Guild Wars 2

I find that the problem is story mode is supposedly ‘easier’ than explorable mode. Anyone who’s done AC story mode knows how incredibly long and tedious that is compared to any AC explorable mode path. Maybe it’s easier compared to path 1 or 3 in that the final boss is basically a boulder-tossing exercise compared to watching some oversized gecko doing a belly dance before dropping rocks or breathing on you, but man is it ridiculous to fight all those mini-bosses along the way. All for what? A hat and some money, and being able to piggy-back 4 PuGers into the Explorable dungeon. Yay.

I’ve yet to find anyone who will say that TA story mode is easier than any TA explorable mode path. Even fighting Vevina in the F/F or F/U path is easy compared to Faolain. It just doesn’t make sense that the TA explorable paths all lead to a stationary tree while the TA story mode leads to 4 illusions and some boss you have to kill 5 times over.

Fair enough, it’s ‘easier’ to do story mode and you can unlock the explorable mode, so let’s not give you tokens. But how is it ‘easier’?

No thanks. With how bugged this class is I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up hurting ourselves with it.

I think the 25 limit is fine in PvP, WvW and on non-silver and silver mobs, but it would be nice to raise the limit on champion and dungeon bosses. Kol Skullsmasher and the Nightmare Tree don’t ‘melt away’ with 25 bleeds and it seems silly that a party of condition damage doers would take forever to kill these bosses compared to a party of DPSing glass cannons.

I’ve hit 80 on my necro a week or so back and am currently working on a guardian on and off. It really was a breath of fresh air. I’ve had some trouble trying to stay in melee range all the time but that will change once I get used to it. I’m loving how supportive I can be as a guardian and there are so many options for builds that is pretty overwhelming coming from a necro where it’s basically condition or power, everyone running around with at least one dagger and one staff.

For ‘big numbers’ I’d go with warrior or thief or possibly engineer, assuming no future nerfs and depending on how you gear/trait the character, and for ‘healing’ I would go with either elementalist or guardian.

Honestly we can’t really help with the ‘what class should I pick?’ except to say to try them and see which you like.

If you poll the community you will likely find that the ratio of the number of people who want ‘Rampager’ gear vs. the number of people who want ‘Cleric’ gear will be greater than 5:1.

While it seems like a bit of an oversight to have none of the dungeons give ‘Cleric’, ‘Valkyrie’ and ‘Explorer’ gear, having those options will not cater to all the whining and whinging glass cannons.

Similarly I wanted ‘Rabid’ gear but I was essentially forced to run dungeons because they’re not craftable. I’ve had to spend all this money transmuting because I don’t like the look of the dungeon gear that I otherwise wouldn’t have spent if I could craft with the stats I wanted.

It’d be nice if they could balance it out but it’ll be a bit of a shame if for example you really liked to run one particular dungeon but it happens to give the 2 groups of stats that you don’t need.

I went on an AC run about 4 hours ago with 2 party members in IoJ and 3 in SoS, so yes you can do dungeons cross-server. You should also be able to join parties and meet up with people in overflow servers – maybe he had left LA overflow?

I had half my level 80 exotic armour + 1 weapon by the time I hit 80 since I started dungeoning at 40+. Saved me quite a bit of gold by starting early. I’ve started to get bored with a couple of dungeons because I’ve done all the paths so many times that I know what’s coming next. If your experience with dungeons has not been great, give it another chance going in with people who know what they’re doing. I don’t think taking half an hour to clear a dungeon is ‘too long’ but if you’re after instant gratification, dungeons are not for you.

If you still don’t like it after doing a successful half hour run, then go back to farming in Orr. You don’t have to do dungeons if you don’t want to. Most people are going for tokens and if none of the dungeon gear/gifts interest you and all you want is gold from an easier environment to navigate and play through, then keep doing what you’re doing. You sound like you’re being compelled to do dungeons when in fact it’s quite optional.

Well that’s the main reason I made the dungeon guilds. I’m happy to send out an invite if you regularly run AC, CM or TA. You never have to represent the guild – just whisper other people online and ask if they’re keen to go.

I’ve invited you to the AC guild Bukkebruse =) Recruiting’s going a little slow. I think I’m in a WvW server >_> Hopefully I’ll get more interest from the forums.

Arazin.4861:

Pretty cool idea! Like a home made dungeon finder : )

That’s the essence of it. Were you keen on joining?

I have created Ascalonian Catacombers (AC), Caudecus Manorians (CM) and Twilight Arborites (TA) guilds. These are the first 3 dungeons people can access.

The idea is that you join the guild(s) of the dungeon you do regularly, and when you need to find people to go with, you just represent that guild for a few minutes or whisper to other online people in that guild to get a party started. It’s a more organised, less random way of setting up a PuG, I suppose, except I expect that members will have at least done one path once.

Please contact me for membership. My in-game name is David Riedmaier. All 3 guilds now only just have me but they will hopefully grow in size as time goes on.

EDIT: You can also send me a forum PM and I will add you when I get online.

This seemed like a good idea so I took the initiative to create 3 guilds. I’m already in 2 others and the max you can join is 5 (so you can’t join all 8 guilds I’m afraid)

I have created Ascalonian Catacombers (AC), Caudecus Manorians (CM) and Twilight Arborites (TA) guilds. These are the first 3 dungeons people can access. I’m hoping other people can take up the initiative to create other guilds for the dungeons they do.

Please contact me for membership. My in-game name is David Riedmaier. All of them will start pretty small but hopefully grow in size as time goes on.

EDIT: You can also send me a forum PM and I will add you when I get online.

I don’t think Awesome answered your question. Jutes from bandits are the fastest way to get jutes, so if it’s not fast enough for you then your only other option is TP.

Have you been salvaging all your drops? At your level there’s nothing worth holding on to so you should salvage all the equips you’ve been getting. Once your equips start selling for 50c or more then you should sell the equips. But I’m still salvaging level 80 white and blue-named light armour tops as they might sell back to merchants for almost 1s but I can get 4 raw mats from it, and cotton/gossamer would have cost me more than 1s.

Another option is to buy insignias off the TP instead of crafting them. You’ll get a bit less EXP but it’s cheaper than finding all the jute and totems and fangs and whatever, and the discovery EXP is the big one you’re looking for anyway.

EDIT: Of course, if you’re not going to use the food ingredients, wood and copper ores you’ve been gathering as you go around the map, put those up for sale and you can use the earnings to buy materials.

I don’t understand why you would play in windowed mode if you don’t need to move your mouse outside the game window? Did you just want to keep track of time or something?

zerk.9701:

No upgrades for him he has a LT and built in graphics not even a card.

Yeah I realised I should have looked up the CPU before writing up all that irrelevant TL;DR XD Unfortunately the options for upgrading a laptop are really limited as everything is on the one board, and laptop upgrades are not usually for the DIY crowd unless you know what you’re doing.

With the number of times my necro keeps hairflipping, fiddling with his gloves idly and adjusting his hair AGAIN every half minute when it rains (I love that the characters acknowledge that it’s raining, but vanity much?), I’ll have to go with “Man, I feel like a woman.”

I understand that it’s frustrating how far you have to go to get back to the action, and by the time you get there – whoops, everyone’s moved on to a different supply camp. But can you imagine having a waypoint right next to all the camps and towers?

A) Oh, I died. But the closest waypoint is contested since, well, that’s where I died from the other server trying to reclaim the territory. In fact half the waypoints on the maps are contested since this is WvW and not PvE.

B) Oh, I died. The closest uncontested waypoint is half a minute away. I’ll just respawn and run back in one minute and keep abusing the waypoint for its infinite resurrections until I’m naked and win back the camp/tower.

I’m sorry to say but zerk is right – your computer is closer to the minimum requirements and you won’t be able to run it on high settings. Before I upgraded my computer I ran mine on low and get 55~60fps. (EDIT: Had an Athlon X2 2.1GHz, 3GB RAM and Radeon HD6570).

If I’m not mistaken, the Radeon HD 4250 is actually below minimum requirements. When it comes to good display, the first thing you should do is upgrade the graphics card.

3GB RAM should be enough but if you’re going to upgrade anyway, I’d advise 8GB RAM. 4GB RAM is also fine if you’re on a budget but RAM is cheap and sooner or later when another game or OS or whatever comes out, 4GB RAM is going to feel too small. RAM does not need an upgrade – optional but nice to have.

The CPU is not the best but I don’t think it needs an upgrade. If you’re going to change the CPU then you might as well buy a whole new machine.

I think you’re on a laptop though, and I’ve never upgraded components in a laptop before. But on a desktop it’s fairly easy to just slot in a graphics card into the slot and swap RAM out. It’s a 15-minute job at most.

(EDIT #2: If on desktop you’d also want a power supply unit of at least 400W, which is the minimum for newer graphics cards.)

I use Flesh Golem and sometimes the Wurm depending on the dungeon run. For all the times we’re like “OMG minion AI sucks”, it comes in handy when it aggros stuff you were going to run past and keep them occupied.

Berullos.6928:

I mostly don’t like the tiers we get certain traits. Some of the desirable ones are way too high tier.

I end up making builds just so I can reach certain traits and ignoring a lot of the minors/base amount of direct benefits.

I also feel pidgeonholed into taking Death magic for staff as the only semi counter versus thieves and mesmers and engis that cloak, as marks are the only reliable way I have to hit them in stealth.

While I agree that it’s frustrating that some of the useful stuff can only be unlocked when you put 30 points into it, I’m actually quite thankful that we actually have something that works against stealth.

I run dungeons just fine. You do need to use some skills that you might normally never use and you’ll play more of a supportive role but I suspect that’s par for the course with anyone who doesn’t want to go in with their PvE standard glass cannon build.

My point is that just because it’s infested with bugs doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy playing a necromancer.

There’s a lot of complaints about necros being broken and underpowered and whatnot but if you enjoy the class, there’s no reason to reroll.

OK. It’s really hard to say. I can tell you that most necromancers I see go with either scepter/dagger and staff or dagger/dagger and staff, and those are good options for ‘fast levelling’ (I levelled quickly through doing dungeons so it didn’t actually matter what weapon I had; some weapons and skills are more useful in some dungeons than others) but those options might not suit your playstyle.

Eh I wouldn’t say useless but scepter is nice because you can keep some distance. You don’t want to get too close because necros are pretty squishy. I keep all spare weapons in my invo but I haven’t swapped out to Axe since level 40 something. If you want to see consistently huge numbers coming off your screen, necromancer is probably not the right class for you. Conditions benefit more from the different trait lines than going pure power build.

Scepter/Dagger and Staff combo is the bread and butter, so to speak, of most necromancers. Dagger/Dagger and Axe/Focus are also viable alternatives. It just depends if you prefer condition or power.

Necros should only be able to summon one flesh wurm at a time so that doesn’t look normal.

At the rate everyone is accusing everyone else about mass server transfers, I do believe that disgruntled players on every server think that they’re losing because all the WvWers must have transferred out of their server.

As an SoSer I’d rather the transient population have a mass exodus and leave us like HoD and ET. They’re not a valuable addition to the community. They’re unhelpful in PvE, try to throw their weight around in WvW even though their tactics are complete bollocks and they’re going to leave once we hit Tier 1 so please do us all a favour and just leave now. Capping the entire map is boring for fellow SoSers who stand around building catapults waiting for a ragtag band of demoralised, unmotivated IoJers and HoDers to come waltzing up only to run away after bored SoSers, after waiting 2 hours to see any action, unload all their siege weapons as soon as they see a red name in the horizon like it’s armageddon.

Let’s just keep in mind that people who are QQing about nightcapping are Americans playing in NA servers with small European/Oceanic/Asian populations, or Europeans playing in EU servers with small American/Oceanic/Asian populations.

Placing restrictions on ‘nightcapping’ punishes Oceanic and Asian players who would be ‘daycapping’ while the Americans and Europeans sleep. If there had been Oceanic and Asian servers to begin with this wouldn’t be such a huge issue. But as we are forced to pick between either an American or European server, we have to play when the majority of the other players are asleep.

Why should players be punished for their timezones? If you want to make WvWvW fairer, there are plenty of other things you could do, like alter the free server transfer system, or have Oceanic and Asian servers, or match up servers based on their American, European, Oceanic and Asian populations rather than what it is now where scores better reflect how many non-NA players are in an NA server or non-EU players in an EU server than any sort of strategy people are trying to use.

As far as I know it is not an exploit. Your party can get the Troll and Lt. Kholer to kill each other if they want but in my experience, most of the time it’s not worth the effort of trying to lure them to the right spot.

The pumpkin looks a little clunky on the rifle >_>

You can convert your gems to gold and buy the skins that way. I’d imagine it’s feasible if the current gem to gold exchange rate is still hyperinflated.

Aewyn Starfall.9406:

Guys, it’s not a guaranteed thing. You should have known that before you did it. No one made you buy the chests. So stop giving Anet any kind of flak about it. You could have just bought it from the trading post.

It’s not like people who bought keys to open the chests didn’t know it was going to be random. It just wasn’t made clear from the outset that it was going to be so rare to obtain the skins. Of course, everyone knows that it would have been cheaper to buy the skins than try their luck with chests in hindsight.

For everyone who’s affirmed to me in the past that Guild Wars 2 is casual player-friendly, I feel like I should have been informed that I need to take the whole week off work to gather up all those materials just to chuck ’em into the forge with my fingers crossed and see what comes out the other end.

shawnd.7802:

Not trying to get forum banned or anything but.. would you really feel like this if it was a pay to play game?

Example:
WoW. You farm one item in WoW for a year while you’re paying $15 a month and never get it.

The problem the OP is highlighting isn’t that it takes a lot of time or money or whatever to get the skins that people are hoping to get by opening the chests; it’s that it wasn’t made clear from the event update notes in the beginning that it was going to be very very rare. So people feel cheated because they thought they had a higher chance of getting a Halloween-themed item from the chests. The word ‘rare’ was only thrown in, almost as if it’s an afterthought, after everyone started QQing/ragequitting.

Yeah. I used to be like “Who the hell would use 10GB per month?” and now my plan is 20GB XD

I was told it was 800 or 900mb, but either way you’re looking at around half of your bandwidth.

I’m going to have to leave mine to patch overnight. New Zealand internet is pretty laughable.

Reading this at work knowing that I’ll be patching overnight. By tomorrow morning gem to gold ratio will probably have gone back to normalish so it wouldn’t be worth it to convert gems to gold to buy the skins I want. Really disappointed. I quit Nexon games because of this kind of ‘pay for a 1% chance’ to get something approach to their cash shop and this feels no different.

I had thought about buying gems to get keys for this event, and I’d have been happy to pay for it if the chance of getting skins was actually decent, but that’s not going to happen after reading all these posts. We don’t do Halloween here but I was under the impression it was supposed to be about lots of candy and lots of fun. This just seems like a whole lot of frustration and misery.

I’m sure the skins aren’t the only thing in the event but it was definitely a big one. Knowing that a lot of players might only want to play around with the skin for the Halloween period – I don’t predict to see everyone running around with scythes and chainsaws a few months from now when the event gets old or when there’s new stuff for Christmas – why make it so difficult to obtain?

What server are you on? I do AC, CM and TA almost every day.

You could always join a guild – most bigger guilds go on daily dungeon runs and they’re less likely to care what level you are.

If you got d/ced it’s usually your ISP’s problem and not ArenaNet’s unless the server crashed, in which case everyone would have d/ced. So it has very little to do with paying $15 a month. Even if ArenaNet started charging you $100 a month to play, you will still d/c.

Sarelm.8317:

lcpdragonslayer.7895:

I’ve done Paths 1 and 3 with a group entirely comprised of under 80s. If the dungeon was designed for a group of level 80s the level requirement would be 80. It is possible but not if all party members are scholar types. You would also want party members to have full greens or better gear. They’re cheap off the TP, often a couple copper above the sellback price.

You shouldn’t pay any attention to the breeders and stalkers and just kite them around to the next mound. Put some AoEs up and just focus solely on the mounds. Keep running circles around the mounds to take less damage from the Gravellings. Knowing where the next mound will pop up also helps so that you don’t waste time running around looking for it.

I just have to argue with that scholar remark. I’m a mesmer, the guildies I go with are an elementalist and a necromancer. The pugs we picked up were occasionally a ranger/engi but more often than not, more clothies. They just seem to be popular. Myself and the necromancer would just keep mobs occupied with clones/pets/DS form or in my case, sitting next to my iDefender and using Distortion (Sword #2, shatter F4, or Sword OH block) whenever possible to block the really hard hitting moves. It’s just a matter of how the group is specced, not what they play.

Were you all under 80 though? I had attempted and failed with a group of 40~60s 2 elementalists, 1 mesmer, 1 necro and 1 engineer regardless of the different skillbuilds we kept swapping in and out. I think that with a group of level 80s then it doesn’t matter since you’d be at the very least semi-competent with your class to know what skills and weapon sets would do better, but a lot of level 40s who come in fresh from the 1-2-3-4-5-7-8-9-0 approach in PvE aren’t quite going to know what would work best in what situation.

EDIT: Also there weren’t many options to ‘respec’, so to speak, since a level 40 isn’t going to have that many skill points to put into different skills for different skillbuilds.

I’ve done Paths 1 and 3 with a group entirely comprised of under 80s. If the dungeon was designed for a group of level 80s the level requirement would be 80. It is possible but not if all party members are scholar types. You would also want party members to have full greens or better gear. They’re cheap off the TP, often a couple copper above the sellback price.

You shouldn’t pay any attention to the breeders and stalkers and just kite them around to the next mound. Put some AoEs up and just focus solely on the mounds. Keep running circles around the mounds to take less damage from the Gravellings. Knowing where the next mound will pop up also helps so that you don’t waste time running around looking for it.

Lol no worries. The only one really worth summoning in any dungeon is the elite skill flesh golem and possibly Flesh Wurm in a dungeon like CM. Has decent HP, does decent damage, and you can make it charge forward to aggro mobs. Staff skill #2 also heals not your minions but anyone standing around the target so you can basically give nearly constant HP regeneration to all melee players. The 6~9 skill slots are better used for condition-related skills.

Crater.1625:

Most people don’t understand anything about the way that the game’s downscaling works. The consolation for being kicked by someone who doesn’t think that you’re a high enough level is, that player is almost guaranteed to have a shaky understanding of the game’s actual mechanics. There’s really nothing to be done about it, though.

This. A level 35 wearing full greens would perform better than a level 80 wearing full blues. Unfortunately people just assume level 80 = intelligent.

I think this is one of the areas where you really do see the difference between random groups and organised ones. When everyone’s all out for themselves, you can still complete the dungeon, but you’re prone to wipes, endless OMG Y U NO _______ and disagreements over every little thing. In an organised group where people communicate then this shows in the support they bring to the table as well.

Elementalists, Mesmers and Guardians in particular I think are awesome to have on dungeon runs, as long as they’re not trying to be glass cannons. As a Necromancer I have multiple roles – meat shields to occupy mobs (for all the complaints about the minion AI being broken, I can’t say it hasn’t come in handy in CM to occupy turrets and TA to occupy hounds/husks) and a lot of condition-related stuff. Absorb all conditions from party members, turn their conditions into boons and so on. I think everyone can work together to make dungeon runs a whole lot faster and easier but a lot of the people in PuGs are just looking out for themselves.

CoE is ridiculous by the way so don’t be too disheartened. Quite a few of the other dungeons are comparatively easier. Honestly I think there are parts of dungeons where you just have to concede that it’s not your forte, but you would expect the other party members to be better at – it’s a team effort after all. Any party of randoms that I have run with in most dungeons that are like 4 DPS chumps and me have just wiped over and over again. You may not be the most helpful in one part but the party can’t complete the dungeon without you.

Though it would be nice if inanimate objects took condition damage, of course. I’m all for that too xD

Oh I see what you mean. I would think it’s unnecessary to carry more than one staff around too. But there’s no point buying a staff just for like 5 or 10 minutes of ‘high DPS required’ per dungeon run. Are you saying your current staff would have noticeably lower DPS than if you used one that had maybe higher power/precision?

I have to agree that there are certain parts of certain dungeons, like the burrows in AC that you quoted, that require you to have high DPS output. But DPS isn’t the focus for all dungeons and indeed for the rest of AC you can go back to your condition/support build.

But you don’t actually have to retrait anything. You might need to change one or two weapons just for that part but I was under the impression that most people carried spare weapons around just in case they come in handy.

Everyone brings something different to the dungeon run. Maybe your DPS isn’t all the way up there but conditions are great on bosses and what kind of party doesn’t enjoy having someone with a support build on their team? Bearing in mind that people who focus on DPS usually go down pretty quick and I think someone who downs often and requires a lot of resurrections is more of a liability than someone who can deal nice damage over time. I’m pretty useless for DPS as well but if you’re good at everything then every stage would feel kind of easy and it wouldn’t feel much like a team effort to get through a dungeon.

@iSinner: I can confirm that it is not bugged. I got overkilled by a dungeon boss with a sliver of the Death Shroud HP bar left and got downed instantly.

@DonQuack I can confirm that you can take lower levels into dungeons, but you’re most likely going to have to help them out especially if it’s their first time. I think those level ‘limits’ are actually ‘recommendations’. Of course it’s probably not ideal that you have a whole party under the level recommendation, but it’s not impossible to do a run that way.

I think the thread starter assumed that level 80 = experienced, which has not been my experience. I started dungeoning from 4x and I’m 70 now. I’m usually the only one under level 80 in a group but I know what I’m doing. Now maybe I’m the deadweight in some parts of various dungeons but it’s not like having people under level 80 means constant wipes/frustration/“what are we doing guys?”.

By contrast I led a group of random level 80s into CM path 3 and the whole group quit on me before the final boss because they refused to follow simple instructions. They thought they could take on the mob with their full exotic gear from whatever other dungeon.

Level 80 doesn’t mean a faster, better and more satisfying dungeon experience. A level 50 who has done exp paths twice brings more to the team than a level 80 who charges in thinking he can tank the bosses.

I’m not being sarcastic. I just don’t understand – if you wanted easy dungeons that rely on the traditional healer, tank and damage-dealing roles then why are you playing GW2?