Guild Wars 2

I said it once, I’ll say it again : soloing dungeons would be all about DPS. Look at the guy soloing Arah, AC and CM right now : DPS and smart playing (with a little exploits for parts where it’s mandatory to be more than 1). If Anet really includes solo mode for dungeons you can throw “smart play” out of the window.

Ungood.3054:

I would like to correct this. There are several MMO’s that have instances that scale to the party size, and some MMO’s even have a Difficulty Setting on their Dungeon Instances.

Not every MMO is the same. You can’t compare the game mechanics of GW2 with Dungeons and Dragons and say that if it worked for D&D it will work for GW2.

There are two equally bad scenarios if Anet decides to add solo options :
-too easy for everyone
-too hard for half the playerbase. But if what they recently did with the Destroyer in CoF is any indication, it would probably be too easy.

And then, due to the nature of fights in GW2, the winning condition will simply be : DPS as much as you can. You can’t heal, apply cc and at the same time kill, so why buy time when you could simply kill ?
Also let’s not forget the modifications some dungeons will have to go through to not only make it possible for the vast majority (AC p1), but also possible mechanic wise (CoF p1, p3, CM p2, etc…)

Isslair.4908:

Phoenix.7845:

kholer.

Kholer is an easy 15-30 silver (not counting drops) for like 2-3 minutes of fighting. Kholer is the perfect example of boss you don’t want to skip.

If all trash were like kholer (quick to die, generous reward) it would’ve been a lot less skipping.

Unfortunately, for some players Kohler is a hard fight, so they skip it instead of getting better, thus forever staying bad at fighting Kohler and other fights similar to Kohler…

I agree that it does have a lot of life and he becomes invulnerable far too frequently. It’s a long fight with a dodge every 10 seconds.

All I know is that Mesmers, aren’t really great against burrows…Better than Necromancers, but that’s not hard. If you have an elementalist on your team, ask him to give you an ice bow.

I thought it was pretty clear that “hindering the group” was a reason to be kicked. Now of course what exactly is hindering the group ? We could go for a while on that debate.

But being kicked because they want to invite their friends when you’ve done more than half the dungeon is not a valid reason.

And to be a little more specific : what you mentioned was a real example ? Please tell me where one player is enough to drag a whole group down ? Was that player under the recommended level ?

So you don’t want to join a group in a MMO because some players are rude and you think you will get kicked from a group because you are bad ?

There are dozens of guilds looking for members, dozens of forum posters saying that they are willing to teach new players. If you never try to do anything, you won’t magically get better.

Now players kicking others for no reasons, should be banned. But if you are an awfully rude player that has been complaining for 80% of the run, you will end up getting kicked.

Nurse.1085:

Xephier.1647:

we had 2 rangers

I found your problem.

This is AC we are talking about…Even if it was Arah or CoE, having 2 rangers in your team isn’t an excuse for losing.

Pick up the barrels. Go a little to the west of the mob.
Have one player put his keg down to aggro the mobs while the other 4 run to place their kegs and the last team member catches up with them with a new keg. It’s that simple and for some reason players seek to complicate it.

Shimond.2478:

The mobs shouldn’t leash in instances, dunno why they designed them to. They are encouraging this behavior.

Players will simply use stealth.

Rems.4783:

But most new people just follow some guy and totally say nothing, no idea what to do, don’t listen to what a say. I think they are just affraid of being kicked.

I sort of understand them, but it’s so annoying when they don’t say anything…But what is worse is when you ask someone if it’s their first time and they get angry…

P1 : hug the right wall. But before doing that have a member pull the monsters and the end of it back to the corridor.

P3 : jump on the rock and then on the ramp.

The recommended level is their for another reason : if you are under your aggro range is bigger, so be careful about that.

Aside from that, the difficulty of the run doesn’t fall entirely on your shoulders. It’s also on your teammates. But as long as you try to improve, you’ll get better.
There are a ton of tips posters could give you, but the best way to learn them is to find them by yourself and to see what works and what doesn’t work.

ThiBash.5634:

And then there’s the stuff that’s plain broken, like the CM path 2 powder keg run. Stuff like that is simply impossible for inexperienced players without glitching.

How the hell is that even hard ?
Every one take a keg, one player places down his keg to aggro the mobs while the 4 other go place their kegs in the red circles and he catches up with them…It’s incredibly simple and yet it seems players want to over complicate it…
Randomly throwing the kegs is what you do when you failed to get it right the first time and resetting is probably a bad idea because you are going to get wiped while they chase you.

And if you have a guardian or an elementalist it makes the whole thing even more trivial. Even a necromancer or a warrior can be of use, or a thief, or pretty much anyone can bring something to keep the bandits away from the kegs.

Use skills that revive a downed players if you don’t want to risk your life.

Now for the WP issue, that had to be quite frustrating. I guess you could have tried to synch the revivals or exit the dungeon and come back (except for the player that created the instance).

loseridoit.2756:

Say that again with a full party of level 35-40 on ac explorer. ANet screwed up on level scaling. Level 80 with exotics trivialize all content in the game while a group of level 35 will not be able to finish.

Arah only hard because you are fighting at your “proper” level

They will be able to finish. It would be harder it will take longer, but I fail to see how they won’t be able to…

Arah isn’t harder because of this…It’s harder because mobs attacks are stronger and harder to dodge…And I guess Giganticus should be mentioned.

If you do a dungeon more than 3 times with the same team, it’s not normal that you end up with huge repair costs. That means you never bothered to learn anything and simply randomly used your skills without paying attention to what was happening around you, thus never getting better.

Whatever profession you are, you have skills to make a fight less dangerous, use them if you aren’t used to dungeons. And try to be more observant.

Malvagite.3254:

No one said “everyone”

You cant make any statement without someone saying that it doesnt apply to them.

The dungeons in this game are full of horrible designs. ie, …

1 shot deaths (mossman even does this from stealth with zero way to react to his attack)

bosses that carpet bomb football field size areas with red circles (dodge the red circle being the core boss mechanic of guild wars 2)

Defensive stats that basically dont work ( 3000 toughness = just as dead as the base 916 toughness in many, many fights)

many boss fights where melee is sub optimal or flat out impossible, yet your trait points are spent to enhance your greatsword ..

Encounters like the knockback shooting harpies in fractals where your options to fight them totally depend on long cooldown skills that not every class has. the end result being death zerging them down.

thats garbage design.

You enjoy that? great….there are people that enjoy opera and burnt toast as well.

But most people do not.

I really hope you are only speaking about 20+ level fractals, especially with “melee being sub optimal”…

Tell me you are seeing more than 20 players in Snowden, Timberline or Iron Marches and you might be on something.

But right now you are seeing more players in the Open World because of daily events (and maybe the living story for certain zones), not because they can’t do dungeons and decided that the only thing they could do was play in Queensdale. And the maw is farmed by players.

In other games you have to take skills to prevent your teammates from dying or at least to be able to resurrect them, why should it be different in this game ? Every profession (except Thief) has a skill to resurrect downed players.

Mario Lemieux.9107:

Not if youre dead.

Are you not reading things ? I say that this happens when I died before the boss was dead…I’m going to go right now in the game to fight a boss and let myself die only to prove something like that. Maybe later, but not today.

rozcinana.7249:

The few times I’ve died right at the end of a boss (I take full responsibility for my laziness hehe) I was not able to loot him, I’ve noticed this happen every time.

Be it at Giganticus or during AC, when a boss dies and you are in its range, you get the drop. I noticed that and so did my guild mates.
So which one is a bug ?

There isn’t a single dungeon where you have to run with monsters pursuing you. They are pursuing you because you don’t want to kill them.

In case anyone is thinking about CM p1 and p3 : the goal is to go without being noticed, by hugging the wall or going on the ramp (by jumping on the rock, not by running straight in the bandit group).

Edit : Oh wait ! Though about one, but it can’t be taken seriously by anyone : CoF p2 where you have to gather flame bombs.

SpiderPIG.4150:

I tried. My friends and I stand infront of magg and AoE and FF the assassins. While the randoms are in their own little world kiting by the lavafall. WTF PEOPLE!!!!!!

Please don’t tell me that you are right in front of Magg…The assassins spawn at the back of the chamber, why would you wait for them to come close to Magg ? (If that’s what you are doing).

You are right by saying that dungeons are hard, when compared to regular PvE.

Not only you have to rely more on dodge and pay more attention on monsters attack, you also have to rely and help your teammates.
And helping teammates is where a lot of players new to dungeons (or bad at them) fail.

They think that going full support is helping, that constantly being a water elementalist is helping, but it’s not and far from it.
Monsters (trash and veterans) need to be eliminated rather quickly because of their numbers and their strength. If you let the fight drag on, you are putting yourself in danger. During those encounters, you’ll be of more help if you kill monsters instead of trying to make green bars go up.

Helping your team is done by removing conditions, giving boons, placing anti projectiles or hindering enemies.

For bosses you face a single enemy (except some rare cases). That’s where going full berserker might be a bad idea if you aren’t responsive enough because the bosses have a stupidly high amount of health so your chances of dying are higher due to the length of the fight.

What profession are you playing ? I hope it’s not an Elementalist and I hope it’s a Guardian or a Warrior because they are easier to play with for newer player, while a majority of Elementalist are horrible.

You said it yourself, the problem with this event is that players don’t want to focus fire on the assassins that are unbelievably slow.

iced cooly.5794:

In AC story the other day two of my team mates were downed by the Troll right at the end of the fight. We couldn’t res them on time before the Troll died; we got the rewards and they go nothing. This really sucks, they did a lot of work in that fight, but we just couldn’t get to them to res.

I think you meant explorable. And they didn’t get any rewards, not because they were dead (I died at the end of certain fights and still got my reward) but because you probably had the Troll fight Kohler and then fought the Troll with the remainder of its life (~10 %). To get drops, you have to do a certain amount of damage, and your teammates probably didn’t.
Or it was a bug (there’s a thread around here on this). But being dead doesn’t prevent you from getting drops.

Basic for professions : http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Revive each profession has skill to revive downed players, except Thieves but they have access to stealth.
Other useful skills :
Stability
Reflect and SoA
Block
Remove Conditions

Now a breakdown of AC, because that’s where most PuGs are (will do the other later).

-Spider. Spiderling attacks are projectiles. Use skills against those projectiles. Be careful, poison might end up killing you.
If someone dies, be careful that he isn’t in the middle of multiple red circles before reviving him.

-Kohler. He charges his spin attack for 2-4 seconds before pulling you and spinning around. You don’t have to wait to see his projectile to dodge.
Also be careful, even if you managed to dodged, don’t get too close to him while he spins.
Stability will prevent you from getting pulled, and anti projectiles work (but some have a long cast time, so be careful).
If someone dies, quickly save him.

-P1 boss. He has 3 attacks : scream and throw up monsters (he won’t do the same attack in a row and the animation for each one is different) and he hides under the ground, be careful about that, while he won’t move, it will do a lot of damage and knock you back if you are hit.
If someone dies because of the scream, quickly save him. If he dies because of spawns, be careful, you might be in danger.
The best tactic is to melee him. That way you only have to move behind him to evade his scream.

-p3 boss : almost the same as path 1 but instead of spawns, he makes the roof crumble. If you see a red circle, quickly move out. His scream has a range a lot wider than the animation. When he goes under the ground, he can also move around before coming up.
If someone dies, be really careful. If you are a thief, mesmer or elementalist, use your 2nd skill to get out only when it’s dangerous. Bringing a reviving skill might not be a bad idea if your team isn’t used to this encounter.

I don’t know. Except for Magg, which was the most rez zerged event, I have never been in a PuG whose tactic was rez rushing.

In fact, I’ve been on countless PuG where one guy would just stay down, waiting for us to resurrect him instead of using the WP that is right next to him.

Getting down isn’t too bad, but letting someone die during a boss fight is awful. Except Giganticus and Plague boss, there isn’t a single boss fight where resurrecting someone is dangerous.
-AC : dies by the scream. One player has enough time to get to the corpse, 2 is even better. Kohler, maybe your connection is slow and you didn’t dodge in the 2-4 second window, and maybe you didn’t bring stability or a break stun, but your team can come to save you while he weakly swings his sword.
-CM : Frost can be dangerous. If you end up having the aggro, move away from the body to let the others rally/revive the downed teammate. Plague boss makes it hard to save someone, but every profession has a skill to revive someone.
-TA : blossoms for the first boss. Not running like a madman for the last one.
-SE : First boss in p3 might down you if you are not careful, but he doesn’t spend every second digging, leaving you enough time to save your teammates.
-CoF : p3, position yourself carefully, bring stability if you can’t dodge.
-CoE : there’s another reason people stack on alpha, it’s because it makes resurrecting easier.
-Arah : Giganticus. Range and hug the walls so your teammates can come later to save you.

You have enough skills to help you during encounters, from blocks to damage mitigation to teleporting skills to reviving skills.
If you don’t want new players to be useless, then guide them instead of letting them die.
That’s the situation we are in : players that didn’t learn a proper way of doing dungeons with their character and now they are lost because they can’t use a WP to cover their mistake.

That’s why I won’t go near CM with a PuG.

I don’t mind skipping monsters, but CM…Easy and simple CM…why would you bother exploiting in this dungeon ? Anyone exploiting in CM deserve to go through a long and painful tutorial to teach them how to play the game.

EzRemake.1860:

I know people will say “It’s the path of least resistance”, but what it really is, is people who are bored of the game and instead of playing a different game, or doing something different, they ruin it and make it boring for everyone else.

But most of the time this isn’t the case. Generally you have 3 types of players :
-those that did it so many times and got better. They don’t bother exploiting because they know how easy it is.
-those that did it so many times and are still awful. They exploit because they can’t do it normally.
-those that do it very rarely. They exploit because they never learned how to do it normally.

And then you have threads and threads of players whining left and right about the difficulty of encounters and whatnot.

We used the mountain exploit in CM p3 once because the first time we did it was awful. And after this we thought “One sec, Anet wouldn’t do something stupidly impossible in a low level dungeon and this exploit will get fixed anyway”, so we learned.

The fight itself doesn’t need a do over.
Even if you have the worse connection in the world (in that case, congrats to the Thief that carried you through the bombs), you can still position yourself so you get knocked back on safe ground.

Now, getting damaged when you are already dead is kind of dumb.

Because it minimizes the risks of encounter. Of course the consequence tied to it is that those who commonly practice that might lose their ability to perform well without using those tricks/exploits (if they ever had it in the first place).

And with the “No WP when in combat” update, I hope they fixed nearly every single exploit because if they didn’t, those exploits are going to become the norm for PuGs, driving the common PuG level in dungeons to a new low.

shonn.5037:

i have the answer to every ones problems .. stop playing GW2 … or at least the dungeons thats what the dev team wants us to really do so they dont have to put any more work on fixing things ,, if not one plays them no need to do any thing about it..

Plenty of players don’t have any trouble with dungeons…But if you want to give up instead of learning, it’s your choice.

Bombul.2506:

I am so confused about what you find hard to take seriously here.

In the first weeks of the game this was probably true because most players running glass cannon were awful at dodging and surviving. But today it’s different : you still have awful players in glass cannon but you also have players that have done the dungeon enough time to be able to sacrifice their survivability for more damage and still not die.

You have DEs. It’s not entirely a solo experience, but if you don’t play during dead hours, you should find some other players attempting to do it, make the experience a little easier.

Stop saying that casual players = bad players. There are enough casual players who do really well in dungeons.
And on the other side, there are players who have done the same path more than 20 times and still die (not down) 3-4 time in it…1 is in accident, 2 is is starting to feel like you are being carried by your team and that you have yet to learn the proper way of doing the dungeon.

angan.6572:

I don’t see any challenge at all in it. What’s the point anymore of doing a dungeon that will require you an hour to get ~40 silver and spent 11+ on armor repairs ?

Really challenging and fun…. not !

Really you don’t see it ? You are paying 11 silver and taking an hour to do a dungeon and you don’t see the challenge ?
Except for Arah p1.2.4 there isn’t a path that cannot be done under an hour and without deaths. There’s you challenge : stop dying and taking your sweet time.

Before Anet allowed mistakes and tactics that everyone could do by using WP to come back. Now think a little more if you are about to die.
A lot of people loved to use CoF path 3 as an example because the boss could knock you in the middle of lava where no one could resurrect you. But guess what ? You can position yourself to prevent that : there are certain places where you’ll be knock on hard ground.
Doing Giganticus ? Maybe die near walls so someone can come to resurrect you while the rest of the team is keeping it busy.

Every path has a daily bonus of 40 tokens per character. If you complete a path 10 minutes before the daily reset you’ll get 60 tokens. If you complete it again 10 minutes after the daily reset you’ll get 60 tokens. If you complete that path 23 hours later (basically on the same day) you’ll only get 20 tokens.

If you complete 5 runs in less than 2 hours you get hit by DR. Which means you’ll get 45 or 30 tokens.

Woops sorry I didn’t fully understand what you were saying. I guess it could be somewhat useful, but really…Interrupting bosses might be useful for teams learning the ropes, but teams that are used to dungeons won’t have any need for it.
Be it in AC or Arah or CoE I can’t remember a time where I though “Oh no ! If only I could interrupt it ! No one would have died !”

That would be the problem with it : it would be sort of learning tool that you won’t have any use for in the end. Hell, before fear was nerfed, my guild mates would sometime tell me to not fear the boss because it made it move outside of our AoEs and out range us.

Rising Dusk.2408:

This would be a good way to make Necros, for instance, feel useful in dungeons again since the Fear nerf.

Two 1-2 seconds fear from skills with long recharge unfortunately won’t really be a breakthrough for Necromancers in dungeons.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

1. Defiance is necessary unfortunately, and we figured that out early on. Without defiance, groups just stack knockdown skills and utilities and kill every boss without them being able to get up off the floor. There are some funny videos of this that can be found where players repeatedly throws rocks at Adelbern and knock him over constantly, allowing them to kill him with ease.

Wait, this isn’t planned ? I always thought it was because of the high number of rocks and because his attack is quite unforgiving, especially against new players.
And it teaches player to look around and use what they find laying there.

While we are on the subject : sometime when you use a CC on bosses with defiance stacks it says “Interrupt”, but are they really interrupted or is it a bug ?

That depends really. On saturday afternoon we had 2 commanders in EB and one in our BL and they completely worked together : telling some of us to help in BL when we were under attack, or going to HoD BL when they situation was rather calm before going back in EB to help fend of DH.
It was really nice to see such teamwork.

But yes, some commanders aren’t that great…they think a little too high of themselves because they got a blue arrow above their head. But that isn’t exclusive to GoM.

If you joined the party at the last boss, then they are running you and you need to pay.

If you played the whole dungeon, you don’t have to pay anything. Take a screenshot and report them. You shouldn’t pay anything when you’ve been playing the whole dungeon run (unless of course, you agreed before).

Every path has laser. The difference between the paths (aside from Alpha) is the boss before alpha : a destroyer, an icebrood or a tree.

You cannot be held responsible for failing at Giganticus. The only player who has the right to open its mouth is the one that is tanking Giganticus while the other 4 come back (and if you fail, that player is obviously not a part of your group).

Nodeninja.5321:

It has been interesting watching HoD and DH duck each other and both go after anything and everything red today…

I’ve been noticing that too over the week end, especially in EB.

But anyway, this WvW isn’t too bad. No server totally dominates the other two. Yes DH has more points, and sometime more than half the points, but generally the other two servers capture back their points.
At least, when you go in WvW you find a bunch of players moving around trying to capture tower and keeps.

When I see some other match ups where one server utterly dominates the other 2, I’m kind of happy to be on a low tier where we can have fun.

skinnyb.5920:

A new necro is not someone you’d want to take to a Lupicus fight.

While necromancers are far from being the best choice in any dungeon (even if in p3, you don’t really need anything specific), at least they have more health which allows one or two more errors, making it easier to grasp that fight.
And then have a signet to rally down players which is quite useful.

grabemx.9836:

styx.7294:

grabemx.9836:

GoM has given up on WvW a long time ago.

Speak for yourself.

No after participating a little today, i pretty much speak for everyone.

After playing 2 hours after this post was created :

Shira.3897:

This is an official apology to GoM. We are sorry we went a little overboard on the fun There is a reason we can’t have nice things, and something something DH and GoM alliance…

and seeing that GoM took back everything and had the standard points in EB, I think it’s safe to say that we are still fighting.

You don’t have to rely on only 2 players to kill it, unless you want to spend more time in CoE.

Now Alpha isn’t too bad. You don’t have to take away all of its life during the first two encounters and its health isn’t as high as some other bosses like the Searing Effigy.

roostapro.9827:

Each boss requires a certain damage class and are immune to certain classes.
No more all warrior groups.

This was just an example of a good boss mechanic.

Making a monster immune to certain classes isn’t a good mechanic. You can make it reflect projectiles or cure conditions almost instantly, but making it immune to a class is a bad idea.

Koga.7215:

i have taken GL countless times when not a single person in the group fully dies, and many times where not a single person goes into downed state. He does not need to be changed due to the no more releasing to the WP while people are in combat.

I mentioned changes to Giganticus because it’s been hinted that certain encounters would be modified due to this update, and I seem to remember that Giganticus was mentioned in there. I could be wrong of course.