Guild Wars 2

Lucas Ashrock.8675:

I clear arah path 3 killing all adds in 38 minutes

“You can’t” hahahahahahaha Did you click my signature before quote me, at least?

Maybe i wasn’t clear. I want a HEAVY fix to put an end to any form of speedfarm/skip of path 3. My armor is meant to be something hard and long to gain for a little number of players able to play hard content, not beggars playing 60 tokens per day, wearing one day a full set, still playing like a newbie

You should probably watch the videos you are criticizing before tagging “newbie” onto other players.

First and foremost, you do not clear path 3 clearing all trash. I guarantee you do not kill those elite giants roaming around right before the last boss, nor do you kill the side packs after the first boss, or any extra spiders packs, you probably don’t even clear the whole room before Gigantipus. So I guess you get to draw the line on the packs that are deemed acceptable to skip, but the trash you can’t/don’t skip is considered wrong? Get off your high horse, stop pretending your way of doing something must be the legitimate/intended way for all players.

On a lighter note, we easily cleared path 2 in that “38 minute” time frame. We will gladly do any path you are doing and do it faster (clearing anything you are clearing). Any trash pack you clear, any path you choose, you have my word on this.

How else are they going to make money off gems?

Kravick.4906:

You can beat that encounter in masterwork gear.

This is a serious discussion. Stop trolling.

I get this a lot, I believe someone said I was trolling a week ago when I mentioned just to kill the mobs instead.

We have attempted this encounter with 0 armor, just exotic weapon and jewelry, the combination of those stats is less than a full set of level 80 BLUE gear (minus weapon damage), with 916 base defense for everyone, and we were relatively successful until the very end.

If someones willing to buy my team a full set of masterwork gear I’ll fraps a video of this encounter done in greens. Hopefully people will stop using gear as the excuse for poor play.

Symbiote.4597:

Cool video. It shows 4 of the 5 members geared in CoF gear. It only proves my point that people in full yellow(rares) can’t beat the dungeon the intended way. Which is dumb considering the dungeon should be tuned for that gear level. Not for people already in exotics.

You can beat that encounter in masterwork gear.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

To say the dungeons will be the SAME 6 months from now isn’t going to hold up either. We’re going to be doing lots of updates to dungeons, changing things that didn’t work out, and introducing new features as we find the time/tech to implement them. Our hope is that dungeons will stay nice and fresh for a long time

Certainly hope this is the case. At the current state all exploration mode can be learned/completed within a week, with ~3 hours a day. That isn’t a lot of PvE content for a game of this caliber.

If you are expecting this to last for months to come there has to be another objective besides just a completion. Horde mode/timed runs?

TA is considered one of the easier dungeons by difficulty and length.

Volatile blossoms have a slight delay on bloom, for a melee the auto-attack aoe by itself should clear any that spawns within range of you. Their damage is tick based, with quick condition removal their damage should not be a problem.

Nightmare vines have almost no health, they die within 10 seconds. You should be clearing these vines fast enough so when you do actually get to the Greater Vine there shouldn’t be much up. Additionally the Nightmare vines have a ranged target preference over melee, as long these vines have 1 valid ranged target they should not target melee.

I’m not going to go over the “cheese” strat for this boss as I’m sure our wonderful sticky guide thread will show you how to exploit this encounter with ease.

Lucas Ashrock.8675:

Path 3 noobpath skipping all, ye. Hoping on a strong fix soon.

Path 3 isn’t the only path can be done with decent times. I think you will be disappointed if you are expecting a patch on efficiency.

Majority of the “end game” Cursed Shore/Straits dynamic events have relatively the same difficulty as the dynamic events you have faced leveling up, aka very very easy.

The 5 man Exploration Mode dungeons are the pinnacle of PvE challenges in this game, they are also for the most part relatively easy in difficulty, but more leaning towards the tedious side in execution.

It is disappointing that the trash of path 2 is more difficult than the bosses. Not that the trash is very difficult, the bosses are just way too under-tuned.

This article is plagued with many poor/biased claims from an inexperienced player.

There are problems with PvE content in this game sure, but he didn’t touch any of the major ones.

Lucas Ashrock.8675:

Agree with Jakar, it’s DR kicking. I’m 100% sure you just made a path3 speedrun skipping 90% of the dungeon, doing the run as fast as possible. Your fault. And i still hope this kind of speedfarm will end with a patch.

There is absolutely no incentive atm for clearing trash, and I see no justification from anyone besides the whole “it feels wrong” argument. Judging from this thread and another of yours pleading for “fixes”, I can only assume you seek some masochistic pleasure for “fairness” for people that are doing things faster than you.

I’m honestly surprised that you are asking people to stop “speed farm”. What do you want people to do after completion of all PvE content? Run dungeons slowly or play another game? There are no challenges set forth after Dungeon Master, only rewarding thing to do is to do what we do currently, except faster. Anet made it apparent that there is no intention to stop trash mobs skipping, there are no gates, no zone wide aggro, not even mob leashing. It is a very nice alternatives for groups that have completed everything multiple times so they can have an option to not repeat the same tedious/boring task over and over.

Geo.2084:

4 Guardians and 1 Warrior do not make a good group to compare to any other set up. That is pretty much the perfect dungeon makeup. I am seriously impressed, at the same time I’d like to see you match that time if you had 1 of 5 different classes in the group. Other classes aren’t quite as survivable.

I honestly just grabbed the first few friends that were online at that point, our static setup has a little more variation than that :P

That path is surprisingly light on damage output. Not going to lie, majority melee group does make most dungeons easier. I’d imagine the absolute perfect setup for that path would be 3+ Warriors with hammer guardian + w/e class thrown in, nothing really matches warrior in damage output.

Ender.3508:

Absolutely astonishing. I noticed you left out the trash at the start but that couldn’t have taken more than a couple minutes. A flawless run could be even quicker. I am seriously in awe, good show mate. Hope DR didn’t hit you too hard.

Thanks! its a fun something to aim for.

Hopefully Anet releases some sort of timed challenges/global scoreboard, as I’d imagine most players would be bored with the limited PvE content within a few months.

Ender.3508:

Kevin.2176:

Ender.3508:

rickets.1386:

Sojou.2067:

People sitting for 20 minutes in CoE path 1 waiting for all the trash to despawn.

Do/did people really do this?! Seriously P1 takes like 15 to 20 minutes tops for my group to finish and we kill everything.

I’d REALLY like to see this. 3 minutes on each alpha fight, perfect laser run, all 5 security locks at the same time, and Bjarl the Rampager never having Scales of Jormag, ever.

No really…I want a video…I’ll wait.

I’ll fraps our next run, it certainly wasn’t significantly longer than 20.

Whoo! If you pull this off, I’ll be in awe. Best of luck.

~16 minutes total. We did pretty poorly on laser and Jormag charged the NPC once or twice, it was our first attempt at a pseudo-speed run tho, hopefully next time will be much better.

Oh Snapalope.1378:

I see that as a legit way of beating her. It’s actually pretty hard to out DPS her heal while avoiding the aoe bombs everywhere and running tears to remove petrify. The challenge is there and it’s still a really hard fight.

The DPS requirement is almost non-existent, you can keep her health stationary with just 2 DPS.

The bombs are very obvious and they do so little damage. The fight is extremely boring with the brute-force strategy.

Ender.3508:

rickets.1386:

Sojou.2067:

People sitting for 20 minutes in CoE path 1 waiting for all the trash to despawn.

Do/did people really do this?! Seriously P1 takes like 15 to 20 minutes tops for my group to finish and we kill everything.

I’d REALLY like to see this. 3 minutes on each alpha fight, perfect laser run, all 5 security locks at the same time, and Bjarl the Rampager never having Scales of Jormag, ever.

No really…I want a video…I’ll wait.

I’ll fraps our next run, it certainly wasn’t significantly longer than 20.

Ravenmoon.5318:

From what I see so far, every succesfull group was successfull due to the mesmer in their group, now, genius pro people, I’d like to see you doing it without a mesmer with only 1 warrior (doesn’t matter, banner or glass cannon)

No mesmer, 1 warrior, first try. I expect the next request to be 1 guardian or something.

You are not forced to die. You can complete the encounter without even downing once.

You are however provided with a way to exchange repair money for encounter completion, that is a pretty big design flaw imo.

They.9516:

@Kevin, subscription games are greedy money thieves. they make millions upon millions in profit that DO NOT GO to developers, developing new content, general work force. The majority of cash that subscription games make go to CEO’s high executives, and into the bank that way stockholders stay happy. You obviously don’t know how money works in the real world so you should just avoid speaking on the matter.

So you are suggesting there are more incentives to regularly release large (in this case massive) content updates for a game that receives no revenue after its initial sale?

I guess you are right I misunderstood how money works in real life after all.

That sounds wonderful but it is slightly unrealistic from a $60 non-sub game.

Path of least resistance, this will always happen, doesn’t matter how interesting the fight is, people will always avoid it if it is possible to avoid while obtaining maximum reward.

As far as I see it, there are only two viable options:

1. Give an incentive to clear trash (via unique skin drops or increased rewards).
2. Force the trash to be fought (via leashing mechanic or some gating mechanism).

As long as you can get away with not doing something while still being rewarded, people will always skip whatever they can. Interest/fun is often times not a factor.

Bumping this as this is far superior to the current guide thread. Much appreciated for the effort put into this.

Oh Snapalope.1378:

Xyrm.5602:

Lucas Ashrock.8675:

Honestly, if 25k+ is his dmg (glasscannon) i will never ever invite this useless player on my party for Arah. I’m not planning to put myself in danger continuosly revving a player falling like a leaf on every add group when someone snooze near him.
Much less if 25k+ is his health. Means his dmg is the lower possible, we have to carry a bag. But ye, i would suggest to save his name as an emergency substitution for simin, only event where he would be useful. (If 25+ is his dmg)
Shortly, cap a stat on gw2= fail. This game is made to be balanced, and a balanced character will play and perform way better than a capped one.
This kind of topics about capped guys offering themself thinking a capped stat will make them pro or a better choice, makes me always laugh

Not inviting someone for gearing damage is fine for pugs, but the group I run with (including E Z and Kevin) runs FULL glass cannon gear, and we clear dungeons in ~half (or less) of the time other people say it takes. If you are smart about dodging and ability usage, you can easily survive any situation. I play a mesmer in full berserker’s stats (power, precision, crit damage) gear, and the ONLY time I die is when I make a mistake. When I use my abilities and dodge wisely, I don’t die. This game encourages personal responsibility by removing the holy trinity, but it seems a lot of players still have trouble getting out of the mentality and habits from games like WoW, SW:TOR or Rift, expecting to be able to focus on rotations instead of reacting to the game.

Even the best of the best screw up eventually. Hell I played top 200 GvG back in GW1’s glorious days as an infuser and I make mistakes all the time. Even rawr (one of the top GvG guilds) monks screw up pretty often if you ever watch them play in tournaments and scrims. The point of building toughness and health is you have something to fall back to if you make a mistake. Why on earth do warriors in GW1 run the same set up as GW2? As in dreadnaughts insignia, all minors runes, and having over 600 health (which is a lot in GW1)? Because it works! I seriously don’t believe you can dodge every thing that gets thrown at you in a dungeon.

Of course you can’t dodge everything, but you do not need to be perfect to make full DPS gear viable. There is very little one-shot PvE mechanic in the game. Unless you are in the habit of repeating mistakes consistently I do not see why someone can’t make full DPS gear work. This play style is definitely not for everyone, it is a very much high risk/high reward gearing choice. At the current state of PvE, at least for me this game gets very stale with out that play style.

1. average around 30 mins – 2 hours on first runs depending on variety of factors, subsequent runs can be cut down to 10 minutes – 1 hour
2. they are very easy to master, these dungeons should be cakewalk on repeated runs. Most bosses have 1-3 obvious attacks and extremely simple mechanic that are very simple to avoid
3. I’d recommend checking your class forums, but do take everything with a grain of salt as there are really no performance measurement, a build that is championed as “amazing” might be mediocre in grand theme of min/max
4. loot from chests are mostly garbage, loot from trash are usually poor as well, people mostly run dungeons for the tokens and end rewards
4 again, you mean 5?) full set of armor is 180*3 + 300 + 330 +210 = 1380 (I believe), so 1380/60 = 23 unique paths/day

Lucas Ashrock.8675:

A perfect example is the grenth battle of arah path 4, when you have to solo 2 adds. A little delay or improper dodge and you will end up pwned while others are laughing on your back. Or CoF path 3, torches.
When the real noob is you, not understanding if you were well balanced, even the noobish pug can be carried at least till lupicus perfectly. As i did trillion times during my pugs on Arah, expecially during september when just a little number of pugs was with experienced full exotic players

Are you talking about those two regular mobs that spawns after the boss teleports? They are regular mobs, you can do them with just a weapon, they are probably the same ones roaming around Cursed Shore. CoF torch event mobs are also regular ones as well. If you really need those extra HP/toughness for the regular mobs inside an instance, then I guess that probably explains why you can’t find a consistent group and have to tailor your gearing choices towards running with pug groups.

You can outperform Effingy’s pathetic pre-nerf regeneration, you can’t outplay invulnerability.

It just seems like a really poor way of allowing the boss to do their ability, all you can do is stand there and stare then roll that obvious 5 second animation.

runeblade.7514:

This makes a warrior in full berserker gear is more glassy than a thief.

I’m not sure if I want to continue this discussion after that statement. I wish you and your 25k+ HP the best in your PvE travels.

runeblade.7514:

Valkyrie gear + Knight gear or even Soldier gear has power stats in it.

Also, 25k is not really high of a hp. I specced about 300-500 in Vitality from Runes and Tactics trait and I only got around 23k of hp.

Why would you want a warrior with high survivability? You want him because of the mace or hammer. It gives weakness on enemies that causes 50% to do glancing blows which does 50% damage on non-critical hit.

That + Hammer guardian means almost invulnerable couple.

Also, high survivability warriors are good ressers. They can endure plenty of hits so they can get you up.

DPS stats isn’t exclusive on power or precision, I hope you are aware of this. Gaining of vitality would means you are losing DPS stats, either in Power, Precision, Crit Dmg or w/e DPS stats fit within your class. I’m not sure why there is even an argument.

I’m also not aware that you gain a stronger weakness with more vitality.

You can gear anyway you want, I guess I’m just curious why a warrior, the class with highest base health is gearing into more vitality, no content in this game would even come close to demanding that much.

Take her to a corner, all five people hit her until she gives loot. Throw some poison in there if you want the fight to be more of a joke.

Ari Kagura.9182:

@Kevin

I would assume the amount of HP the warrior has, meaning that the warrior in the OP has a bunch of gear with Vitality on it.

Wouldn’t that mean you are sacrificing tons of DPS stats just for your own survival? I’m not sure why a group would actively seek players with high health, since most aggro are a factor of damage done + proximity.

What does 25k+ mean?

This is our first try as well, but with some friends instead of a complete pug.

Try using food and potion next time when you do this, that 15%+ damage and 10% less damage taken will make that significantly smoother.

I posted a different approach to this boss earlier.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Priestess-Simin-bruteforce-strategy-intended/first#post422981

Maybe this will help.

Sticky this, much much better than the other “guide” thread.

BlackDevil.9268:

Why would I do the dungeon 20x if I’m not going for gears? Sure, if you want the gears at least have some time spend into the dungeon without skipping 90% of the path.

I don’t understand why you are trying to enforce your unrealistic version of “fun” on to everyone else. I honestly see no justification to completing all trash besides the whole “you should do it”, “it feels wrong”, or maybe some masochistic version of enjoyment.

BlackDevil.9268:

That’s just… Idk
I don’t like the fact that you litterly can skip all trash mobs. I guess I’m still one of those players who actually wants to do the dungeon as it’s supposed to do by killing at least 1/2 of all trash mobs.

Btw you can skip those 3 mobs after giganticus easier by jumping on the stones at the left side. There’s also a small ‘’jumping puzzle’’ between boss 1 and 2 on the left side after you’ve walked the first two rooms so you don’t have to take the risk with the mobs and giant.

You guys all got dps-based build I suppose? Since you guys kill gigaticus really fast. Problem with my party usually is, is that we usually got 1 first timer with us. I always need to explain giganticus to them which also takes a bit time. Also we don’t skip most of the mobs you’ve skipped. I also tank 90% of the time at giganticus as ele with tanker build, which also lowers our dps. We basicly prefer survivability over dps in arah, which is probably the main factor for us to be slow.

Sorry for derail.

There is at least something to aim for when doing efficient/faster clears. After you completed everything multiple times the trash gets very stale and tedious, compounded by large amount of health and the lack of rewards, it is simply not worthwhile to do trash after your first few clears (fix that Anet, make skins drop please).

I believe my party is full Berserker, it makes dungeons more fun with this high risk/high reward setup. Thanks for the tips on the jumps, I might check that out after.

Giganticus is about a 4-6 minute fight for us usually.

Here is a video of one of our runs (this one is unfortunately 25 minutes), not our fastest but it gives a good idea what you can do to achieve a sub-20 minute run.

BlackDevil.9268:

since you are saying that path is as short as the 3rd path, which is 1h and 20mins to 2h.

Then again @ Kevin: What’s the fun of skipping trash mobs? Better to not have them there anyway if you’re able to skip them…

Path 3 can be completed under 20 minutes by the way.

The skipping mobs part is something you should be taking with Anet and their poor leashing mechanic. Its not fun to beat on meat shields that is simply there to inflate dungeon run times. They usually have 1 cliche attack and almost no reward to justify killing them.

This path is long, but its only long compared to how ridiculously short path 3 is. The completion time of this path can be cut down to 1/3 of what you spent in there tho.

You can skip a lot of packs, especially the two champion spiders towards the end.

You can wait outside of the aggro range of those whelps and engage with your party at the same time. Unless there is that large of a DPS discrepancy between you and your party I don’t think you need to wait that long with 1 whelp on you. Consider you are in full defensive setup and you are still able to kill that whelp pack faster than your party? I think you identified the problem already.

If her being able to be damaged while hidden is indeed intended, then the difficulty of obtaining a kill using this strategy is about as low as killing any other non-Gigantipus boss in this instance.

There is virtually no execution required, the DPS requirement is almost non-existent (I believe you can keep her health stationary with just 2 people), our tear break out was very poor and uncoordinated and we were missing 15+% more group damage from food and potion.

Full Berserker’s armor/jewelry/weapons with all offensive traits.

This game is boring and too slow paced otherwise.

All of our past kills of Priestess Simin has been achieved with everyone running sparks, DPS her rinse/repeat strategy. She would usually take 2-5 rotations of spark runs depending how annoying the sparks behaves.

After reading about how she is able to be damaged while hidden we decided to try if we can actually down her without using the spark mechanic at all.

Here is the result.

We actually didn’t expect this to work, notice I have no food/potion poped. If this is indeed intended, she just got downgraded few levels in difficulty.

I’m surprised with the sheer amount of information available currently on this encounter, people are still claiming this to be 1. last boss 2. difficult.

Make some effort before crying out for non-existent bug fixes on what little PvE challenges this game still has to offer.

issacTheMarker.8530:

I am sorry but exp modes have to be made puggable.

I’m glad there is already a thread named “Be careful who you listen to regarding difficulty”.

Alphard is the second to last boss, don’t worry the last boss is rather easy in comparison.

Perhaps you should list some of the problems you are running into with Alphard? (I posted a video of that path in the video sticky, maybe it’ll help) he is actually a step down in difficulty from Gigantipus. I see no reason why a group that can clear Lupicus can’t down Alphard in a reasonable amount of time.

20/25/0/20/5 (imo highest DPS GS build)

Full clearing every exploration mode with Berserker’s armor and jewelry.

Isn’t that what you did? “ignore the mechanic and power through”? I didn’t see you attack the crystals at all at any point, maybe some incidental cleaves.

I think you are going a little too far to call this an art or a puzzle for moving out of a tick 3 ground effect and dodging a 2 second animation based attack. I’m not sure what tip you are providing to the community here, red circle bad is a common theme before you are even out of the starting zone.

I doubt a level 75 zone is considered end game content, especially one that is nerfed this hard.

This has been the case for more than double digit kills we have had on her. You can easily confirm this by letting her be after shes under 50%.

Milennin.4825:

Which is exactly why this encounter fails. It isn’t based on player skill. A skilled group of players won’t beat her if they don’t have the DPS. And in a game that prides itself on having combat that requires skill that’s pretty poor design.

…???

Having good DPS doesn’t count as part of being a skilled group? I’m not sure if you are new to mmo or anything, but mastering an action priority list (good DPS rotation) while avoiding environmental hazard is pretty much the core of most encounter design.

This encounter failed on the other levels, however having a DPS check is a very good thing, just the other mechanics isn’t punishing enough, you can pretty much stand there and press your DPS abilities and still be able to defeat her.

Just a note, hopefully this helps, her 1st restealth is % HP based, the rest of restealth is based on a timer. So yes, DPS matters a lot, it is pretty much the entirely fight (Unless you utilize the DPS her while shes hidden strategy, which in my opinion isn’t intended).