Guild Wars 2

I like this change a lot, even though I had not yet gone through the grindy process of zerg chaining in the orr areas. Dungeons are what I do daily and karma is what I need.

One question: Does anyone know if the new dungeon karma rewards are affected by DR? It seems it’s affected by a certain guild bonus for karma.

Here’s how my group deals with dungeon mob groups:

1) Pull mob group together into one ball either by stacking (having a melee profession drag melee mobs onto caster/range), using an AoE pull, or using an AoE knockback to push the mobs against a wall. Repeat when you can if mobs start scattering again. (Control)

2) Snare/root (cripple, chill, immobilize, etc) the mobs in place, and apply damage boons or other conditions that help party DPS. Repeat as necessary. (Support)

3) Deal AoE damage as much as possible. You deal more DPS when you can hit multiple targets at once. Spike down key targets as necessary. (DPS)

^This is the new trinity that Anet was talking about. It’s not a chaotic mess if your team uses the proper skills to control, support, and DPS. Turn a scattered group into a single focal point for your damage.

If you do a dungeon long enough, you should know what each mob type is capable of. You should know which ones are melee, range, and casters. You should know which ones to prioritize.

Sometimes you have to stop using your favorite weapon or setup to adapt to the situation. As a guardian, I don’t really like using shield of the avenger, but when I know there will be plenty of projectiles, I will use it to negate 30 seconds of projectile damage to my team. This helps with the TA wurm fight, a lot of CM, against dredge in SE, negates knockback from AC rangers, etc. I don’t like using the staff either, but I can use that to clear TA blossoms, control mobs in detha’s trap room in AC, and trap enemies in small areas for quick kills.

There’s a lot of available options to make the dungeon experience easier, but it comes from a lot of trial and error. Sometimes you discover one of your less used skills become more useful in a given situation. Sometimes using one of your more frequently used skills in a different way will produce better results. It’s all there, so I don’t know what else to say to prove that the dungeon combat does not have to be chaotic as people claim it to be.

Yeah, when I figured that out, it made the laser part feel like a 2d platformer. Reminded me of my Mario days as a kid.

My group and I finally did all three CoE paths today. For alpha, it’s easier to stand next to/on top of each other within melee range of the boss, assuming your group knows how to dodge alpha’s attacks. With everyone next to each other, any nearby allied AoE helps break the crystal quickly without having to run around finding people. You’ll also spend more time damaging alpha rather than running an obstacle course to help your teammates.

My dungeon group:

Person 1: “I need runes from Caudecus’s Manor.”

Person 2: “I need to work on getting my armor from Honor of the Waves.”

— The rest of the group just wants to play together —

Me: “Okay, let’s do 2 unique HotW runs and 2 unique CM runs. Sounds good?”

— The group agrees. —

— We successfully finish all runs while having casual conversation and discussions —

Person 1: “Thanks for the runs guys! See you tomorrow! ”

Person 2: “Yep, I’m out too. Let’s do this again tomorrow.”

— In the end, we are all richer from salvaging, merch fodder, and dungeon rewards, while having fun playing together. Who knew that friends actually help each other achieve their goals? —

I’ve learned that his AoEs are delayed, so I try to run towards a safe area (without a circle) and dodge like 1-2 seconds after (evades the delayed AoE attack even if you happen to be stuck in the circles). It certainly feels awkward compared to the usual circle telegraphs that tell you to dodge quickly (i.e. Adelbern’s foefire).

I do agree that the telegraph is not that helpful. Maybe they can make the inner circle blink or something?

I’ve been running AC since I was 35 with people of that level range. It certainly is much easier when you’re level 80 (with the traits and other extra boosts), but it is not impossible at lower levels with proper coordination. Those runs took us maybe 45 mins to an hour because we had to be extra careful for each mob group and boss compared to when we’re 80.

It resets at the same time as the daily achievements. My dungeon group started to form at 5PM PST once we discovered this.

My static group has run successful fast and efficient dungeon clears with varying setups (even ran some good runs without having a heavy class in the team). One of my friends runs a ranger and knows exactly what situations he needs to swap weapons/heals/utilities/elites. If you like playing a ranger, don’t let others convince you otherwise. All professions are useful and efficient at some degree in dungeons.

Although I have not played a ranger yet, here’s some things I like about them based on how my friend plays his:

-entangle keeps mobs in place for an important AoE spike
-multiple ways to snare/keep mobs in place
-they are good at killing blossoms with axe mainhand in TA
-whirlwind attack gives a nice vulnerability AoE to help with damage
-they can kite well (this is a viable “tanking” strategy in GW2)
-area heal w/ condition removal

My guess is that most people that are rejecting you are probably stuck with the class role mentality of other MMOs for whatever reason. I laugh when people look specifically for a heavy armor profession and especially when they are still out there after we’ve completed 3 runs of the same dungeon without a heavy armor profession. The roles are more on the players than their profession.

I’d say look for a guild/group that actually understands that dungeons can be run with any profession. With a little adaptation to team strategy, any profession can contribute well. Don’t submit to the ignorance. Only you should decide what profession you want to play.

Though I am not here for your request, I just want to say kudos on your initiative to find like-minded individuals to run dungeons with. This is the kind of thing I think dedicated dungeon runners need to do to improve the quality of their runs.

I made a casual guild for my real life friends, so there were barely any members. I ran with a few of my game friends for a while and we eventually created a network of dungeon runners for our play time. My guild now serves as a roster for our dungeon players, so when it’s dungeon time, we just pick from the roster based on who is online and who needs specific stuff from a dungeon — no representation or log-on activity required to stay in the guild. It’s really nice not to have to spam LFG on a public medium anymore when I can just pick up people from the roster. Every time we go in a dungeon, we learn new strategies, we learn how to work together, and our clear time becomes more efficient and consistent.

I hope all goes well with your endeavors!

This is yet another reason why I’m glad I don’t PuG (not that I dislike all PuGs; just ones that produce unnecessary drama for a game). As a player that is experienced with most of the dungeons in this game, I love taking in new people and showing them the ropes. I try to be concise in my explanations (ex: TA vine has two attacks — frequent shotgun AoE at range and occasional close range AoE knockdown; stay close to a vine to avoid the majority of damage and quickly dodge/negate the knockdown.).

Like many have said, either kick the problematic member or leave the group as this scenario isn’t worth any dedicated dungeon runner’s time. You’ve already dedicated effort to form the group and continuing with an arrogant person like that defeats the purpose of trying to clear the dungeon. Time spent finding a civilized player is more valuable.

I’m honestly not sure why that arrogant jerk even decided to play with your group if he cared that much about the success of the run when he contradicts himself by being one of the major causes of failure. Hopefully this isn’t a frequent thing otherwise you may need to create a personal dungeon blacklist.

Congrats! My group and I are on the same path towards that goal as well. We’re just helping everyone grab their desired dungeon items first and then we will focus on the title.

Organized teams ftw!

Jeez I’m even more grateful that I don’t PuG these things now. Even though my usual core group of dungeon runners prefer a fast run through, we still let our newcomers watch the cutscenes and take in the dungeon environment at their own leisure. We want to grow and develop our community of dungeon runners — not throw them off an airplane.

Hopefully there’s something that will be done about these behaviors.

Through a bunch of trial and error, my group ended up luring all the mobs by the keg station and killing them there. Immediately after, with this window of opportunity, we rushed the kegs simultaneously to the door. Most of the mobs were still trying to get to us by the time the door blew up.

maaprid.2168:

Ok, as topic suggests is there eventually going to be a time in the future where we switch to a universal token system?

I have a small guild and all of us want items from different instances. Since we only get a few hours here and there to play we end up pugging our perspective dungeons.

We would very much like to play together, a universal token system would make that possible. Plus I would like to see other dungeons.

I had this situation with my group, so our solution was to rotate the dungeons evenly based on who joined. At this point, we all got what we wanted, even though it took some time (did with the old token system of 30 per unique path), but we played together and learned some new strategies along the way. At the very least, the people who don’t want the current dungeon are getting paid some coin at the end, so there’s a bit of incentive to help each other out.

Maybe you can make a compromise with your group and figure out a fair way to both play together and satisfy each others’ personal token needs. I really don’t see a need to rush the token acquisition as I personally find it more fun just to play with my friends than to get the tokens.

Servers dont matter to much for dungeons, just finding groups. My advice, find a guild (or make one) with people you typically run dungeons with. I used to PUG with groups, but when you starting getting organized, dungeon runs are just that much faster and smoother.
The past 2 days my typical group has had to grab 2 pugs and things took way longer just because we had to explain the way we wanted to do certain paths to make them go faster.
(Note: this isnt a knock on players or PUGs, but when you work together all the time you learn each other tendencies and find quick things along paths that you can do to make runs go faster. PUGs are fine.)

^This is what I believe people should be doing to eventually to break the “PuG” cycle. If you really want to make the most out of dungeon clears, it helps a lot if you have a pool of players who are reliable and cooperative. These will be people who want to improve their ability to clear dungeons and learn how to work with others.

I’m not knocking on PuGs or other players, but unless you take the initiative to either form or join a pool of dungeon runners, you’ll likely waste a lot of time stuck in the cycle of LFGs, LFMs, etc. I have a pool of players that I have either on my friend’s list or my guild roster and never do I type LFG/LFM/etc. I whisper whoever is online and we spend more time working on dungeon clearing than forming (we do about 8-10 runs over a total of about four hours with some breaks in between).

Hope you find a group that suits your dungeon needs!

Perhaps, there could be a buyback system much like the one from the merchants, only this one refunds karma.

Yep, I mostly run AC with my daily group because of those rewards (omnom bars increase their coin drops). It’s a decent incentive for killing those bosses. I hope these kind of rewards will eventually make it to other bosses in other dungeons.

Strangely enough, my group and I used to kite this part before the change, but having the battle last twice as long has encouraged us to fight until Magg completed his task. There’s very little room for error, but it can be done. I’ve always felt kiting was a pretty cheap and boring way to deal with this encounter. Nowadays, we can do this path with barely anyone getting downed, since we know what all the mobs do, when they spawn, which ones to kill first, how to stack them, and how to counter their abilities.

All of the dungeon vendors use a different token. If you were to put a separate trader, you would need to make 8 more different traders because those are 8 different tokens.

I love being able to just search for people instead of roles when forming a dungeon group. I hated waiting hours just to find a healer/tank in most other MMOs. More time spent doing/mastering a dungeon is better than time spent trying to make a group.

Okay, maybe this isn’t ideal for some PuG groups, but I like how I can just ask my friends to bring the profession they like to play. I honestly don’t think I can go back to that trinity system or any other system where a specific profession/class is pretty much required to do an instance run.

My daily dungeon group can do the kaboomium event without getting a single death. Sure, we get downed, but we have learned how to recover quickly and not need to kite the mobs. We used to suffer deaths a few times after they made the change, but eventually we learned which targets to hit and how to coordinate our attacks effectively. If you choose to PuG, it’s likely that it’s going to be difficult. If you can muster a group of people who can coordinate very well, maybe you’ll realize that this is a fair challenge for the dungeon.

I, for one, am glad that Anet decided to increase the difficulty of this part because their intent was for players to complete the challenges with good coordination. Suicide/kiting the mobs in the room doesn’t help you exercise good strategy. I felt accomplished when my team and I finally learned how to take down the mobs in the room more efficiently. We still clear this path in about 15-20 minutes.

If you don’t memorize the skills that each mob type uses in those groups, then you may want to pay more attention. My group counters the flamethrower with stuns, dodges the bombs, pulls range mobs into melee for team AoEs, etc. The groups are timed, so you need to figure out the fastest way to kill each spawn. If your team is fighting mobs in different parts of the room, then you’re doing it wrong. If the mobs are in one place and everyone is fighting at that place, then you’re on the right track.

The tokens are different, meaning no matter what dungeon you do, you could obtain them eventually if you so desire.

In general, I like it when they give us mini obstacles like the laser jumping scenario you just mentioned. I think, if properly implemented, these can be used to control speed clears and make the runs a bit more fun.

To name a few:
-CoF path 1’s flame lighting/rolling boulder obstacle
-CoF path 3’s simultaneous torch lighting obstacle
-CoF path 3’s bomb tunnel
-CoF path 2’s bomb collection and fire extinguisher (great excuse to use an enviromental weapon :P)
-AC’s trap hallway with the trap switch at the end
-CM’s trap hallway (forgot which path)

Short answer:
Completing story mode allows you to HOST the instance for explorable.
A HOST can allow appropriate leveled characters to enter explorable regardless if they have completed story or not.

Dangerkips.6035:

I’m not here to plea for a nerf. I’m just very disillusioned with how the actual game mechanics work. It’s complete chaos.

Where is the “skill” here? Dodging? Running away? Not dps’ing until halfway into the fight?

Here’s some strategies I use with my friends/guildies when we do dungeons.

Basic mob macromanagement:
If you got mobs on you, stack them together, then have your group apply roots/snares, then proceed to AoE. Rinse and repeat until dead.

If you have skills that can push back, you can push isolated mobs into the stack/ball of other mobs. If you have pull skills (i.e. guardian’s binding blade or mesmer’s temporal curtain), you can position the pull point in the stack/ball of other mobs and pull isolated mobs into it.

It’s basically strategical positioning/control. You deal more DPS if you can hit many targets at once, rather than if they were scattered.

Basic mob micromanagement:
Have someone in your group identify and call key targets during the AoE fest (requires prior knowledge of what each mob does). You want to spike down targets that produce adds, kill your group fast, or hinder you from dealing damage effectively. For example, in AC explorable, you may want someone keeping an eye on graveling breeder cues (looks like she’s taking a deep breath and about to scream) and interrupting her before she spawns adds.

Killing low hp targets are also a priority since it can help rally downed players and can reduce the pressure on the team.

Reviving:
Pay attention to your party member UI every now and then. If any of the bars go red (downed state), make sure your team can rally that member quickly, either by killing a near-death mob the downed player can attack or by reviving the downed member. Your team is stronger with more living members. Anticipate downed states before they happen, not after they happen. Defeated party members should usually waypoint, since it’s free and reviving a defeated player in the middle of combat takes too long (still irks me when people yell revive in the defeated state when we’re in combat).

These are just a few things we took the time to understand and learn, but there’s more to it. Just evaluate yourself each time you do a run and look for something to improve.

In AC explorable, as a Guardian, I used to counter Kholer’s pull ability (he pulls you in with a projectile and spins to down/kill you) by using scepter/shield, shield of the avenger, and wall of reflection to counter his pulls for as many teammates as I can. Now, I use stand your ground (stability shout), retreat (aegis shout), and virtue of courage (aegis virtue) to counter Kholer’s pulls, while fighting him at melee with my greatsword. I’ve traded a completely supportive stance to one that allows me to increase my DPS and produce instantaneous results as support. A lot of people have complained that this fight was hard, but we now understand that projectile counters make it much easier.

No, I think these are just generic armor you will pick up for stats at the various lower levels. In some of the betas, these armors actually had the same skin as the exotics, but I think it was removed, so that the skins would be a bit more prestigious. People would have just gone for the lower cost armors just to get the skin rather than getting the higher cost ones for the stats.

Bruno Sardine.2907:

They’re hard at first, but once you learn them they’re fairly easy to rinse and repeat with minimal death…. Most of my experience has been such. They’re like an investment where you have to sink capital (time and money) in order to learn them because once you know how to do them you can make pretty good money and tokens off them. I do agree that some encounters are unnecessarily long when they’re only 1-phase fights.

But to say it can be exclusionary when partying up I find somewhat true. You don’t need all 80’s and vent, but you do need to listen, cooperate with each other, and be ready to do things you might not be accustomed to doing with your toon. The exclusion is not just level and vent availability but classes. I’ve had people turn me down just cause I’m an engineer (with no other engineers in their party)… like seriously?

Yeah, it takes some time and practice. I play with a group of friends/guildies, so that we can develop our skills together and never have to say LFG on both public and guild chats. Our runs are typically 30 mins or less once we mastered the paths.

lol @ the turndown because of your profession. That’s just sad that people do that. I see people around AC advertising that they specifically need a heavy armor profession, and they are there after we clear AC a few times, but guess what? We cleared 2 different AC explorables with all medium and light armor professions in less than 30 mins each. People need to realize that it isn’t healthy to bring the group composition mentality of other MMOs into this game because with enough knowledge of the dungeon mechanics, your professions, and group coordination, you can find a way to do the dungeon. Anet essentially promised us that we can just pick up people instead of professions for dungeons, and I find that more true each day. It’s funny when some of my friends ask what they should bring, and I just tell them to bring what’s comfortable and we’ll tweak for the situation.

This is basically a hit box issue across many objects across all professions. Some professions can’t hit blossoms with their ranged weapons, some bow users can’t hit burrows, I can’t hit a simple road block (log) with daggers. For some of these things, you have to dance around it until you can hit it at a certain spot. It’s frustrating and there is no natural feel in trying to hit these objects. The temporary solution now is to use a weapon that can hit these objects more efficiently. For example, I don’t like using the staff on my guardian much, but I bring it in TA explorable because it literally sweeps a line of blossoms flawlessly.

lol Nice OP. I personally find that group strategy, traits, and skill setup matter more than gear, not that gear is irrelevant. Wearing that stronger armor won’t make you invincible or wielding that super greatsword won’t make you 1 shot the boss. I felt more impact from changing strategy than upgrading gear when doing dungeons, but having better gear can mean you need X less hits to kill a guy or can withstand X more hits from mob Y.

I’m definitely getting tired of the “this dungeon is impossible!!!!! <insert random caps spam for emphasis/attention here>” posts to the point where I don’t even bother to defend the argument anymore. Kudos to the frustrated players that actually kindly ASK for advice or attempt to give CONSTRUCTIVE criticism to the devs rather than calling the dungeon stupid, threatening to leave the game, or say that experienced dungeon runners are full of themselves.

Although, I don’t believe the dungeons to be perfect, they are generally not too difficult as many have exaggerated. I’ve had my fair share of wiping for 3 hours, getting nowhere and am now running some of these dungeons in 30 mins or less after some trial and error with my usual dungeon group. If you really want the items from the dungeon vendors, then you should really dedicate yourself to working for it. Failing dungeons should be an incentive to try some new strategies or take in what you learned about the dungeon mechanics. If you really want a consistent dungeon group, start adding cooperative players to your friends list when you PuG and learn together. You could also do some research to find coordinated guilds that dedicate their time with dungeons. YOU need to make the effort to get what YOU want out of this.

You, sir, know how to have fun. This is breath of fresh air from some of the other things I’ve been reading in this forum.

I’ve always wondered if the instance host kicking would be a problem eventually, and this is a good example. Suddenly, I’m more appreciative that I only do these things with my friends/guildies, though in the event of a disconnect, I’d still get hit with this problem. I certainly hope they eventually develop a workaround that does not rely on a single instance host.

Ender.3508:

Don’t misunderstand, I rarely wipe during dungeons, even on rumblus when my team wiped I was the one surviving and kiting his fat kitten around. In fact when we dont have a guardian, I play full time tank/CC on kohler and the graveling zergs. I’ve just found the telegraph to be way too short on Rumblus’ scream. I’ve had the best luck with getting in his face with stability and protection and dodge rolling through him when he screams. It’s definitely not a L2P issue, but thanks for your reply.

Yeah, those telegraphs are way too short. For me, it just became a pattern prediction, where I would just expect the scream to follow after the rock fall or the burrowing (assuming no one was using basilisk venom or disabling him after defiance was broken). The best I can do is get ready to dodge as soon as I see him raise his head upwards.

In some ways, the gw2 dungeons are a breath of fresh air:
-5 person limit; quick grouping with friends/guildies
-does not take 1 hour or more once you learn the dungeon; I can do multiple runs a night and feel accomplished
-does not require a specific profession; freedom to play our favorite profession(s)
-decent completion rewards; will likely improve over time since it has dev attention

When it comes to grouping with my friends/guildies on our nightly runs, I love observing how we improve our dungeon clearing skills over time. Sometimes we learn new strategies, sometimes we pick up a new profession to get a new perspective, and sometimes we switch our group composition.

However, when it comes to PuGs, I feel it is really hard to play dungeons sometimes. I’ve had some successful PuG runs during the beta, but I chose not to PuG after launch because sitting around for hours spamming LFG is not fun and very time consuming when I could just whisper some guildies/friends and we would have a full team in seconds. When you pick up a PuG group where everyone is dedicated and willing to learn from mistakes and help each other out, I’m sure the run will go well. However, when you get those people that don’t cooperate, leave your party in frustration, or don’t even bother to communicate, it’s a hassle and you’ve wasted a lot of your time making the group and attempting the dungeon. Sometimes, you get the occasional condescension when things go wrong and it causes a lot of drama. After a bit of experience in online gaming, I’ve just accepted scenarios like this with pessimism. It’s the internet… you can’t expect much.

This happened to us a few days ago. Luckily, the instance was still saved. I thought it was a random server hiccup or something. However, we were unable to reproduce the crash in our subsequent runs.

We took an a party with a thief, a ranger, an engineer, and 2 eles to do colossus rumblus. I’ll admit that these professions were our lower level alts, but like many have said, you can easily avoid the scream with practice.

Assuming no one interrupts colossus rumblus’s pattern, you should realize that he typically screams either after his ceiling rock attack or after the burrowing. As an ele, I brought a stun breaker just in case I get hit by the ceiling rocks. During the rock fall phase, colossus doesn’t do anything, so you can take the time to position yourself in time for that scream (1200+ distance helps). I don’t use any dodge rolls during the rock falls unless I run into a circle because of poor judgement. During the scream, I dodge sideways and all is well.

I was using a staff during this fight, so I could maintain range and be able to damage safely in preparation for the scream (staff even gives you a 3rd dodge in fire). I think if you insist on using any other weapon on the ele during this fight, you should anticipate the scream more strictly. Otherwise, make the sacrifice of your favorite setup and use the staff to support, damage, and keep yourself safe.

I’ve been told that playing an ele in dungeons was too hard because if a mob looks at you, then you’re pretty much dead. I honestly don’t find this an issue because once you understand the mechanics of the dungeon, you just use the best of your abilities to counter the situation. I even pull mobs with my ele, dropping a static field to ball them up for my team’s AoE damage, roots, and snares. Playing an ele is quite enjoyable for me and playing one in a dungeon forces me to learn more about the ele’s capabilities (just recently found out offhand dag is great for single target non-boss shutdown).

Sorry if this sounds like your typical L2P argument, but I’m sure with a bit of practice and effort, you can figure out how to counter these difficult situations. With that said, I do agree that bosses need a bit more improved AI, but I do not think the 1-shot thing is a problem. I have never been one-shot on my ele unless it was something like kudu in CoE story, whose ability really is a 1 shot to downed state.

ref.8196:

The thing about Kholer is a good point, but there is still a chest right?

Although I don’t run dungeons just for the rewards.

There is a chest, but because they moved all token rewards towards the end reward, there is almost no reason to get the chest now. Most of the time, it just gives you fine (blue) items. If they want us to fight Kholer, they should properly seal us away from the next area and unlock it when Kholer dies. All three paths are open to skip Kholer for some reason. I’m not even sure if skipping him is an exploit or not.

I also don’t do dungeon runs just for the rewards, but I just assume most people do it for just the rewards. Some of my friends absolutely hate Twilight Arbor, but they want the skins from it, so they try to endure it as much as possible. I do dungeons to improve my PvE play skill and coordination with my friends. At the moment, I agree with others on this thread saying that some of the dungeon boss mechanics are just dull and you just end up hitting a boss for 5 minutes like your usual tank and spank from some other MMOs. It seems we have a long journey to find a good compromise between the dungeon mechanics and the rewards system, but I am confident that we will get there eventually.

I won’t be able to test some of these changes tonight, but I am concerned about a few things right off the bat.

1) If dungeon tokens are only rewarded at the completion of an explorable, would that not encourage people to try to skip bosses along the way? For example, Kholer in Ascalonian Catacombs has full reason to be skipped now because he no longer rewards tokens. All he really guards now is a usable waypoint, but if there’s no real reason to kill him, especially if your team is very experienced and rarely dies on any of the AC paths.

2) Dungeon rewards are pretty much why people would run explorables, so if the bosses along the way do not provide any sort of reward, it would seem a waste of time for nothing. I noticed that some bosses in Ascalon Catacombs drop a couple silver (the champion howler/scavenger and the end bosses). I think, at the very least, until a better system is suggested/discovered, have the other dungeon bosses drop a few silver, so that there is a bit of incentive in clearing the dungeon as intended, rather than trying to find ways to bypass content.

The original CoF run (before the anti-speedfarm patch) was an incentive for people to run because of its speed and coin rewards that you would get at the end. I understand that the intent for explorables is for people to play through it, so there needs to be a balance between progression and end rewards. Repeated running of one boss should not exceed the gain from completing the entire explorable path. I think for now, I can agree with giving token rewards at the end of a run, but there should be checkpoint rewards (aside from a closer waypoint) for killing the bosses on the way to the end of the explorable path. I think 1-3 silver on loot or chest drop would be fine as most of the dungeon bosses feel like mini dynamic events.

3) I’m still a bit concerned about the diminishing returns on the rewards system. My dungeon group has been getting more and more efficient at clearing dungeons we once thought were a nightmare (Twilight Arbor for example, with the volatile blossoms). If we increase our speed through refined coordination and dungeon mastery, it seems a bit unfair that we get severely punished for that. Dungeon running has been our nightly activity and because we play so much together, we keep finding more and more ways to coordinate our attacks and strategies in dungeons. I think the current system punishes us for clearing faster without the use of exploits or bypassing content. The earlier suggestion I made about checkpoint rewards may remedy this situation as well, while diminishing the end reward won’t seem so bad. It may be an incentive to slow down the explorable, so that they won’t get hit by the diminished end rewards too much.

I think it’s great that there is more incentive to clear paths and more incentive to clear all dungeon paths. I keep hearing that the token rewards are bugged, but I have yet to test that out. In any case, I’m sure it will be fixed. This is why you ask for feedback, of course. :P

Thanks for listening, and I hope we can continue the path towards a better dungeon experience!

In the original GW, they added name changing and makeovers pretty late. I was really happy when they added it because my original characters were not really how I wanted them to look. I hope they do add it to GW2, and it would be interesting to see how they implement it. Back then, you could only buy it through microtransactions, but it would be nice to see this as a gem shop option in GW2.

I’ve had problems with this room in the past. Sometimes if the team wipes the room does not properly recognize party proximity and the events get stuck

I saw Rubi Bayer in Rata Sum once. During pre-launch, she gave suggestions on map chat on how to deal with the blocking issues in the starting instance. I was able to finally get unstuck thanks to her advice.

Wep: Ghastly Greatsword
Armor: T1 human gloves, boots, and shoulders | heart of koda (chest) and fur of koda (leggings)

Is this after dungeon completion or trying to leave the dungeon before it is completed? If it is the former, after a dungeon completion, you can click the leave instance button right above your mini map. Once all party members leave, the instance host can re-enter and you have a fresh instance again. If it is the latter, then I apologize for misunderstanding your issue. :P

When I first started doing TA with my dungeon regulars, I thought the blossoms were extremely problematic when progressing the dungeon, especially against the champion vine wurm. Recently, we have mastered all 3 TA paths, clearing in 30 mins or less and never dying to the blossoms anymore. However, although I think the respawn timer is okay, I think the major issue is that a lot of weapons are unable to directly attack them because of some hitbox problem. Because of TA, I have adopted the staff as my secondary weapon of choice as a guardian just to clear those nasty blossoms and improve dungeon clear time. One of my regulars occasionally switches to mainhand axe as a ranger to bounce attack the blossoms, too. I’m curious what happens when you have a group that can barely attack the blossoms. Hopefully, they fix the hitboxes on those things…

Strangely enough, we experienced this mostly in maps that had overflows, typically the dungeons in the 1-15 zones. One workaround we found on the first try was that if the instance host started the dungeon on the normal shard, all other party members had to be on the overflow to join the instance properly. To force yourself into overflow, try to go to the character select screen and re-select your character.

Honor of the Waves has a weird scenario where other party members will not get the join prompt when the instance host starts the dungeon. Other party members need to manually enter the portal to join up.

I like the general difficulty of the dungeons (played them all). However, there are some really strange design choices that disrupt the flow of progression in a way that doesn’t make sense. For example, in Honor of the Waves explorable path 2, some of the bosses have some decent AI, and their tricks are typically non-threatening once you figure it out, but they have an unnecessarily large amount of health. Even though my team has high DPS, these bosses can take anywhere from 10-20 minutes and you’re just standing there bored out of your mind.

My dungeon group once found TA to be too difficult with all the volatile blossoms, but once we memorized where they were and started killing them effectively, the runs went a lot smoother. We considered the dungeon to be hell, and some of our members felt like they didn’t want the TA skins anymore, but now, TA is part of our rotation and they’re aiming for that goal again.

My friends all have different dungeon armor sets that they want to get, but we all still help each other out even if we don’t need the tokens from the dungeon. We rotate between three dungeons daily. At the very least, you get paid some silver for your efforts and, sometimes, a relevant amount of exp for collecting skill points for mystic forge components for legendary weapon parts.

While I do feel for your situation, I think you and your friends should consider helping each other out, so you don’t have to deal with the stress of running with strangers. At the very least run at least 2 unique paths for each dungeon your collective group needs to do on a daily basis. Also, perhaps, you can rotate the order, so that it feels less repetitive.

Previously, the dungeon equipment was too easy to get for its skin (had a rare and exotic version; rare being really easy to get), so I guess this change was put in place to make the skins more prestigious. We’ll probably disagree on this, but I really only like the dungeon gear for its skin rather than its stats. I think it’s fair that we have to work for something “unique” like the dungeon armor skins. The fact that you’re wearing that skin pretty much proved that you worked hard for it. I think it’s great that acquiring the dungeon equipment is essentially optional because you can optimize your stats with less effort. However, I will agree that the method of obtaining the gear is pretty annoying with how much you have to repeat the dungeon explorable. I typically do at least 2 unique explorable modes daily, so that I accumulate tokens without trying too hard to repeat the same content too many times in a day. It’s a slow process, but I’ll eventually get what I want.

My guardian is my favorite character to play, and while I want to get some dungeon gear aesthetics for alts, I don’t want to be forced to play that alt just to get the gear. We can buy gear from the TP and give it to alts, so I don’t really see why we can’t do dungeons on our favorite character and pass the skins to an alt through the bank. My guardian has a ton of unused tokens that I would rather use for my alts.

However, I do have an experiment that I want to try later when my alts are in their 80s. I’m thinking of getting a piece of dungeon equipment with my guardian and then transmuting it onto a piece of gear on my alt via the bank. If this at least works, then I can live with the current soulbound token system. If someone has tried this, could you confirm/deny if this works?

Echoing the OP a bit here…

The first time my dungeon group did all the explorable paths, each took over an hour. However, once we got used to our professions and playing together, we clear each path anywhere from 20-40 mins. Kholer used to be able to pull us in and tear us apart, but now, we know how to shut him down and no one even gets pulled in. We have a systematic way of killing graveling burrows quickly. We know how to prioritize targets without having to call them. I think, in general, dungeon explorables will take a long time until your group gets used to it. Eventually, you can reach a point where your repairs are minimal and your clear time is much faster than your initial clear.

I think that if you approach the explorable dungeons in such a way that you’re always rotating your party members, you probably won’t get anywhere. This is usually the case for people who don’t have guilds or have contacts that want to make this a regular thing. In this situation, you would have to constantly spam chat and other mediums to find or make your own group, usually unsure of how well your team will work together. This cycle just repeats itself and you’re stuck in a loop until you decide you want to move to a higher level of play involving more cohesive teamwork.

If you really want the dungeon experience to be more serious and efficient, you should consider creating a network among other frequent dungeon runners you play with. I do this with a few of my friends who are in different guilds, and we rotate between three different explorables daily, based on what tokens we need. In the time you play together you’ll learn how to complement each others’ strategies, you’ll learn more about your own profession, and you’ll be able to prepare for each of the dungeon stages more quickly.

TL;DR: Practice makes perfect. Form a network of friends for more efficient dungeon grouping and gameplay experience. Dungeon explorables are usually hard because of a lot of uncontrollable factors, so don’t let repeated grouping with more and more strangers be one of them — become friends with those strangers and practice runs together.

I’m not sure if you tried it yet, but you can actually test your professions as a level 80 character with access to all your skills and weapons (minus racial skills). When your character is done with the starting instance, press H and click the last tab on the left. Enter the mists and you’ll be taken to the PvP lobby where you will be leveled to 80 while in there, with access to all your skills, and you can obtain weapons for free from the weaponsmith NPC. This area is essentially a training ground for PvP players, but it can help you test drive a bunch of your skills and traits.

When you first arrive in the mists, go across the courtyard and up the stairs on the other side to use the portal that takes you to the main lobby. In the hall of memories area, you will find NPCs who will give you equipment for free, so feel free to use those to test drive your main skills.

I hope this helps!