I try to use search and rescue for opponents such as Lupicus who have big aoe circles that I prefer not to personally sit in while reviving people. All the problems mentioned above come into play though. You have to be in range (or does the pet have to be in range?). The pet needs to be alive but generally isn’t since it doesn’t dodge red circles. The pet will usually be killed in the next aoe circle anyway while it is reviving. I work round this by leaving a defeated pet active until I need search and rescue, swap to a live healthy pet and then immediately tell it to rescue.
It’s quite notable that the main times you want to use the pet or spirit to revive people – big aoe or red circles that you don’t want to sit in – are the times your spirit and pet will fail as well. You can trait your spirit to give its benefit when killed but that is really only compensating for failures of the spirit itself.
Remember that level 35 rare gear is abolutely peak equipment for that level of character. You are meant to be able to go in there, collect tokens, and barter for your rare level 35 gear as your reward.
Dps might be an issue for Dwayna but the sparks following pets is probably more of a problem. I’m guessing that rangers would otherwise be a reasonable support class to remove the petrification with the tears. Someone has to do it.
I haven’t been into AC since the patch so I’m not going to say much about the change, apart from ask why AC was given a big revamp first. It seemed a fair dungeon since
- as the first dungeon it could be could be completed by dungeon newbies
- it was easily tough enough to wipe beginners
- it acted as a gateway towards earning exotic gear
- there was a good mix of traps, monsters, and some puzzly stuff
- any bugs were manageable, even the misses on graveling mounds
- it was very popular and run frequently with all classes
- it could be run by characters of the intended level
- all paths were run regularly
- the place had some character with ok storylines and some good voice acting
- the time frame to complete was reasonable – whether skipping or killing all
- most encounters were not just long and tedious (except the Ghost Eater)
Not many of the other dungeons meet those criteria. Why was AC given a makeover when it was needed much more on the other dungeons?
I can’t pin this down but sometimes when using shadow step my character facing changes to an unexpected direction. I first noticed this when picking up a wisp in the swamp fractal, shadow stepping, and finding myself looking (and running) somewhere unexpected. If you stop there for a second to check your direction you get rooted (great!). It does also happen elsewhere though.
Has anyone else seen this problem? Does anyone know whether this is a bug, feature, or something intentionally confusing.
Perhaps signet of stone should affect spirits as well as pets.
Thieves are fine in dungeons but the play style needed is different from world areas. Shortbows are fine for dungeons and sword+pistol will work but if you’re not sure if you can survive in melee then start with the shortbow, learn the timing of the dodges, then pick the right times to melee.
With some classes, something like a ranger probably, you can go into a dungeon and do much the same as you do in solo pve. You won’t be performing well but nobody will really notice the problem. If you try to play a solo pve thief in a dungeon you could well be down all the time and the group will obviously notice. This doesn’t mean that thieves are bad in dungeons but you might need to learn new ways of using your skills, weapons, and traits.
Throw a handful of feathers, vanishing in stealth and blinding nearby foes.
I love these. Nothing wrong with blinding foes. It’s useful to get an extra attack from stealth. I’ll happily cash in all my bonuses from the Shadow Trait line for going into stealth. I don’t want to burn all my skills or initiative to go into stealth all the time and since these beauties come free from stealing so often, especially in TA, I don’t have to.
Lightning Reflexes also rolls you away from enemies that have knocked you down. You need to be on your feet to perform a regular dodge . The more dangerous your enemies are the more important this can be.
Is it true that you always die if you fall when downed? This might explain a lot of the spurious looking deaths that happen in the harpy fractal.
As usual there is an attitude on these forums along the lines of “There’s a tactic on a forum for a fight, therefore it’s easy and nobody should complain.” These dungeon fights should be possible to complete by groups that learn tactics by exploring the dungeon, not exploring forums. The alpha fights are fast paced and players need to be alert for dangers, which is good, but this does make it more difficult for players to learn from animations and deduce tactics when they are frantically struggling to survive.
I did him last night with a guild group, 3 players never having seen him before. So it’s certainly possible. I think it’s a fight where you can lucky or unlucky with who Lupi is targeting, and if you’re lucky he’ll target someone who knows when to dodge.
A lot of players simply need to change their play style for Lupi. My thief has two 30pt trait lines that become almost useless for skills I use on Lupi, but that’s still better than going into the fight with my usual weapons/skills.
What your fellow group members want from your thief are (in no particular order)
- shadow refuge
- some useful cripples, weakness, poisons, interrupts, blinds
- some damage
- you to stay alive
The more you stay of melee the more you survive. The more you survive the more you can do the other useful stuff. You can accomplish all of that with any build but points invested in either shadow arts or acrobatics will certainly help. The harder the content gets the more important it is to use the right skills/weapons than your favorite skills/weapons. In easier content you can get by with any melee weapon pairing as long as you’re using it well.
Some problems with raids
– Individual player contributions drop in scale compared to teamwork, or rather following a leader’s instructions to the letter
- Getting a lot of people together at the right time is frustrating and raids are very prone to drop outs, afk, time wasting, and boredom
- As soon as guilds arrange times to meet for raiding it starts to impinge on personal lives. There is always pressure on guild members to attend and stay longer than they want.
- Leading big raids can be very fractious, stressful, and burns players out
- Raiding content is not seen by ‘casual’ players and it makes them unhappy if they can’t experience it (and it has better loots)
- Most of what could be achieved with raids is already done with big world events that don’t have the above problems.
My group completed it yesterday.
Are you using a class build found on the internet and dungeon strategies found on the internet? The game is designed to be appropriate for players who do not take builds from the internet and do not read dungeon strategies on forums.
If you want difficulty then try fractals. They become progressively more difficult until you reach your own level of impossibility. PvP also makes the game as difficult as players want to make it.
“I watched our QA do it a few times and the behavior seemed to operate much better than it was before.”
I’ve been to this fight only once, after the patch, and the sparks followed pets as much as they followed anyone else. This fight absolutely needs the sparks to totally ignore pets or else it is broken for rangers. Being sometimes right or mostly right isn’t good enough. My advice for the designers would be :
- Make Simin say things during the fight that let players know her status and what she’s doing. This does not ultimately make the fight easier but it would prevent a lot of frustration and confusion for players who are learning the fight.
- Give some visual indication on screen as to who the sparks are following. This could be a thin trail between the spark and the player, or an outline around a player, even an icon on the player’s buff bar.
I’ve got my thief up to fractal 20 but it seems like a lot more work than it is for my ranger. The ranger can go through the fractals on close to auto-pilot while the thief needs to constantly change weapons (from the bags), swap skills, swap traits to match the new skills/weapons, and so on. This makes me feel that others thieves are under performing when not using these skills, such as smoke screen, but also makes me feel that there’s not enough core strength to the class without these changes. Dodge and stealth isn’t an appropriate defense to the incoming barrage of damage in fractals.
I think our spear skill is actually good for solo PvE. I’d love to have a block skill on land as well. After that though, the harpoon has a bare minimum really. There’s just not enough in the weapon sets for fighting large groups of underwater enemies. Our side skills are reduced to a bare minimum. With so many land based abilities forgone when underwater the trait lines can become mismatched too. Worse than all that, the combats become really boring …
I’m traited to pick up stealth benefits from an offhand dagger and that still allows me to use either a dagger or sword in the main hand. Getting the tactical benefits from the sword can certainly be worth it.
For example in ice fractals, shadow stepping to/from the elemental pillar is better than leaping over it with a dagger and trying to make it bleed.
There is a cunning plan for thieves in dungeons. Swap your weapons. Pick your fights for the shortbow, pistols, melee, and be capable with all of them. A lot of CoF is fine for a shortbow with groups of 3-8 mobs in an aoe cluster. The fire breathing mobs don’t like an interrupt from a pistol. If you really want fun with dagger/dagger in a dungeon then I suggest you head over to TA instead.
CM has ambushes so if you know the manor and know how to deal with ambushes it is fine. Otherwise it is not. I think there are still problems with the barrel fight. A lot of people think it’s ok because a strange solution exists on the internet, and everyone reads internet solutions rather than work out their own game, so it’s ok. Well the barrel stuff should work for a wider variety of solutions, reset properly, and not mess up when players try reasonable things like drop barrels in stealth.
As the title says, the six rune fear effect very rarely triggers. Against lower level enemies in an open world zone it does trigger, maybe perhaps 3% of the time. Against dungeon trash it triggers rarely, at most once in a dozen dungeon runs maybe. Against any sort of veteran it never ever triggers which seems fine until you realise that a lot of trash-like mobs in dungeons/fractals are actually veteran.
In effect, the six piece bonus seems to never trigger in any dangerous situation and to be honest it seems as annoying as beneficial on the rare occasions it happens against trivial mobs. I don’t know what level scaling and resistances are involved but can this be please be reviewed so that the six piece set bonus for this dungeon armor is more than a fanciful oddity?
Can there please be a setting to turn off the change of facing when looting an item. This may be more realistic for PvP or whatever but it is just plain annoying for someone who wants to just run past dead things and autoloot quickly. Any time that game mechanics like this induce a player to run into a lava field, or wherever else, I think it’s a bad mechanic rather than players being stupid for not knowing the mechanics in depth to avoid it.
As far as I understood, when you used a venom each application used to cover each firing of the weapon, so a shortbow would hit three targets and apply the venom to each target using up just one application. However I ’ve noticed that now each target hit always consumes an application of the venom, so if you have 3 applications they will be all be applied when the shortbow hits 3 targets.
Has this been changed or was my understanding of venoms wrong in the past?
If the ranger skills seem dull you might just be doing content that’s too easy. For example, the big longbow shots might look dull but if you have to think about evading in the middle of executing them, in difficult content, then that’s a reasonable decision for a player to face. Difficult content suits simple weapons that have relatively high damage from auto attacks, reactive skills for evade, knockback, cripple, daze, etc, and no standing around powering up skills, sequencing skills, unlocking skills, or whatever. If you are looking for skills improving others then don’t just look at one weapon, consider weapons swaps and sidebar skills too, and the combos begin to appear with the bows as the finishers (starters come elsewhere).
I traited my ranger with extended range and a burning spirit and started shooting the fractal harpies, fine. After five seconds or so the harpy changed it’s mind and went immune. I could get closer and jump across the platforms but the harpy stayed immune to damage. This sort of thing happened a number of times. On one occasion I walked right under it while it was shooting at me and my group were killing the harpy, and all the while it was immune. I could shoot other harpies ok.
This seems like a clear bug if other people can hit the harpy, the harpy can hit me, and I’m standing under it, but it’s entirely immune to my damage.
When moving from the outside world into dungeons you can start as a ranged class and then pick the moments to go into melee as you learn stuff.
I find the spear to be a highly effective weapon when fighting a few simple opponents. The evade skills and the block are effective. The damage is quite good.
As soon as you get into a larger fight the blocks and evades seem insufficient and you sadly need to stay at range with the harpoon. The harpoon is quite dull but has a useful backwards evade to keep you at range.
Skipping isn’t itself a bad thing but I see a number of problems with it -
If dungeons are designed for people to skip mobs then it just punishes newcomers who see it for the first time. I know that if I go into Arah path 4 with my guild, and none of us have yet seen it, then we’ll just be wasting most/all of time with trash. That’s a big deterrent to going into a new dungeon. Going into a new dungeon should be one of the best experiences from that dungeon.
Skipping punishes a single newcomer to a dungeon who hasn’t seen the route before.
Dieing while skipping is a just not fun. After the second or third time running past on your own it is no fun whatsoever. The rest of party standing around waiting don’t find it fun either. Death in combat should at least have some excitement.
Why spend time designing a whole load of monsters that people are meant to ignore? Why spend time designing dungeons with good dungeon combats with risk and reward, just to let players skip the risk and to get the reward?
The bottom line is that dungeons do not have to be designed like Arah where players should skip most of the content. Better design is available that still makes it feel like the place is full of nasty badness.
I mainly play two characters, a ranger and a thief. On my ranger I almost never change traits. On my thief I can often change up to 6 traits before a dungeon or encounter for great benefit. For fractals I should really be doing this, and changing weapons, and changing skills, for each new fractal. Unfortunately this takes a long time of standing around looking at very uninteresting screens doing character admin. Annoying admin. My group expects me to be off an running immediately much as I would be on my ranger.
Could there please be a way to save trait (and skill) settings so that they can loaded quickly whilst looking at the game world? I see no reason why this couldn’t be done with local files.