Guild Wars 2

I think the issue, insofar as not being able to spam one dungeon over and over again in record time is an issue, is that it can on occasion be hard to find middle ground between the absurd people who kick for banner of tactics and the horribad groups who want to try out their new healing power ranger and “High DPS” engineer, or the party of sub-1000 AP fresh 80s who would like to be carried through getting tokens for their signet warr, never dodge, and look around for a guardian to blame for not popping virtues.

I don’t get a lot of kitten from the speedrunners because I use a mesmer and many of the pro-warrs don’t stress too much about mesmers as long as the portals and the pulls flow smoothly. But they’re still unpleasant to be around.

I’ve played both a lot lately, just for tokens because I like the armor. I would say CM is more dead. HotW at least has good old path 1 which is pretty quick and easy to run once a day. You can usually get people for that.

In CM there isn’t really a quick path per se. I will say, though, I’ve had fun running CM and there have been some really great players there. (Thanks a bunch to those Mesmers for Mass Invis/Veiling us through the trash!) HotW 2 and 3 are excruciating though, so I stay away. (Awful HP pools + underwater combat.)

Find a competent group with which to run CoE. (standard dungeon group – Guard, 3 Warrs, Mes) More up and down than CoF, but that makes it more interesting. There will be dry runs – though those are not valueless – but there will also be runs with multiple charged cores, or even the odd lodestone, worth over 1g and 3g respectively.

Key thing is to mix things up. Yes, running CoF 24/7 is probably best for money, but it is eye-bleedingly boring if it’s all you do. I don’t have infinite time to play, so on a typical day I’ll do a CoF P1 run, maybe a P2, 1-3 paths of CoE, P1 HotW, some combination thereof. 60 tokens per run = two extra rares. And toss in the odd dragon event or WvW. Slower than nothing but CoF but you won’t hate yourself and the game won’t feel like a job.

There are a few really strong design principles at play in the dungeon that should be applied in the existing dungeons:

1. Condition removal is a necessary thing. You actually need to use non-damage utilities.
2. DPS is not king. It will make certain parts of the dungeon go faster, but mastery of the mechanics – dodging the lasers, getting the shields off of Mai – is more important than blowing the doors of enemies dps wise. Golem fight particularly hits the traditional high-DPS melee-ers with a premium on range. (Not saying all encounters need to punish melee or anything, just that many boss encounters should not be like slave driver/searing effigy.)
3. Trash actually can give half-way decent drops. The aetherized metal scraps can drop charged cores when salvaged.
4. Trash mobs actually feel different. The big hammer dudes knock you over, and the little knife people throw dowkittenllion bleeds in a flash.

If I could change it, and this is true of GW2 dungeons in general, I would like for the dungeon to be able to be completed faster by people who are better at it, but not better solely in the sense of “HURR DURR MOAR DEEPS” – better in terms of the mechanics of the dungeon. Imagine during the cannon sequence, for example, that in addition to standing there a set amount of time dodging, there were also a way turn off the cannons by having someone jump along a JP-style set of platforms off to the side, all the while dodging cannonballs that would knock you to your death if hit. If you were good, you could get through that sequence faster, but you’d be taking a risk. Reward skill, but in a more interesting way than maxing DPS.

Anyway, I like the direction they’re taking but we need to get some of the living story folks back in the plain old dungeons to give them some flair!

Mostly liked the dungeon. Last boss should be shortened (shorter cannon sequence perhaps, maybe less health for Mai) and maybe something with the pulls – shorten the range, give more of an emote to make it more dodgeable, something like that. Or keep as is but shorten the shield uptime on the golems. I got a charged core from salvaging the aetherized scrap I found though, which was pretty cool.

Yeah just stack on her if you can’t immobilize. You can stand in the fields a while, they don’t hurt much.

Yay for challenging content. The pulls are cheap though. So are the golems with the shield camping on top of downed teammates, meaning you get repeatedly stunned if you try to res.

Favorites:
- Lion’s Arch decoration – awesome as always, good as Wintersday.
- Hologram fighting out in the open world, not just hanging out in an instance
- Amazing design work on the Dragon skins. Two tickets so far and can’t decide between them.

Always love the festival events.

More of a threshold question, OP do you play on a high pop server? Because what you’re describing with Orr doesn’t fit with my experience. On Dragonbrand, except at really unusual times of day there are people around to do many of the events. Indeed, there have been even more around since Dragon Bash started because people figured out you can rack up dragon coffers really quickly with the Cursed Shore events.

It’s true they’re not what they used to be – you have to mix it up more than sitting between Pen and Shelter, throwing in Plinx and a few of the escort events. It’s not amazing like it used to be but it’s a non-terrible option. And I think it’s only fair to say dungeon loot crushes open world loot in the sense that CoF crushes all other content in the game in terms of rewards; the other dungeons are fairly balanced in terms of effort v. reward when compared with Orr.

The devs always have to strike a balance, and I think they’ve done a good job here. During Wintersday everyone got stuff (which was appropriate for Christmas.) Southsun was waaaay to far on the other end – the sclerite stuff is super rare because the process for obtaining it was ridiculous. This is in the middle – the tickets seem to be obtainable on average from opening 500-700 boxes or so, could be much more or much less. At current price for the coffers on the TP, on average that means the weapons cost around 20-30 gold. That puts them at obtainable for many players, but not as a trifle.

And oh yeah, not a ton of sympathy for “woe is me, other people have my skin.” It’s great to feel cool/special, and I always feel kitten when my dagger ele breaks out the fractal dagger (which is fairly exclusive, but the downside is that the process for obtaining it is enormously tedious, random, and unfair) but I think for most people the game is about creating fantasy characters and outfitting them in magical-looking fantasy gear that fits the story the player has created for them. Exclusivity is unnecessary for that.

These are boring when people try to do them all in three days. The achievements are designed so that you do a little of each thing each day. You have a month. That means spend a little game time each day killing holograms. Of course spending four hours camping holo boxes is going to be boring, because it isn’t meant to be done that way.

I agree with OP, but would go one further. I think they should do away with gold to gems. Don’t grab the pitchforks.

From Anet’s perspective, if they add content into the game, they have to price it knowing that people can obtain it by running CoF a ton and converting the gold to gems. Therefore, they

1. Have to set the price of items very high to make doing that inconvenient and
2. Make much of the content temporary so that people need gold on hand to convert in gems, rather than have months to grind for the thing they want and
3. Introduce RNG into every way of obtaining items to obscure the very high price. (Besides being annoying, that’s all RNG really is – it’s a way to make someone spend $1 one hundred times and make the thing feel cheaper, rather than charge $100 outright.)

What I mean is that if Anet knew when they put items in the gemstore that people would pay CASH for those items, not grind gold and convert it to gems, they could put weapon skins in the store and expect to do well from it.

As is, however, the existence of people with huge gold stores who play the game (read, run CoF) all the time but therefore don’t need to buy gems is built into the price of every item. This is why the sclerite skins were basically only obtainable by burning piles of money at the RNG altar. That makes the prices for regular players, who wouldn’t mind buying a skin for say two or three dollars, much higher than they would otherwise be.

There should be a wall between what can be purchased with money and what can be purchased with gold. Let those two economies exist separately, and most people will be better off.

OP don’t dare compare the sclerite skins with the Dragon Jade ones. Dragon is much easier to get and the skins as a whole look waaaaaaaaaaaay better. Some of their best design work, not counting the ugly greatsword. (And there are already a ton of cool greatswords.)

I feel like Anet actually listened after the Southsun event and did far better this time around. Yes, the rich coffers were a scam, but I can’t feel too bad when people didn’t wait around to see how much better than the regular coffers they are. Turns out regular coffers are the way to go. (And I didn’t have amazing luck like some people getting a ticket on number 25 or so; I opened about 600 before getting one, which is apparently around average.)

Price on the regulars is dropping down. If you buy five or six hundred (around the median to get a ticket far as I can tell) at the moment the price would be around 20g or so. A tidy sum but attainable. (And you can certainly farm the things yourself – there’s plenty of time and they drop everywhere.) The SAB weapons trade from around 5g to 35g, so same ballpark. And the artwork on the new skins is awesome.

I didn’t have amazing luck with the regular coffers – I opened about 300 that I found (farmed Orr events last night) and I bought 300 when the price dropped down. (It will probably go down further; I’m a tad impatient!) Number 560 or so dropped the ticket. This is pretty consistent with the numbers I’ve seen other people report.

But overall I am actually pretty happy. Vs. the Southsun event this is night and day. Those kitten chests never dropped AND had basically no chance to get the kitten tickets. And unsurprisingly I’ve seen almost no one in the world with the sclerite weapons.

This is considerably better. The coffers are plentiful, enough that farming the tickets is a reasonable goal, and large numbers can be obtained fairly cheaply if you’d rather buy. Yes the Rich boxes are basically a scam, but they are totally optional. The tickets are attainable – yes, it’s work or coin, but attainable – without spending a penny. I am already thinking about getting another ticket with a few hundred more boxes, which I could readily afford with a few hours of CoF runs or Orr farming.

And needless to say artistry wise these beat the pants off the sclerite weapons (cool eye effect but meh otherwise) and most of the fused ones too. (CoF reskins with particle flames.) These are some of the most intricately designed skins in this or any MMO. The staff, the rifle, the shield, the hammer – all beautiful. Great to see some of the weaker skin categories – rifles, staves, and hammers for example – get some serious love.

I am happy to support the game through non-rng means. I buy makeover kits and transmutation crystals and occasionally BL salvage kits at the gem store with gems for which I pay cash, as well as some of the gem store purchaseable skins like the Wintersday ones. I feel like this type Anet gave me the choice to pay money and go the rng route of the rich boxes – that isn’t my thing, though it is some people’s – or go play the game and get the rewards. That’s a fair choice, and I’m happy enough.

tldr: don’t buy the rich boxes you sillies, just farm them, don’t engage with a practice you don’t condone, and kudos to Anet for a fun event and eye-popping skins.

I actually have pet rats so I’ve never been a fan of ambient killer, but I realize it’s all in good fun. That said, it should be tempered with a new “ambient helper” daily where you give treats to the ambient fauna instead of killing them. Would help balance the population problem ambient killing would present

I use my guard for fractals and some dungeons, and while greatsword can do some nice things, I really prefer the hammer. This entire discussion so far, long as it’s been, has focused solely on, “How much damage am I doing?” which would be myopic for any class but particularly so for a guardian. Guardians are a team class, and hammer is a team weapon.

Why always run hammer in fractals? Simple – five (or four, depending on traits) second blast finisher. That translates to:

1. Elementalist lava font or guard purging flames = three team-wide stacks of area might.
2. Ranger or engi water field = area heal
3. Necro well or thief refuge = area blind

and area retaliation any other time I feel like it. A single staff ele and a hammer guard can keep a team in teen stacks of might by themselves. Water heals save lives. Retaliation adds to dps and blinds are all round useful.

Every four seconds, guys. Whatever dps differences hammer and sword have – and the overall message of the conversation here is that they are not enormous, if existent at all – in a team environment hammer is just superior because blast combos are awesome and whirls aren’t. That’s not to say greatswords can’t be good – binding blade-ing enemies into a compact space so team can aoe them, for example – in a team environment. By all means bring one on switch if you can’t live without it, but at the end of the day guards are at their best in a team environment and in a team environment you need to think about combos.

Guardian here, to reassure everyone that we are prepared to provide dungeon protection through the forthcoming game-wide warrior strike/spy-kit extravaganza.

I don’t want them buyable, as I like that they are rare and mark someone as a dedicated fractal runner in a way few other weapons do. But I do think they should be exchangeable; I found a dagger and one of my three 80s is a dagger ele, so I was perfectly happy but I know some people run one main character with a particular weapon for a particular build. It’s fine that they’re rare – they ought to be – but the chance of finding the particular one you want is just way too low.

I play as a guard and run in the 30s and 40s. Guardians are very good in fractals, which I think is justified given that they are not that great in regular dungeons because they are DPS races and defense counts for very little.

I’ve found many fractals at the higher levels are easier with a thief in the group, and some of the best fractal players I’ve seen play thieves. I agree that glass backstab thieves have no place in fractals, but frankly any build of any class that is not team oriented is not useful in a fractal. Off the top of my head:

- While not as much coverage as mesmer or guardian, thieves can block projectiles with smoke screen. Very useful when shields are on cooldown fighting bloomhunger or the asura golems,or getting through harpies.

- Bomb event in dredge fractal – way way better if you can have a thief stealth solo the bombs. On 30s or 40s, this usually saves a death or two.

- Shadow refuge is a lifesaver, useful in all dangerous situations.

- Shortbow blast spam heals off of engi/ranger/tree item water fields, particularly useful in cliffside, but really anywhere you take a lot of damage.

There are more but those all strike me immediately. All of these require a thief that is thinking about more than spamming backstab, but as I said any class that is thinking about only damage is not going to be useful in a fractal above level 10 or so. Thieves have plenty of team friendly tools if they use them.

“Maybe people don’t want to feel like a twink leveling service.”

Lol, I feel for OP somewhat as someone who levels alts using dungeons. I wouldn’t say the sub-lvl 80 hate happens too often, though when it does it’s almost always a super-l88t group of skillful teenagers who just leveled their first hundy blades warr, have something like seven or eight hundred achievement points, and wind up eating dirt on Kholer “because of the lag” or “my dodge button isn’t working right.”

That said, I’m fine with people organizing groups as they want, but they ought to be explicit. You want 80s? Write “80s only,” as many people do. That’s totally fine by me. Same with something like “Speed Run,” which suggests you want nothing but high DPS folks who’ve run that dungeon a lot. If you don’t write any of those things, to me you are implying you’ll take all comers.

As for our much put-upon forum brethren who feel oh-so-burdened by having to level up other people’s characters in AC and TA, grow up. You are money-running a sub-lvl 80 dungeon because it is easy. If you feel like you’re a “twinking service” it’s because you’re re-running an easy and early portion of the game ad nauseum.

Make a lvl-80 only group that says so on the label, join a guild that fits your proclivities, or deal with the fact that you are running early to mid-game content on an end-game character to make the game easier. AC is not even the only farmable dungeon. Don’t want low-lvl chars in your speed runs? Go run CoF, which is just as farmable and where everyone will be at least 75. Or run CoE (lvl 78) for charged cores, which with a decent group winds up netting as much or more as AC runs.

stof.9341:

Stinson.5972:

The event requires a decent number of people

Yeah, something like 3-4 people. How will you ever get that many people to enter a dungeon??!?

Yeah, those of us who use the LFG tool, i.e. the best way to get together a group, often form groups across servers, which means we can’t all just get together and do the event. Thanks for the snarky kitten response though.

This is really irritating. It would be fine to gate the stupid dungeon if there were always a lot of people around Mount Maelstrom, but there aren’t. The event requires a decent number of people and people not running the dungeon basically have zero incentive to help kill this guy because they get next to no reward. Either ease this guy up a little or let dungeon parties guest into each other’s servers to try to work it together. I’ve been in two groups today that couldn’t find a server where CoE was open.

No trading. I agree there are some annoyances about getting the weapons now, and that could be addressed in other ways. The crafting idea you mention is good, presuming the players are required to earn the relics themselves. But the last thing the game needs is another loot type that serves as a bauble for the day trader crowd, the same way the majority of loot does now. Having the fractal weapons should show that you played fractals to get them.

Wanted to know if anyone knows whether finishing a combo, namely blast finishing a fire field, which grants boons to allies (I know some combo blasts don’t grant boons like stealth fields; I am wondering specifically about those like fire that grant boons) procs AH for each might granted?

Thanks.

Been running the 30 daily a lot lately and noticing groups actually losing on the first part where the grawl shamans go after the captives, which had never really happened before. Wondering if I’m missing something about how you’re supposed to do this.

Obviously you want to stop the shaman so CC seems obvious. Knockdown/pull works well. But immobilize isn’t so hot. It seems like after you immobilize them, once they get free they run faster to make up for it. Is that intended? If so, do you just need to chain immobilize together?

I guess the other possibility is to all-out DPS but the makeup of some parties can make that hard. Any thoughts?

I really don’t feel this way at all. Exotic gear requires no grind. The cool looking stuff takes a while to get, but there are multiple paths to the goal so I don’t really consider it grind. It seems like a lot of people are saying, “I need 100 of x, I’ll go farm x. Oh no, DR is hitting me and I can’t farm them effectively! This game sucks! Boo grind!”

Except you don’t need to do that. You just need to do some sort of activity that makes you enough money to buy the materials. (Some of these, I’ll grant are probably too hard to get due to market manipulation/too many of the same materials being used for the same desirable items, and this should be fixed.) Dungeons give money, fractals give good money, gathering gives money, running big events usually gives drops that can be converted into money. If you mix these activities together rather than do one over and over I don’t think it feels grindy. I think that Anet has made efforts to equalize these activities somewhat i.e. adding wondrous bags to dungeons, better drops to vets, cores in fractal chests. That’s an imperfect but evolving balance.

As for crafting, I don’t agree at all. If you have several characters and are crafting stuff for all of them you don’t wind up making a ton of useless stuff, and it doesn’t take that long. Also, leveling cooking is awesome/fun with discovering all the recipes, and cooking remains very useful at 80.

So far we’ve had monthly updates with new content, most of which could be enjoyed without spending gems. (I.e. fractals cost nothing., the scavenger hunts at Halloween, the toy mini crafting.) There are always a couple of things that are obvious money grabs but that’s how B2P works, at least if you want the cool new updates coming out, and I don’t begrudge buying gems now and then. That doesn’t feel very F2P to me. I play this game a lot, have literally never touched PVP, and only very rarely done WvW and I find that if I just rotate activities it stays fun.

And that is the judging quaggan.

Imagine judging quaggan sitting in the waiting area.

“Who taught you to jump? A rock? Quaggan thinks it must have been a rock.”

:)

Yeah I fully agree about them taking too long. At 20+ things are usually closer to two hours unless you draw short fractals – like swamp, asura, and underwater. You make a really good point that I forgot to make about loot. Loot is a good reason to run fractals, and the amount isn’t really well related to the difficulty of the fractals, and some combinations of fractals reward very little. Cliffside, for example, is one of the longer fractals but has very few drops. Asura has few drops but at least the harpies drop expensive T6 blood. Dredge takes a long time – I really think toning down Rab would help – but at least you get a pile of loot.

I really like the fractal dungeons and the way they are implemented in the game. Iplay a guardian and have run through the 30s solely with public groups (using the website) and generally enjoy them. Others please share your thoughts ABOUT THE FRACTALS, and not about why you hate rings, or why agony is the worst thing ever, or using the website, or fractals in general, or dc issues that will soon be fixed.

If I have one basic theme, it’s that fractals should be designed so that a skilled group can move through them quickly. Boss fights should be exciting, high danger scenarios – not attrition fests. The speed of progression should be based on skill, and not on artificial, non-skill based barriers like giant hp pools for bosses. The current fractals are a mix of both.

Dredge – I really like this one, especially because various parts of it (the bombs, the door you have to cut through) really give thieves a useful role with their stealth fields. But please doublecheck your spreadsheet – I think you gave Rabsovich an extra zero or two on his health. He takes longer to kill than the boss, and it’s not a challenging fight; he just has way too much health. Give him a damage boost, an extra attack or two, and a massive cut to HP. The mining suit/ice boss is a great team battle design – he hits hard enough to hurt you, but played correctly he goes down fairly quickly.

Underwater – Another favorite, but same issue as with the Dredge. The jellyfish isn’t hard, he just has a stupid amount of health. Again, boost damage, give him some different attacks, and a big hp cut.

Asura – Love this one, harpies or no harpies; fun boss fights with good team work. (Ressing is good for team building.) Would like to see more jump puzzle type fractal content in the future.

Swamp – probably the best designed fractal. This is how a fractal ought to be designed – for a well-coordinated team that knows the ropes, it can be run quickly.

Blizzard – Same thing for the boss here. Probably too much health, but could use a few extra attacks to shake things up. He basically can’t hurt anyone as is, and his agony attack is totally avoidable.

Ascalon – awesome, and I love the idea of using the fractals to elaborate on little slices of Tyria’s history. Definitely a path for the future. The boss here is challenging without being cheap, goes down fast enough that you fear him killing you instead of you falling asleep, and the mob fights similarly can be rough if you overpull, but encourage the team to work methodically together.

Lava – Another good boss that rewards teamwork and tactics, and who can be a good challenge. Indiana-Jones style boulder rolling is always welcome, and another good inspiration for future fractals.

Hope some of this is useful. The dungeon designers have overall done a tremendous job and added a really fun element to the game that gives a challenge and some decent loot too.