Guild Wars 2

drkn.3429:

Even if you’re never dying with MF gear, you’re dragging your party down in terms of speed as you could have been running a berserker set instead, dishing out more damage if you can manage a glassy build.

Instead, you bring a greedy stat which benefits only you while makes others suffer for your choices, as they get nothing but a longer run than they potentially could have.

This as well. My warrior wears mostly berserkers and hardly dies, and I have a 104% crit damage (on top of 50% base) meaning I do 254% more damage @ 93% crit rate when I get 25 stacks of precision.

By introducing MF drops to dungeons, people will want to wear MF gear instead, meaning you now have 100% less crit damage and less crit chance since people will probably want to use Luck Stacks instead of Precision Stacks meaning I will also lose about 11% crit chance.

As someone who crits 93% of the time, this basically means a dps class like me who now switches to mf gear will kill ([.93(1.50) + .07] / [.82(2.54)+.18]) – 1 = 35.3% decrease in damage.

So you are now carrying someone who use to do good damage to kill things quicker in dungeons, now they do 35.3% less damage even if you don’t want to use it yourself.

If you don’t think that a 35.3% decrease in efficiency is a problem just because natural human greed and devs bringing in mf gear to dungeon loot calculations, then there is something wrong with you.

Also note, mf gear actually has lower power then berserker as well, since mf is the major trait on gear, while crit % dmg is the minor trait. So this 35.3% is pushed even higher which I’m not going to calculate as to the exact amount it further decreases your damage.

It’s not about wearing MF yourself, it’s about gathering 4 other randoms for a dungeon, having them wear MF gear because they now want better drops, and then dealing with a bunch of crappy players constantly dieing in their power/prec/mf gear even more then currently happens in terrible PuGs.

Luckily that won’t affect me.

Iehova.9518:

I’m willing to bet all my capitals that Kholer is one of these bosses.

Considering all AC exp paths only have 3 bosses and they put loot on 3 bosses per run I’d say you’re right…

Here is the other issue in regards to straight silver drops from bags instead of using something like increased core/lodestone drop rates inside of dungeons:

6 months from now gold will obviously be worth less, due to inflation. This means the buying power of 4s per bag is severely reduced. Certain high end items like core, lodestones, T5/T6 mats, reflect inflation because they are always used to make harder to acquire cosmetic exotics and legendaries. These are the endgame items of GW2 (with the new Ascended items as well which will probably have some T6 mat component), meaning they will always reflect inflation and can be used in recipes for future exotics/legendaries/ascended items.

What this means, is it will be less profitable running dungeons 6 months from now, and more profitable to farm Orr 6 months now, because you are getting ectos and t5/t6 mats as your primary source of Orr farming, while right now, dungeon rewards are mainly based on pure silver drops.

By creating even more static silver drops instead of a legendary/exotic crafting component (cores/lodestone again being the logical choice for dungeons, since they already come from chests although at terrible rates), you will be devaluing the reward that dungeons give players as time progresses.

If you did increase rewards through means like cores/lodestones, people would want to run dungeons until an equilibrium was reached, between the price of cores/lodestones and what you could farm outside of dungeons. This would always ensure that people would be running dungeons, even if it was to farm, to keep the equilibrium between core/lodestone farming and other methods somewhat equal. This ensures that whether you farm a dungeon or a high end zone 6 months from now, people would at least be getting somewhat equal rates, even if dungeons required more teamwork and were harder.

By using straight silver drops instead of items used for end-game gear as a reward, you are creating a structure which will deteriorate as time progresses. Silver is not unique, a higher chance at cores/lodestones is unique. If you want to push people to experience dungeons and play challenging content, you need to create a unique source of income, something that will relatively inflate with the rate of inflation, and something that does not frustrate PuGs like MF mechanics.

While you may say that you could change dungeon loot in the future, or increase the silver from bags as time progresses, I feel like that is bad design for a game, as already proven. It takes time and balancing and manpower to constantly tweak every aspect of a game. We have seen this with the long turn-around for current loot changes and dungeon balancing. It is much better to put something in place now that will ensure running dungeons are still valuable many months from now. I don’t think silver does that.

Hopefully you read this and at least think about it, thanks.

Magic Find as a mechanic in dungeons to ensure the “best” loot?

Bad decision..

I don’t think MF belongs in a MMO in the first place, it is much different then a hack and slash like Diablo.

The fact that you want to bring it into the most challenging area of PvE content which should be balanced and rewarded based on player skill, synergized builds, and teamwork, not who can struggle through a dungeon with randoms who want to wear max mf, is really going in the wrong direction imho.

Also have you guys thought about Lodestones at all? It seemed like an obvious area to improved dungeon loot and give it something specific, since Lodestones right now have terrible drop rates pretty much everywhere, are used in all legendaries and the devs have stated they are looking into ways to reduce the cost of legendaries. This would give people incentive to enter dungeons instead of grinding Orr all day for loot. I don’t really agree with inflating gold through more direct silver drops through those bags, instead you should look at increasing the supply of certain crafting mats which are pushing over 1g per currently. I think it’s better for the long-term health of MMOs and try and keep inflation as low as possible without straight deflation.

I get 2-4 yellows wearing MF gear for every 15 minute Plinx chain. Leave that mindless farming and lack of combat focused gear out of dungeons.

Just to be clear, this won’t affect dedicated dungeon groups like the one I run in my videos, we already clear 90% of all paths in under 20 min easily, and we are not the ones complaining about the difficulty of dungeons. I already have a full set of exotic mf gear. We all know when we can wear mf gear, and when we need real gear. This will affect all of the PuGs who already spend tons of time and complaining about dungeons which are simple, because now they get to deal with randoms in full mf gear instead of some survivability or dps focused.

I will get lots of loot by wearing mf, the majority of the player base will complain that it is even harder, and ultimately, I don’t really agree with mf being the mechanic that is used to better reward players for doing dungeons even though players like myself will benefit from it the most. I like the challenge, teamwork, and efficiency of clearing dungeons with a dedicated group, I don’t think this should be artificially inflated to get the best gear by forcing mf gear onto people.

People always seem to love to bring up CoF more then any other dungeon after resets even though nothing ever changes.

Probably just got a terrible group with people wearing greens or something.

I’m taking a half day.

Told my boss I had to be somewhere at 12 and he was like “okay”.

One of the benefits of being salary instead of hourly.

Whew this sounds amazing, and I love that tokens actually have more options now. 20 slot bags and obsidian shards? Awww yes.

Pretty much the only thing I do everyday is run dungeons now, so I can’t wait for this.

My favorite paths are probably

AC1, CM3, TA Up, SE1, CoF 2, CoE 1&2, Arah 3.

Not a fan of HotW even though I ran HotW 1 forever to get my full armor set on guardian, dungeon is boring, all the bosses have way too much health, and underwater sucks. HotW is mainly tedious and not hard even though the length of runs is as short as any other dungeon.

So Powercat pm’ed me because of the frustration he had doing this with a PuG, and my group decided to take him along since we had an extra spot last night (he’s the GS War). This is the result of doing the above strategy I mentioned:

Path 2 (14:45):

Clear Magg event at 92% without much trouble, this is what usually happens, even if we take a 1-2 pubs. I’ve done this event the “correct” way for the past month.

Been posted about many many times, it’s a bug that affects everyone because of bugged hitboxes with them. Strafe back and forth while attacking and you will always hit them in the meantime.

“The dungeon will remember your progress, and will poll the party’s levels when you enter, scaling the dungeon to the highest common attained level.”

This is pretty obvious that it “remembers your progress” from previous runs.

What this means is that it saves your personal progress, and in a group of 5 people it starts at whoever has the lowest progress.

So say there are 5 people, A, B, C, D, and E.

Say A, B, C, and D are a dedicated dungeon group and have completed the the mini 3-dungeon event 10 times in previous runs, so they are at tier 10.

They are missing their 5th person, so they pick up random person E who has only made it to tier 2. They enter the dungeon and the dungeon is scaled to level 2 difficulty because this is the highest common attained level., level 10 is not common among them because 1 person has only made it to level 2.

Seems pretty clear to me, not sure what’s confusing. It’s similar to these type of dungeons in other games. Progress is saved, you attain a rank, and most of the time high rank people will find other high rank people knowing that this will weed out bad or undergeared players if the rank is high enough.

You kicked the person who zoned you in.. that was dumb.

Gear matters more then classes. I’ve done that section with an 80 war, 80 guard, and 57 engi before, I’ve ran all of AC a couple times with only 4 people as well because my dedicated group didn’t feel like finding a random.

There is a ton of buffer on the dps check for that event, if you have 5 people and can’t pass it then people in your group are severely undergeared. If you are not 80, the biggest mistake people make is not having up to date gear. If gear is not close to your current level you lose out on a huge amount of damage.

I’ll make a new video, because the one I currently have up is a little dirty since it was our first run of new SE1.

We do it in about 16 minutes now.

This path requires dps, and requires teamwork. This is no longer as pug friendly.

These are the key strategies, not all of them are shown in the 21 min. vid I have on my youtube page below, since we ironed out our strategy after running it a few more times.

1. Kill the first barrier, jump over to the ledge on the right, let the first wave pass.
2. Have one person activate the talking sequence at the golem which takes a while, then go back to the ledge and let the 2nd wave pass.
3. Rush to the golem and focus only him, in my group we kill it before more then 2 waves can stack.
4. Move forward, quickly killing barriers, ignoring all mobs.
5. Stop before Nokk, clear the current wave, use something like Guardian GS pull, War/Guard/Mesmer knockback, etc. to move Nokk towards the closed door at the end of the path.
6. Fight Nokk by the door, which means you no longer agro any waves.
7. Single pull the Golems and fight them one at a time in the long tunnel to the left of their spawn.
8. Single pull the Champion at the last boss and fight him outside which makes him very easy.
9. Kill the last mesmer boss like normal, 2 waves of inquest will come out of the tents, they are easy, just focus them.

Looking for one right now, someone missing tonight.

For path 1, when you save them it means you have access to the unexploded bomb. One of your party members can then use the bomb on alpha to take ~50% of his health.

For path 3 the earth wave is a avoided through positioning and as you said, the tell is the previous attack. My group never gets hit by it, because 4 of use stack melee. He always uses earth wave right after earth ring, meaning when earth ring activates you walk up to his body and never get hit by it.

The 5th person we use as bait who gets the ice ring instead of the earth ring knows when to use their dodge or if they are far enough away they can avoid it by constantly strafing or not being directly behind the other 4 members in melee range. I regularly do alpha without ever getting hit.

I agree that destroyer is tedious and not hard other then taking 10 minutes to kill, and the golem should at least give a chest…

Easy way:

Path 1: All 5 stack melee, easy mode

Path 2: His main attack in melee range is the earth rings. He will also cast an ice spike in the middle of the earth rings for the 1 person who is furthest. If all 5 people stack melee in path 2 (and 3), the ice spike will hit everyone, meaning everyone needs to dodge. What my group does is 4 people stack melee on top of each other, we just stand there and kill him. The 5th person who is ranged needs to basically time their dodges so they get an invincible frame to take no damage from the ring. You basically wait 1 second then dodge.

Path 3: His main attack is the same as path 2, except immediately after the rings he casts his cone attack. Again 4 people stack melee, except right after the earth rings proc you want to move into his body to avoid the cone attack. Once you push him into the wall you can just stand in his body and never get hit.

Basically as long as one person who is ranged is good at dodging he’s super easy. This is what my dedicated group does for each path.

lol no one skips him because he’s hard. We skip him because he’s a waste of time. I’ve beat him easily many times without dieing, until I realized there’s no reason to fight him after the chest stopped giving tokens.

You can kill them with the right group, but running is the easiest. ‘Running’ strategies as you put it don’t rely on wierd places to de-agro, it’s literally the same simple place every single time.

I have both CM1 and 3 in my videos and what I do works 100% of the time for that room. CM3 you don’t even agro them, and CM1 there really should be no reason someone dies unless they are terrible. As long as you use both of your evades and your group has condition removal, you should make it by without much trouble at all.

The scaffolding room after you fight the 6 rifleman has 2x silver roaming, 1 big group but only 2 silver mobs and 6 normal mobs, and then the 2 rifleman in the scaffolding, which you fight in that order. There is nothing hard about that. After that you go on the scaffolding and run and jump in the water to bypass the last group. Again, it should be clear from my videos.

If you’re complaining about 5 dungeon paths for a monthly then you don’t deserve it. Anet stated early on that monthlies would change month to month to get people to try all aspects of the game. 5 dungeon paths which literally takes ~2 hours if you do easy ones like AC, CoF1/2, TA u/u, CM1/3, HotW1, etc. is better then something useless like 500 salvages.

If you cannot handle an easy dungeon path 5 times in 30 days you might as well stick to single player games.

Iridiana.9078:

Don’t forget to eat Omniberries Bar (2.3 silvers at TP) when running AC (I suggest path 2, the easiest). You get 40% more gold from mobs (and +30% magic find!)… As you drop 25 silvers from mobs you gain 10 more silvers under this buff! You can get 1 gold or so per run (under 30 minute with a nice team).

I still wonder how people can say they run CoE in 30 minutes. I have a really good guild team but we run Teleport Path in 1 hour. You need 30 total minutes only to kill Alpha 3 times… So please tell me how could you run all the dungeon in 30 minutes. Different path? O_o

I’ll have some videos up in the next couple days, I already have path 1 recorded, but waiting to finish path 2 and 3, hopefully tonight.

It takes ~3 minutes to do the opening escort event which I recorded separately, then our path 1 video is 16 minutes long, for 19 min. total.

Path 2 can be done in roughly the same amount of time.

Path 3 takes the longest because of the stupid destroyer boss, that one ends up taking about 30 minutes or so.

If it’s taking you 30 minutes just to kill Alpha 3 times you have a very bad group…

Anyways, hopefully my videos will help people out with CoE speed runs, similar to the other dungeons I currently have uploaded. Expect TA, CoE, re-recorded HotW, and re-recorded AC before Nov 15th patch, since after that my group will probably be playing the new dungeon and I won’t be uploaded new vids for a week or two.

Lorana.2468:

no it’s because he died, over and over.
and how in any way is muscle memory skill, thats no different than me never taking a single hit from Subject Alpha because i know exactly when to dodge roll.

the only way your ever going to get true difficulty out of a boss is if the boss is random, the fight is chaotic to the point where you cannot guess or predict what’s coming next.

if you know what’s coming, and when it’s coming it’s not hard and it never will be, why else is WoW PVE so easy these days? because addons do it all for you, it’s not that much different from GW2 tells.

Artifical Difficulty in another form, that’s all.

He died over and over while learning, he didn’t die over and over to zerg it down. Everytime you die you have to start over.

And lol at thinking muscle memory isn’t a skill, muscle memory is the major part of any skill based game. I’ve played competitive FPS for years, a huge part of being good is muscle memory. Amazing “plays” in any game is hugely influenced by your muscle memory from playing the game for hundreds of hours. Sounds like you’ve never actually played a hard or competitive game in your life.

Lorana.2468:

Dark Souls is just artificial difficulty though, you learn through dying, theres nothin remotely difficult about it, i’ve even seen a japanese guy kill one of the bosses with nothing but his fists.

Actually Dark Souls is real difficulty where everything is based on your skill. Sounds like you think difficulty = gear checks and high health pools.

You pretty much proved this point that a skillful player can kill the first boss in Dark Souls with his fists because he knows all the tells of each move, when to attack, when to dodge, etc. Everytime you die in Dark Souls, you die because of your own lack of skill. Not because of a cheap unavoidable attack or because you have a lack of gear.

If you actually researched or played the game, that’s the exact reason people love it and why the reviews are so positive. It goes back to old school gaming with clean controls and gameplay that punishes you for being bad, not because you don’t have proper gear or because every encounter takes 10 minutes to kill. If you actually play it or read reviews, you’ll notice many times people say “I died but it didn’t feel like I died because the game was cheap, it’s because I didn’t do ‘x’ or I could have done ‘y’ better.” DS is a game where everytime you die you learn something, and eventually it becomes easy because your skill level rises. That’s exactly what the devs said when explaining the game, they expect you to die 100s of times to learn from your mistakes and eventually conquer the game.

Many modern games are the opposite, there is very little skill and it heavily weighs on gear checks or high health to slow people down.

Anyways, as far as the OP, I love both DS games, but this game is completely different and some of the same things that make DS great aren’t going to work in an MMO…

No, they said they are working on something like that, but there’s nothing in the game right now to do it. And as Awesome said, DE = Dynamic Events.

It’s not long if you know what you’re doing:

CM:
Path 1 (14:10): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoWhasHltgM
Path 2:
Path 3 (13:00): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDRJg5OJJAE

I have a video of path 2 in 19 minutes as well, but it is not as clean as I like so I’m going to re-record it first.

You can actually do path 1 and 3 about 2 minutes shorter using a certain environmental glitch, but I choose not to release it in my videos since it’s not the true legit way to speed run the dungeon. It let’s you take advantage of terrain to go straight from the 2nd boss to the 3rd boss…

Anytime someone complains about a dungeon being too hard, it’s because they have a lack of knowledge, not because the dungeon is actually hard. I’ve speed run pretty much every dungeon path except SE2 (which I did once for the achievement and haven’t gone back since), besides bugs, no dungeon is really hard once you learn the bosses and events.

For point 3 and 4.. it’s 45 tokens the first time you hit speed DR. From my experience after weeks of speed running dungeons every night, it’s the 5th completed run in under 2 hours.

There is no such thing as #4. I run a variety of dungeons in under 15 min. every single night, we get 60 everytime for our first 4 runs. Here is proof of my runs, with many other paths under 15 min. as well that I haven’t uploaded yet:

CM:
Path 1 (14:10): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoWhasHltgM
Path 3 (13:00): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDRJg5OJJAE

SE:
Path 1 (21:01): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWbjBOIKn_E
Path 3 (11:35): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95vVeG1H7tw

CoF:
Path 1 (8:21): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6D4l3pGrvQ
Path 2 (14:45): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZFmXQaeJ3I
Path 3 (18:32): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssIE8w2JJeQ

HotW:
Path 1 (15:08): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgQMIThg-oo

Trinity is still viable, and probably the best way to speed run dungeons. People are right, you can complete almost every dungeon with various classes, but there are certain comps. that do it the fastest.

It’s not a complete trinity anymore since everyone can heal, it’s more tank/dps/support with certain classes offering support in conjunction with either tank or dps.

I haven’t done a full Pug in forever, never want to go through that again…

That’s not since the November 10th patch, I speed run dungeons nightly with a dedicated group and we always get 45 on the 5th path we do, no matter what dungeon. It’s been like that for at least a month. It happens when you run a 5th path in under 2 hours.

It resets after about 30 min., so usually we either run speed paths and throw in something a bit longer, or just take a break and go eat or something.

I’m pretty sure it’s been like that since they added then fixed DR like a week later way back 1+ month ago.

But yes, my group has been saying forever that it’s dumb that it carries across all dungeons. The original design of DR was to combat any bugs/exploits of a dungeon. The fact that we can run every AC path, every CM path, every TA path, SE1/3, HotW1/3, CoE1/2, and every CoF path in under 20 min., many times much less, means DR is punishing a efficient and dedicated dungeon group.

Looking for one now if anyone is on, you can msg me ingame.

I speed run CoE all the time with my guild, path 1 and 2 are the easiest and you can speed run it in about 22 min.

All you do is all stack up on subject alpha in melee range, making sure you are all in the same location, make sure you move into his body after he does the earth rings so you don’t get hit by that cone attack that always comes after his earth rings, and then beat him with no challenge.

Your problem is your lack of knowledge, don’t whine that the whole dungeon is broken because you ran it for the first time and have no clue how to do it when there are numerous videos with people easily clearing the dungeon in ~20-25 min.

That’s been going on for a while, I joined a dungeon guild like a month ago that maxed out to 500 people.

Here’s the problem:
You can only see chat while you are representing that guild. I get not being able to talk without representing, but not being able to see chat is a huge problem because most people don’t want to represent a dungeon guild all night just to see the chat.

Ultimately the guild ended up failing because 95% of the people aren’t even representing so they can’t even see you trying to setup dungeons. This has been done multiple times on reddit where it hits 500 members very quickly, but after a couple days no one is representing and it ends up failing. If Anet let you see chat and filter it to different tabs without having to represent, this would work a million times better.

doubt it, someone always posts this.

I did it after the last patch and it was still as easy as ever.

Prima.3512:

So opening the contact tab (Z -key) and clicking the tab Looking for Group, does not work for you guys? As far as i know, it shows all players that are in the Looking For Group status near you.

It works only for the zone you are in on the server you are in, which basically limits like 99% of the playbase who is actually lfg.

I’ll ask him tonight.

Also some of us run dungeons at various times on the weekends. So if you do meet the requirements and play on the weekends and want to run stuff without a set time, I can add you for some more “organized Pugs”.

Renegade.6325:

Ive run Hodgins path about 50 times. Ive never skipped Kholer AND ive never had it bug.

I’ve run the path about 50 times, skipped Kholer and all trash everytime, and only seen it bug once. It’s not because of him or trash, it just happens once in a while.

My groups first run of it:

It went a little rough, there are a couple things I’d probably do different next time.

1. After you kill the first barrier, instead of killing the first wave, jump over to the ledge to let them pass like you used to do for the first wave of grenadiers. This gives you more time to focus down the first golem boss before another wave comes. Also make sure to focus down the golem as fast as possible. After that just run to each barrier like we did instead of killing each wave.

2. I haven’t tried it, but I’m wondering if you can leash the last boss and kill the champion separately.

Rangers have to work twice as hard to be almost as good as other classes. Play a fully geared ranger, then play another class. They will be out damaged and out utilitied by a variety of other classes/builds.

Not to mention single target ranged weapons are terrible for a majority of dungeon events. They can use greatsword but they are just a subpar guardian or warrior who dies quicker and doesn’t provide the offensive and defensive boons that benefit the group much more like a guardian or warrior.

Mesmer and Ele provide better support through increased dps, combo fields, and misc. utility if you want to talk about softer ranged classes, can’t do near the burst damage of warrior or thieves, and don’t provide even close to the group survivability a guardian does.

Thieves can be okay as long as they are not terrible, but sometimes you get full berserker thieves who don’t know how to dodge/stealth who are constantly dieing. Necro and Rangers are bottom tier for dungeons, this is coming from someone who played Necro all 3 BWEs and my first 80 was a necro. Some classes just provide much more in dungeons and can kill faster, provide better buffs, and generally make runs more smooth or provide some sort of function better then other classes. Necro and Ranger are not those classes.

From personal experience, eles die way faster run through trash when you have to run through alot of stuff such as TA and arah. If you talking about in battle, all the CC and dodging that a light armor class has to do means less dps time.

You are correct, current metagame heavies are king in PvE, that’s just the way it is. It doesn’t matter what it could be, it matters what it actually is now. You can’t theorycraft stuff that doesn’t exist. I personally have 4x 80s and everyone in my dedicated group has at least 3x 80s. The reason we all have at least one heavy class is because that is the current ideal comp. If the meta ever changes then it’s simple enough to change classes.

Theorycrafting is one thing, I have multiple dungeon guides and paths on my youtube page that show how fast and easily the real ideal party can clear dungeons. I would be very surprised if a balanced group with a couple mage classes, a thief, and a couple heavies can clear dungeons as easily and quickly as a 4x or 5x heavy comp. Fact is, the chance that you have to clear events like Magg bomb without kiting, the new SE1, or speed running through all trash in Arah is highly unlikely with the comp you posted. It will also be much harder to speed run things like CoE because you don’t have enough mitigation or pure dps to do some of the events and bosses efficiently.

entropythreee.8152:

@Strifey

Right I understand how your comp works, and I totally agree that DPS is the most important thing right now in dungeons. The same could be said for cleave attacks, they are often the most efficient delivery of damage for small groups.

Now, without trying to start a forum war, I’d just like to point out that you still haven’t described why mine is terrible. You’ve only described why yours is good (which I agree with, it is rather good). Unless you meant to imply that mine was terrible because of how good yours was by comparison, which is not a bad argument in its own right because in the end the best comp is the best comp, without doubt.

But, as you state (correctly for the most part) damage is king, and AoE damage at that. Well I could argue that mine has sufficient amounts of both. With the constant might stacks (much more than your comp on average, just for the sake of comparison) I could argue that the group DPS is brought up to a level equal to your comp, and the Guardian, Mesmer, and both Elementalists are AoE focused, only the Warrior is single-target-focused. Going further, with both elementalists havein +60% boon duration and constantly switching attunements and providing their support (via water mostly), plus the guardian my comp too can maintain near constant defensive boons.

In the end all I’m saying is that just because you’re comp is good and you have experience, it doesn’t mean that mine is automatically terrible.

Because the title is misleading because it’s not an ideal group. My GS guardian has around 10 stacks of constant might, and my warrior around 15 stacks with 2x guard, 2x war. With a 5th class it can get up to 18+.

5 more might stacks won’t make up the damage with classes like a shortbow/sword thf or staff eles. Those classes will also die faster when running through trash.

One guardian will have good protection, but won’t things like stability and regen up and since you are using boon duration runes you’re not getting the tons of condition removal for the group without wasting skills or having to take other classes for condition removal that don’t put out as good dps.

Of course you can complete dungeons with your group, but it’s definitely not ideal.

I’ve run plenty of dungeons with other classes and comps, my dedicated group now all has at least one heavy class at 80 because for anyone that has run dungeons extensively, it’s quite obvious that certain classes just make dungeons so much faster and easier.

entropythreee.8152:

Strifey.7215:

As someone who speed runs dungeons nightly, and has over 8k tokens and 2 full sets of dungeon gear + multiple weapons that guide is terrible.

It seems like you know what you’re talking about, and you’re comp is definitely good, but would you mind explaining why you think mine is terrible?

Right now the way PvE is balanced, damage is king. The goal is to basically do as much damage as possible without dieing. If your talking about speed running, you are also going to run through alot of trash, and heavy classes just have more survivability making it easier. It’s pretty much impossible for my guardian to die, even running through dungeons like Arah.

Warrior and Guardian are heavy classes, meaning they can get away with more damage because they naturally have 10% more armor. Warriors and Guardians also have large cleave attacks, meaning you will be hitting all enemies at once while still sustaining very high dps.

2 Guardians (1 hammer) means you will have 100% protection uptime. There is no better survivability buff then protection, 33% damage reduction in dungeons is huge. With 2 guardians, you will have near 100% uptime on defensive boons as well as plenty of condition removal for your entire group with runes of the soldier without wasting either traits or skills. This lets you focus on berserker/knights gear to kill faster = get through dungeons faster.

2 warriors are basically the opposite of guardians. They provide near 100% uptime on 3 stacks of might each and fury (20% crit). They also stack 8 stacks of vulnerability each with mace, more crit chance, boon uptime, and crit damage 100% of the time with banners. All this means everyone in your group is doing much more damage 100% of the time while still having defensive buffs 100% of the time. The fact is, many dungeon events are dps checks, almost every dungeon has one of them. It also lets you kill tedious bosses much faster. The 5th slot can be situational depending on the dungeon or just a 5th warrior for clearing faster.

It’s nice to theorycraft with multiple classes and builds, but the simple fact is, group boons and pure direct damage dps is king right now for dungeons.

You cannot compete with 4 heavy classes in dps gear with cleave attacks and near 100% uptime on both offensive and defensive boons with 1 class for any utility you may need to switch out for a specific path.

As someone who speed runs dungeons nightly, and has over 8k tokens and 2 full sets of dungeon gear + multiple weapons that guide is terrible.

2 guardian (1 hammer, 1 greatsword), 2 warrior (axe/mace + longbow), and 1 situational (ele, mesmer, thf, or 3rd war) is the best comp. if you’re talking about both speed and ease of dungeons.

I’ve run dungeons for ~2-3 hours in a dedicated group every night for the past month. Most dungeon paths can be cleared in under 20 min with ease with a comp group like that with optimal gear and builds.

Still missing Blackgate, was wondering where it was and then googled and found this thread.

Currently have a dedicated dungeon group but sometimes one person is out for the night and it would be nice to have a capable backup.

You can see how we run dungeons from the videos I record in my sig below, I am in the process of re-recording some earlier runs and filling in the missing gaps since I’ve had to use a backup video card for the past 2 weeks and couldn’t record anything.

Yes we do speed runs, so generally we skip most of the trash. So you must have knowledge of most dungeons or at least be able to listen.. which brings me to requirements:

-Full optimal gear (i.e. optimal exotics for your build) and a dungeon build
-At least one of the following classes: Guardian, Warrior, Mesmer (everyone in our dedicated group has at least 3x 80s, looking for someone who at least has one optimal class)
-At least be present in teamspeak, although a mic as well is optimal
-Our playtime is from 6:30ish to 9pm pst M-F. Some of us stay later but 2 of the members are east coast so we usually end at 9pm and the rest of us may run some pug friendly stuff like AC. We play randomly on the weekends as well if people are on.
-Basically be smart, be able to run through trash without dieing, etc.

Yes the requirements are kind of elitist, but our group has put time into learning dungeons, gearing out multiple characters in optimal builds, etc. so we don’t have to deal with pugs.

I personally have over 8k dungeon tokens, and both my guardian and warrior fully geared in dungeon armor and multiple weapons, so we’re past the point of trying to carry people.

If you are interested you can msg my ingame, thanks.

I have a video of it that my dedicated group just did. We hadn’t done it since the “fix” where you can’t hold one grenadier, and it was pretty rough.

But we managed to complete it in 21 min, 2 guard, 2 war, 1 mesmer group.

I’ll upload it tonight and post it to my youtube page tomorrow.

Yep it sucks, I just started on my second bank tab to hold my tokens. And this is after already having full set of armor, 1 of every exotic weapon my class can use, and even going as far as transmuting the AC GS skin onto my mf weapon and buying the 500 token gift to try and save some room.

I have over 2k AC, 1.5k CoF, and like 500-1k of pretty much all the other dungeons except Arah. Leveling an alt warrior right now so that will help a bit with space I guess since I can get him full exotics except jewelery from all the tokens…

Why would you go for that comp setup when 2x guardian, and either 3x warrior or 2x warrior and 1x light class is pretty much the fastest comp for speed running..

So far I’ve gotten a black lion salvage kit, a crafting booster, and a level 76 exotic from 6 runs which take less then 10 minutes each, how exactly is that bad loot?