Guild Wars 2

Rising Dusk.2408:

I haven’t thought it all through and honestly, I was joking in my previous post, but 3 thief 2 mesmer seems plausible to me with only a marginal time loss compared to the group comp you used.

Between 3 thieves stacking 3 stacks of might in an aoe each with fury through runes of altruism and signet of inspiration, that’s 18 stacks of might maintainable on the group for the duration of the fight. If we throw those runes on the mesmers too, we can get that up to 25 stacks easily without too significant a hit to the actual thief dps, which is very impressive in its own right. If each thief is using D/D, they can time their C&D -> BS to keep invulnerability up on GL pretty significantly as well (though certainly not 25 stacks at all times with just that).

Like I said, I haven’t thought it all through, but I’m convinced that group comp can do it in under 90 seconds.

Under 90 seconds would probably be possible, but not having Scholar runes or at least Ruby orbs and wasting stats on healing power for the 3 might stacks on 10 second CD is a pretty large DPS loss. It’s a pretty creative strategy, I’ll definitely give you credit for that, and even more so if you put it into practice and made a video. That would be pretty nice to see as well, and I’m sure a lot of Thieves out there would love it too. I do apologize if I’m coming off as rude, too. It’s just sort of the way that I type.

Rising Dusk.2408:

TheMaskedParadigm.3629:

Speaking of 0 Might stacks…

Hey man, runes of altruism with signet of malice lets get it.

Waaaaaay too much loss of DPS. For each Warrior you replace, you lose a Battle Standard, a For Great Justice, and either Banner of Strength / Discipline or On My Mark. Replacing the Guardian was something that just made sense after breaking down the situation more, because the only thing it really contributed was a block for an attack that may or may not happen, a reflection with a delayed cast time, and Stability that we figured out how to bypass. You also gain more vulnerability with 2 Mesmers and obviously the second Time Warp. If there is some crazy Warrior replacement strategy we may very well figure it out, but I don’t see one from all of the angles I’ve looked at the situation from. I’ve gone into a bit more detail than what I wanted to, but hopefully that all makes sense.

randomfightfan.4091:

DanH.5879:

i wish 3 thieves and 2 rangers could do that….

Bet 3 thieves and 2 mesmers could. All you need is massive melee dps and those projectile reflections.

Speaking of 0 Might stacks…

JJBigs.8456:

Wow I could barley tell which phase was which because he was dying so fast. Also a note I saw but was not commentated on, I saw him using axe #5(Rupt), but I thought that is less DPS than just axe auto. So my guess is that he was trying to rupt a certain move so they didnt have to dodge or something? Anyone else pick up on that or can explain why he was using a non maximized DPS skill?

Edit: GZZZZZZZZZ! Awsome vid and time btw

I think you mean Mace 5, and it actually does do slightly higher damage than autoattack and it can sometimes hit twice. Unless I’ve missed it for this long and am wrong somehow, you can’t interrupt anything that Lupicus does. But hopefully that answers your question.

Rising Dusk.2408:

I’m telling you guys…

GL is great and an awesome speed kill, but you guys should run speed kills of Grawl Boss L48 FotM. I would love to see how you all properly optimize for a boss that so heavily punishes melee, and how you’d balance the need for dps against the need for multiple reflects to handle the eles.

Make it happen.

We all spec shout heal and use Soldier’s gear.

shiNn.2571:

which build do the mesmers play? You vid at your channel seem outdated
i saw a duellist and wonder why somebody prefer pistol instead of focus or Offsword.

It’s a completely different build than what Strife has on his channel, so I don’t want to disclose all of the details on it. That’s about all I’ll say.

It’s the same idea of when I eat cheeseburgers over and over and hope that chewing burns the calories away. I stopped my progressiokitten after spending 3 weeks where a guild member we grouped with disconnected each night at either Maw or the 3rd fractal due to poor internet. This was of course before the DC issue was fixed. All of that combined with only getting maybe 5 or so skins total, all of which I couldn’t make any use of and the increasing amount of WTF nerfs made me lose interest. I don’t really understand the state of Fractals, and I feel bad for the people wasting away trying for that Greatsword or whatever else they may be after. It’s a terrible way to have to gear alts, it’s simply not worth the time investment, and it’s been in this state for so long that I’m not sure why Fractals are still in the game. I still haven’t given up on cheeseburgers, though. Maybe I’ll be skinny again some day.

Your RNG in phase 3 was the best I’ve ever seen, and if you had sigil stacks, you may have been able to get something closer to what we got. I don’t think you’l be able to get below 45 with your current setup, though, and that would probably be pushing it a bit.

Well you know, keep at it.

The 60 token reward DR resets each day at server reset. It’s also character bound, so you could switch an alt in after killing the last boss and have some friends wait in the ending cutscene. Since AC is in a starting zone, you could theoretically make alts over and over and swap them in at the end of path 1 or something until you have enough tokens, but some people view strategies like that as “cheap” or unethical, but they should each get 60 tokens unless I’m mistaken for some reason.

Happy mothers day.

This one even has music.

I don’t even know if this is a serious screenshot between the signet warriors and all the other mess about it. 10/10 if you were trolling, I’m confused and sad if you are serious.

Mirta.5029:

TheMaskedParadigm.3629:

Mirta.5029:

TheMaskedParadigm.3629:

Goodness. You don’t have to dodge across the room, You can evade into the wall that you have him pushed against. And Warriors don’t have infinite dodges… Every class has enough dodges to avoid getting hit by his AoE in every single encounter with him. If you run out of dodges, you are doing something wrong. And having one person run around and range while 4 people melee is (surprise!) slower than 5 people meleeing and dodging into the wall.

full endurance recover = 15 seconds, aoe goes off every 5 seconds, after the first 3 dodges you can end up out of dodge unless you have a high endurance regen.
If your character is specked to be ranged you’ll not be any faster if you go melee. Good ranged classes: p/p thieves, necros, eles (unless using lightning hammer), scepter guardians, rangers.
Surprise surprise most parties do feature them.
While dodging you’re also not doing DPS that you could have been using by just standing there. Especially if you have a ranged class in your party.

Warrior damages on dodge and has Whirlwind (against a wall is super cool damage), Mesmer has Blurred Frenzy / Distortion from shattering, Guardian has all sorts of super cool party-wide blocks. Not to mention if you kill him fast enough, you barely see his AoE (which usually happens if you melee him).

and like I said, if at least one person in the party is not built for melee, he will put out less damage in melee and will force the party to lose damage while dodging as well. It’s very kitten simple to position one ranged away and have nobody dodging.
If you don’t have a ranged on your team the NPC will be the first one to get the ice, meaning that dodging until she is dead is just a waste of DPS.

I think the underlying problem here is that dodging is hard for some people. It’s also faster to have all 5 people in your group melee him instead of having one person range him like a kitten but what do I know.

Mirta.5029:

TheMaskedParadigm.3629:

Goodness. You don’t have to dodge across the room, You can evade into the wall that you have him pushed against. And Warriors don’t have infinite dodges… Every class has enough dodges to avoid getting hit by his AoE in every single encounter with him. If you run out of dodges, you are doing something wrong. And having one person run around and range while 4 people melee is (surprise!) slower than 5 people meleeing and dodging into the wall.

full endurance recover = 15 seconds, aoe goes off every 5 seconds, after the first 3 dodges you can end up out of dodge unless you have a high endurance regen.
If your character is specked to be ranged you’ll not be any faster if you go melee. Good ranged classes: p/p thieves, necros, eles (unless using lightning hammer), scepter guardians, rangers.
Surprise surprise most parties do feature them.
While dodging you’re also not doing DPS that you could have been using by just standing there. Especially if you have a ranged class in your party.

Warrior damages on dodge and has Whirlwind (against a wall is super cool damage), Mesmer has Blurred Frenzy / Distortion from shattering, Guardian has all sorts of super cool party-wide blocks. Not to mention if you kill him fast enough, you barely see his AoE (which usually happens if you melee him).

Cheap tactics are great and all, but in all my days of skipping content I’ve yet to see any.

Seems legit. Have you got a video?

Mirta.5029:

Iures.2894:

What?

Path 2 and 3: Stand there in melee beating the crap out of him, when circles form, count to ~2 and dodge. Resume beating the crap out of him. . .

if you’re not a warrior chances are you don’t have infinite dodge. Also by dodging you spread the aoe and can even dodge into someone elses aoe. Easier to just have one with the ice spike stand away and shoot at the boss.
If you’re high on DPS ice spike will likely be the NPC, then all can take him down before NPC dies.
Ice spike always targets a person with the least aggro, meaning that if you have a ranged player all he will have to do is stay ranged.
I actually hate when people go “all stack and dodge” because I’ve seen those teams wipe again and again and again.
You also can’t efficiently keep alpha pressed against the wall with dodging, because he will move away from there, meaning on path 3 you’re going to screw yourself up.
I find it weird that people want to dodge when 4 can literally stand there without moving just keep hitting him and stand in the middle of rock corona and NEVER get hit by it. Ever.

Goodness. You don’t have to dodge across the room, You can evade into the wall that you have him pushed against. And Warriors don’t have infinite dodges… Every class has enough dodges to avoid getting hit by his AoE in every single encounter with him. If you run out of dodges, you are doing something wrong. And having one person run around and range while 4 people melee is (surprise!) slower than 5 people meleeing and dodging into the wall.

If you range everything, you probably won’t need reflection. Ranging is a fantastic strategy, it’s just abysmally slow. And there are mediums for players to learn dungeon mechanics rather than having to have them explained by people trying to farm tokens etc. I’ve personally grown tired of explaining the same encounters over and over when all it takes is watching the boss / what other players do and reacting.

Looks like we’ve got something to compete with now.

I don’t think it’s a particularly hard dungeon, but the conditions applied by all of the mobs do a ton of damage. If you’ve got reflection and condition removal, that should really be enough.

That being said, most people / pugs don’t seem to bother learning game mechanics and want to yolo into the middle of huge groups of mobs, and that simply doesn’t work in CM. I don’t think it’s the dungeon being too hard in this case, I think the issue is that people that don’t understand game mechanics.

Dub.1273:

TheMaskedParadigm.3629:

Maybe you could ride Moa birds and joust with Grenth as he rides a risen Dolyak. I’M LOOKING AT YOU, HROUDA. MAKE THIS HAPPEN.

YES, MAKE THIS HAPPEN ROBERT, PLEASE!
@whoever said that a 30min’ish run would be speed: after doing a 28 minute casual now whith heavily lacking dps and a group which wasn’t on teamspeak i can say: no, 30 minutes is a pretty realistic time as long as everyone is familiar with the dungeon, able to skip trash first try and at least maintains some quite well dps.

…You did path 4 in 28 minutes with a casual / low DPS group and no voice communication? Or maybe I’m misunderstanding you.

Isslair.4908:

TheMaskedParadigm.3629:

When you know all of the encounters well, the whole path only takes about 30 minutes.

Quite a speedrun actually. Our fastest time was around 40+ minutes. Do you melee Melandru? Cause that and grenth are the major timesinks for us.

Yup. Meleeing Melandru doesn’t take very long, maybe 30 seconds or so if I’m remembering correctly. As Strife described in a previous post, you can stand right in front of him and avoid the green balls / interrupt him each time he goes to do his knockdown attack. Using interrupts doesn’t seem to affect his defiant stacks, so you can rotate between Warrior Mace 5, Mesmer Shatter / Focus pull / GS knockback and Guardian Binding Blades and Banish each time he goes to attack. You could also take Hallowed Ground and Stand Your Ground on Guardian just to provide some extra flexibility. If you don’t want to depend on “safe spots” or whatever you may call them, you could probably do the fight with a Hammer Guardian and lots of Stability pretty easily.

For Grenth, I used to feel it was best to have everyone run as a group and kill wraiths, but it seems that splitting up and having 2 Warriors take certain spawns and having 1 Warrior and the Guardian and Memser take the other spawns makes it go a bit faster, but overall, I’d like see the encounter redone completely. Maybe you could ride Moa birds and joust with Grenth as he rides a risen Dolyak. I’M LOOKING AT YOU, HROUDA. MAKE THIS HAPPEN.

LordByron.8369:

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

LordByron.8369:

i don t believe you can recover a messed up cliffside arm seals at 50 without 2 guardians

Why would you do such a high level fractal without two Guardians in the first place?

because if i need 2 guardians to play them it just proves my pont the design is wrong.
Also because finding 2 guardians for a PUG party is really difficult.

I think your real problem is depending on random people with varying skill level and expecting that everything should go perfectly. You’ve got a friends list and you’ve got the option to join a guild that specializes in dungeons / PvE content. I do have to say, your logic on exploits makes me wonder if you consider joining a guild and using your friends list to be exploits too.

People don’t ask for Guardians because the game design is wrong, but rather because Guardians were designed to provide utility to deal with encounters like what you find in fractals. You don’t NEED to have 2 Guardians, but it makes things easier because of the blocks and projectile reflection (among other things like stability and protection) that they offer. If you want to take a group composed of Rangers, you could utilize safer combat mechanics like using ranged weapons and being able to evade more attacks and you could make it fairly high up into fractals. I can’t seem to understand why you think that using class mechanics to counter boss or game mechanics is an exploit, but you really need to examine your logic behind it.

Nikaido.3457:

No one ever ran path 4 just because they felt like having fun in a dungeon.

I actually run path 4 with a few guildies just to have fun from time to time. I’ve probably done it close to 40 times by now, maybe more. The only encounter in there that really bothers me is Grenth. It’s gotten to the point of being mindless like the rest of them, but I could also probably do a full CoF path 1 run in the amount of time it takes from first coming into the room and when you finally get the chest. For first time path 4 runners, the dungeon is hard, especially if you don’t quite grasp game mechanics yet and don’t have someone to guide you along. When you know all of the encounters well, the whole path only takes about 30 minutes.

Hopefully Robert Hrouda sees this.

Awww yeah.

Easiest way is to find some bad players and find safe spots to range everything so you are in no danger of taking damage. It really helps to increase your skill.

Dub.1273:

In AC Eles deal more DPS than any other class.

Substantiate this claim, please.

My advice:

1 Guardian, 1 Mesmer, 3 Warriors. You don’t need ice bows, Eles do less DPS than Warrior and don’t have Banners or For Great Justice.

It’s simple: Kill the Batman.

Dead pet follows you, Lupi follows pet, Lupi bubbles pet, you get caught in bubble. Recipe for rage quit. It may just be that I don’t play my Ranger well enough, but the bubble spam doesn’t help out at all.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Zogyark.4597:

now your turn to solo it with your ranger ;p

Stuck on phase 3, having a really hard time escaping the bubble when it gets me. I’ll get there soon though!

A friend and I have had decent luck in phase 1 and 2 attempting solos on our Rangers, but he seems to really love to YOLO bubble spam dead pets. Even in group settings with our Rangers in melee distance, the only attack he seems to want to do is the bubble and it usually targets our pets.

If you have a Guardian and Mesmer, you can just use reflection and ignore the spiders while the group melees the tree. The only reason you should be ranging anything in TA is because of a bad group composition (5 Rangers) or people that are unfamiliar with the content and don’t know what to do.

If you are in melee range and stand behind him when he starts shaking, you pretty much never get hit by his agony. I also think that his agony can stack (I may be wrong here), so that may also contribute to the high damage. If you’ve got a Guardian in your group, have them use Wall of Reflect and Shield of the Avenger to block the agony as well.

You must not have ever tried level 40+ Fractals. It’s very difficult to just blow through 40s, although if you have good strategies, you can make them a bit easier. As far as anything higher than 65, they are pretty well impossible unless you play perfectly and everyone knows exactly how to react in every possible situation.

Casuals usually get mad and rage kick you if you tell them how to play, and people that are more experienced tend to ignore your comments and ninja kick you if they get irritated. It’s all about the type of people you are dealing with and whether or not you should really try and get into conflict if you know that people are grouped together.

I’m not sure how you play your Mesmer or what build / armor stats you use. I use Berserker’s stats and Sword / Focus for primary DPS, and I still do pretty good damage to that boss. If you are really concerned about that fight, you could always take a Sword along for the autoattack so you don’t have to rely on clones.

It’s not hard, it’s just unfamiliar and takes a bit longer to do than path 1 or 2. Not to mention the last boss goes invulnerable something like every 10 seconds so doing damage to him is a very slow process.

Guesting could work, too.

Renewed Focus does stop Agony from the Archdiviner.

You get one per daily (20s, 30s, 40s etc) per character per day. So if you are level 46, you can get one at level 10, level 22, level 36, and level 42 etc. If you are 40 on multiple characters, you can do the same on the other character.

You are supposed to have one person stay in each of the circles. He teleports around between them. You shouldn’t really need high DPS for that part.

They quit at Grenth? Ouch. Did you even make it to Simin?

Rachel.1249:

U guys keep talking bout rangers sucks and such, but at least say out y it sucks and how it sucks!!

At the risk of feeding a troll, I’ll go ahead and say it anyways:

Can you read?

Actually, on Guardian, you can get hit by Agony and then use Renewed Focus to survive the hit. The invulnerability from that particular skill will prevent you from taking damage while it is active.

Necro / Ranger / Engi / Ele are not really optimal to speed clears, but for a “fun” dungeon run, I don’t have a problem with any of them. I don’t have a huge problem with Thieves, but a bad Thief will do a great job of ruining a run.

I think the problem people have with it has to do with the large jump in difficulty that came with no real indication of quite how big that jump would be. Also, a lot of people seemed to be in the habit of autopilot farming it and probably didn’t want to adapt to the changes. It’s honestly not a huge deal apart from things like infinite bleeds and perma CC, but that can be avoided.

Welcome to Ascalon, the Citadel of Flame is this way.

It would be nice to see something done about Fractal loot in the future, and possibly do something to allow Rangers more of a chance in dungeons. It’s not easy trying to get world’s first solo Lupicus on my Ranger :/