Guild Wars 2

runeblade.7514:

Jzl.8715:

dodge when he bends to smash the ground in melee, a little after as ranged

Except that animation is too quick(.10 seconds to react) and share animation with his searing crystal summoning. It also happens directly after he smashes the ground so it hard to react to it.

No it doesn’t, crystal is sort of a upward flex animation, knockdown wave is downwards animation

dodge when he bends to smash the ground in melee, a little after as ranged

You already said you avoid those players, and maybe those players are avoiding you. I think everyone should be happy now that they are all doing what they want to do. Besides this is a really old topic that there is at least 5 similar posts right there in the first two pages of this forum. Maybe go check them out and see what people have to say.

Besides, you shouldn’t rule out all those lfg anyway. If you are so experiences as you said you are you should definitely know the mindset behind fast clears and asking for experienced groups. If a lfg is put out in a way that is articulate and not so dramatic, usually all is fine. The lfgs to avoid are ones with caps, ones that uses “no noobs” instead of please be experiences, basically the ones that shows the lack of respect and a sense of superiority with no apparent reason.

Generally I still don’t see a problem with people who wants to play how they want to play. Rude players, impatient players will always be rude and impatient, and they will always exist regardless of the system. Doesn’t really matter which dungeon what class and who they group up with. Just be smarter and take care of yourself.

P.S So many people confuse elitists with bad mannered players nowadays, we should take an effort to purge this misconception.

Quam.7218:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH6Oearkm0Y

look what I found.

looked, quite irrelevant.

Your pug is someone else’s guidie, try joining another PvE focused guild. The problem with finding a static group for low level fractals is most people probably won’t be willing to wait for everyone to get online and be ready, pug groups are very easy to find for level 10-20. it’s better once you get to a higher level.

Just a suggestion, but hope you still get some reply in this thread nonetheless.

Best ones are imo the 2 added with the halloween event,
Forsaken Fortune, in Lonar’s pass, with the dark room,
Vexa’s Lab, in Fireheart rise.

Start with these 2, you’ll have a lot of fun with your friends. I have done all the mini dungeons out there, these 2 still stands out by far.

Alucard.8297:

Jzl.8715:

Complaining and feedback are okay, but don’t call people stupid.

I believe I called the issue stupid, not specific people.

“that they would not be so stupid to implement this…”
You were calling people specific out, making a lot of general assumptions about how the dev teams work and saying they are making stupid decisions. It does hurt the eye a bit.

Complaining and feedback are okay, but don’t call people stupid.

Don’t use the word elitist so loosely. People who rage quits after a few fails or swears a lot are not what you call elitists, people who don’t want to join an inexperienced group and want easy rewards is also not necessarily what you call elitists. In this case, you have a problem with impolite, impatient, and nasty people, that is all.

CHIPS.6018:

Nokaru.7831:

GW1 had a different type of skill. It’s also find this really amusing: Your double-standard, with regards to how you to expect any sort of respect for how well you say you played that game, when you don’t show the same sentiment who play GW2 better than you do.

I love how elitist always attack others instead of the issue at hand. It forces others to go on defensive, and then they change the topic altogether. Finally they get the thread locked, which puts a huge grim on their faces.

People pointing out your double standard is extremely valid. When I played GW1 for a couple of month prior to GW2, I didn’t think anything ways actually all that easy, but hey, I didn’t expect to beat everything in GW1 within 4 months. So what I am confused about is the difference of your attitude towards GW1 and GW2 content. Did the so called challenging content become trivial 2 months after released in GW1? Don’t forget GW1 released for a 8 years now, skill and awareness and experience do grow with time, same will apply to GW2.

When GW2 just launched beating the AC explorable paths were considered such an achievement, and look where we are now. Truth be told, I have never seen any MMO so casual friendly as GW2, for one there is no subscription fee, I can’t see how any MMO can be more casual friendly than that. Secondly there is a downstate, then defeated state, it already give you more window to make mistakes. Lastly regarding when people are able to rez zerg, I personally have never seen such a unbelievably unpunishing death system . WoW was considered a revolution for not substantially punishing players in an MMO, but I don’t recall being able to get back into combat if dead, save one or two combat resurrections. People need to start seeing encounters as a closed environment and deal with it as such.

Regarding your statement about 25 minute changes, you are simply assuming that such a so called good players does not exist. As a matter of fact, I would say 70% of the dungeons can definitely be done in under 25 minutes even at the overall skill level today, and as time goes by the time will only decrease. I personally don’t see a problem of having a few long dungeons in there. Your assumption of 2 hours a day is extremely arbitrary. People already have pointed out for you that the path you are talking about does not take 4 hours as you stated, my first time in Arah path 4 took around 1 hour 40 minutes. Also, you have mentioned yourself that you haven’t done path 4 yet, maybe give it a try, and judge for yourself. You might know your guildies well, but their opinion certainly does not reflect the general population, nor you. After saying all that, we have to get back to the beginning. What makes you so certain that a dungeon that can be done in 25 minutes will not take the not prepared, less experienced people more than 2 hours to complete? Arah path 3 can be done in 25 minutes, just saying. So the way you have backed up your arguments is extremely contrived. I do see some merits in making contents bite sized. But I don’t see any problem with having a few longer ones in there, because like I said, most of them can already be done in under 25 minutes.

Lastly, your notion of casual people doesn’t yet have access to everything is extremely flawed, as someone have already pointed out. Nobody is charging casual players 2 pennies for every hour while giving a free pass to more invested people. If the game provides 1000 hours of gameplay, everyone who have paid for it have access to all of it. People who play 10 hours a day gets there in 100 days, people who spend 2 hours get there in 500 days. I personally don’t see how that is making any game inaccessible. It all comes down to these knee jerk reactions. When you see an achievement that takes a total 10 hours to complete, immediately people see it as inaccessible to them because they are “casual”. I do think playing for 2 hours and complaining for not being able to get 8 hours worth of reward ridiculous.

Lastly, if you put yourself in such a high position of being able to provide positive and relevant feedback, don’t start bashing others halfway down your own thread, and if you have a passion against elitist behavior, don’t act like one when you talk about GW1. Self contradiction takes away a lot of credibility, just a token of advice.

CHIPS.6018:

Mirta.5029:

CHIPS.6018:

I already finished Arah paths 1 to 3. I farmed enough in Arah for the Arah armor. But I refuse to touch path 4 because everyone in my guild said it was brutal time wise. I do not have 4+ hours to burn on this, with the risk of failing and not getting anything.

Just the thought of a 4+ hour long dungeon (success not guaranteed) turns me away. I am not even going to attempt it until it gets changed. It got nothing to do with my player skills, which is very decent btw.

you’re saying that it will take you 4+ hours when a guy linked you a video where it was completed in 43 minutes? It is a skill issue.

Here we go again. Elitist calling everyone else noob.

Until you finish GW1 Winds of Change in Hard Mode and get Zei Ri as a hero, do not lecture me about player skills.

Wait wait… I’m confused… Could someone tell me, who is the “Elitist” again?

CHIPS.6018:

Casual players do not have time to overcome anything. They want to log in for their 2 hours of free time and enjoy themselves.

All these ideas that are clearly designed for elitists and hard core should have been made in a separated “Hard Mode” just like GW1.

Well done sir, you have just insulted both the so called casuals and hardcore

Morfedel.4165:

Strifey.7215:

In the process of re-recording my CoE paths since it is easier now. Uploaded P2 last night, will have the new P1 and 3 up soon, but the older videos on my page still apply to the alpha fight, it just takes longer since he has more health in those.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnRnK3qoYxk

But really, all you do is stand in melee range and time your dodges.

You naturally cleave out whoever gets hit by the purple crystal in part 2 and 3.

In path 1 you don’t even need to dodge the red circles because his only two attacks in melee range are the flame AoE and conal attack
In path 2 the only other attack you need to worry about is his flame AoE, which does minor direct damage so you just want to remove burning
In path 3 you just dodge the same red circles as path 2 but have the conal attack instead of the fire AoE.

Alpha is basically like Kholer, dodge one very obvious attack and everything else is easy. Just count 1-1thousand, 2-1thousand, then dodge.

like I said, we tried stacking on him. we still got wiped.

I’m not sure what the problem was. hi it was the last 1 to go down. the rest, maybe they didn’t have a good enough armor, but really, it was on path 1, his pbaoe fire and cone is what killed us.

Stacking is only worth while if you have enough group healing and condition removal. Even then you still avoid most of his attacks by spreading around him in path 1, or dodge the frontal cone and ground AoE.

Getting through an alpha fight is not necessarily having the right gear, it’s more about executing a great number of details successfully, dodging is crucial, but what’s more important is not dodging when you don’t have to.

You really have to get into the tempo and have a good idea of which attacks are coming up next. Just in brief:

1) Dragon Tooth: this should never be a problem in the first place

2) Ice circles: don’t stay still when he is doing this attack, it’s much easier to get out of it when you are already on the move when it appears, also you have enough time to move the radius of the aoe circle between appearing and landing the attack. Lastly, search up “fast ice”, “slow ice” if you don’t know what it means

3) frontal cone AoE, he will always face the direction for a few seconds before casting. Run in tangent if you are out of dodge, and when dodging, dodge to the side don’t dodge to the back and front

And about crystal, everyone should keep an eye on the others, he will face the person he is casting the crystal on, and after being trapped there is about a 5 seconds window to dps the crystal down.

You can try stacking, but that’s not a really good strategy in my opinion.

Ald.9418:

How exactly is pet revives and rez orbs quantified as “skill”?

I’ll give you bosses prior to Maw since agony is avoidable, but come on now.

The real problem is that Maw never took any skill other than agony resist. The encounter should be the most difficult one in the entire dungeon where agony can be dodged but with a lot more intense mechanics. Instead, it’s an “I already won” before the encounter even starts.

The only reason people progressing far into the fractal DIDN’T have a problem with exploiting Mas is because it isn’t a hard fight in the first place and the agony gating is contrived. I don’t see you get the whole picture here. The maw agony mechanic has always been talked about. But there is a way to get around it before, not there isn’t.

I took you way too seriously in another post, now that I see this one, I guess I was thinking too much.

JJBigs.8456:

well since you didnt do research, i wont give direct links, but there is some interview i recall saying that “every 3 months or so” a new tier of ascended gear will come out, and then playerse are given 3 months to “get that tier of new gear” etc…repeat….

so yes, you will be able too if this is right. google some of those quotes to try to find official article but that sums it up basically. yes, just you cant progress ASAP, just like they told you it would be in the start

I haven’t seen any official claims regarding this on the forum and on the official website. Do please point me to it if there is. These are the only places that I consider to be 100% valid sources. As far as interview go, not many people follow the millions of third party websites out there, and crucial information should never be release there, as we have seen with the ascendent gear when it’s first announced. But that is an entirely different matter.

Besides, I don’t think you have a clear understanding with regards to the actual issue here. I would advice you to go check on the recent few articles and try very hard to filter the noises in there.

The issue is always about how the content was gated, how the Jade Maw agony is a cheap mechanic, and the fact that gear is needed merely for the sake of entry (which to an extent shattered my overall image of the game), when there are many people who can do without agony resistance gear on the actual challenging part of fractal, and no that does not include Jade Maw.

This is people opinion and feedback to the fractal design, maybe instead of doing research you should also learn to separate facts and opinions.

Ungood.3054:

I hate to say it, but a large part of being casual is simply that I don’t have the time to spend a part time job doing “research” just to have some fun. In fact the idea that I need to “study up” on how to play a game that I supposedly do to get away from the stress and frustration of life seems like an oxymoron in the purest sense. In fact, when you couple that with the idea that I am now forced to spend my “play time” IE: the time I have put aside and allocated to gaming, is now spent looking at how to do a dungeon seems to be the apex of exactly what “against the casual” gamer in every sens of the word.

Sorry Silidus, but while I loved your post, I sincerely could not tell if you were trying to toll by setting people up to fail and fail hard, or if you really were trying to be encouraging, but none the less, the reality is, to get good and know a dungeon well enough to be able run it in 20 – 60 min takes either a veteran group willing to carry you, or it takes a lot of time to practice getting good at it, and it’s the latter that by definition is exactly what “Casual” players are strapped for.

Yep I agree, and I would also extent on this, because playing sports for fun is just ridiculously tiring right? I think we don’t need any of this. What we need is a screen that feeds us entertainment without any effort at all. Actually i think such a thing has been invented already, called Youtube or television. Better get a fat couch too, to maximize the rate of entertainment return and lack of effort.

Mirta.5029:

Jzl.8715:

How about try to make the best out of it

Is that what you were told when you were punched in the face as a child? It doesn’t need people to just grin and bare with it, it needs a good fixing.

No, Mister, what I am saying, is pleading for change is fine, not satisfied with the situation is fine. But there are things an individual can do to avoid such things and even make it better for others, and it is not even that hard. Like I said, form your own group, get others in your group instead of others with the possibility of being kicked.

You said things should change, I agree, so how? I am making a suggestion that in the current situation we ourselves can do to make a difference. And how are you contributing buy just putting out pure demands and coming up with totally irrelevant metaphorical scenarios? Please don’t take things out of context and make a fool out of yourself. You are not contributing to anything.

How about try to make the best out of it, how about actively looking for solution on your side? Nothing is perfect. How you yourself start a group, gather the lonely pugs, you are secure yourself, you also shielded your team from possible scamming.

Maybe edit your title a tad because the actual post have little do to with it. Also this is an old topic, unless you have something very specific you want to bring forward, I would say check out older posts.

Nihilus.3015:

DancingPenguins.9875:

The main issue I have with guardian is that because the class is innately useful, you end up with a lot of players who are clueless how to use them even at higher fractals.

I’m actually ambivalent about having guardians for certain fights at this point. On one hand they do have the potential to throw down the right reflects at the right time. On the other hand, most often it’s the guardian in the group that dies first because almost everybody else had to practice their dodging and timing furiously to get as far as they did.

Whats ambivalent mean?

It means in short: mixed bag.

And while we are on grammar, “what does” ambivalent mean,

Kurr.4179:

Stigma.7869:

Kurr.4179:

http://www.twitch.tv/stronlol

Videos of Fractals 67-69

Guess it’s not impossible. They even 4 man 67.

Do you even know what this thread is about?

Yes, the agony damage. It’s a pain I get it, but other people have gotten through it.

ok, 2 things: 1) the video at around 2hr15min, what do I see? 99% res, also more importantly 2) Date of record: Jan 27th. I think you should read the post thoroughly again

To be fair, the title of the post is clearly directed towards the change in the Jade Maw mechanic. Same as most recent mechanics regarding fractal capping.

Tarsius.3170:

Jzl.8715:

It’s still useful, it’s just not mindless now… SoA will be more about positioning, and Guardians still have WoR which is still among the best of project reflecting utilities.

If they are useful, it would be in such a slender set of circumstances that using another utility would most likely be more beneficial to everyone.

At first I thought the harpies might be a good candidate still for SoA, but sadly tests show the shield dies before it even gets a chance to proc a bubble. ( admittedly, I haven’t had the asura fractal yet since the patch, so i can’t speak from first-hand knowledge )

Don’t get me wrong, I’m fine running fractals without spirit weapons – I can see that they were OP for those instances – but the proper fix would have been to make fractal skills unblockable, or to make the weapons susceptable to agony, rather than make them useless in every part of the game (otherwise it’s better to just remove them entirely, as they are wasting valuable traits)

SoA were too much of a necessity in fractals, and that alone speaks a lot of why it need to be adjusted. Also someone also mentioned that this was mainly a response to PvP perhaps that’s why it’s on all spirit weapons, SoA in PvE is just collateral damage.

IMO the best way regarding SoA in PvE alone was increase the duration of downtime between pulses. But again that’s solely in a PvE scenario, the patch clearly is directed at all spirit weapons.

But at the end of the day, some sort of adjustment to SoA should be fully expected.

@pinch

Well.. regarding on how people should maturely behave. Isn’t that what most people here have been saying…? Out of the shouting and ranting currently on the forum, people on this topic to me are the most civilized.

Arenanet never officially give any sort of statements regarding this, and initially they never stated any sort of hard cap. The main reason people didn’t like it is because the way that Jade Maw blocks the progress is so arbitrary in the first place. Like you said, there are many exploits in the game already, but most of those fights can be done normally, and also, they are by no means the only challenging part of the fractals. getting up from Jade Maw itself is an exploit, but as I argued earlier, the reason that we are fine with this is that the fight itself is easy.As for the challenge, it doesn’t really matter what the intention is. Overall the fights are a lot harder as you level up, and that’s the challenge. You can’t really negate that just by saying some few use certain exploits. And just climbing up that number itself might be considered as a drive for many people, and I personally don’t see anything wrong with that either.

Most people who are not happy with are the ones past 40 or 50. The simple reason is this: These people are the ones most invested, most prepared for this content. It’s probably the only thing that they are focusing on for the time being, and now it’s taken away.

I played this game a lot with one of my friend. The current state of the dungeon difficulty and mindset of dungeon population makes it no longer a challenge for us. We can breeze though most of them that we did countless times, so fractals is where we find that sense of challenge for the past months or so. Once we hit 40+ it was hard to find people to group up, so we gathered a few skilled player and made a semi static team based on our composition preference. We devised strategies for each encounter for each fight, now everyone knows exactly what to do in each fight. My friend and I also prepared many different consumables for every person for each fractals. It was an engaging process and friends were made along the way.

We have to admit that fractals is the only place where this sense of coherent group progression can remain for a long time. And now that if the fact is we can’t do it anymore, I think these people have all the reason they need to be upset.

Sages.3496:

Jzl.8715:

Sages.3496:

if they realy wanted to gain players ROLL THE PATCH BACK FOR DUNGEONS!

I would be surprised if the comments like this with pure biased personal opinion not at all fully backed up by logic or statistics not being removed.

look at how many people are kitten off about this change then look at your stupid comments. this change will impact this game regardless of what you think. this makes it realy hard to play dungeons anymore. go do ac explore and tell me you can beat kholer without dying and the boss resetting over and over with newbies. then come post here!

I’m just mindblown.. totally, the lack of evidence, the lack of well thought arguments, the biased and contrived imaginary scenarios. An now that you brought Kholer back into the fray again I guess there will be a lot more people in the following comments will respond to you. I think I’ll just leave the others to deal with you while I head out to lunch. Wow, just wow

Sages.3496:

Jzl.8715:

The explorable dungeons are supposed to be “face meltingly hard”, people gotten used to mindless playstyle and not learning the fights and even mechanics of their classes properly, hardly can you put all the blame on the developers in my opinion.

Players in the current GW2 dungeons are spoiled, simple as that. Tell me one game where getting through by dying over and over again is meant to be a proper mechanic in an encounter?

And regarding new content, now about not trying to prove your point by simply ignoring everything else? From what i can tell probably in 3 hours you can put on your quaggan backpack and help the norn and charr in Wayfarer Foothiss or Dessia Platue because their homeland is attack by possibly minions of Jormag and Primordus? Now there are some more casual and managable and, oh, NEW, content for you.

So people still haven’t gotten around the fact that explorable dungeons are suppose to be hard eh? fascinating

you fail stop trying to justify the new changes and just admit things were better as they were

I definitely can be convinced, but you sir have yet to establish any sort of credibility. All the post you have made on this forum is in this post, which thus far consists of 3 posts each containing 1 sentence of around 10 words or so. I have seen many better written and well thought posts regarding the casual players matter and yes, guess what, I can actual see their argument and concerns. Forgive me, I don’t really know how to react to mindless shouting

Sages.3496:

if they realy wanted to gain players ROLL THE PATCH BACK FOR DUNGEONS!

I would be surprised if the comments like this with pure biased personal opinion not at all fully backed up by logic or statistics not being removed.

The explorable dungeons are supposed to be “face meltingly hard”, people gotten used to mindless playstyle and not learning the fights and even mechanics of their classes properly, hardly can you put all the blame on the developers in my opinion.

Players in the current GW2 dungeons are spoiled, simple as that. Tell me one game where getting through by dying over and over again is meant to be a proper mechanic in an encounter?

And regarding new content, now about not trying to prove your point by simply ignoring everything else? From what i can tell probably in 3 hours you can put on your quaggan backpack and help the norn and charr in Wayfarer Foothiss or Dessia Platue because their homeland is attack by possibly minions of Jormag and Primordus? Now there are some more casual and managable and, oh, NEW, content for you.

So people still haven’t gotten around the fact that explorable dungeons are suppose to be hard eh? fascinating

Tarsius.3170:

Ok this looks like it’s no longer an issue.

Guardian spirit weapons have been all nerfed into the ground on the last patch, and are no longer viable in any scenario, let alone fractals.

It’s still useful, it’s just not mindless now… SoA will be more about positioning, and Guardians still have WoR which is still among the best of project reflecting utilities.

This has become a problem now only because the recent patch fixed the gimmicks and exploits that are useful past 50+. Now let’s not talk about these fixes, we should take a step back and look at the Jade Maw agony mechanism from the beginning.

I do believe now that the original intention was capping the level at around 39 with the possible 30 AR, the idea is probably with more gear released you will be able to approach higher levels.

So this is not just a problem with this fix, it’s the problem with the very design of Jade Maw agony. We just ignored it because we could get around it, and that the Jade Maw fight isn’t really considered a hard fight by any stretch anyway, so people were fine with that.

And a post I made earlier regarding the topic:

Jzl.8715:

Some personal input here.

My team and I are currently sitting at level 56 in fractals. We quite enjoyed the process of leveling up, and the rise in challenge moving past 50 is quite engaging. Since level 50+ we have been using revive orbs. So I guess I have to talk about the Jade Maw fight, and why I didn’t have so much problem with buying a few orbs before:

Jade Maw is never considered by us as a hard fight, in fact it is incredibly easy. So we don’t see it as a challenging part of moving up the level in fractals. My team basically came into an agreement that we will just pay 1g to whoever is buying an orb. The money didn’t quite bother us, and we see it just part of the expense of progressing. The Jade maw fight before has some issue. If we consider the most effective strategies to be exploits, (99%, ranger, orb), which I think they are, there aren’t really much other reliable strategies. This is why I don’t understand the system in the first place, being:

Why using such a nonsensible method to hard cap content?

This didn’t bother us all that much before, because like I said, this is an easy fight after all, we take the previous 3 fractals as the challenging part.

Now I just put our planned level 56 run tonight on hold because I heard from multiple sources that there are currently no way of getting past the Jade Maw fight. Fixing exploits and things that are considered as bugs are fine, but then this brings me back to the original question: Why such a weird kind of hard cap? We already know that fractal goes to at least level 80, why not just let the people willing to progress do so? If not, then wouldn’t it make more sense just to cap it at say 50, and then 60 and so on with the release of new gear?

I still fail to see the reason behind absolutely halting any progress. Unless level 80 was supposed to be only reached with full ascendent and ar, but then that was also ridiculous. I was anticipating some kind of valid mechanic to get around orbing and pet rezzing, so I do anticipate the current status is not what in intended.

But at the end of the day we haven’t really ever heard any official statements with the level of fractals and the intention of Jade Maw agony mechanic. Hope this time around we get some feedback.

EDIT 1: Got a tip from a friend who just finished 42 with 99%, seems like there are some false info flying around or it has been hotfixed in the build around half an hour ago.

Some personal input here.

My team and I are currently sitting at level 56 in fractals. We quite enjoyed the process of leveling up, and the rise in challenge moving past 50 is quite engaging. Since level 50+ we have been using revive orbs. So I guess I have to talk about the Jade Maw fight, and why I didn’t have so much problem with buying a few orbs before:

Jade Maw is never considered by us as a hard fight, in fact it is incredibly easy. So we don’t see it as a challenging part of moving up the level in fractals. My team basically came into an agreement that we will just pay 1g to whoever is buying an orb. The money didn’t quite bother us, and we see it just part of the expense of progressing. The Jade maw fight before has some issue. If we consider the most effective strategies to be exploits, (99%, ranger, orb), which I think they are, there aren’t really much other reliable strategies. This is why I don’t understand the system in the first place, being:

Why using such a nonsensible method to hard cap content?

This didn’t bother us all that much before, because like I said, this is an easy fight after all, we take the previous 3 fractals as the challenging part.

Now I just put our planned level 56 run tonight on hold because I heard from multiple sources that there are currently no way of getting past the Jade Maw fight. Fixing exploits and things that are considered as bugs are fine, but then this brings me back to the original question: Why such a weird kind of hard cap? We already know that fractal goes to at least level 80, why not just let the people willing to progress do so? If not, then wouldn’t it make more sense just to cap it at say 50, and then 60 and so on with the release of new gear?

I still fail to see the reason behind absolutely halting any progress. Unless level 80 was supposed to be only reached with full ascendent and ar, but then that was also ridiculous. I was anticipating some kind of valid mechanic to get around orbing and pet rezzing, so I do anticipate the current status is not what in intended.

But at the end of the day we haven’t really ever heard any official statements with the level of fractals and the intention of Jade Maw agony mechanic. Hope this time around we get some feedback.

EDIT 1: Got a tip from a friend who just finished 42 with 99%, seems like there are some false info flying around or it has been hotfixed in the build around half an hour ago.

Increase all cost x6 on items
Make each sub achievement of daily give 1 laurel.

That is all.

Calixtus.8617:

I’ll play a few dungeons first but my initial reaction is dislike for this move. We have already seen that in CoF unless you are a Mesmer or Warrior/Guardian it is hard to find a decent PUG during recent weeks.

This I think will drive even more elitism in dungeons and specific group make up requests. People who have not been in dungeons before will not be welcomed. Just look at all the Arah requests in gw2lfg. If you have no exp in this dungeon you are not wanted and having recently done P2 and 3 which are the easiest you will need a group with a lot of patience (which we had) to take new people through it.

Those that have done dungeons regularly will of course have no trouble and the elitists will be welcoming this stopping of so called zerging a boss. Not convniced and will cause a lot of unecessary angst in some paths that are already hard.

Very valid concerns, but we should take a step back and think about if graveyard zerging should be there in the first place. Like, what it outlines now, shouldn’t it have always been the case for dungeon fights?

Also we should think about where dungeon actually stands in the overall PvE setting. Most players still run in a new dungeon without any clue about mechanics leave alone preparations. New players was never personally a problem for me, and a lot of others. I’m just saying, if you need a guide, ask for it, you’d be surprise how many people will actually be willing to help you, we already have seen Arah guides right here on the forums, why can’t there be others if the rest of the dungeons are just as hard?

What I do have problems with, and quite a lot of them, is the lack of effort from a lot of inexperienced players. Willingness to learn is essential to any player, doesn’t matter if you are a so called casual or hardcore. Going into something new, learn about it, simple as that. People have been very vocal about elitists on this portion of the forum recently. Elitists are annoying in certain instances, but at the end of the day, they are just doing their own things. It’s a funny illusion isn’t it, that when these people say: experienced and geared players only, a lot of people that doesn’t necessarily meet these criteria feel excluded, when in reality these groups have nothing to do with them.

And then there is the other side of the coin. Where the so called elitists are very specific about what they want to do and how they want to do it, it seems usually it’s the casual players that are having a hard time setting their expectations right. Having not enough dedicated time to learn and figure out things is not a valid reason nor excuse. To me, a lot of these complains boils downs to something is not casual friendly because I don’t have time to play for 8 hours a day and I can’t achieve this in my limited playtime of 2 hours.

It might be just be me, but being lazy is worst than being demanding, by far,

I was wondering when people will start making this post, it was really slower than I expected.

It’ll be interesting to see how many groups couldn’t get though the regular fights now, I guess most groups won’t be fighting kholer again.. CoE runs will be a lot rarer, CoF will have the most complaints because it’ll be deemed impossible.. where in fact it’s the easiness of the dungeon giving many people a false sense of skill, and what else.. so many possibilities!

I just hope they don’t nerf the actual damage output from bosses so that now it is actually impossible to die.. If that’s not the case, this is a welcome change, great change actually.

Blackers.7512:

and before the elitist trolls start saying ‘learn to play’ or ‘find a guild’ that has nothing to do with it. because it is so blatant that the difficulty of this 1 fractal is just so much higher than the rest, and it just seems ridiculous.

This is a very, very bad attitude. Fractals is the closest thing there is to progressively challenging content, yes, challenge is the keyword here. The shaman fight indeed is one of the hardest fights as levels get higher if not the hardest, then this fight should be the bar of your overall ability to complete each level.

Because of the randomness of the fractals, many people avoided the this fractal. In 30+ levels having a good composition and knowledge of the fight is essential to complete the fight. And as it seems currently, this isn’t the case. So consider this, if someone can’t complete a shaman fight, maybe he or she don’t belong to that level in the first place.

Learning and practicing to play is exactly what should be done here. So let’s please not complain about the hard contents being too hard, this is plain silly. There are people who have done this fight at the fractal level cap.

Well, we talked a lot about how we are not so fond of pure dps warriors and now they found a home where they can all gather and be useful! I think everyone should be happy.

short answer: SoA and WoR
long answer: Shield of Avenger, Wall of reflection

Of course there are protection and aegis. Any of these are essential in a few fights in higher level fractals, not so much in lower levels, and definitely not around 20. I don’t even play a guardian, I shouldn’t be the one telling you how you are useful

Conner.4702:

Jzl.8715:

Whoofe.7643:

story mode CoF first boss was pretty difficult as i remember it. i can see where this guy is coming from

The only harder boss that I can remember is the boss in the weapon room, and even then it’s only the greatsword set that cause most of the problems.

While the dungeons doesn’t have a consistent difficulty curve from low to higher level, CoF is still a level 70/75 dungeon.

I’m not really big in this casual/hardcore players arguments, but as a casual player one should set realistic expectations of what is achievable in game. The limited gameplay and game experience will ultimately bottleneck the game content somewhere, and it is unrealistic to ask for shortcuts.

There is one thing you should let go of when comparing casual and hardcore and that is thinking skill is directly linked to either playstyles. Casual or Hardcore only point to time spend not how good they are. Sure a lot of hardcores are skilled, but just as many are not except for in their own mind. Same for casuals. Just because someone doesn’t play a lot, that doesn’t mean you should assume they are unskilled players. Experience only helps so much before personal skill must be taken into consideration. IE intelligence and such.

I am almost certain we are not talking about the same thing here. And yes, this is exactly why I mentioned I am not so fond of all these casual/hardcore nonsense.

Whoofe.7643:

story mode CoF first boss was pretty difficult as i remember it. i can see where this guy is coming from

The only harder boss that I can remember is the boss in the weapon room, and even then it’s only the greatsword set that cause most of the problems.

While the dungeons doesn’t have a consistent difficulty curve from low to higher level, CoF is still a level 70/75 dungeon.

I’m not really big in this casual/hardcore players arguments, but as a casual player one should set realistic expectations of what is achievable in game. The limited gameplay and game experience will ultimately bottleneck the game content somewhere, and it is unrealistic to ask for shortcuts.

I think what you need is simply a clearer sense of the “CoF culture as of now”. First off this is the most popular of any dungeons because it is the easiest.

When it comes to speed runs, there are currently 2 kinds of groups: P1 farming groups and P1/P2 token groups. The unofficial best farming group composition for P1 is 4 warriors with 1 time warp mesmer. So your message is quite misleading, “Warrior” and “Fast P1 run”, I would guess most would assume you are looking for a farming group. What they should do is whisper you first instead of invite you to part first. So fault on both sides, if I’m completely unbiased.

The more knowledge and experience you have the less you become tolerable, so beware when joining a CoF group. I’m personally not a big fan of CoF farming 4War1Mez either, but hey, people play how they want to play, and group with people who they want to group with. If the berserker warriors and mesmers have to have something to make them feel special, just let them have this round. An in my humble opinion, them discriminating you and you complaining about them really doesn’t make much difference to me. Play how you want to play.

DancingPenguins.9875:

jheryn.8390:

DancingPenguins.9875:

How did you keep in touch with them before? Just keep on doing that?

Yeah, I get that it is a business and support them fully in making money. That is a given, but I am sure that the technology is there to support international guesting right?

As far as how we kept in touch before, we transferred worlds. Now that is going to cost real cash. So I cannot keep doing it that way.

That’s unfortunate. What I would recommend is to settle on a single region and a set of 3 servers that have a healthy population across all hours.

As someone who has been playing since BETA, we were always made aware, at least in early parts of the game’s history that free transfer was going away any minute so never made much use of it for anything but server shopping. Apparently the knowledge is lost and I’ve been hearing how people are using it to visit people like a short vacation.

Break’s over, get back to work.

DancingPenguins.9875:

Bas.8976:

DancingPenguins.9875:

Bas.8976:

StrayDilettante.8671:

I shudder to think how my hunter does fractals. With no missile deflecting or blocking spells at all.

Actually, Rangers are very desirable in good FotM groups due to an ability to DPS relatively safely (doing your job). Not to mention Search & Rescue which besides 40+ efficiency at Maw is a great skill for other tough boss encounters when you cannot risk rezzing yourselves (e.g. Dredge, Volcanic).

Entangle is also very useful. And in terms of projectile reflection and avoiding damage you should bring Whirling Defense (axe offhand I believe?) and Lightning Reflexes. Not to mention your awesome Healing Spring for a looong water field combo!

You are overstating the usefulness of rangers. They are at best as good as most other classes. If you consider the people playing rangers at the level, most are there only on the merit of search and rescue and otherwise contribute very little. It was actually refreshing the other day to see a ranger who was actually pleasant to have around and performs capably. Then again, this more of a people issue than class.

Nah, usefuleness of rangers is not overestimated. The thing is, it is a very appealing class to low-medium skilled players – simple, remotely safe-in-use and because of that people get an impression that rangers are useless. The truth is that each and every class in useful in this game – everything depends, as you said, on the players.

Exactly, it’s the type of player it attracts that really makes a difference.

If we want to factor out the player skills and only talk about actual class usefulness we really have to make an effort to put it into perspective and specific situations. As far as fractal goes, basically you can separate the classes into 3 groups, or main functionalists: first tier support, 2nd tier support and the damage dealers.

First tier support are the damage mitigation classes, and these are the most important. So you are looking at guardians, to a very much lesser extent elementalists and thieves.

Second tier is the healing, the offensive buffs and combat resurrections. These won’t be much useful in the first place if you don’t have the mitigation to take the grunt of the fights, and that’s what makes guardians so indispensable in fractals simply because they are so good at it. Also, of course the attentions of SoA and WoR are well deserved, let’s not forget protection and aegis that guardians also excel at.

And lastly there aren’t much to say about damage dealers, but I do want to point out one thing, and this may get some disagreements, which is personally I think high single target dps is less valuable compared to support and high aoe. This of course depends on if you are on progression or farming, ie. getting through or getting through fast.

So the problem with Rangers are where do you actually fit in in fractals, it is there is no one aspect of rangers that make them the ‘first pick’. But of course if all aspects are covered already, a ranger is more than welcomed, but so will be any other class for that matter. As of search and rescue that many people likes to bring up, you can’t really justify a classes based on one bug that probably will get fixed in the future, or becomes irrelevant when new ascendent gears hit.

I can clearly how OP could offend people from him pug groups,

DancingPenguins.9875:

The more you read OP’s story, the less coherent it becomes. Nobody gets kicked that often without a reason.

His writing exudes rage and ego most people hate pugs for. If that’s after having time to cool off and gather his thoughts, I can’t imagine what party chat must be like. In fact, looking at your post history, there’s a lot of insult and mocking of other players. I wouldn’t be surprised if you are already on a lot of people’s blocklist.

What a surprise, you are actually on my blocklist already.

This has become all too amusing, I will check my list later on since we share an extensive part of our block list.

Not that I do much.

the only people doing that are farming group, most people aren’t interested in farming endlessly anyway, and the token groups most of them don’t care about the class composition. So it’s the classical situation of you play the game you want to play and others play the game they want to play, what is the issue here again?

Kakeru.2873:

This game is in NO WAY like Dark Souls at all. Please stop saying that because it is such a poor comparison they are hardly alike. This game has so many bugs in instances.

And RNG is random number generator. Guessing your not from an MMO background as you don’t know what RNG means and you compare this to Dark Souls.

I don’t like saying this but, you’re wrong it’s nothing like Dark souls

You are definitely RIGHT ON topic, as OP said “in terms of combat, difficulty”. So I guess according to your logic GW2 is more like a casino, fair enough.

No if you are not willing to trotting all the way to 26+ where the loot is actually worth it, but even then you are subjected to the mercy of RNG. In short, it’s not consistent, running easier dungeons for loot, token, and money rewards is much more consistent.

You’ll have to be level 80 for most people willing to take you, Fractal is the unofficial end game as of now. As a result you are expected to be well geared, but hardly anyway really checks for gear in initial levels.

Kain Francois.4328:

If you see someone doing “LF1M Must be Guardian”, ask them which Guatdian build they need since they’re so picky. If they don’t even know what build of the Guardian they need, then lol and be on your way.

How about I tell you, I value their wall of reflection, Shield of the Avenger, protection and aegis boons? Also the ability to position control multiple mobs with Sanctuary, Shield of Absorption and Binding Blade? People might not know the absolute details about each and every traits, but when people talk about a guardian, they usually know what they are looking for.

And frankly, no one is really expecting a glass cannon dps guardian honestly