Guild Wars 2

I’ve been doing some 3-Ranger groups in Arah with a few guildies just for fun, and it’s pretty noticeable DPS wise. If you use a Sword, you can’t interrupt the attack chain to dodge so you are more prone to going down. If you use a Short Bow, you don’t really do any damage. Pets die at every boss, and it’s pretty hard to deal with Lupicus in phase 3 because he loves to bubble pets (even if they are dead), and you usually get caught inside with them. I can pull off 3k+ autoattacks on my Ranger with Sword if there are Warriors or Guardians in the group, but if there aren’t, there goes my damage. I enjoy playing my Ranger on occasion because I simply get bored of my Warrior, Guardian, and Mesmer, but they really don’t offer much in dungeon runs and are really just a hazard (piercing arrows aggroing every mob in the room, forgetting to set pet to defend, bouncing axes etc).

One other thing is that each person in my guild with a Ranger has a pretty good grasp on playing it, and there are a lot of pugs out there that sit back and max range bosses with a Long Bow. These are the people that I won’t tolerate in a group, because they already contribute so little just by bringing a Ranger and their low skill level only makes it worse.

thisisu.7504:

TheMaskedParadigm.3629:

I carry every group I join, because I am the best player in the game. This is a fact, by the way.

Hahaha, yeah right.

GG

I second this. When the night gets dark, it’s almost time for the dawn to come with Batman. We need Harpy love.

If you have Stability when you become petrified, your character will turn grey but will still be able to move about. If you had a Guardian, it’s possible that they were using “Stand Your Ground” and prevented you from receiving the effects from being petrified. You can also cure yourself if you time throwing a tear properly, and you can throw a tear at yourself if you had Stability when you were petrified. I’ve not experienced Simin being visible while the sparks are out, I may have to see if that is something that happened after this patch. I need to do path 4 again anyhow.

Shared path (Spider Queen): http://youtu.be/pymBXNnH150

Path 1 post Spider Queen: http://youtu.be/CYyEuF8g_Yc

What if we give all of the trash mobs unicycles and clown suits so that they could chase after us when we run past them? I think that would make everyone happy. Just imagine those cute little Abominations in Arah wearing big red noses while being piled into a miniature clown car in hot pursuit.

Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

ryokoalways.3450:

Now you need continuous pull of sparks by 2 members (1 at the far end, pulling 3, 1 at the close end, pulling 2). In this manner you will only have 4 people fighting simin. When we did it we started with 4-1, and took a little bit of time before we figured it out. That said, the new simin is really really easy, just more tedious. Of course, a simple dps check like before wasn’t the most thought provoking fight either.

I don’t… What? You don’t need a continuous pulling of sparks. Have the spark runners go when she is about to stealth, have a Guardian throw tears while DPSing at the same time. The 4-1 doesn’t work anymore. Simin is nowhere near as tedious an encounter as it used to be, it’s flat-out easy. As long as you have a basic idea of what to do, you can push her into a wall and melee with only 3 people actually doing any type of job.

He already is a “stack up, time warp, and melee dps” encounter for some groups. It’s just a matter of how comfortable you are fighting him.

There are other ways of surviving his bubble other than using stability to get out. You can block, evade inside of it, use invulnerability etc. It just takes some practice.

Watch this, learn his moves:

http://youtu.be/b-WJP0LR5VU

Jaga.2084:

My last PuG needed 32 minutes for Lupi. And that was just the one fight they didn’t wipe. My guild is made of friends who are casuals, so I pug. I’m not going to leave my friends for an other guild because I want dungeon tokens. I have no idea were you get your “good” pugs. Mine are always quite exhausting. I just want to hop on any PuG and have fun. This isn’t working. And I do not want to solo Lupi!
There are already enough “noob-barriers”. You don’t encourage people to get better, you drive them off. My guildies don’t want to do the Crucible of Eternity again because of Subject Alpha. Tedious one-mistake-fail encounters are not fun, they are frustrating. I’d like to see our content designers do those dungeons with pugs and without chat for a month.

Where do I get my good pugs? RNG like everything else in the game.

Driving people away and not helping them improve? I’m not sure who this is directed at, but I spent over a month doing Arah path 4 multiple times a day so I could master the Simin encounter and hopefully get the Bloodstone Fragment recipe. I spent time with each group explaining every single encounter and teaching them fights in an attempt to help them improve.

You don’t want to leave your friends? You can join multiple guilds. You have a friends list that you can populate with players you’d like to group with again. Make some proper use of it.

Outdated because of the fix to Reckless Dodge, but all of Lupicus’s attacks are the same and Strife still explains the mechanics of the fight quite well. It may be outdated as a solo, but the commentary is still valuable.

TBH, ranged is more inconsistent because of the projectiles Lupicus throws. They cause you to evade sporadically and do quite a bit of damage when they hit you. If you stay in melee range, those projectiles won’t be able to hit you and the series of attacks Lupicus does is more predictable and fluid to dodge. That being said, most pugs don’t understand the dodge mechanic, most Mesmers or Guardians don’t understand how to use Reflection abilities, and most people seem to prefer ranging things in general and aren’t familiar with how melee mechanics work. If your group can’t handle melee Lupicus, it may very well be safer to range him. When I pug Arah out of boredom or when I really need tokens for whatever reason, I melee Lupicus regardless of what the group is doing. If you need to range, range. If you can melee, melee.

BTW, it was 1min 24secs. I was there

I carry every group I join, because I am the best player in the game. This is a fact, by the way.

Thank you for actually posting a screenshot of that. You’ve got her in the proper corner and you definitely make it sound like your group was aware of the mechanics. Hopefully people will realize that it’s possible to do the fight, providing you have the proper “technique,” if you will.

If you have one Warrior use a longbow to keep the boss constantly burned, you don’t need to use the whiskey. As long as the boss is burned, everyone else can fight him normally.

Longbow Warrior is #1 here. As long as the rest of the Warriors melee the boss to speed up the fight.

What is getting out of hand?

Berserker everything. Refer to these:

Mesmer: http://youtu.be/ajFtp6mnM1k

Warrior: http://youtu.be/0Hndx3cV_QA

/thread

Alright, cool. Thanks for the tips.

Call of Duty style.

Why not have a Dugeon Master prestige title like “Hobby Dungeon Explorer – Rank 50.” That would give people some initiative to do dungeons.

Next on my to-do list: Solo Lupicus with a Staff Guardian in Soldier’s gear.

loneknight.8425:

There is no good or bad profession for dungeon, only co-operative or selfish players.

No, you are wrong. Rangers offer absolutely nothing to a dungeon group that you couldn’t find anywhere else in the form of something better. I have a fully geared level 80 Ranger, I’ve used it in dungeons, I feel comfortable playing it. In most cases (in terms of speed clearing) it is optimal to take 3 Warriors, 1 Guardian and 1 Mesmer. If you were to replace any of those with 1 or more Rangers (in the same group of people, providing each person has a good ability to play both classes) the run would become noticeably slower. If your idea of running a dungeon is ranging everything with a Long Bow from the back of the room while not caring how long it takes to kill something, you are free to do that. Ranger’s pets die too frequently in dungeons to make a difference in DPS. Rangers cannot do enough damage on their own and provide the same utility a Warrior does to make them valuable to any sort of organized group. Rangers do not provide enough support to make them more useful than a Guardian or a Mesmer. They are simply not worth taking along in a group that has the desire to clear a dungeon quickly.

As far as the topic of achieving Dungeon Master only using a Ranger, that’s believable and great that the OP did that. DM is not an easy title to get for a lot of people, and it wasn’t easy for me to get. I got mine quite some time ago, and pugged almost every dungeon in order to get it (all of Arah, etc). I’ve lead people through Arah path 4 that clearly had no idea how to play their class, people that were playing Rangers, Eles and Engineers, but I didn’t replace them for another player. Many of them got their DM title because I was able to teach them how to properly complete Arah path 4, and their ability to play was average at best. With all of the nerfs to Simin and changes made to other dungeons, there will surely be more people out there with DM that simply do not have a skill set that matches up with other people that do have DM, and that is all there is to it. If anything, DM is a starting point in that you realize how you can improve and master the classes that you play.

If you enjoy playing a Ranger and want to take it in dungeons, I don’t have a problem with it and there are plenty of other people that would be glad to have you in their party. I prefer to only run with classes that are optimized for dungeons and in organized groups, and that is what I do most of the time (unless I am helping another group out). I don’t hate people that play Rangers, but they do not offer the same to a group that a Guardian, Warrior or Mesmer can.

I’ve always found that getting her into a corner works (We do my strat in Strife’s p4 video). Not sure that has anything to do with the bug, though. And it’s not like it took half an hour extra to get past the bug. When I say it took a few extra phases, I mean maybe about 3 minutes extra at most. The fight never takes us that long, maybe 4-5 minutes total if she bugs out, probably less than 2 under optimal conditions.

http://youtu.be/gje-8VHGmNw

Sigh. I’ll get a good solo video eventually. Did I push him too far away? I’m not too sure what causes this to happen.

Why would you range him? It takes 19 years to kill him that way.

Urxx.6840:

Then you didn’t really hit the bug I was referring to, and that ANet aknowledged. When she bugs out that way, she goes back to phase 1 each and every time she gets out of stealth.

First time she stealths exactly at 50%. No matter how quick you are to kite the sparks, when she reappers she has something more than 50% health because she did regen a bit. Let’s say she has 50,9%. As soon as you bring her back down to 50% (which in that case would take mere seconds if you have decent DPS) she disappears again. Rinse and repeat.

You can’t kill her if she disappears at 50% no matter how little she’s been visible. That’s why in phase 2 her stealth is supposed to be driven by a timer and not her health.

If you were able to kill her then she wasn’t really bugged, or at least not in the way my party has experienced.

I’m quite aware of the mechanics to this specific fight, and yes, I did experience what you were describing. The groups I’ve taken through that dungeon get sparks in quickly, and she would reappear at X amount of health and disappear at 50% irregardless of what we did (for a few “phases,” if you will). We were, however, still able to kill Simin each time this happened. It could be that we run a very organized group with people that know exactly what their role is, that we have spark runners that can consistently and perfectly kite sparks in each time, it may be that our DPS was able to break past whatever barrier was implemented by this bug. Previous to the patch, we would set Simin up in the corner, DPS her to 50%, take sparks in, and then kill her outright in the next phase. After the patch, it’s taken a few phases of her resetting at 50% but we have been successful in defeating her each time. I acknowledge that the fight is not as fluid as it used to be, from this bug or whatever it may be, but at most it has only slowed us down a few minutes.

Is there a problem with the fight? Yes. Is it causing some groups to be unable to complete the path? Yes. I’m just saying that my groups have not been forced to restart the dungeon because of it and that it IS possible to complete the fight.

Locusts are really just noobs, and you just run around and cleave them. That’s really all there is to dealing with them.

Bumping with my Guardian solo video:
http://youtu.be/gje-8VHGmNw

Sidestep and damage the locusts at the same time if they give you too much trouble. They won’t hit you as easily and you can cleave them while you move around.

DnT is the best at killing Lupi, I hear.

The best thing about soloing a dungeon with a Necro is that you don’t have a group to hold back

But nonetheless, good job. Not everyone is able to solo dungeons, let alone understand the dodge mechanic.

No. we were able to kill her each time, regardless of her bugging or not. It took maybe an extra cycle of kiting sparks, up to 3 in one instance, but we did it each time. Also, after we got her past the first phase, we were able to kill her in one Time Warp in one phase. The few times she went back at the initial 50%, it only took maybe 4 hits total to get her to disappear. I’m sure it had something to do with how high our DPS was, but its still doable nonetheless.

I’ve done path 4 a few times post-nerf, and Simin has worked fairly well each time aside from the first. The first time, we tried the 4-1 method to see if it would still work. It didn’t, and that messed up the rest of the fight. She would get to 50% health and stealth again, and after repeated attempts to get her below that 50%, we reset her and did it the normal method. The other few times, my group killed her with the intended method of taking all 5 sparks in, and between our group makeup of 3 Warriors, 1 Guardian, 1 Mesmer and kiting the sparks in in about 10 seconds, she went down as normal.

First, my advice would be to stop trying the 4-1 method if you are doing that, second, it would be to learn to position her properly and have spark runners that know what they are doing. The method I teach people (when I used to PUG p4 repeatedly) was the one we used in Strife’s video by pushing her into a particular corner, allowing spark runners to go unhindered by the rest of the party. All of this being said, it is possible to do Simin without super high DPS, as I’ve even completed the fight in PUGs with groups like 2 Guardian, 1 Ele, 1 Thief, 1 Engi (pre-nerf, mind you). The fight is more about technique in my opinion, and that is where a lot of people go wrong. They try to fight her in the middle of the room, the tear-thrower isn’t fast enough, spark runners are too slow, etc. If you can perfect all of that, you should be able to at least improve your chances in the fight. If not, you can always just ask for Warriors, Mesmers and Guardians when you are forming your group.

timecookie.8570:

TheMaskedParadigm.3629:

From what I’ve experienced, his attacks seem to target different people. For example, his life suck in phase 3 rarely targets my Guardian with 3k Armor, but his bubble in phase 3 almost always targets my Guardian.

His life suck prioritize ranged ppl while his dome melee ppl. It’s not all about armor value.

Yeah, I probably should have mentioned that as well. Although I still tend to find myself taking the most aggro with the bubble when I play my Guardian, even though the rest of of my group is in melee range too.

From what I’ve experienced, his attacks seem to target different people. For example, his life suck in phase 3 rarely targets my Guardian with 3k Armor, but his bubble in phase 3 almost always targets my Guardian. And even still, if one person in the party continues to go down and can’t dodge, it may be best just to ignore them and stop wasting time rezzing them. There have been several occasions where everyone in my party but me had died because they wanted to be heroes and rez people that couldn’t dodge, which resulted in me soloing him through the rest of the encounter. I guess the point in saying that is that if you don’t feel you can trust pugs, at least be confident enough to know you can solo him if the situation calls for it.

What about the people that want to do speed clears? Forcing people to fight Kholer doesn’t seem optimal. Leaving it up to choice allows a group to fight him if they want, or skip him if they want. If you are in a PUG group, discuss it before you go into the dungeon. It isn’t a failure on Anet’s part if people skip Kholer and the encounter is designed to where that is able to happen. If it’s a failure on anyone’s part, it’s due to lack of communication or not taking initiative to lay out what you are going to do before the dungeon starts.

As someone who runs Arah daily, the only things that have changed recently (as far as I can tell) are the Crusher and Hunter at the beginning of path 3 and the Simin regen nerf. It may seem like Lupicus has gotten harder because of people in your group being clueless or not really having an optimal group makeup or optimal builds, but my groups generally don’t have any problems with him. I generally only do Arah with guild groups, but I occasionally join PUGs just to see how other people do the dungeon.

One thing you may want to learn and explain to your group is that the grubs can be avoided altogether by dodging his hand raise animation. If you are interested, you may find this video useful, as it explains every threat that Lupicus poses:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-WJP0LR5VU&feature=share&list=PLzYy8FVzP3HZcddc7Zc8t8Q3PaztcOPiM

One final comment, you probably don’t want to be “tanking” hits from Lupicus, as well-timed dodges will mitigate all of the damage he outputs. If you play a warrior, you may find it easier to stay in melee range of him, because his ranged projectiles will not be able to hit you.

Hopefully all of that is useful to you.

Must you really let this argument spill over to the official forums? I could screenshot your entire application, all of your responses, and post them here. Why haven’t I? because we are attempting to be civil, and you are attempting to be unpleasant and abrasive. I also noticed that you left out the replies written by myself, which I felt to be polite and fair. I hope you can see that you aren’t doing yourself any favors by trying to flame us in a thread about recruitment because you neglected to take our requirements into consideration.

Since you don’t seem to have read the comment i wrote on your application after it was denied, i’ll post it below for you:

“Hello, Dark. I can’t say that we are being narrow-minded because we did offer you the option of applying once you could meet the requirements we have set, and the majority of the people we consider for trials already meet those requirements. If we simply took in everyone that applied with very little experience in fractals and dungeons, we would spend a lot of time teaching and wouldn’t make the most of the time that we are able to play (most of us wither work or have class to attend). We do, however, care about newer players as a lot of our members contribute to forums or assist strife in his dungeon tutorials, which are designed to help players with less experience. I suppose to put it simply, we are looking for people that can play on a level of what it takes to keep up with us. We don’t mind teaching to a degree, but we can’t focus purely on that. Hopefully you understand.”

I’m sorry that we seem like elitists to you, and to be fair, the requirements we look for are listed at the beginning of the application you submitted, so you knew what you were applying to from the start (providing you took the time to read the application).

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Maybe you should seek out some help. You’ve just told me that you are crazy.

It sounds to me like you are mad, puny human.

My IQ would indicate that I am a super-human, and better than you. But thank you for your concern, weakling.

Gwalchgwn.1659:

TheMaskedParadigm.3629:

We are elitists and better than most people, so we do have large egos, yes. We have big skulls because most of us have IQ scores close to 300.

Big skulls most likely will indicate you have a brain tumour rather than a high IQ score. Research has shown that the diameter of your skull has few to no correlation at all with IQ.
I’d suggest you let it checked before it’s too late.

Sounds like you are jelly of my IQ toast.

I’m sorry that your pond is so small, but we are pretty big fish, you know.

We are elitists and better than most people, so we do have large egos, yes. We have big skulls because most of us have IQ scores close to 300.

Hey now, I’m a DnT member. We are the best guild in the world, and everyone knows this.