Guild Wars 2

Stun. Break. Hurr. The only one that’s a true threat once you’re pinned is the champion one at the north within AC, as you can’t knock him off every time with a stun (Unshakable). The others, if your teammates are coordinates, well – I’m an engineer, and I solve problems. I push 4 with my rifle and there’s no longer a pinned player.

I’d kill for a DPS meter or somesuch. When you’re speed-clearing dungeons, that’s the number one priority – how much damage you dish out. Honestly, I just wanna see how much damage I’m putting out relative to other players. It’d be a nice thing to look at in terms of self-improvement.

Just to make this clear, HB isn’t actually the most damaging build in the game. The only reason people think it is such, is because they see a large number, ignore the long channel time, and the fact said channel time is tacked on to the cooldown (making it a 10s cooldown between packets of damage, in actuality, with cooldown reduction). Regardless of this statement, warrior is still incredibly strong for dungeons – mainly due to damage output, and you can either choose to go shouts or banners for support (truthfully, going straight-DPS and bringing along the +crit%/critdamage banner is pretty great).

They clearly said it would stop being available Halloween day at 9:00 server-time. If you missed it, tough kitty, wait ‘til next Halloween. It was available for 2-3 days, and if you couldn’t find 10 minutes to set aside to try it out (we’ll say 20 for logging in and finding a group), then you’ve only yourself to blame.

Shados.1306:

Kamahl.3621:

I’ve been speedclearing AC for the past few days.

Only one group was able to skip the spider queen successfully. We had some kitten screwing it up for us every time because he’d aggro the spiders that trigger the queen spawn one way or another.

First time? He walked to the left instead of hugging the right wall.
Second time? His flesh golem aggroed them.
Third time? His staff auto attack went through one mob and aggroed the trigger mob.

I do get pretty irritated at that. I didn’t call him out on it directly, but I did whisper the other persons in the group why I was so rage-mode. 2 agreed.

IMO very very few bosses are skippable by design, and its bordering on exploits (or at least, gray area) in quite a few cases. A lot of groups won’t skip them on that account (kohler is one of the few bosses that is so skippable you can skip him without even knowing he exists there in some of the paths. Happened my first time through the Howling King path.). So raging because someone isn’t skipping it properly, even during a speedrun, is a bit much IMO.

There’s a dev post stating it’s not an exploit. Says players skip it because:
1) Crap rewards
2) Can’t do it
3) Don’t want to

Or something like that. For killing the spider queen, you get zilch. For killing Kohler, you get a chest and a waypoint. Nothing worthwhile drops from AC chests (UNLESS YOU LIKE DEM GARLIC BREADS), so case closed.

Here’s my suggestion – stop trying to use bleed stacking on engineer. It’s okay with supplementary damage sources like Shrapnel grenade, but the base durations are too low to make effective use of it (compared to classes that do it better, like Rifle Warrior or Scepter Necro). Honestly, if you want to stack bleeds, use the elixir gun – it lasts longer and does like 10 less base damage. So, with that said, elixir gun >mainhand pistol for damage. You can’t break 2.5s bleeds on pistol without using a pizza, it’s just a weak weapon overall.

Axe warrior is actually the highest warrior DPS spec. That auto attack does ludicrous amounts of damage, and eviscerate is like hundred blades but claiming ‘huge numbers’ given HB’s channel time. But I see where you’re coming from, I finally hit full berserker’s last night and went through CoE – my crit ‘nades were hitting for 1.4-1.8k depending on mob, and I was dropping the stimulant from medkit and abusing the Scope trait as well for some pretty high crit chances. I’ve actually stopped using bomb kit due to this, ’cause.. swapping to that actually makes me lose damage, even if just to drop flame bomb and concussion bomb.

How about a Fleshreaver dungeon. Rragar’s Menagerie was probably the second or third hardest Dungeon in GW1, at least if you actually stopped to fight the mobs (OH GOD WHY ARE THERE SO MANY RAY OF JUDGEMENTS). I was pretty excited to hear Fleshreavers were making a return in GW2, but.. they’re like, so rarely encountered. A few mobs in this one zone, a few in another – the object of I think, one event? Let’s see them a threat like the Gravelings!

There’s already plenty of drawn-out advice in this thread. But I’ll give some more blunt versions:

1) Learn to time your dodges.
2) Watch for his tells. Everything he does has a tell. If you were wiping for 2 hours and didn’t learn them, that’s your fault.
3) Learn to strafe his auto attacks.
4) Learn to play your class.

Not saying you’re not doing those, but it’s abhorrent how many things you’ll see people doing – like an engineer using the mainhand pistol as a primary means of damage. Or an engineer staying in grenade kit when using grenade barrage. I’ve several more engineer examples but that’s because 99% of my time is spent as engineer. The rest is on my warrior who’s.. pretty hard to screw up.

I’ve been speedclearing AC for the past few days.

Only one group was able to skip the spider queen successfully. We had some kitten screwing it up for us every time because he’d aggro the spiders that trigger the queen spawn one way or another.

First time? He walked to the left instead of hugging the right wall.
Second time? His flesh golem aggroed them.
Third time? His staff auto attack went through one mob and aggroed the trigger mob.

I do get pretty irritated at that. I didn’t call him out on it directly, but I did whisper the other persons in the group why I was so rage-mode. 2 agreed.

Clicking LMB + RMB makes you run. Bind jump to your scrollwheel or something. Good luck!

You can get 15s bleeds off your rifle. That’s as long as a necromancer can make them. So, yes. Warrior can do ranged perfectly fine. So long as there isn’t more than one other condition-oriented player (read: bleeds) in your party for dungeons, you’ll be fine (this is to avoid the 25 bleed cap).

Did you use the master’s training manual? Can’t skip it, I tried and was sorely disappointed.

So, I bound my second utility skill (normally to left alt, because it’s pretty simple for me to slap that as an engineer to whip out my grenade kit, right? Welp – gathering in Orr, running around, alt+tab while mining to talk to friends with an Orichalcum pickaxe – and a triplet of ‘Ruined Ore’ on the right side of my screen. At first I thought this was some lazy effort on Anet’s part to combat botting – if GW2 isn’t the active program, mining produces ruined results! [Just to note – I was not in combat, I know better than that!]

But later on it repeated. But I never actually alt+tabbed out of the game. I’m not entirely sure if it’s just because I’m swapping kits while mining, or if it’s because I’m swapping to grenade kit – or even if it’s because I have the ‘Refined Kits’ trait, which makes a grenade barrage when I swap to the grenade kit. But it’s ruining my mining efforts sometimes! Yes, I’m aware of it now, but it’s an annoying issue that could easily be remedied!

I love feeling like a maestro while fighting Simin. My rotation is typically standing there with grenades, tossing them away – then when Big Ol’ Bomb and Grenade Barrage are off cooldown, swap to my rifle – drop both of my toolbelt skills, unload blunderbuss and leap shot – see several big numbers pop up almost simultaneously, swap to bomb kit, drop fire bomb, roll back to grenade kit – repeat for ~10 more seconds, drop another fire bomb, and next rotation roll back to the tremendous rifle + bombs burst. I love it!

Should be hundred blades. Would suddenly make the GS a bit more of a strategic weapon, and allow Anet to increase it’s mediocre auto attack damage per second by upping the values slightly. Personally, at the moment, I see the mediocre adrenaline skill as it being balanced compared to other weapons (mainhand axe, for example).

I’m gonna say this right now – don’t use pistols for sPvP. The mainhand does such pitiful damage, the only time it suddenly becomes meaningful is if enemies cluster up and you can get the explosions to tag one another. You can stack all the bleed buff durations in the world, but it won’t break 2.5 seconds / auto attack in sPvP. Stick to rifle for your mainhand weapon (or perhaps pistol/shield, the shield is.. stupidly good). You’ll get a root, a knockback + root/chill/cripple cleanse, two majorly spike-damaging skills, and a decent auto that’ll never get obstructed. If you want some burst, I’d advise going elixir U, grenade kit, and elixir S (that last one’s your safety net and stomp-guarantee). When someone gets close, overcharge them – net shot them – start running up, pop elixir U, then blunderbuss, grenade barrage (WHILE YOUR RIFLE IS OUT), possibly swap to grenade kit if you’re not close enough yet for a jump shot and throw out shrapnel and/or freeze grenades, then use jump shot on their head. They’ll be dead. So very, very dead. If they’re not, you can guarantee they’ll be dead with a big fat supply crate to let you get in those last few hits.

I know you’ve been killin’ her longer than I have, but we’ve found it easier to just get her in a corner of the room, and when she turns invisible, 2 people run off to grab sparks while the 2 DPS + tear person all wail on her. She doesn’t really move in health much during that period, and it seems to go quick enough. 5 damage method seems to work pretty swell though, I’ll admit.

People are going to probably reference the light-Icebrood from the Jotun path of Arah for the highest, as I’ve done ~40k / grenade there as an engineer when standing in the painful light for too long.

Not a bad idea whatsoever. Especially given that we’ve already seen them implement a melee-oriented weapon as a ranged device on other classes (axe on Necro, greatsword on Mesmer).

The mechanics of the fight are ‘dear god did we bring engineers and/or rangers’. Else you’ll actually have to sit on the pads outside his shield before it goes down, run in, wail on him, run out, repeat.. for even longer than 2 grenadiers chilling would take.

Laser-manning players can speed it up fractionally by running up to the grenadiers and giving them buffs. Thieves give toxins (hahah yeah this really helps, no not really), guardians could give 12 stacks of might, warriors could drop allll the banners, elementalists could make several might stacks, etcetera. It at least gives the cannon-users something else to do.

We beat her in 2-3 minutes now with just 2 people wailing on her while one throws tears (plus occasional AoEs), and two people sit at either end of the cave (preferably someone with 1500 range like an engineer or ranger). Two strong DPSers (I was an engineer, partner was a warrior) just need to wail on her while she’s invisible (do this in a corner of the room to avoid pulling spark aggro). Poison, burning, bleeds, strong damage, do it all. As an engineer I was dropping fire bomb, grenade barrages, shrapnel grenades, blunderbusses, etcetera nonstop on top of where we’d pinned her, she actually /lost/ health between the time the sparks disappeared and the 8 seconds later she reappeared (yes the passing by elementalist dropped a few nukes as well). If you bring on sub-geared players, you’re gonna have a bad time on this boss.

While we’re on the subject of it, can we find out what the jump puzzle is in Ascalonian Catacombs? With mostly-transparent walkways and all that. That, and the turkey room.

Was Simin fixed? I’m aware she’s killable, but it’s due to an exploit (read: bug) that someone I spoke with has been able to repeatedly kill her. When one spark more than needed spawns, it’s impossible to make her reappear until she heals to full – but the next time she only needs one spark to reappear.

Was she fixed? I doubt anyone wants to spend 4-5 hours getting to her again (how long it takes actually when clearing the hordes of trash) just to encounter the same buggy wall.

I’m hoping for patch notes soon. Real ones, the last few have hardly been sufficient.

Kudos on killing her, but why wasn’t she petrifying anyone in your group? As the person she petrifies nonstop, this would be a glorious thing to find out.

It’s probably already been listed, but when using the 50% increased bleed duration trait, runes and sigils that improve bleed duration have no effect. I can’t get the bleed to last longer than 11.5s, when it should be 19.5s (assuming multiplicative, 14.5s if additive).

We took him down in roughly a minute or so, he’s incredibly easy. I just maintained poison grenades on him and he ended up with 30-45s of poison from each barrage (they make 3 poison fields). Basically, if there’s slackers in your group damage-wise, you’re gonna have a bad time. He had 18 stacks of regen when we took him down.

Pretty easy to stack in WvW, just run off and punch some jaguar cubs or whatnot until you’re at 25 stacks.

I do admit for dungeons it’s kind of a crap solution, unless you know some hidden spawn locations like the 30 risen spiders at the start of Arah.. and then never, ever get downed.

They’re looking into it. But every new thread on it makes me happy, as it’s the only truly kittened up boss at the moment. CoF path 1 just needs strong damage output and poison. Simin, I’ve tried everything (Look up Arah Seer Path, locked thread). It seems to boil down to luck of having sparks glitch and stick around. When they do, it seems to make her take significantly longer to disappear. We got her down to 30% once that way, and could only replicate it once. The people who have killed her basically did the same bullhorn strategy of wail on her, rush to sparks / rush back, repeat until dead. For 2 hours. Something is certainly wrong.

Because there’s this thing called variation, and the same strategy won’t work for every mob in the game. I actually had to pull out the tool kit as an engineer once in Twilight Arbor explorable. If you insist on being a melee thief in dungeons, that’s your problem. Shortbow provides blast finishers and mediocre AoE damage, so you could go to that instead. Finishers aren’t bad when you’re throwing them at every field you see. At that point, you can actually somehow contribute to the team’s efforts (as a collective, not yourself dealing mad deeps) as a thief, as you have been in the past encounters with blind fields.

Use weakness then. Poison field + blast finishers are pretty kitten amazing.

Engineers probably have the easiest poison application, between using a pistol (not my thing), and poison grenades (3x poison fields on a pretty big target).

I’m kind of irked about Unshakable. It wasn’t in the first BWE, and if it wasn’t implemented until BWE2, think of all the testing they did with their combo field abuse to clear dungeons – all of it tossed out the window? Poison field + blasts for AoE weakness cut down to fractions of a second. Blindness being ineffective. Etcetera.

I’d use Elixir U more if I knew what drawback I was getting, and what toss I was getting. Not fun saying ‘DEAR GOD I NEED A WALL’, throw it, and the boss projectiles continue to decimate you while trying to revive an ally. I do admit the randomness is a complete pain. Should make a trait that forces them to be more predictable. I’ll stop there though since there’s a lot they could do about current traits.

You should always use a rifle for point defender build. Blow them off the point, root them, cap it. Can also couple it with hidden ram to blow them off again. And Big Ol’ Bomb. And then net turret too. Pistol/shield has a 20s minor knockback, but it’s not a 2s knockdown like the rifle is. And you lose a potential root if you go /shield, but the shield is pretty awesome anyway.

I’m also curious about the Kohler thing, I’m sure he’s doable with 3 people, but all 3 people need to bring roots and chills to keep him from leaping all over you.

I don’t quite buy that, the only time we got her below 50 was when a spark lingered around for what we are assuming was a buggy reason. We only replicated that twice and both times were able to get her below 50, because she wouldn’t disappear for a bit longer. We consistently got the sparks back in record time, but it didn’t make a difference as she’d just vanish again at 50%. You didn’t even mention not needing all 5 sparks (you only need to put ones in shielded icons to start), so it tells me you just bullhorned it until it worked. I believe it’s a valid tactic, but I don’t think it’s the one intended. Or supposed to be achieved that way. Grats, regardless. I just talked to someone else who did it and they said they did the same thing, wailed on her endlessly until she just seemed to die (2 hours).

I talked to someone who beat her. They said they brute forced it, which is kind of a disappointment. No gimmick to the fight, just 5 well-geared players all focusing her down. Time warp when she was at ~55%, run to sparks, run around statue, repeat until dead. Seems she recovers health based on a timer, and if the timer is exceeded, she just disappears at 50% health. He also said it took him 2 hours, so there’s a very large chance it could’ve just bugged for them and enabled it to die.

Mind actually linking that?

Sylvari / Forgotten is the best for farming.
Asura / Mursaat is the hardest working one. Great challenge, long dungeon. Not very rewarding, but fun experience.
Norn / Jotun is a nice in-between, the final boss was a good brain teaser.
Human / Seer is bugged at the end / second to end boss. No confirmation anyone’s killed her yet.

We did it for 2 hours, we know how the sparks work. Still not 100% sure what the activate part on the statue is for, but mainly just getting a spark into the shield-laden circles is all you need, and they’ll pop and reveal her. In addition, I know you can hit her while she’s stealthed (not that it does much good to counteract her immense health regeneration, even poisoned).

You’re supposed to run past the abominations. We just used swiftness the whole time (I popped an elixir B + adrenaline pack before hopping in the suit).

How’d you beat the High Priestess of Dwayna? I call shenanigans.

Notice: Take this rant with a grain of salt. It’s what happens when you still haven’t fixed the longest explorable dungeon in the game, and say you did in the patch notes. For future reference, explicitly state what you fix. Don’t just say:

Arah
• Fixed a blocking issue.

Glad to see you didn’t fix anything that was broken with Arah, despite patch notes. What a wonderful utilization of my time putting faith in Anet. This is the last path left for me, and several compatriots, to complete, and it’s still broken. Simin still disappears every time at 50% health. We managed to make her go below 50% once, due to a glitch where a spark stayed around. We’ve figured out how the statue and it’s glyphs work, and know you don’t need all 5 sparks on it in order to make Simin reappear. However, no matter how fast we make her reappear, she doesn’t give a crap and disappears again.

Please, Anet. I’m sick of this. I’ve got several friends asking if GW2 is worth it, and a few months ago I was screaming yes. Now I’m like ‘Lemme get back to you when they fix it.’ Most of the traits still don’t operate properly (Hey guys, what’s Freeze Grenade’s cooldown with grenadier + short fuse? 40% cooldown reduction? Golly jee that seems awfully high). You didn’t fix anything with this path, I beat down all the priests and priestesses again, only to get stuck at this kitten. Either fix it, or tell me what we’re doing wrong. There’s an activate button on the statue we’ve tried to manipulate in the following manner, as well as other possible solutions:

Get Simin in the glyph with shields (which is always the last one a spark was put in), and activate it.

Do the same as above, but when she has Dwayna’s Embrace buff active (which by the way, has a description of “…”)

Interrupt her during Dwayna’s Embrace (just knocks her down, she gets up and disappears anyway)

Get the sparks in 5 seconds to the shielded ones (without putting them in non-shielded spheres), having her reappear incredibly fast, only to disappear a moment later.

Wail on her while she’s invisible (I have swiftness on crits with my engineer – I know when I’m hitting her)

POISON HER while she’s invisible (see above + poison grenades)

Lure her away from the statue (it’s how we figured out how the statue works with sparks + panels / glyphs / whatever you want to call it)

None of this works. Please, I want to hear an Anet Dev’s input on this – is there some solution we’re not seeing, or is this genuinely broken? Please post specific changes for dungeons like you did with CoF Magg’s chain – this seriously has my hopes in shambles over what you’re trying to do with your end-game content. I can bend Giganticus over my knee and make him scream (I literally solo him during second phase for most groups I teach how to kill him), but Simin – she isn’t hard, she isn’t complex, she’s just buggy, and shoddily designed. I literally tank her all day between being petrified, dropping regeneration, and super elixir – along with backpack regenerator. I just tell teammates to stay back so her attack doesn’t bounce between us and deal double damage (quadruple overall).

tl;dr Anet can’t fix dungeons for kitten. Not token-wise, or difficulty-wise, but completion-wise. I submitted a bug report and a formal complaint about 3 weeks back when it was busted, and noticed there was one other post on the forums. Heck, before you even implemented the diminished rewards on finishing dungeons, you somehow managed to screw up an HotW route when you implemented it.

Try using combat rezzes. Toss Elixir R, battle standard, illusion of life, glyph of [revival], the ranger’s revival spirit, etc.

I’m almost 100% certain there’s a way to craft mystic clovers that either nobody has discovered yet, or someone’s not telling. There’s a dev post somewhere that mentioned this within the past week or so – not explicitly stating it, but saying there are plenty of recipes left to be discovered (with regards to clovers).

You don’t have to get all of the professions on one character you know. I got master leatherworker, went to my level 1 necro, got him to 400 jewelcrafting, and I’m at 2/8 for master craftsman.

Fay kind of hit the nail on the head. If you’re wanting to look good, wear whatever. If you’re trying to look pr0, you should probably just go purchase the WvW exotic armor instead of dungeon armors. Or T3 cultural, some of them look pretty good. I wouldn’t waste my gold on it however.

@Wulfheart: If they’re chasing you with a knockdown ability, ones like Separatist Fighters (I’m assuming this is their shield bash?), you could either root or chill them as they get close, and it’ll whiff. I do it all the time to sentries in WvW to speed-kill them, including knocking them down when they try to heal. If you’re having issues with enemies who knock down on attack and whatnot, go fight the knockdown-on-autoattack boss in CM Explorable, or.. no I won’t suggest fighting through the Jotun path in Arah to see a certain boss with quite literally unlimited knockdown mobs, as it’s both long, and painful to get to. As an engineer, I just tag the mob – they seem to always aggro me, then I run around throwing grenades over my shoulder while the rest of my team fights the boss. I’d imagine a necro could do this too with wells (as he won’t have to turn around), albeit to lesser effect. The only enemy in the game who has a real stunlock are these little Asurans in Arah Explorable, who are fairly easy to kill, and simply placed alongside one-hit-kill mobs to test the group’s ability to root, stun, and disable to save them (or dodge in some cases).