost provide you that help you beat the boss? There has to be something thematic that would work here.

Isslair.4908:

VoiceOfUnreason.5976:

unique RNG drops

Please no.
We already have a horrible situation with precursor market. You should get reward for your skill (yes, speedruning takes skill), not for luck and mindles repetition.

Speedruns are better than no runs at all.

You should be rewarded based on skill, yes. However, speed running does not require skill or at least not as much as you think it does, though you can tell yourself otherwise if you want.

Also I disagree about speedruns better than no runs. Speedrunning is only better if you want the reward at the end. If you are running the dungeon to run the dungeon and see the content, then honestly I’d rather solo it than run it with a speed run.

Folk.2093:

I did p3 yesterday for the first time since the change and it seemed easier..

The dungeon only got harder for the people that want to face tank bosses, stand in AoEs and that expect the developers to design dungeons that cater to their rigid play style.

As Foo said, define your role more. What Major Traits were you going to spec? Do you see yourself as more of a back line support or a “in the thick of it” support. Also, do you have a consistent group that you will be doing dungeons/pvp etc. with or are you going to pug?

If you are going to pug, I would suggest more a dps/support rather than hard support mostly because you might run into a group with a hard support already and more than one full support in a group can be a hindrance as they sacrifice a lot of personal DPS to buff everyone (at least if you go the Boon Duration route). A decent build to look at is Empowering Might with Knight’s gear. That will give you the toughness that Giver’s is giving with the Power and Precision to get crits.

Do you plan on going an Altruistic Healing route? If so, steer away from Healing Power gear as AH doesn’t benefit much from it (0.01 Coefficient).

Pure support can work in an organized group, but lean more toward flexibility when pugging.

With skills like “Save Yourselves”, “Hold the Line”, Stand Your Ground" and “Retreat” I’d venture to believe that Guardians were designed to be first in, last out. If you’ve distracted the enemy long enough for 1 or 2 of your allies to get away then you have done your job right.

Puandro.3245:

IamDuddits.1692:

DancingPenguins.9875:

Erasmus.1624:

Gigantic Lupicus is easy. Actually, Arah in general is easy. It’s just tedious. Also, I love Gigantic Lupicus.

Wait till you pug it. People apparently don’t carry ranged weapons these days.

I wasn’t suppose to melee Lupi? The more you know.

Im surprised people don’t carry ranged weapons because when i PUG thats all i see.

I also play Guardian which are really lacking in the ranged department. Scepter is awful in my opinion and Staff is hardly ranged. If I’m going to attack it with Staff I may as well just melee him with greatsword.

VoiceOfUnreason.5976:

Stooperdale.3560:

“My experience is that Queen Spider causes more wipes than most of the end bosses. I admittedly can’t put my finger on what exactly it is.”

One of the problems is the persistent, high damage, extremely wide poison fields that the queen lays down. If player is downed in one of those fields then other players typically cannot go near enough to revive, making the encounter very punishing.

Yeah the biggest issue there is the fact that the wells linger for so long. They could probably reduce the overall duration and increase the damage, that way the player still gets punished (and possibly get downed) for staying in the well too long, but it would be more possible to revive them since they disappear quicker.

Yea I think that’s pretty much it. It seems like if one or two get immobilized in the poison they are pretty much downed/defeated without a chance for revive (unless they are on the edge. The boss + the adds isn’t horrible but the size and coverage of the AoEs combined with the long duration is unforgiving.

PetricaKerempuh.7958:

for me it is about not being worth the effort anymore. why would i run AC? before i could lvl my alts there, and get enough tokens to gear them in lvl 80 starter rares, but now… i can’t even get the ectos there. this goes for all dungeons <70. dungeons to farm are cof+. rest is just too bad rewards once i had my chars lvl80 and started grinding money.

Dungeons should not be designed for any of the reasons you’ve listed because there are more than enough options for grinding ectos, gold, and starter rares/exotics. Believe it or not, some people run AC because gasp they enjoy running AC/Challenging dungeons and aren’t really that concerned with the end reward.

VoiceOfUnreason.5976:

IamDuddits.1692:

Reading the posts in this and numerous similar threads complaining about the challenge of AC exp lead me to believe that the majority of the player base running it pre-patch were: A) awful at the game or looking for easy gold/exotics.

I’ve four manned it multiple times with pugs and I’ve run it with more than half the party being less than level 50 and/or first timers. Yes, we wiped multiple times on Kholer, Queen Spider, Hodg, and Lovers, but the most important part was each attempt we’d improve. This dungeon is challenging, but doable.

Also, I don’t perceive it as a bad thing that people have stopped farming AC (and yes I’m implying most of the people complaining about AC changes were just farming an easy dungeon). If the goal of an introductory dungeon is to teach new players how to handle dungeon content then I fail to see how “No Kholer, AC Exp Speedruns, lvl 80s only” accomplished this. AC is a great learning dungeon if you have enough sense to learn from your mistakes or have one experienced (patient) player that is willing to take the time to explain things.

Also, having run old AC enough times to get the full Armor Set, Gift, and two 2-Handers, I can only describe old AC as tedious and unsatisfying, but quick and easy, kind of like McDonald’s.

I also think they’ve improved the dungeon from an actual gameplay perspective (read:CHALLENGE), though I think there are some legitimate concerns. I addressed that in my big wall of text above. Most of these complaints do tend to stem from farmers/speedrunners which should not be the focus of any design. In fact, I would rather they add more methods of blocking player progress in the dungeon in order to cut down on content skipping. This would also mean that some of these “trash” pulls need to be improved to actually offer unique challenges rather than just be tedious time wasters.

I admittedly only skimmed over some of the larger posts in the thread, so I’ll go back and look through your wall. I am by no means saying that the dungeon is perfect as is. After running it several times with friends and pugs of various skill/character level, I agree that there are some areas that could use some tuning. A brief list of things that come to mind:

-CC on troll needs to get tuned down. The daze and the AoE fear combined with his other AoE is a bit much. Doable, but a bit much.

-My experience is that Queen Spider causes more wipes than most of the end bosses. I admittedly can’t put my finger on what exactly it is. I’m skeptical of whether it’s the fight itself or poor group comp with too few condition removers or just poor position/experience, so insight here would be good.

-Kind of a given, but bugging NPCs are a big killer.

-It’d be nice if Hodgins and Lovers felt less like a DPS race. A lot of the AC exp groups I see run P2 only. I generally have to convince them to run P1/P3 and I think it’s because these two parts can sometimes be almost impossible if you don’t have the damage output. Even so, it’d be nice to have an alternative method of doing this without it being a race.

It’s worth noting that Kholer is pretty much perfect at this point. This fight was my favorite pre-patch and it only got better post-patch. This fight is great for new players because it truly fortifies the principles of dealing with adds and reading the boss for which skills to dodge. When you wipe it’s obvious why you wiped.

I agree they need to discourage content skipping more. Reducing the hit point pool was a good start but if they gave some reward or incentive to kill the mobs that would be good. Honestly the mobs go down fairly quickly already. I hadn’t done a full dungeon clear in a long time, but with some friends we did and even with only four of us we had no problem so long as we didn’t aggro the whole room.

AC admittedly has spoiled me. When I go to other dungeons it’s hard to deal with the long, tedious trash/boss fights due to the massive hit point pools. I really hope that they keep up the good work and revamp the other dungeons along the same lines of AC. AC in my opinion is a very satisfying challenge. I still run it even though I really don’t need the tokens.

Reading the posts in this and numerous similar threads complaining about the challenge of AC exp leads me to believe that the majority of the player base running it pre-patch were: a) awful at the game or b) looking for easy gold/exotics.

Post-patch, I’ve four manned it multiple times with pugs and I’ve run it with more than half the party being less than level 50 and/or first timers. Yes, we wiped multiple times on Kholer, Queen Spider, Hodg, and Lovers, but the most important part was each attempt we’d improve. This dungeon is challenging, but doable.

Also, I don’t perceive it as a bad thing that people have stopped farming AC (and yes I’m implying most of the people complaining about AC changes were just farming an easy dungeon). If the goal of an introductory dungeon is to teach new players how to handle dungeon content then I fail to see how “No Kholer, AC Exp Speedruns, lvl 80s only” accomplished this. AC is a great learning dungeon if you have enough sense to learn from your mistakes or have one experienced (patient) player that is willing to take the time to explain things.

Also, having run old AC enough times to get the full Armor Set, Gift, and two 2-Handers, I can only describe old AC as tedious and unsatisfying, but quick and easy, kind of like McDonald’s.

DancingPenguins.9875:

Erasmus.1624:

Gigantic Lupicus is easy. Actually, Arah in general is easy. It’s just tedious. Also, I love Gigantic Lupicus.

Wait till you pug it. People apparently don’t carry ranged weapons these days.

I wasn’t suppose to melee Lupi? The more you know.

Ooshi.8607:

This is kinda pointless as usually these “crafting is useless, there’s no point in even making your own gear” kinda people don’t have enough attention span to check on the threads that they spout nonsense into, but here it goes anyway.

Joe has a newly dinged lvl80 warrior with both lvl400 armorsmith and lvl400 weaponsmith.
Joe wants to gear his new warrior all in beserker exotics, he is going to need helm, shoulders, chest, gloves, leggings and boots. He will also need a greatsword and a pair of axes.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Cost to Craft xxxx Cost w/ Buy Order xxx Cost for straight Buy
Draconic Helm —-————- 3g21s94c—————-3g58s75c——————— 4g23s65c
Draconic Shoulders —-——- 3g26s18c—————-3g35s63c——————— 4g32s69c
Draconic Chest —-————-3g48s64c—————- 3g28s30c———————4g30s50c
Draconic Gloves —-————-3g26s18c——————3g80s43c———————4g33s59c
Draconic Leggings —-——— 3g41s58c—————-4g00s00c———————4g47s88c
Draconic Boots —-———— 3g26s18c——————3g50s20c——————-4g32s60c
Pearl Broadsword —-——- 3g39s91c——————3g90s36c —-————- 4g60s00c
Pearl Axe —-————————3g23s11c —-————4g45s40c —-————- 5g56s00c
Pearl Axe —-————————3g23s11c —-———- 4g45s40c —-————- 5g56s00c
—————————————————————————————————————————————————-
——————————————- 29g76s83c —-———-34g34s47c —-———— 41g72s91c

Difference Between Crafted / Buy Order – 4g57s64c
Difference Between Crafted / Buy Immediately – 11g96s08c
Difference Between Buy Order / Sell Order – 7g38s44c

The cost for the mats and prices for armor weapons where all taken from TP at around 7.30pm GMT.
Can one of you guys PLEASE explain to me how is crafting not profitable / rewarding / useful?

Edit: formating,

You’ve shown it’s rewarding for a person that is crafting their own gear. How rewarding is it for someone trying to buy mats and sell the item or for someone who has the mats and is torn between selling the mats vs crafting and selling the item. Something can be profitable for your personal use but the 15% TP fee makes it impractical for making a profit.

Basically if the mats sell for more gold than the item does then it’s questionable how useful crafting is.

Edit: What versions of those items are you using for your values? Knight’s vs Valk’s vs Carrion are going to have different values. Same for the weapons. It’s worth noting that most of the profit you’d be getting on the sale would be from the weapons and not the armor.

CassieGold.7460:

Minion of Vey.4398:

I’m not sure what people expect out of crafting. Do they want every random thing they make to be profitable? How could the game even function if that was the case?

I feel some times like yes, this is what people expect. Every time I wade into a thread and try to explain how to profit via crafting I get the answer back: “That’s not crafting, that’s playing the TP.”

Maybe in some games, the process of crafting is so unappealing to the vast majority of people that for the few willing to partake in the activity there is profit to be had… maybe crafting in those games is something that creates an opportunity for people who wind up with their face in the dirt in end game content…. I just don’t know.

What I do know is that crafting in GW is easy to learn for anyone, and takes a higher skill curve to use effectively…. If all you want to do is gear your own characters, its easy to do that, and accessible to everyone. If you want to make money… that takes some skill beyond pushing the buttons and watching your character stand at an anvil.

I think the reason people generally call it “playing the TP” is because the profit margin on a lot of the entry level items (destroyer/corrupted weapons) aren’t incredibly high, meaning it’s arguably better to just sell the mats. When you also factor in that a lot of these items require Skill points for Core to Lodestone upgrades you begin to realize that the Craft itself isn’t really providing the means to make the profit but rather the skill points used to save gold on the lodestones are the key.

Most of the gold people make on the TP is just from intelligent purchase of mats. Since I started trying to make gold off the TP I always buy all of the mats I need to make the item rather than using my personal stash because it forces me to look at the cost of the materials and because it keeps a record of what the mats were at the item I made the item. What kills me the most is the skill points. I might make about 7-8 gold on a Destroyer GS, but I’m basically just converting Skill points into money at a 40-50s/SP exchange rate. This also requires some level of time spent researching the cost of the item, the mats and roughly a 30 g overhead to make the item. Still learning here, but from what I gather it’s difficult to get into the market when the entry level stuff is difficult to really get decent returns on.

With that being said, some of the higher level gear like the Foefire’s can bring in a good return but require you to already be pretty well off.

TL DR; The profit margin between selling the mats and the final item have too much overlap, the profitable items have a huge barrier to entry, and the profit margin on the entry level stuff means it’ll be a long time before you can make decent gold (in addition to a lot of SP farming).

Obtena.7952:

The only enlightenment I can offer is that burning is an intrinsic part of the Guardian toolset and bleeding is not. It’s easier to work with the tools you have.

I guess it meant on a more general level. Guardians from what I can see would have no reason to go Condition Damage. Burning already does really good damage without any CD, but the problem is its fairly easy to mitigate most of the damage because it relies on duration stacking. For Guardians in particular it’s not too big of a deal because it’s more of a supplementary damage, similar to retaliation, but I can’t really see anyone really building around it for their damage output.

Obtena.7952:

IamDuddits.1692:

-Burning could remove boons on application and every X seconds after. It’d fit in with the purging nature of the condition.

Secondary effects like what have been proposed here are probably a better approach without affecting burning damage directly. I particularly like yours since it seems inline with some of the other thinking we have heard from the devs about boon hate.

Most of the useful (unique) secondary effects are already conditions. Even the purge that I suggested is actually rather redundant because it’s offered as a trait (Searing Flames being a specific example).

There are a few thematic effects I can think of, but they seem redundant:

-Take increased damage while burned (also achieved with Radiant Power)
-Reduced Movement Speed while burned (Crippled does this)
-Reduced outgoing damage (Weakness does this)

I’m not sure these are included in traits or runes:

-Reduced Endurance Regeneration
-Deals a fraction of the damage as AoE to nearby allies (could see some issues with this idea and AoE burns like Purging Flames)

Enlighten me if I’m missing something, but as of right now I see little reason to take burning over bleeds (it’s assumed that a bleed build can stack enough to make the bleed damage greater, ~8 stacks).
-

What if additional stacks of burning gave a condition equivalent of Defiant stacks that Boss mobs have. For example, if a Ranger and a Guardian chain 4 burns together, it’d require 4 instances of condition removal to remove the entire stack. When an “instance” of burn runs it’s duration then the stacks of Condition Defiance will retroactively change, but will not remove the condition as a result. For example, if I apply two 5-sec burns (total duration of 10 seconds) and the enemy uses a cleanse (reducing the defiant stack from 2 to 1) the entire condition won’t get removed after 5 seconds when the initial burn was applied, however, in the same instance if a cleanse wasn’t applied the stack would reduce from 2 to 1 when the duration ran up.

What would this accomplish?
-It would make multiple condition specs somewhat viable as stacking burning would be an improvement as opposed to a waste.

-It’d fit better with it’s design. Bleeds are meant to be short duration, but intense burst/DoTs (kind of an oxymoron); Burning is meant to be a consistent damage over a long period based on the stacked duration. The problem with burning is that a single condition removal will remove 20+ seconds of burning damage, so it’s really only viable against someone that is running no condition removal, or that has tons of conditions on them.

-With the exception of Fire Elementalist, most classes don’t have a lot of options for stacking burning damage and most of the options that are available I rarely see run. Do people actually run Torch Guardian/Mesmer/Ranger or Longbow Warrior? This would mean that most classes would have a rather difficult time abusing this by themselves. Guardians for example would be able to drop 4 stacks at most. At the very least it might add viability to running these weapons.

The draw back to this is Elementalist could potentially drop A LOT of burn stacks and abuse the hell out of this mechanic, but then again I’d say this isn’t that awful because unlike bleeds (intensity) and poison (heal debuff) you can generally regen/heal through the damage.

The niche burning would fill is a difficult to remove condition meant to counteract Regeneration more than to actually cause intense damage over a short period (like bleeds).

I see no reason to compete with bleeds for short duration condition damage without make it exactly like bleeds and it seems like nearly every other debuff that a condition could apply is already done by another condition.

Edit: Actually another mechanic I just thought of.

-Burning could remove boons on application and every X seconds after. It’d fit in with the purging nature of the condition.

AlietteFaye.7316:

IamDuddits.1692:

So the reason you don’t want this removed is so that you can continue to work around DR? Also your argument for doing the same DEs, same personal story etc. really doesn’t work when you are grinding the same dungeons to level up alts.

Have you ever tried leveling up in WvWvW? In my opinion that would be a better alternative considering you are actually playing the character you are leveling (thus learning the profession) rather than piggy backing them to 80 on a character that you are already familiar with.

From both a role-playing and a game mechanics stand point it simply has no place here. And thank you for bringing up the DR abuse that this always. And yes, I consider it an exploit to complete a dungeon on the same one or two characters but get the full rewards benefit 3-5 times because you swap characters into the dungeon that wouldn’t be able to complete the dungeon.

DR is dumb and shouldn’t affect people actually playing the game, anyway. So “working around it” isn’t exactly something I should be ashamed of. Doing the same dungeon to level up alts quickly rather than doing the same DEs, Personal Stories, and Explorations is definitely something that I’d rather be doing. At least it’s a method of getting my alts to max level quicker without making me spend my gold.

Leveling an alt in WvW does not work out very well, actually. It’s slower, you can definitely feel how downscaling is not as fantastic as it should be, and not having your skills and traits unlocked simply sucks.

Again, it isn’t “DR abuse”. It’s one of the FEW perks of having alts, so please don’t complain about it. Just because my character isn’t the appropriate level, doesn’t mean I completed the dungeon any less. Why would I want the extra EXP on my main character? It’s useless to me.

It sounds like cheesing to me and I fail to see how it isn’t DR abuse. You are running the dungeon several times on one character and only changing characters at the very end so that your reward doesn’t diminish.

If alts have so few perks then why are you leveling one up to begin with? The whole point of making an alt is to try out a new class, which you aren’t even doing because you are just leveling through dungeon rewards?

I understand where you are coming from. Some people obviously don’t like leveling through content for the fifth/sixth time, however, if leveling in this game is so awful that you have to resort to a “work around” to level up an alt then why not just ask ANet to add a “Start at 80” button and save yourself some time. Seems like it’d be easier than swapping characters at the end of a dungeon which, aside from being immersion breaking, is simply an kitten backwards mechanic.

Edit: To elaborate, I agree with you that after five characters (one of each race) there really is little incentive to level up through the content unless you really enjoy it. I think that a “level to 80” option would be good for veteran players that just want to get to the end game dungeons or whatever, however, I disagree with char swapping dungeons as being a solution for this.

Also, keep in mind that leveling the “old fashioned way” serves as a learning process for players to get familiar with a new class. While I’m not implying you are incapable of rapidly learning a class that you power leveled, I’d guess that a lot of people that leveled a new class in this manner end up hitting level 80 with no clue how to play their class properly which leads to miserable dungeon runs for other players.

Leo already pointed out most of what I was going to say, but I have some other things I’d like to comment on:

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

No, that literally tells you a few things the boss is immune to, or what he does. And then the boss still clubs you over the head with an insta-kill attack that you couldn’t see coming.

Please give me a specific example of this.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

You have a complete misunderstanding about what trial and error means. It doesn’t mean learning things by trying them out. It means being forced to fail constantly, in order to learn mechanics, something vastly different from simply learning to play your class. Trial and error is the equivalent of being killed by opening a door, without being warned that that door is deadly. That is trial and error.

A door killing you as an example of trial and error isn’t even a valid example. Trial and error loses it’s ability to be viable when you can only try once, as in your example. Cooking is a better example of trial and error. You make a recipe, you try the recipe and adjust accordingly. Rinse and repeat. The scientific method is trial and error. I’m fully aware of what trial and error is, you are the one that seems to be misunderstanding and throwing around straw man arguments. And Leo already pointed out that one of the luxuries of video games is that death can be a learning experience.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

A strawman argument, and dodging the issue. My criticism on the nature of the way difficulty is implemented has nothing to do with whether I’m looking to be challenged or not. Assuming I want things easy, just because I criticize the way difficulty has been implemented, is dishonest.

Are you complaining that AC is too hard or that it’s harder compared to CoF and HotW as you mentioned before? If it’s the latter then I think you are failing to realize that they are (hopefully) revamping the other dungeons too to bring the difficulty up.

The dungeons at release were a joke. They simply aren’t difficult. I mean, Story mode CoF was more difficult than CoF P1 explorable.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Are you saying that I’m expecting to clear it on a first attempt? People in these threads really need to stop making assumptions that just because someone has criticism on the design, that some how means they want an easy ride. I never said dungeons should be made more easy.

I’m not making assumptions. Maybe you specifically didn’t state that, but it has been stated that a dungeon should be doable on the first attempt. And from posts in other threads that I’ve read on this topic, the consensus appears to be that people just want a dungeon that they can finish (grind).

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

What I’m expecting, is when I go into a dungeon, and get beaten into a bloody pulp, that I can say “that was totally my own fault”. That is the difference between a fair challenge and an unfair challenge. Being insta-killed by a trap that you couldn’t see coming, makes you hate the challenge itself. Its unfair, because unless you knew ahead of time that trap was there, you couldn’t possibly have prevented the death from happening. And while you may say “well, that’s the point of traps, isn’t it?”, this is still a game, and players want to have fun. Even in a really difficult challenge, a certain forgiveness must be present in order to give the players a fair challenge.

I agree with everything you say here, but I fail to see how the changes to AC don’t provide this. Bugs aside (path 3 specifically) I think the dungeon teaches a lot of useful and basic dungeoning (sp?) techniques that they will hopefully build on in later dungeons. Things like kiting (Howling King, Hodgins, Detha), don’t stand in AoEs (Queen Spider, Ghost Eater), dealing with adds (Kholer, Queen Spider, Howling King), target priority (any fight with breeders, graveling mounds in Path 3), and team coordination (Ghost Eater, Detha). Come to think of it the only thing I really feel is a little “unfair” is the CC on Troll, but it makes him annoying more so than dangerous.

And as for the traps, if you mean that in the literal sense of the spike and fire traps in AC then you may want to pay attention to the very obvious red circles on the screen.

I think these AC too hard crying posts would be given more merit if people gave very specific and thought out arguments for why it’s unfair. Most of the posts are just very vague and come off more as rage quit venting than as serious criticism. And I’m not referring to you specifically, but rather every post I read about this gives either no specific examples or gives childish arguments like, “I can’t run AC in 15 mins now, guess I’ll be doing CoF”. I wish I were making this up but these are a good portion of the arguments I see as to why the changes to AC were bad.

AlietteFaye.7316:

Heyo, I’m one of those people. I make sure never to be the one that enters, and I always ask the pugs I get in if it is okay with them before I do it. Honestly, it wouldn’t be an issue if they just removed the whole psuedo party leader and didn’t ever kick an entire party out. It’s mindboggling that they haven’t changed that.

Btw, yes I am too lazy to level my alts up. I’ve leveled 3 characters to 80 now. Doing the same zones, same DEs, same personal stories.. it’s really not all that enjoyable.

As for using crafting, this is a free method of getting levels, and it actually earns you money in the process. Not just from the money and loot drops, but because every character gets their own separate “first run” of the day. Meaning, each character will get their 60 tokens before DRing to 20. More tokens, more ectos, more money.

:)

So the reason you don’t want this removed is so that you can continue to work around DR? Also your argument for doing the same DEs, same personal story etc. really doesn’t work when you are grinding the same dungeons to level up alts.

Have you ever tried leveling up in WvWvW? In my opinion that would be a better alternative considering you are actually playing the character you are leveling (thus learning the profession) rather than piggy backing them to 80 on a character that you are already familiar with.

From both a role-playing and a game mechanics stand point it simply has no place here. And thank you for bringing up the DR abuse that this always. And yes, I consider it an exploit to complete a dungeon on the same one or two characters but get the full rewards benefit 3-5 times because you swap characters into the dungeon that wouldn’t be able to complete the dungeon.

Chorazin.4107:

Makes me be a lot more elitist when it comes to doing this dungeon, you arnt 80, f_ off then, kick from party to get someone else i know or someone else 80 and decently geared. I am certainly not wasting my time with a group thats going to wipe continuously, if im doing a daily i want to do it as fast and efficiently as possible.

B4 the changes i didnt care who was in the group, you could be afk 1/2 the time and i wouldnt care.

And as if CoF P1 runs were not done enough, went onto gw2lfg and theres just pages of CoF P1, so dumb.

This dungeon has an identity crisis, is it meant for lvl 35’s just new to the game? Or for lvl 80’s in full exotic/ascended? Seems the latter, yeah sure some group of 35’s did it, yipee, with a decent dungeon crew i will do it in 1/2 the time with 0 issues.

If this is true, then you are as bad at this game as these whiners. Whenever I read a post like this it motivates me to go to Plains of Ashford and gather together an AC run while kicking all lvl 80s from the party and replacing them with non-80s.

To me it’s more about the experience of running the dungeon and helping people in the process and less so about getting the reward at the end in the least time and with the least effort as possible. But maybe I’m alone in this respect.

And by the way, this dungeon doesn’t require all 80s with exotics. I ran the first two paths with a 4-man (three that had never run the instance since the changes) consisting of a level 80 guardian (me), a level 80 Flamethrower Engi, a level 40 guardian, and a level 80 warrior in magic find gear.

swiftpaw.6397:

Simple: Don’t trust pugs.
Always open the dungeon yourself.
Problem solved.

True, but this should still be removed outright. It breaks immersion, it forces the other 4 players to carry someone that is too lazy to level their character, and it’s redundant (if you want easy mode leveling then use crafting).

Mourningcry.9428:

LordByron.8369:

…

Same is often for GW2……

You just memorize patterns and Attacks and dumb AI cannot adapt.
Its just not a game of skill, tactic and stuff….its just memorizing a strategy (you possibly already seen on youtube or by other players).

No skill involved.

Please demonstrate. We were asked to. I offer the same.

Show me a flawless Kholer kill. The patterns are well know, and readily availble.

You claim it’s not a test of skill. Have at it.

Edit:

My apologies, response is childish. Just tired of seeing such blatantly dismissive and ignorant posts.

It’s obviously theoretically possible to perform a flawless Kholer kill, but to state that there would be no skill involved is a bit audacious.

Not childish at all. It’s an honest and fair request, though I wouldn’t expect anything constructive. He lost credibility when he argued over the difference between learning and memorization.

LordByron.8369:

just to keep challenge the same (and your Learning means you get better not you memorize stuff) you should randomize spawns, opponents and stuff like that.

In DS you just learn enemies pattern….and then they keep doing the same thing Always.

Its quite easy to understand where stats takes place of the AI.

DS does that, you are slower and does less damage than mobs.

Same is often for GW2……

You just memorize patterns and Attacks and dumb AI cannot adapt.
Its just not a game of skill, tactic and stuff….its just memorizing a strategy (you possibly already seen on youtube or by other players).

No skill involved.

Maybe we could have ANet phone up Skynet and get them to implement a new AI system for GW2. Until Skynet calls back we will have to stick to the reality that MMO encounters have learned mechanics and patterns that the players will eventually discover and master through repetition.

What does randomizing spawns do for the challenge when most people skip the mobs anyways? Same goes for opponents.

As for the “stats take place of AI”, I’m assuming you are referring to gear checks, which are something that ANet has been doing a good job of avoiding.

I’m sorry that you dislike that MMO boss/dungeon mechanics have a memorization component to them, but I think you are over emphasizing this aspect. If running a raid or dungeon was as simple as memorizing an instance or boss fight then every player would be able to run top end content simply by watching a youtube video according to you. However, based on the number of whine threads about AC this clearly isn’t the case. So obviously player skill is involved.

Knowing what you should do and actually being able to do so aren’t the same thing. Skill is when you can do both.

Also, I recommend you read a wiki page or dictionary definition of what it means to learn.

LordByron.8369:

snip

I feel we agree on some part and disagree on others.

I agree Demon’s Souls is an incredibly easy game, with the levels being arguably more difficult than some of the bosses (I’m looking at you Valley of Defilement). I’ll also agree the aesthetics of the game are fantastic and the environments are beautifully done, but I don’t want to derail this topic too much.

The point I see you are making is that Demon’s Souls is only difficult until you realize how to beat the bosses and what skills to dodge (I think this is your argument correct me if I’m wrong). While I agree that there are certain spots where it’s difficult to avoid without prior knowledge, I think it’s a bit unfair to claim that all of the games difficulty was from easy to dodge (once you knew about them) one shot deaths. Sure the boss mechanics are very easy, but what the game does well is it teaches you skills that are transferable throughout the game. Some examples are Maneater and Flamelurker which are a greater test of patience (if you are melee and not cheesing) than anything else. The most important thing it teaches is to observe before you engage, which is a skill that many of the run-and-gun style games today really don’t teach.

I disagree with your statement that a challenge should be same with a new attempt. By the inherent nature of how a challenge works it’s going to get easier with each attempt. The more you do something the better you get at it. It’s called learning, or in some cases conditioning. In GW2, for example, you are conditioned to know that glowing light + elaborate windup animation = dodge.

Give me an example where this type of challenge design you speak of exists, because I fail to see how anything outside of PvP game play could remain challenging with continued attempts.

Memory is always going to be a factor in challenge design. There is no way around it. Everything that you do (your build, the way you react to certain things, your positioning etc.) is going to be affected in some form or another by past attempts. Do you honestly think that player skill at a game isn’t memory based?

For something to fit your “perfect” challenge design would require the player to not learn anything from repeated attempts, thus being just as challenging as the first attempt.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

snip

You do have time to figure out boss mechanics in GW2. Have you ever looked at the text below their health bar? ANet literally tells you everything that each mob does in plain English.

Trial and error is a bad game design? I’m not even sure where to begin with this statement. How did you learn to play your class? Don’t you have to try skills out to find which ones work for your play style and which ones don’t work?

What I’m beginning to think is that you aren’t actually looking for a challenge, but merely an easy task that you can succeed at disguised as a challenge. Challenges are meant to test your limits and be a learning experience.

If you are going into dungeons expecting to clear it on the first attempt then you aren’t seeking challenges, you are seeking easy rewards.

CryxTryx.9208:

snip

I read all of it, as long winded as it was, and agree. That is the very point we are trying to make: Group A wants AC to be easy because they want a dungeon they can run so that they can enjoy every aspect of the game. Group B wants the dungeon to be difficult enough so that the barrier to entry requires a certain level of skill or motivation to complete.

Another thing I couldn’t agree more on is that dungeons require a coordinated group. At the beginning you are always going to pug, but if a dungeon is difficult then you can be sure that you will be more likely to friend people that you get along with, as opposed to WoW where I hardly ever friended people I pugged with in LFD.

LordByron.8369:

Really nobody complained the game is too easy? (most of them are guardians also and that makes me think)

Also i Always asked for Appropriate reward for lvl 35 ascalon explorable

No need to give lvl 80 exotics, but actually there is need for lvl 60-40 affordable gear.

Try, fail, retry etc is what actually a bad design was considered in VG for decades.
Something that requires you yo know what is about to happen before……and not only act, but also equip regarding to that.

But most of all let people learn how to do xplorabledungeon with an adequate challenge…

Complaining about endgame proves just how egohistic players are.
This is not endgame this is a lvl 35 dungeon….if you want endgame play a lvl 80…if there is not enough endgame it has nothing to do with a lvl 35 dungeon….

I can possibly do every dungeon now due to quite an amount of experience….yet when some new players arrives and want to play a dungeon i m quite tired of saying…don t even try before 80…

If they do it anyways they just get shocked, and posssibly leave the game…

That is all……

Learning by failing is not bad game design. Demon’s Souls is a perfect example of this concept. People here seem to think that an intro dungeon should be a cake walk but on the contrary it should be a baptism of fire. The cake walk is the open world where you try new skills as you learn them and get use to your class mechanics. You go to dungeons for a challenge that requires you to think and adjust your play style (and further learn the intricacies of your class) and you are rewarded for completing the challenge.

Don’t even argue that old AC was challenging, it was a joke.

Mourningcry.9428:

Edit: Repsonse deleted.

Pretty much have come to accept that based upon the frequency and intensity of the commentary lately, it’s the rare minority of players that would rather spend the time to raise their play to meet the content rather then have the content lowered to their comfort level. No level of arguement on my part is gonna change this.

Kudos to those silent, and minority of vocal players, that do the opposite and take some pride and enjoyment from attempting the challeges offered (even if they fail) – best of luck to them.

It’s because the people that are complaining are looking for easy exotics or easy sources of gold. It’s much less effort for them to complain on the forums until it’s nerfed to a 10 min per path run than to actually learn to play the game properly.

From reading a lot of the complaint threads I just get the impression that these people shouldn’t be running dungeons at all. They are the bottom of the barrel, worst type of pug any group could have the misfortune of having. The type of player that blames their party for every wipe because their game play is flawless.

I hope you are right that they are a minority.

Leo G.4501:

Oolune.4357:

I am glad ANet does not go out of its way to cater to them, and I hope they continue to resist doing so. There is plenty of content for people to sleepwalk through. They do NOT need to try and dumb down pretty much the only things that require particularly active thought to complete.

I think they should mold the open world for this type of content. It feels perfect too. They should introduce not only mini-dungeons but rewards unique to this content so that the non-twitch gamers have their own type of rewards for their runs, and the advanced players have their dungeon tokens while the PvPers have their PvP rewards, so on and so forth.

I guess there is Karma vendors and stuff…I dunno, the idea needs more thought.

I’m fine with them having open world stuff like this for those that aren’t made for the dungeon experience that ANet is trying to go towards. The problem, however, is that a portion of the community (consisting mostly of entitled whiners) feel that every aspect of the game should be catered and molded to fit the effort level to reward ratio that they are willing to put in.

I’ve ran old AC enough times to get the Exotic set and Gift of Ascalon (~30 tedious runs). Not only do I enjoy running the new AC but I also enjoy running it with people unfamiliar with it. The mechanics are just much more engaging.

The dungeon still needs some tweaks before it is perfect, but to the people that are complaining that the dungeon is impossible here are some useful tips:

-Come to the realization that your aren’t as good as you think you are. Old AC and many of the other dungeons and open world monsters have infused this idea that you are the best <Insert Class> to ever step foot into Tyria. After all you finished your personal story and beat Zhaitan, so the only logical conclusion is that you are a fantastic GW2 player, right?

-If you are continuously wiping consider trying a new build or skill set. A well designed dungeon will force you (both the individual and the group) to adjust your play style.

-Don’t stand in AoEs.

-Learn to Dodge. The more drawn out and obvious a channel is, the more likely it is to one shot you.

-Learn to read the buffs and text on mobs.

-Learn self-criticism.

-Learn your class. Learn your combo field and finishers. Learn them for other classes too. You don’t need coordination to make combos in a group, just one person that knows what they are doing. And combos can be very helpful.

If any of the things I’ve listed are too complicated, too time consuming, or beyond the level of effort you care to put into GW2, then I suggest that you stop running dungeons and stop complaining on the forums about the dungeons being too complicated since you clearly lack any understanding of the niche that dungeons are meant to fill. Stick to world events where you just have to stand next to someone’s foot and spam the 1-skill while AFKing.

I also hope that they revamp the other dungeons in a similar manner.

Bloodwort MacFangho.4638:

It’s debatable whether it’s more cost effective to sell the ingredients directly rather than crafting the weapon and selling that.

This is something that really has concerned me about crafting in GW2. I many of the more profitable items have a massive overhead, and the ones you can afford to make don’t have a high enough profit margin to make the 15% TP fees worth it.

The thing is that the ease of leveling to 80 and leveling a craft to 400 means that anyone with an excel spreadsheet and a brain can deduce that if they have the 500 g to buy Foefire’s Essence then they may as well just make it themselves. I mean with the extra 150 g you could just make a new character and level whatever crafts up to 400 off the market, or even just do it on the same character. It’d be significantly cheaper than 150 g.

Even consumables like the Sharpening Stones are only marginally profitable.

CassieGold.7460:

IamDuddits.1692:

Some questions, as I’ve been considering doing something like this.

-Did you assume you bought the Greatsword Blades or did you assume you bought the Ore and made them yourself? I could say the same about the Ingots. Does it even make that much of a difference overall?
-Have you tried doing this for lower stuff? This is great if you have 350 g floating around but it’s hard to argue that Crafting is profitable if you need to have 350 g laying around to make profit. That’s like saying it’s easy to own your own multimillion dollar company if you have 100 million dollars for the overhead.

I’m particularly interested in this simply because I have both those crafts at 400 and have really yet to find a profitable way of using them without the overhead for items like this. I simply don’t have 350 gold sitting around (or 200 or 100).

Don’t get me wrong, this is a great point you’ve made, however, it’s something only attainable by people who already appear to be having no problem acquiring gold.

Sorry about the typo on the number of Fractal Relics, I was tagging back and forth between my notes for doing this for Foefire’s Essence and doing this for Infinite Light and I think I dropped a ball there, but you’re spot on with why they’re there.

As to your other question’s let me provide some answers:

1: At the time of this post, crafting the Orichalcum Greatsword blades vs buying them offered a savings of approx 10.5g. That’s buying Ingots directly, I didn’t drill down to buying Ore to make ingots. All of the pricing I used was at ‘buy now’ pricing, rather than assuming a fixed price for using a buy order which would further optimize pricing.

2: If you want to do this on a micro scale, you can do the same thing for a Destroyer or Corrupted Weapon….. It’s a great deal fewer lodestones to work with.

As an example:

60 Destroyer Cores
30 Elonian Wine
30 Crystaline Dust
630 Fractal Relics
5 Globs of Ectoplasm
21 Orichalcum Ingots
10 Ancient Wood Planks
5 Powerful Blood

Result is a Berserker’s Destroyer Greatsword.

I honestly didn’t even know that the Destroyer Weapons existed. And of course the profit margins only increase when you compound the fact that the Ectos are “free” from fractal drops (I mean you are bound to get 5 ectos from all the runs to do get 630 Relics) along with any other stuff you salvage during the runs.

This is easily the most useful post I’ve read on these forums so far. Thank you for this.

CassieGold.7460:

Okay, lots of threads about weather or not crafting is profitable, I wanted to throw out an example (in the form of a puzzle) and see what people think. Below is a recipe for an item that currently lists for 500g+ and would cost less than 350g to create for someone who had both a lvl 400 armorsmith and lvl 400 weaponsmith. Crafting this item without 400 armorsmith is not possible.

500 Ascalonian Tears
200 Charged Cores
100 Bottles of Elonian Wine
100 Piles of Crystaline Dust
5,250 Fractal Relics
250 Cured Hardened Leather Squares
250 Orichalcum Ingots
70 Mystic Coins
250 Orichalcum Greatsword Blades (or 1,500 Orichalcum Ore)

So, who knows what the item is?

As the previous post said, it’s Foefire’s Essence, but I’ll elaborate a bit:

Gift of Ascalon
500 Ascalonian Tears

Crystals and Eldritch Scroll
5,250 (I think this is a typo: should be 3850) Fractal Relics = 150 Skill Points from Dessa’s = 1 Eldritch Scroll (50 SP) and 100 Crystals (3 SP/5 Crystals * 100 Crystals = 60 SP) Note: I think you took Miyani’s price being 5 Skill points for 3 Crystals which is how you got 5250.

100 Charged Lodestones via the Mystic Forge
200 Charged Cores
100 Bottles of Elonian Wine
100 Piles of Crystaline Dust
100 Crystals

Gift of Light
250 Cured Hardened Leather Squares
250 Orichalcum Ingots
100 Charged Lodestones
1 Gift of Ascalon

Foefire’s Essence
1 Eldritch Scroll
1 Gift of Light
70 Mystic Coins
250 Orichalcum Greatsword Blades

Some questions, as I’ve been considering doing something like this.

-Did you assume you bought the Greatsword Blades or did you assume you bought the Ore and made them yourself? I could say the same about the Ingots. Does it even make that much of a difference overall?
-Have you tried doing this for lower stuff? This is great if you have 350 g floating around but it’s hard to argue that Crafting is profitable if you need to have 350 g laying around to make profit. That’s like saying it’s easy to own your own multimillion dollar company if you have 100 million dollars for the overhead.

I’m particularly interested in this simply because I have both those crafts at 400 and have really yet to find a profitable way of using them without the overhead for items like this. I simply don’t have 350 gold sitting around (or 200 or 100).

Don’t get me wrong, this is a great point you’ve made, however, it’s something only attainable by people who already appear to be having no problem acquiring gold.

Sifu.6527:

IamDuddits.1692:

Sifu.6527:

IamDuddits.1692:

Sifu.6527:

Atreus.5429:

You misunderstand. Actually I still have half of my gold left. What’s depressing is the realization that the most efficient way to get to that point where I can actually afford a precursor on the TP is to grind COF mindlessly and/or play the TP instead of the game. That’s what’s depressing. The Sunrise (I’ve wvwvw’d, I’ve gotten Dungeon Master (before the nerf), and I’ve gotten what ascended items I could. ) was the (only) goal I was working towards and the Dawn was the only thing getting my way. It was either I gambled or painfully ground my way to the requisite amount of gold to afford one. The thought of going through COF for two to three hours whenever I can was just too much.

By the way, if anyone is wondering, /age is at 750.

I’m going to call your buff here.

You have all of your gifts right? That means 100 charged lodestone and 250 each of every crafting material right?

Lets see what you can get if you add everything together. (These are rough numbers)

250 Ecto – 100G
100 Charged Lodestones – 300-350G
250 each lvl 400 crafting mats – 200-300G
Icy Runestones – 100g
Money you saved up – 450g

Rough Estimate is -
1300G including the gold you saved up.
850G not including the gold you saved up.

Price of Dawn – 500 to 600G

You had plenty of gold. I don’t understand your QQ!

The question is, why didn’t you build the precusor first?

Where does he say he saved up 450 g? From doing the numbers on the rare great swords he bought I get he had less than 200 gold: 478 GS at ~35 s each is about 168 g, at 40 s each he’d have roughly 191 g.

I myself have sunk 15 g into the forge and am done experimenting with that. I was lucky enough to get Emberglow which sold for ~15 g on my second try (using rares that I crafted while maxing Weaponsmithing no less) and decided to use the 15 g to see what I could get out of the forge. I’d rather save up and buy mats than believe in some dream that the forge will make me rich.

For the record, I don’t think that obtaining a legendary should be easier rather I think it should be more than a gold grind. I feel like there are just better ways of making the legendary item seem like more of a skill-based accomplishment than devotion to farming CoF or other zones for gold.

Another large problem is that the low drop rates and expensive transmutation costs make the TP the most cost efficient source of nearly every Tier 6 mat Fine and every Lodestone.

Look at my calculation without the 450G. He would still have 850G enough for a Dawn. Again, I don’t understand the OP’s QQ…

Is it so unreasonable to assume that he probably acquired much of those resources over time, bit by bit? Do you mean to imply that he had 850 G he was sitting on and just mass purchased all the gifts in one run?

If that is your assumption, then yes he should’ve just bought the precursor before prices went up. However, my guess is that most people figure they will get Gift of Fortune and Gift of Mastery first (because they are universal) and then hope they get a lucky drop while farming up the basic mats.

Ok, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that he crafted the Gift of Fortune and Gift of Mastery first as those are universal. That leaves us with the precursor “dawn” and Gift of Sunrise.

Gift of Sunrise requires 100 Charge Lodestone and 100 Icy Runestones. Why in the world would you craft those first? Thats 500G right there! 500G + 450G saved = 950gold! Almost enough for 2 Dawn precursors. For kittening sake…

He probably wanted to play the RNG game and when he got kittened, he blamed it on RNG for his downfall instead of his crappy planning.

Where are you getting this 450 g saved from? Did you not read his post carefully? He said he didn’t want to play the TP and do CoF runs to obtain the 450 g for the Precursor, not that he had 450 g and didn’t feel like running CoF for the remainder…

Are you just making up BS evidence that is easier to argue a case against? Maybe he did want to gamble all his gold away. Clearly he doesn’t know how to save up gold as evidenced by his ability to acquire every component besides the Precursor. Oh wait…

Near as I can tell, from what he’s told us he had maybe 200 g on him from the GS he flushed down the toilet. It’s also possible that he was just sick of farming considering that all those components (which you already did the math for) is upwards of 1500 gold.

Sifu.6527:

IamDuddits.1692:

Sifu.6527:

Atreus.5429:

You misunderstand. Actually I still have half of my gold left. What’s depressing is the realization that the most efficient way to get to that point where I can actually afford a precursor on the TP is to grind COF mindlessly and/or play the TP instead of the game. That’s what’s depressing. The Sunrise (I’ve wvwvw’d, I’ve gotten Dungeon Master (before the nerf), and I’ve gotten what ascended items I could. ) was the (only) goal I was working towards and the Dawn was the only thing getting my way. It was either I gambled or painfully ground my way to the requisite amount of gold to afford one. The thought of going through COF for two to three hours whenever I can was just too much.

By the way, if anyone is wondering, /age is at 750.

I’m going to call your buff here.

You have all of your gifts right? That means 100 charged lodestone and 250 each of every crafting material right?

Lets see what you can get if you add everything together. (These are rough numbers)

250 Ecto – 100G
100 Charged Lodestones – 300-350G
250 each lvl 400 crafting mats – 200-300G
Icy Runestones – 100g
Money you saved up – 450g

Rough Estimate is -
1300G including the gold you saved up.
850G not including the gold you saved up.

Price of Dawn – 500 to 600G

You had plenty of gold. I don’t understand your QQ!

The question is, why didn’t you build the precusor first?

Where does he say he saved up 450 g? From doing the numbers on the rare great swords he bought I get he had less than 200 gold: 478 GS at ~35 s each is about 168 g, at 40 s each he’d have roughly 191 g.

I myself have sunk 15 g into the forge and am done experimenting with that. I was lucky enough to get Emberglow which sold for ~15 g on my second try (using rares that I crafted while maxing Weaponsmithing no less) and decided to use the 15 g to see what I could get out of the forge. I’d rather save up and buy mats than believe in some dream that the forge will make me rich.

For the record, I don’t think that obtaining a legendary should be easier rather I think it should be more than a gold grind. I feel like there are just better ways of making the legendary item seem like more of a skill-based accomplishment than devotion to farming CoF or other zones for gold.

Another large problem is that the low drop rates and expensive transmutation costs make the TP the most cost efficient source of nearly every Tier 6 mat Fine and every Lodestone.

Look at my calculation without the 450G. He would still have 850G enough for a Dawn. Again, I don’t understand the OP’s QQ…

Is it so unreasonable to assume that he probably acquired much of those resources over time, bit by bit? Do you mean to imply that he had 850 G he was sitting on and just mass purchased all the gifts in one run?

If that is your assumption, then yes he should’ve just bought the precursor before prices went up. However, my guess is that most people figure they will get Gift of Fortune and Gift of Mastery first (because they are universal) and then hope they get a lucky drop while farming up the basic mats.

Sifu.6527:

Atreus.5429:

You misunderstand. Actually I still have half of my gold left. What’s depressing is the realization that the most efficient way to get to that point where I can actually afford a precursor on the TP is to grind COF mindlessly and/or play the TP instead of the game. That’s what’s depressing. The Sunrise (I’ve wvwvw’d, I’ve gotten Dungeon Master (before the nerf), and I’ve gotten what ascended items I could. ) was the (only) goal I was working towards and the Dawn was the only thing getting my way. It was either I gambled or painfully ground my way to the requisite amount of gold to afford one. The thought of going through COF for two to three hours whenever I can was just too much.

By the way, if anyone is wondering, /age is at 750.

I’m going to call your buff here.

You have all of your gifts right? That means 100 charged lodestone and 250 each of every crafting material right?

Lets see what you can get if you add everything together. (These are rough numbers)

250 Ecto – 100G
100 Charged Lodestones – 300-350G
250 each lvl 400 crafting mats – 200-300G
Icy Runestones – 100g
Money you saved up – 450g

Rough Estimate is -
1300G including the gold you saved up.
850G not including the gold you saved up.

Price of Dawn – 500 to 600G

You had plenty of gold. I don’t understand your QQ!

The question is, why didn’t you build the precusor first?

Where does he say he saved up 450 g? From doing the numbers on the rare great swords he bought I get he had less than 200 gold: 478 GS at ~35 s each is about 168 g, at 40 s each he’d have roughly 191 g.

I myself have sunk 15 g into the forge and am done experimenting with that. I was lucky enough to get Emberglow which sold for ~15 g on my second try (using rares that I crafted while maxing Weaponsmithing no less) and decided to use the 15 g to see what I could get out of the forge. I’d rather save up and buy mats than believe in some dream that the forge will make me rich.

For the record, I don’t think that obtaining a legendary should be easier rather I think it should be more than a gold grind. I feel like there are just better ways of making the legendary item seem like more of a skill-based accomplishment than devotion to farming CoF or other zones for gold.

Another large problem is that the low drop rates and expensive transmutation costs make the TP the most cost efficient source of nearly every Tier 6 mat Fine and every Lodestone.

If they made the mobs worth killing then maybe we’d make the effort to kill them.

Burn.5401:

Imryn.2879:

Ethics.4519:

Eh, I’m with Vol. Not everybody is meant to have a legendary. You don’t need one, it’s nice to have.

I am sick and tired of people saying this. Everybody who wants a legendary can have one. There is no skill requirement involved, just money.

In fact the most efficient way to get a legendary is to never leave Lions Arch, to play the TP and to buy all of the components.

The devs who designed the “Legendary” aquisition process should be hanging their heads in shame because there is nothing legendary about it.

Thread should’ve ended with this post. Everyone that thinks otherwise either got lucky with a precursor or he bought it for a reasonable price on the TP when prices were somewhat normal. Everything involving RNG is terrible design by default so deal with it.

Pretty much this. The irony of the legendary, as was pointed out, is that there is nothing legendary about it’s acquisition. Purchasing 90% of the components of the legendary from the TP feels about as epic as acing an exam that you paid someone else to take for you.

A legendary should actually have some legendary aspect to acquiring it. As of right now I don’t really seem impressed when I see a legendary, as it’s all luck and gold.

Ivanov.8914:

garraeth.3267:

Ya this is why I don’t tell anyone how to “think out of the box”. There’s no exploits or hacks. It’s just taking what you’ve got and carrying it down a path to a bigger profit than the parts you started with. Those “parts” could be time, mats, places on the map, people you happen to be with, a combo of some or all these things, etc.

But it seems like people who are replying are more anxious to defend their position of: “it’s all grind”, than coming at it from a different angle. (It’s actually kind of interesting to watch.)

And if we reply not to defend our point, what do we reply for? To make some nonsense gibberish like your post?Maybe ,I guess……

First off, nobody mentioned hacks and exploits in the thread, so don’t go there and derail it.
“carrying it down a path to a bigger profit” , as I said , you go to the best farm spot, and you start farming, cuz this one is better than the rest.

I do applause your interest in watching this debate, but I wonder what your point was? Why did you make the post, or you made it just because?

In his defense I did mention exploits as one way that people gotten Precursors, though they’ve been fixed since. Regardless, his post as well as the others here saying that they didn’t have to grind and didn’t get their precursor on a drop just smells of troll. IF they are telling the truth then they must’ve gotten their precursors back when they were <100 g. I fail to see how you can get a precursor without excessive luck, excessive gold farming, or playing the TP all day.

Agfor.6213:

I’ve just been into the new AC. Well done Arena, you’ve turned a fun way of spending an hour or so with my mates into a masochists’ death-fest. If this had been my first dungeon I wouldn’t have bothered with any others, even though the game is structured more and more around dungeon tokens. At the moment the other dungeons are available and are a lot more fun…..at the moment.

In the words from AD&D “the purpose of the game is to have fun and socialise”. Perhaps Arena should remember that not everyone wants to bang their head against a wall for entertainment.

You can’t socialize running DEs, World Bosses, Farming Zones, running Fractals, WvWvW, sPvP, doing Guild Missions, doing Story Mode, getting achievements, doing jump puzzles or clearing for World Completion?

Are you so selfish that you expect them to cater every aspect of the game to such a single-minded demographic of people that expect the rewards (a majority of which have craftable equivalents) to be handed to them on a silver platter because they dislike a challenge?

garraeth.3267:

Snip

Pretty sure most of the think out of the box…. how do I get the things I need skill has been described as exploits. Legendary progression at the moment is just a mindless gold grind combined with stupid luck. Finding the most efficient farming locations isn’t skill. You could barely know how to play your class effectively and still farm areas with the utmost ease.

If they just wanted to make it a grind they could’ve done extended quest lines that require you to get moderately rare dungeon drops, gather components, talk to NPCs etc. that could potentially span over months of in game time by requiring fixed cooldowns between each step of the quest chain. Even this would show little skill or mastery of the game, but it’d be better than making nearly every component of the legendary be translatable to a TP gold value. Really the only aspect that is remotely skill related would be the Gift of Mastery simply because the player has to commit time to getting each of those components himself. Gift of Fortune is aptly named and I’m fine with one requiring lots of gold or farming to acquire.

The Legendary Gift is only half bad. Gift of Wood/Energy/Metal from an immersion stand point make sense and aren’t that hard to obtain from farming/TP. Dungeon Gifts show a mastery of dungeons. Sigil once again is easy to obtain by TP but also shows a mastery of a craft. However, the greater Gifts are just unimaginative, for the most part. Gift of Color has some flavor to it, along with Gift of Entertainment. However, most of the Gifts are some combination of a refined Tier 6 and Tier 5 Lodestones (mega gold sink).

Instead of using using the same Tier 6 Common/Fine and Tier 5 Rare materials they could’ve done something more interesting like using those Gray/White trophies that mobs drop (vendor trash) for crafting/giving to an NPC to make a special crafting component. Make these junk items account bound. There now you’ve just taken the TP out of the equation while still making it a grind. You don’t even need to limit it to this. Make things achievement oriented too. Instead of Gift of Color being Unidentified Dyes that you have to buy/find make it simply Dyes on a character. Only a character that has X number of unlocked dyes (which are on a per character basis) can buy the Gift and the gift is soulbound on acquire. Gift of Music could’ve had a requirement of acquire instruments/songs from vendors/random NPCs that you had to explore the world to find. Gift of History could’ve required you to read those random texts and tomes that are scattered all over Tyria that I’m sure most people completely ignore. Gift of Water… Diving Goggles? Things like this add so much more to the Legendary acquisition that feels less like a grind and more like exploration. Even Jump Puzzles could’ve been incorporated into the Legendary search.

Precursors are just a gold grind or pure RNG. Either way it’s a very dumb mechanic because, once again, we have the Gift of Fortune to show that you are rich and Mystic Clovers are RNG enough. Precursors should be Account Bound. I don’t have any great ideas for how to improve on Precursor acquisition, but I think RNG for the legendary is just an awful mechanic. There is so much more they could do with this. Achievements, quests, scavenger hunt (as has been suggested), or area specific drops. Maybe even have the Precursor drop in pieces at a moderately higher rate and then you can forge pieces you have duplicates of to get the remaining ones. This would remove some of the gold sink aspect of it while still keeping the RNG aspect.

The current design of this system just feeds the out of control increase of market prices for Precursors and specific high tier mats to the point where the only way to acquire these are grinding gold endlessly or playing the TP like a second job. There are ways of making an item difficult to obtain without making it into a 1-dimensional gold grind. It just requires some imagination and creativity using the mechanics and the world that has been created. Getting the legendary should incorporate more than a simple gold value price tag. It should show that you’ve mastered all the different nooks of the game play. It should show that you’ve invested a lot of time in exploring, contributing to different areas, and different modes of play rather than simply gold farming one zone for weeks and weeks.

I just find it very sad that for all the innovative changes that they’ve made to the genre that they’ve stuck to the very linear gold grind aspect of Legendary acquisition.

Morpheus.6401:

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I have not done the dungeon on a 35 yet. In all honesty, I’d be surprised to find a full group of level 35s running AC unless it’s a group of people that you already know, which would not be a standard pug anyways. I’d be happy to post my input on my level 35 Engineer (whom I’ve yet to master) after I run the dungeon.

Also could you please elaborate on what Old AC did better? Was face tanking Ghost Eater really better mechanics wise? Notice I don’t mean easier, it’s rather obvious that old GE was a joke.

I have some responses to your other comments:

-Queen Spider: Poison OP? So is condition removal.
-Ghost Eater: While a nice change-up I think it gets old quick. Either length the debuff from the trap, lower the charge up from 3 to 2, lower his HP, add a nuke from the trap as well etc. The main problem here is that I find most people kite GE to the trap, then attack him and just use #1 on the guns to charge up the trap. It’s just easier. I still think this mechanic is better than old GE, which had absolutely no mechanic.

Blur.3465:

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There we go. Your post is so much easier to empathize with when you actually give specific examples of dislikes about the dungeon rather than saying the old one was better.

I’ll list some comments on the bosses and overall dungeon (some of this is summed up by another poster):

Queen Spider
-Spiderlings are fine. The added HP was needed because they died to the point of being negligible before. Their ranged attack, while devastating, can be easily mitigated with projectile reflection.
-The AoE and immobilize are the largest threat of dying. This fight is meant to be more centered around condition management than direct damage mitigation.

Overall I think this fight was an improvement. I don’t think there is really any argument that Queen Spider was a complete joke in old AC.

Kholer
-You can’t cheese his adds anymore by pulling him down the stairs. His adds have less HP and are used as CC to set up his Scorpion Wire. This fight is meant to teach new players to manage the adds before focusing the boss.
-Basic tank n spank with a dodge-or-die mechanic. The dodge has enough build to to see it coming and dodge or cast stability.

I think the spawned adds took a bland fight and made it into an interesting fight. Mind you they also decreased both Kholer and the adds hit points which also made it a less tedious fight. Improvement overall.

Troll
As another poster said, this is an improvement overall. Only real annoying ability is the AoE fear that is seemingly unavoidable but it generally isn’t a problem unless you engage him with adds.

Howling King
-This fight is all about add management. The knockdown from the gravelings, in my opinion, make this fight more difficult than the boss himself.

I like the direction of this fight. The seemingly random aggro makes this mechanic more complicated than it should be: (4 people DPS the boss while one person holds aggro on the mobs and kites them into the AoEs). You also need to dodge more frequently which means you need to manage your endurance. Improvement overall.

Ghost Eater
-As with spider queen this fight teaches you to avoid the AoEs. These are the biggest cause of wipes on this fight.
-The ghost busters mechanic is a nice touch, but does require reasonable coordination for success.

Overall and improvement over old ACs AFK tank n spank. Of the three I think he’s probably the most noob friendly simply because the only real threat of dying is from standing in his AoE. You have all the time in the world to charge up those traps.

Colossus Rumblus
-Bugs aside, I think this is a great mechanic for teaching new players to pay attention to their surroundings. Once they fix Grast and his bubble I think this will be a good fight.

I think this fight is an improvement over the old CR which was a less forgiving version of HK.

The bosses as a whole I think utilize more mechanics now than they did before. I’d go so far as to say the bosses are not what makes this dungeon difficult for new players, but rather the events are.

Events
-Path 1 and Path 3 graveling mounds could use a revamp. These events are too much alike and too heavily dependent on DPS more than anything. If a group of 35s with 35 gear are in these events I’d venture to guess they would hit a road block here. I’d like to see these events unique from one another and be less of a dps race.

-Path 2 I think is in a fine difficulty range.

Trash
-I still feel trash is too easily skipped. If content is skipped then it might as well be removed. From a new player perspective it’s an unintuitive mechanic and it’s a poor attempt to artificially lengthen clear times for dungeons. It adds no challenge overall.

-Stalker mechanics are overall a nice change up. The main problem is when the AoE knock back procs evasion when hitting pets and NPCs. This needs to be changed because as we all know NPCs and pets make no effort to avoid/dodge AoE. Essentially if you run this with a Ranger you will be spending a lot of time with Stalkers evading attacks.

I’d be interested to see what aspects old AC did better. You touched on some briefly, but I’d say that the update has improved upon these mechanics. Furthermore, I think that AC should be an easier dungeon but not an easy dungeon. A successful intro dungeon should provide enough of a challenge so that new players realize that they need to switch skills up, change playstyle and have an overall basic understanding of their class. Just from personal experience running with pugs I get the impression that a lot of players want the dungeon adjusted to their playstyle rather than adjust their playstyle to the dungeon.