Guild Wars 2

Dee Jay.2460:

The problem with loot is that it’s so abundant that anything less than a rare item feels like trash.

Rares are ok, but only because of their Ectoplasms.

Exotics, at least the ones that drop, are nice, but not truly special or interesting. Most random Exotics aren’t even worth 2 Gold.

But then the truly rare drops like Precursors are suddenly worth more than everything else you have ever collected, combined. It’s so extreme, there’s no middle ground.

Its the result of supply and demand. The supply of good stat gear is about the same as crap gear. Crap gear regardless of rarity is effectively worth about its salvage value: Normal supply + no demand = garbage/vender/salvage. Gear that people will actually use has demand behind it so will be worth more. But the game has been out forever now so there is very little reason to need to buy a new set. Weak demand + normal supply = low price. Then you have the issue of ascended gear, which lowers demand for even good stuff even more. If it weren’t for the requirements for salvage mats that getting to 500 and the actually gear requires the price of drops would be even worse. The net result is leveling mats have more demand than the gear they can be salvaged from actually being used, and this trend goes all the way to exotic gear. Legendary precursors have very low drops and many people want at least 1 for completionist/vanity/ascended stat flexibility reason so there is both high demand and restricted supply. There is also a glut of money from champ bag farming and other LS events that have exploded the money supply.

Harper.4173:

cranos.5913:

Oh come on, you run till you’re allmost at the first boss, pop some reflects and the bombers kill themselves. Almost every PUG knows this by now and do the path often.

I’m not arguing what the skip was or how it worked – my question to you and others is this : is it better now that the dungeon path is dead?
Try getting the SE tokens you need now? – P2 and P3 aren’t getting done. So you’re stuck doing P1 for forever.

Edit : yes – it was a pipe thing – both at the start and closer to the end. Both are gone.

3 is done all the time, you are either bad, impatient or a liar. After the nerf you are talking about groups just ran through the bombers then LoSed them at the end. The bridge barricade nerf can be bypassed by just taking 1 second to break a barricade or jumping through the right side instead of left. The left ledge skip is still there at that point. This path still is one of the shortest for pug farming and is trivially easy.

Healway isn’t a bad build, in the right circumstances. 2v1, 1v1, and/or roaming isn’t where its supposed to be. Its a group support build so trying to solo roam is giving up things without gaining the benefit for doing so.

As for your build, its not really doing anything, a mashup of sub par traiting. Going all the way to 30 in honor without AH is a bit of a waste even in a wvw build.

The game is also rather strongly gear based, going mostly cleric/soldier means that even with buffs you are going to have poor direct damage and no condition damage of note. Which is fine when you are group support in wvw. It means you hit like a wet noodle in solo environments.

I think what I see here is somebody not knowing their class, grabbing a niche build, not understanding what its for, then tinkering with the build without knowing what they are doing. Its like buying an fuel economy hybrid and then not liking the high end performance of it and attempting to install a super charger to it (hint, it defeats the purpose and doesn’t accomplish what is intended).

Harper.4173:

Also – regarding the issue of “more challenge”.

Up until recently there was a skip you could do in Sorrow’s Embrace path 3 that allowed you to circumvent a good portion of mobs and generally cut down dungeon path time by quite a lot.

People did that path – and you would frequently see groups forming for Sorrow’s P1+P3.

A few patches ago that skip has been fixed – do you know what happened?
No more P3 runs in SE. I’ve done the dungeon multiple times since then and not only have I not been able to get P3 groups together( at first i didn’t even know why), one group disbanded when they saw the skip was gone.
Nor have I seen any other P3 groups forming that I could join.

Do you know what this means? People don’t want more challenging content.

So yes – I think Anet would like their content to be skipped through by experienced players instead of it not being played at all.

You must either be incredibly impatient or not being truthful. Right after patch my waits even at 2 AM later increased by 2 minutes at best. Currently its about the same time to LFG. Also you can still skip everything that matters. You can still run around the first baricade on the left side and not even break them (skipping the mobs). Sure they got rid of the JP to the first boss, but the bombers are easy, just run through then LOS them on a corner. You can even stack on the stairs for the first boss+adds instead of ranging from the gear. You can still drop down to the ledge and run past the spiders, jump over the barrier, run across the ledge above the destroyers ect to get to the 2nd boss. The only thing that changed is you need to jump over the right side instead of left, or spend 1.3 seconds to burst a single barricade away to run through the mobs. None of the patches actually changed anything important to the run.

I have some guild members that hates how dungeons are all about stacking, skipping, zerk ect. They spend most of their time on the queen’s dale and frostgorge trains, or leaching zergs in wvw…

Unless I’m doing arah I don’t bother with gear checks or wordy descriptions. It usually takes longer to find a perfect group than just doing it with a noob pug for me. Yeah, it feels real bad having to carry bads but I’m used to it so its not like its any extra effort. Then again my dungeon class is guardian so i can usually blind/aegis/dps my way through the content enough to carry all but the worst groups.

nagr.1593:

I stopped at 125% mf. Basically it got too tiresome for me: had to salvage blues/greens, some of which I could’ve sold on the TP for 5s each—not to mention those annoying stacks of luck sitting in my bag, which I rarely felt like clicking them all and if I didn’t they would accumulate and take up space (as if I didn’t have enough crap taking up bag space already). Basically felt too much like a chore so it felt good to vendor/tp them instead, less hassle for me (plus didn’t really see a huge difference with mf).

idk, I almost always get enough mats that the loss is small enough I don’t care. Also I haven’t capped my master of entropy yet so the APs are a nice bonus. Besides when im on my dugeon tour its just more expediant to just break everything down into mats and bank them rather than pop a merchant or go to one.

An all cleric dungeon group is actually kind of funny. Pretty average power, no crit damage or chance… But you probably wont die even with the dodge disabled. Fights take like 5-10 times longer to complete, but since most dungeons have skipable sections, it adds less time to the ran than you would thing (depends on actual run, SE1&3, HotW1, CoF1, AC, ect are almost entirely skip most mobs to get to the unavoidable fights/bosses).

TBH If I didnt’ feel comfortable running more damage based builds I would at least run a knights or valk build before I would run a cleric build. I run more balanced in wvw, but in small raiding parties (5 man in a group and whatever people we pick up on the way) and solo/duo camp/yak killing so I don’t need to even consider the role of the cleric guard that you see in zerg groups.

DeathPanel.8362:

J Eberle.9312:

DeathPanel.8362:

Manuelito.6081:

DeathPanel.8362:

Manuelito.6081:

DeathPanel.8362:

Manuelito.6081:

Nobody is asking you to play the meta; however, your comments result in being misleading for new players and a waste of time for experienced players. You are really arguing against facts which have been proven in many ways (as much as a game without addons allow).

e.g. I also had problems in playing Scholar runes, but that was not due to the fact that the runes were not the optimal choice for PvE DPS

For the 100th time one of my guardians IS playing the meta build. Do you people even bother to read or do you just jump at anything that questions the sacred “meta” build which you all mindlessly worship? It’s like I’m trying to reason with a bunch of rabid Bieber fangirls.

I understood that you weren’t playing Scholar runes, hence not playing the meta.

Anyway, I tried to be constructive, but it really seems you just want to feed the argument for the sake of it. For this reason, I am out.

Scholar runes only work if you are in a well coordinated team where you can maintain your hp. Otherwise for dps purposes even ruby orbs are better.

You see the difference between you and I is that while I saw this discrepancy in practice and adjusted for it you mindlessly copycat, follow, and defend it.

Since this comment was totally uncalled for, I will just add that you do not know how I got to play the meta build. Your “seeing the discrepancy and adapting to it” seems more an excuse than anything else.

So, just to be clear, it seems to me that the difference between you and I is that I learned to play the optimal meta build, You did not.

Peace.

Nope, you’re just mindlessly copycatting a rune setup that works well only in well coordinated chat enabled teams and mistakenly thinking it will work better in all situations.

Conversely as I’ve stated I realized this limitation and made adjustments so that it will work well in all situations including pugs and other disorganized teams. So the difference between you and I is that I actually learned to play while you learned to copy.

Class dismissed.

I actually pug and gear check and have perfect runs with people in full scholar/zerk running the correct builds without voice com pretty regularly. I have no idea what you get these assumptions.

Being able succeed in a run while having scholar runes doesn’t mean you’ve actually managed to take advantage of the 6 pc 10% damage bonus enough to make it worth having over for example ruby orbs if dps is what you are after.

Fact is pugs are terrible sometimes, and maintaining 90%+ hp in a bad pug in high lvl fractals is near impossible.

This is so hilariously bad IDK even where to go. Anyways somebody else did the math: scholar runes is superior to the next best option if you can keep your health above 90 percent for about half of the fight. Not a hard bar to meet even in a terribad pug since most tough fights tend to be 90+ or downed in zerk gear. If you are good enough to avoid being downed in zerk, you are good enough to be at 90+. Personally in all dungeons group I run in this is a trivial issue. I pug nearly all of the runs I make, 6-10 runs a night, not always the easy farm ones either. I don’t normally fractal with pugs, but I have guild mates who do and they have no problems running scholars on squishier classes than guard at high level fracts (40+). If you are in a bad pug in a high fractal, its much better for your state of mind and time to either bail or gear check before hand to see if they pass the 101 level threshold of knowing the game.

Your philosophy towards building expecting failure also prevents you from capitalizing on success. Fatalism often invites failure.

Its nice that you are getting awesome might stacks and everything, but the meta build without any food, might stacks, sigil stacks or anything other than traits and gear (and lets nerf it down to exotics to show how low your ascended numbers are) has about double the effective power of your build without boons… Its still more even when you fully buff up. In an organized group where the party or ele stacks 25 might + fury and adding in proper foods it ends up about double your ascended boonguard. Yeah, gives up healing and all that stuff that you never need because you don’t facetank like a newbie…

Now if you talking wvw, nvm different skill set entirely.

Sera.6250:

Or when you use the LFG tool, just look for a party with like 2 necromancers and a ranger in it. They won’t kick you no matter what your build is. -.-

I got into a group labeled “speed run” for AC 3… lvl 70 engi, staff necro, bow warrior, support bow ranger… Yeah, idk who thought that was a speed run group… They were mad I wasn’t a ele so they could kill the burrows.

I’m a zerk meta guardian, I could tell they did no damage to anything because i would randomly stop attacking and watch the health bars on the enemy just freeze solid. I couldn’t imagine how much of a pita that that group would have been if I hadn’t been there to carry them. Over all the run went smooth because although they weren’t doing any damage they weren’t’ dying or anything either. Run only took about 4 minutes longer than normal because most of the dungeon is time gating and running.

Why would anybody actually buy AC p3 for any amount of gold? Its like 15 minutes even with terrible pug group.

Kaizz.7306:

Wait, Guardians can be kicked from dungeon runs? Huh… musta missed that nerf…

But seriously, Clerics, in general… is not that awesome, unless you’re using the Healway build. I have a Clerics set just for that build, but I never use it because, while I can survive, I lack to much damage sometimes. It’s not a bad armor set, but just like everything else in the game, especially with the Guardian, it’s situational. I have a Knights set for roaming, Soldier’s set for WvW Guild Raiding, Zerker Set for Dungeons and Fractals, Clerics for that one build I never use but put Phalanx Armor skin over so I’m dam sure not getting rid of it, and a Sentinel’s Set…. which is my holy kitten this fractals is really really hard, lemme swap some pieces. I haven’t used my Sentinel’s set in a few weeks….

If you’re getting booted, though, as a Guardian, unless you have, like, <2K AP (I know, it’s dumb, but I’m seeing it more often of ppl being kicked based on AP), I am left to wonder if you were kicked for dying so much. I’m still getting used to runing 100% Zerker gear, and so I’ve been doing fractals and dungeons with it on, only dying once or twice the whole run. I still don’t get kicked from groups. If you start dropping 5+ times on one boss however….

People are starting to wise up on guardian leaches is what the nerf is. Camp staff or scepter to long in a dungeon group and you are quite likely to get kicked.

If you are in full/partial zerker (or at least knights/valk)and dealing your share of damage it should be obvious to the party. A good group is usually understanding of getting downed, it happens when you have low passive defense: sometimes you miss your aegis/blind/prot/dodge. No big deal, they are zerk too so the fight is quickly over. A bad group sees a zerker go down and they get kitten, stop being bad, dead dps is no dps ect blah blah blah. Well if the clerics did their share of damage the zerker wouldn’t have run out of active defense or had too many chances to make a mistake (long fights can get sloppy). 9/10 times when the zerker goes down in a survival based pug group its not as much his fault as it is the fight is taking to long and quite often the selfish clerics aren’t providing the correct types of support focusing on irrelevant heals instead of preventing the damage in the first place. A very good zerker player can solo quite a bit of the content, but its not easy and even good players have trouble with other players interference (great use of fear skills there bud, now the ball of enemies is split and its a big mess now…)

On the dungeon paths you missed some easier runs. CoF and AC aren’t bad, but SE 1&3 and HotW 1 are just as farm-able if not even more so. The dungeon tokens for level 70+ dungeons can be converted to yellow rarity items and salvaged for ectos, and the right dungeon exotic tier gear can be salvaged for inscriptions that are worth 2+ gold each (iirc Soldiers, Dire, Magi, and Rabid).

Another group of easy runs are TA up and CM 1&3, but some people/classes seem to struggle with the mechanics of those dungeons. COE all is pretty easy farm-able, but requires knowledge of the fights beyond the capabilities of the average gold farmer.

I guess what I’m saying if you were to do all of those runs you would make 15 gold just in bonus chests. This does not count the bag/box drops, normal dungeon rewards, or the ability to convert dungeon currency into gold through salvage. 13 dungeon runs at 20 minutes a run (which is really long for most of the ones I named, but I included the time for selling off and finding groups in that calculation) ought to keep you busy for 3-5 hours. Its most likely a better gold per hour rate than champ farming on the train and is less at the whim of the world boss spawn timer. On average I get 2ish gold per run, with AC giving slightly more. That is just shy of 30 gold a dungeon tour. Since I have to share a computer and my laptop does’t perform well in dungeons I will also do WBs and trains, but that isn’t really as rewarding in my experience. Other dungeons can be added to the tour, but they are in general more time consuming without really being much more rewarding in gold (unless you are really fast at arah).

I used to advertise teaching runs for CM all the time. About half of the players were people wanting to help teach. Now when I want to teach newbies in CM is just put in pX ads because all you seem to get with that particular ad is sub 80 characters who don’t know how to use the reflect guns or fight sureshot (or do the skips or pulls). Its a trivial dungeon and I have no problems carrying lowbies/newbies through it. Maybe 1/10 will actually learn something, but I count that as a win in my book.

I read the entire thing, including the OP. OP wasn’t rejecting the meta build, he was wanting to know if AH was viable (which it isn’t by most terms of viable that matter) and if it wasn’t what alternatives were there. The meta build is just as survivable, if not more so, as the typical AH 12 months ago meta build. Any attempt to defend a AH build is backtracking 12 months to a time and place that no longer exist.

As for the dead dps is no dps argument, a AH zerker build isn’t really any more survivable in areas where such arguments might be valid than the meta build. You lose active survival skills compared to meta AND the static survival the cleric/knights/valk armor/trinkets that normal AH builds provide. Its like the worst of both worlds.

I would rather have a meta guy go down occasionally while being useful 99% of the time than a toon that ineffectively putters around looking busy. Your “best” ah build does 76 percent of what a meta character does? 24 percent less dps is huge, esp if you were to say nerf everybody in a party by a similar amount. Across an entire party it more net loss than just 4 manning content. I’ll have to say this: sometimes you are in a group and it feels like you are the only one doing anything. You go down because you miss a skill/lag/other guys does something stupid you are trying to compensate for( long fights make these errors more likely). Party damage grinds to near 0. I’ve seen the effigy in CoF actually heal with 4 characters attacking it after i went down. . Nobody who actually would run with the AH in the first place is going to use the 76% effective build anyways.

Giving bad advice is not a virtue. Telling people that AH is viable is a lie, because it is not at all viable. It’s at best a crutch, a crutch that actually just hobbles you into a series of bad choices that ends up in a best case scenario being 3/4’s as effective as you should be, and in a most like scenario half the player that even a scrub with a modified meta build (like using knights) is. I pug a fair amount its fairly obvious when a new pet trash builds like the scepter/smite build or a staff AH build is being pushed. Its a nightmare of dealing with would be healers/tanks/resmonkeys trying to get through content with the most pants on head strategies and builds possible. Anybody pushing AH is part of the reason why pugging is such a nightmare of bearbows, fearmancers and gandalf staff guardians. Don’t be part of the problem, be part of the solution. Friends don’t let friends AH. This isn’t from any sort of elitism (I’m not particularly good, its why I rely on the superior survival/damage of the meta build), its doing everybody a favor. Don’t waste your time and gold on trash builds, don’t encourage people to waste their time and gold on trash builds.

There are many reasons why AH builds are so bad:
1) Useless trait line, the toughness you gain from going 30 deep doesn’t do a whole lot unless you also gear for toughness. Gearing AND traiting for toughness is a huge dps loss that isn’t really affordable if you still want to deal your “share” of damage. The 5/15/25 traits are pretty bad compared to traits available in other lines. The choices in that line are also similarly bad
2) By putting 30 points into valor you miss out on about half of the damage multiplying traits, and you also miss out on critical quality of life traits from going down virtues. The opportunity cost is not something you can ignore.
3) Most AH builds also go deep into honor for the shouts and empowering might. While some of the traits are perfectly fine in this line, going deep into this AND valor gives up nearly all of the quality of life and damage modifiers that make the meta build so good.
4) While using zerker gear can mitigate some of the damage loss, missing out on the damage modifying traits and the trait line bonuses can’t be made up. Doing this btw means you can’t facetank anything, you gain maybe an extra hit you can take from a silver mob.
The net effect of the entire build is giving up nearly all of you damage ability, your ability to spam blinds and apply vuln and group burning. You GAIN a higher health pool, the ability to face tank open world mobs and dungeon trash and the ability and inducement to spam boons and use the staff (which is terrible btw). Since most of the boons you are spamming aren’t wanted or can be given with the meta builds, its a non factor. The only reason why you are granting boons is because you want to heal up. Heals that aren’t required with active dodging and blind/aegis use. AH builds encourage selfish and ineffective play that is effectively just leaching off the group because you aren’t doing anything needed or wanted. The ideas that lead to AH being “good” are using arguments that try to force a trinity. A mechanic that is not in this game. Parties don’t need healers or tanks. Individual heals work better and the aggro tables aren’t conducive to “holding” aggro Parties need damage focused players who provide their share of needed boons and utility.

Ryan.9387:

Also double post but the measurement units aren’t just randomly defined. They are tied to constants so they will never change.

E.g. 1 meter = distance light travels in 1/299,xxx,xxx of a second in a vacuum. It isn’t entirely random.

Of course we could just use planck constants for everything…

Arbitrary =/= random. Also you are using the SI version of the meter. The original meter was barely better than a stick that somebody liked the length of.

Metric is just as arbitrary as Imperial units. It doesn’t really matter because its unlikely the asura would even use either inferior measurement system. Heck metric is based on H2O of all things. They would use a system based on something much fundamental to the eternal alchemy.

Eles are by far more useful in a dungeon group. There is a very hard learning cliff however. For most people its like running into a brick wall. BUT if you can climb that cliff you will have the highest dps and group might/fury stacking in the game.

In PVP they are on the weak end of the meta from what I understand. WvW they provide superb group support, as for solo roaming, it really requires superior mastery levels to even contemplate it.

On world events, FGS rush while not targeting things deals more damage than anything else that I’m aware of. Idk if they patched it or not but FGS rush brings down teqs bone walls super fast.

Mesmer is very surviable with sword/x and proper traiting. They do below par damage due to reliance on buggy mechanics and a lack of self might stacking. When the stars align they can do thief level spikes (not quite, but within touching distance) but it requires skill and the ai working in perfect harmony to pull it off. More than anything mesmers are reflect mules who are brought because they trivialize certain fights.

In pvp the stealth build is very annoying for people that can’t deal with such play. Once again idk about the tier they at atm. In wvw they have various uses, in zergs they are often stealth/portal monkeys.

Casmurro.9046:

I noticed that SE p3 now has invisible walls on that skip on the barricades before the boss who inflicts burning on you, where you need to cleanse it at the fontains. Did they really added invisible walls there or its just me that suck at jumping those barricades?

I found that you can still jump over on the right side but the left side you can’t.

People ignore the healing aspect of empower because its not worth talking about… As is most healing.

Why would you use staff for skipping? You have a perfectly good shout in retreat. Should be all you need for anything in path 3. Staff also leaves marks on the ground, if a mob hits it you get the in combat penalty to speed.

If the pug wasn’t good enough for kholer they should have skipped him, he is a purely optional fight. You needed to support a lot because your group didn’t’ have the dps to melt him assuming you stacked. By using staff you lowered your dps even further making the fight take longer. Scepter is a more acceptable ranged weapon (decent enough dps, a powerful blind), but you don’t need to range much so keep it in the bag for 99 percent of the content. The warrior in your party was probably pure zerk and was used to a party that complemented his play-style. By having more than one player who did bad dps, including a staff guardian probably not traited/geared with the meta dps build he didn’t have the sustain to burn through the fight. Yeah, he should probably get better so he can compensate for the bad groups you often get in pugs (which are often full of bear bows, staff guards, and minion master necros….), but honestly it would be better for all involved that more people understood that defense doesn’t kill and dead mobs deal no damage.

Thaddeus.4891:

Carpboy.7145:

In a nutshell. But warriors can bring defensive support and boons and guards can do offensive.

I guess yes. But really, its minimal. Yes 2 Guardian with staff can give 25 stack of might for a short period of time and 5 guardian can give constant 25might. But the Warrior can do that better and give constant fury.

Warrior on the other hand don’t have any reflect, aegis, and most defensive boons is for themselves and not the party, except if you trait your Warrior for support (which is not the best choice for PvE). So ya each profession can do a bit of everything, but Guardian shine in defensive support while warrior are better for offensive support.

Only bad guardians use staff for might stacking in pve. It is low duration and you get stuck on a terrible dps weapon that can’t really utilize those might stacks. Guardians out of the box do less than wars do, but in actual play guardians get more for group boosts AND get the situation based huge burst from reflect damage. That being said you want both in a group because they bring different and stacking buffs/utility to a party. In terms of party composition, you generally only want one of either, but if you do double up its better to have 2 wars than 2 guards. This has no bearing on the question at hand. TBH, I have both so I swap based on what the group needs.

Also, A defensive warrior in pve is a waste of time, as are all defensive builds. Any meta dps build will have enough built in active defense to not even worry about such trivialities. Some classes however are better at providing these defenses to the party, and that is where guardians shine: providing top level dps while providing active group defense.

If you want hammer, guardian. If you want GS, either/both.

In pve warriors tend to use axe/mace + GS as their primary dungeon dps set. Its solid dps and get the job done quite well. Other weapons for specific situations of course. The hammer for warrior has been used in the past as CC in wvw zergs ect, as for small groups, i dunno, i don’t play much warrior in wvw.

In PVE guardian, the typical dungeon meta build uses GS + Sword/focus as their main set, with scepter being used for range required fights and staff used for clearing blossoms in TA (and not used for anything else there, its just for niche uses). Hammer should be reserved for high fractals where the protection symbol on auto attack is more in demand. In normal dungeons it usually just cause havoc for combo fields (nobody needs retaliation on blast finish when they are trying to blast fire fields for might). Hammer can be used to provide more protection if the group is a bit glassy and can’t handle the fights with the normal aegis/blind protection you offer in normal dungeons if required, but it really shouldn’t be necessary. Farming dungeons are easy enough to be done with any set, the meta set is just to get through it quickly feel free to use hammer if you want to (but mace/shield/staff are better in other game modes). In WvW guardians are better in groups and the builds for them reflect this fact. Staff is viable in this setting (though the nerf on the symbol makes it sketchy) The lack of viable ranged attacks means you will probably have a scepter handy for those types of fights. Hammer and GS are still usable for melee fights.

Mercury has it right. I would like to add that if you are still leveling gems work great, and if you on a budget at 80 ruby orbs are a good budget choice.

Hayashi.3416:

Guard staff is the #1 weapon setup for TA run phase. More so for Fwd path since Up is so easy you don’t have to care. It is one of the stronger builds for CoE 1-4 defense when traited for offense. Condition damage should never be specced under any circumstances for a guardian, period. With high base and low scaling Burn is improved by duration, not damage; and damage speccing, using permaburn as a conduit for buffing direct and boonstrip is its main purpose. If desiring offensive stats, one should go into power instead. Toughness mainbuilds are usually used for holding aggro for the rest of your party, and is used in conjunction with AH because healing power scales badly with it, power and retaliation – and AH is paired with shout traits, shouts and staff’s Empower for max effect. In dealing the lowest damage, booning others and taking the most attacks it is the least selfish build possible – its users have the lowest chance of dealing enough damage to ensure drops. It is also so slow at killing its main purpose in PvE is to anchor teams of 4 completely fail players in dungeons; its second, the highest level fractals.

Normally I wouldn’t be this direct, but as you have disqualified yourself from politeness by being rude yourself: do not give advice when you clearly have no idea how the game, or specific dungeon, drop, stat, trait or aggro mechanics, work.

AH builds are selfish because it sacrifices damage and useful things like blinds giving vuln for individual survival. Toughness doesn’t hold aggro. It can grab aggro, but since you are doing nearly 0 damage you won’t hold it for more than 3 seconds. This is from experience running the terrible AH build till i ditched it for a good build. As for carrying 4 fail players… Don’t run with fail players. Yeah pugs and the like… I mostly pug and while I have been in some pretty bad groups it is a rare day where I can’t get them through with my meta build. In practice the shout build is additionally selfish because the player spams their shouts on cooldown to keep their health topped off instead of timing their shouts for when they matter. On the issue of TA, I’ve been very annoyed by players who remove the poison in the fight that lets you kill the spider faster if you are poisoned. Stop using shouts+soldier runes. The might stacks from staff are fine in a bad group that has nobody else who can stack might (either an odd party composition or incompetent players), but in any reasonable group they will hedge out good duration might stacks given by blasting on fire fields.

High level fractals meta build uses hammer, not staff.

As for boon stripping, who cares, the fight shouldn’t last very long if you are building for the proper things in pve. Getting rid of boons matters very little, getting rid of defiant rarely even matters tbh.

Since you pulled out the do not give advice if blah blah blah… I’ll turn that back around on you. Your ideas how this game work are outdated and wrong.

Another solution is getting into an active pve guild that will help you. Most champs can be 2 manned by decent players, 1 manned by a great player. Or you can get a friendly mesmer or thief to invisibility you long enough to commune. Finding helpful friends is a completely viable way of completing content in this game.

The problem I see with this entire thread is he has a pair of crap builds, nobody is actually calling him on it, AND people are telling him how great the worst pve weapon short of mace/shield is and going after the few people that give good advice. Cmon, a meditation build with pure Tough vit is as greedy and useless as it gets for pve, might as well make it worse by adding a crap weapon right? Oh, he has a shout version too, for “helping”… yup also a greedy and useless trait setup. For god’s sake he traits for retaliation duration! Oh, there is a burning build trait in one with NO condition damage buffing… On the gear, Knights is ok for learning and wvw, but once you get better you need to move on to zerk/assassin for pve.

My advice to the OP, scrap entire build, have at least 2 different builds (wvw and PVE), make sure they are actually good builds instead of this pile of randomly choose “sounds good” stuff. Then block anybody who recommends staff for any pve content. Staff has its uses, but it is not in pve anywhere, not in open world, not in dungeons, not in fractals and not even in champ bag farming or world boss tagging.

cerulean moth.2743:

Good points, Thaddeus. Seems like CM needs something to sweeten the runs, maybe a guaranteed dye drop with the daily chest?

You can get rabid gear from CM. Salvage exotic tier stuff for inscriptions. Not a great amount of reward for the work but it helps.

That being said I think CM is pretty kitten easy, dunno why people think its hard at all.

Most players in this game are really bad, they need champ trains to make money or farm LS content ect. Toss them into an area were knowledge of fights and your class/ build are recommended/required, they fall immediately (I’ve seen pugs wipe to the silver mob at the very beginning of AC before, joined after they had started).

Most dungeons in this game are actually pretty easy. IF you do the homework on the path and truly know your class/build and can execute the teams gameplan it goes very smoothly. The bad part is once you “get” dungeons, its hard to go back to normal pve where the challenge of open world is essentially 0 short of soloing some of the harder champions. Bonus points for killing the QD troll before the train can get there

In short if you want to do dungeons in a guild group, join a guild that actually runs content instead of just farming champs in FG or QD or sitting in LA showing off their gem purchased town clothes. (full disclosure, my guild does all of the above, but at least has a core of good dungeon runners).

mPascoal.4258:

Tree.3916:

Why do people feel that there is a problem? Everything is working as intended. Deal with it.

So Anet wnat us to skip most of the dgn’s content and want people to sell dgn runs too? This just promotes scamming since if you buy a path you can’t be sure if you will get what you want or if you just will get robbed.
I prefer runnign dgn’s to make gold over anything in this game. But because of this mentality I just run CoF and AC since it’s the easiest and what most people farm. I would actually try another dgn’s if they fixed these 2 since the ime to do these or other would basicly be the “same”.

SE 1&3 are easier than AC, SE is actually easier than CoF 1 IMHO. HotW path one is also easier (and usually faster) than AC as well. I would say HotW1 and SE 1 are the two easiest paths for farming. I run AC, SE, HotW, CoF as my main rotation, and CM and TA if I have time. I don’t like COE but its super easy for all paths if you can dodge and pay attention.

As for what Anet intends? Who knows. Pretty much the consensus is that we are to play how we like as long as we don’t “exploit” the map like getting under it or finding holes to clip through the map. Everything else is fair game.

inb4 moved to dungeon forum.
the devs haven’t touched dungeons in any significant way in about a year.

In addition, all of these suggestions have been posted at least 4 times a week. Putting this here just makes a mod move it to the proper place.

Belzebu.3912:

Guardian isn’t that good with swords, sure there are builds that use it but the other weapons are more effective.

This opinion is wrong… Guardian sword has one of the best auto attacks for the class in terms of damage, has a teleport blinding skill, and a somewhat situational ranged attack that blocks specific sorts of attacks too. Paired with focus its actually part of the “meta” dps guardian build for pve/dungeons (focus brings more blinds and blocks). Usually either GS or hammer as the alt set (hammer in fractals, GS everywhere else).

Mesmer’s best pve weapon is sword mainhand, the other main hand/2 hand options suck so your pve default load out is going to be sword main then any two of these as your main and swap choices: focus, pistol, sword. Which two depends on where you are and personal preference.

I don’t recomend warriors for swords if you are going to be primarily pve/dungeons, the meta there is axe/mace + GS. Sword is more of an option in pvp game modes.

If you get downed a lot try dodging, if you are targeted she will hit you if you don’t have evades or prots against it. Stacking is only an issue because of cleave. Also, what class is “squishy”? I’ve played most at 80 and IDK why people consider some classes squishy. They all have decent enough active damage avoidance if built competently.

I pug a fair amount and never really had the problems with getting kicked that some people seem to have. 99 percent of the complaints about kicking seem to come from people who aren’t even remotely competent in their class or didn’t do the basic homework to know what to do in a given area, or didn’t read the party descriptions. Sure, there is selling of arah… but dont pug arah and your problems are solved (find some friends, don’t be socially lazy).

The spider queen only spits when it tries to attack somebody it cant melee. When fighting “normally” its not an issue since the aoe’s are spread out and easily dodged, and dont trigger if all players are meleeing normally. In the tight confines even 1 character distance prevents her from attack, which triggers a spit, with multiple aoes in one spot.

Tazza and alpha can instant down BECAUSE of stacking (dodge or die), the midboss champ in SE3 will hurt more if players don’t stack smoothly (the burning rings, but they can be cleansed easily so its not a big deal). Lupi when you range him its recommended to stack so you can deal with failed grub dodges better (because if you are ranging you are in group that is going to range, they will probably let grubs happen).

Phadde.7362:

Pleurodesed.7625:

…..
Screw it. From now on the only dungeons I’ll be running will be story mode with noobs
…….

Am I the only one who hates the way gw2 is evolving?

Ah, I hate it when people stack to skip content. The goal/reward is just the incentive and not the actual fun of the game. The fun lies in the content.

I always bring at least a few guildies whenever I do a dungeon, partly because they don’t stack. I suggest you do the same.

How is stacking skipping the content? I mean you still fight the same mobs, still get attacks applied against you, and get the same dings for dungeon completion (after all, most stacks are used when real skipping isn’t possible). Sure you end up clearing the content faster, but that is because you are making max use of cleaves and aoes and powerful defensive skills that cause blinds/aegis/reflect ect and can dodge all the mobs attacks at once since they are in the same spot. Get rid of evade frames on dodges and skills and you might see less of it, yeah, not going to happen.

They can also try wall dodging. That is the point of using the pillar after all.

chasewystone.2918:

I wasn’t making any assumptions or generalizations regarding other dungeons. I was just explaining my personal experience with the one dungeon I did stack in. I’m also not saying that stacking is horrible or anything of the sort. It’s not my preferred playstyle, is all.

And I didn’t make assumptions regarding dungeon design. I enjoy watching and reading up on video games, as a whole, and happened across a video interview between IGN and Kevin Miller regarding dungeons (published Aug 2012). It was a specific interview done while showing off Twilight Arbor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcK6NnXwhIw

And I do have fun running dungeons. To each their own… but I think it’s important to understand that everyone enjoys different things about any MMO.

I think its important to realize that the designers showing off their content in an interview is going to be pretty laid back. Notice for instance the pov player equiping a rare level bow. They also spend more time on mobs to explain the mechanics of dungeon mobs, and other similar stuff.

Its also important to understand that the dungeons have been out a year and a half with little/no change. We are on full farm mode on them because there is little reason to do them except personal satisfaction (often derived from Speed clears, but also by other stuff like naked runs or solo/duos) and in game currency rewards. If you wanted to play like when the game first came out, you probably should have played more back then because its not going back to that. The mechanics of the game are pretty well understood, as are the most optimal rotations for the various class and builds out there.

Stooperdale.3560:

Maybe not six metas but there’s usually someone who posts something with shadow arts, and someone who posts something with acrobatics. Speed runners can post up pure dps builds all day long but it doesn’t help the casual players who are running PUG dungeons, don’t know tactics, and haven’t the skill to make every dodge.

They won’t ever get that skill if they don’t run good builds. Toughness and vitality are crutches that people learn to lean on. Not a problem with solo content, but in group content you have your crippled build: you are letting the team down. You don’t have the practice in running a proper meta build so can’t just swap and adjust. Just go with the meta build and take your lumps and get better.

It’s not a glitch, its a feature.

Miszou.3158:

Rising Dusk.2408:

If you’re doing Fractals at character level 38 in blues and greens I have no doubt it would be a nightmare. Sure it upscales, but you’d be a huge burden on your team, if not a considerable reason for failure en masse. Definitely get to max level, gear out in exotics, and then try again. Scaling can’t make up for the differences in gear tiers or the differences in having gear not your level or in a lot of things really. You probably don’t even have all of your utility skills unlocked yet.

Well, this begs the obvious question… why are Fractals even available to noobs, if the gear available at that level isn’t good enough, even after scaling up?

Most are easy enough once you know how to do them. They are available early so that people can level alts. The game in general punishes lack of knowledge: Mechanically speaking its not hard, you just have to know what to do. The needing full traits and exotic gear is to give you a buffer of survival so you don’t die to a single mistake, and deal enough damage to kill the enemy fast.

Miszou: You need to take a step back and learn how to play the game instead of jumping into endgame content. This means learning the interface, the mechanics, your class, what the gear and traits mean for your build, AND getting to level cap and gearing your character in proper level of gear (exotic at the very least, its cheap and easy to get once you are 80). Go do some world exploration and run around doing hearts and dynamic events, and not the zerg train ones either. Read/watch some guides, and THEN you will be hopefully ready for endgame content like dungeon explore modes and fractals (yeah, you can do them before then, but you have less gear meaning you have to know the content to get it done properly)..

Shinzou.1534:

I forgot about how the party disbands when the leader leaves the party. I wish they would make it to be more like WoW in that regard, in which the leader role is just handed to another party member when the leader leaves. I am very surprised the game has been out so long and this fix hasn’t been done yet.

I am in a fairly large and friendly guild. It is just the guild at the time of me running fractals were more into going afk for an hour or more in Lorimar’s Pass, wating for the event, than running any dungeons.

My guild is the same way, whenever there is time gated open world content that is new they like to camp that crap. I much prefer the LS stuff when its not time gated instances. Its so bad I’ve had to kick guildies from guild/pug combination runs because they decided to go do a world boss like karka instead of arriving in the dungeon in a timely fashion. Its what I get for being in a large casual/play how you want guild. At least the pacific members are into dungeons, got to stay up till 2 to play with them though lol.

As for fractals, my first experience was pretty decent, iirc we ended up with swamp, dredge, the annoying dolphin swim fractal, and then instance leader had to leave and instead of staying in group/afk he left it killing our progress. Was kind of on the easy/rough side for me just jumping into it. Most of it was on the easy side, but the mechanics tend to be on the screw up: you die side of things. Which I’m fine with since the open world and non arah dungeons tend to be too far on the easy side of things (though I can’t stand the CoE lasers, they the bane of my existence, I can’t jump worth crap).

I don’t really enjoy fractals that much due to the time it can take, and I’m not really into the gear grind aspect of it. Mechanically I like most paths, even dredge is fun for me.

Well if you were factually truthful they had 2 temp dungeons in there, one of them was even pretty good. The other was added as a replacement TA path, and they also added fractals of the mists which can’t really be called anything other than dungeons. There has even been new fractals added since those launched… yeah, stop being misleading about your gripes.

I wonder if they will fix the broken rail in CM and take away our LoS safe box. That and frost’s rock and the gear in SEp3.

Error.6290:

Stooperdale.3560:

“i want a challange when i play dungeons, i team up 5 ppl to do something challanging Not to group farm… that i can do in orr.”

Almost all dungeons in all MMOs eventually lose challenge and are repeated for loot rather than difficulty. In other MMOs the difficulty is based around gear that lets the tank take more damage and the healer heal more. In MMOs without down leveling a top level character is often taken in to ensure the farming lower level dungeons is successful.

In GW2 players don’t need gear, they only need the right tactics for the dungeon to be made easy. Anyone who picks up tactics from walk throughs before going inside is immediately losing some of the challenge, but that’s surely not the designer’s fault?

Ye.. standing in a corner and AFK whit 1 on auto is hard. and press F when somone go down. Super hard tactics.
Most bosses just have a large health pool. Nothing needs to be cured or applied.
Maybe some boss who force u to dodge alot and u need to give vigor to party?
Maybe a Really long Stun that force u to give stability to party?
You see where i am going? bosses should not be all about DMG and evade core abilitys, maybe u need some CD’s to be timed right or boons applied to make the ecounter more team based rather then “if i dodge right we have nothing to worry about” (i know some bosses have boons that Helps if you remove, but ye… zerkers don’t care much about that just takes a few secs longer)

Well stability doesn’t do anything to remove stuns, and it doesn’t last long enough to proactively use it as protection. Thus the enemy would have to telegraph the stun move (like they do currently) and then its just easier to dodge the attack or use normal blinds/aegis to not even worry about it. Some bosses already give nasty effects, but normal skill use or other party members if traited correctly gets rid of it easy enough. Most classes have access to vigor, and the ones that don’t have other passive/active defenses going for them, or in an organized group somebody whose build in addition to being the meta dps does a good job of protecting the team.

The interplay that you are wanting is already there, you just are leaching off of the others putting up boons for you, or worse you are just spamming on rotation and not even knowing what is going on (admittedly its so fast its hard to really see all of the things happening all at once).

George Steel.1804:

I’m a huge fan of organized, tough PvE content. I was a “hardcore” raider back in my high school days when * *cough * * there was a popular MMO out there..

It’s not even so much the vertical progression that entertains me or gets me excited, it’s the conquering of challenges with a team, testing out builds, min/maxing, etc..

There’s just nothing in this game when it comes to PvE or group progression. We group up, skip trash pulls, and zerk down bosses. Again, I’m not talking stat/gear progression. I’d be happy just earning new prestigious titles, skins, new visual backpieces. But we’ve been stuck grinding away the same old dungeons. For what? .0001% chance at a precursor?

I just don’t see it happening in GW2. It’s been a year and all we’ve seen is a Tequatl (and rumors about “upcoming” open world boss) improvements. But that’s open-world zerg content, another topic altogether

With the emergence of some new titles (see: Wildstar) and even existing with a similar F2P model (see: Rift) I’m starting to feel drawn away from the bland content we get on the “hardcore PvE” side in GW2.

I would like to point out that much of your rose colored glasses concerning “challenging” raids in that other game cover up the fact that 97 percent of it was gear checks and the remaining was split between players being able to be herded like cats by the raid leader, their ability to use macros or at least know their rotation, and being smart enough to not stand in the fire.

In that other game sure, there was tons of things to do, but really it was just the same old same old grinding out dungeons/raids hoping for a drop that you can use and hoping somebody else doesn’t “need” the only thing out of the random loot distribution that you actually can use.

Wildstar is made by the same company as gw2, draw your own conclusions. Rifts while fun for a bit, is quickly tiring. IDK if the population has recovered since they changed models, but last I checked it was nearly dead everywhere.

LordByron.8369:

any dungeon requires to watch youtube and understand some rotations….

At that time you can almost turn off your monitor.

Trying to play a dungeon for the first time without knowing the stupid AI mechanics and animations is way more than difficult.

A really good pvp or www team trying a dungeon for the first time would wipe in few seconds.

Once you see a dungeon once, you can do any dungeon with minimal effort.
The exact reason why this game lack longevity.

Putting random events would ve helped with minimal effort, but they instead choose to add gear grinding that requires almost 0 work.

The problem with a good pvper or wvwer is that none of their skills translates into dungeons. PVE players run into the problem that open world content is pretty easy so their skills are often lacking. All 3 have the problem that their builds aren’t suited for dungeons.

The gear grind is optional, all dungeons (other than fractals with agony) don’t need anything more than exotics (and good players can do them in blues and greens, or naked for that matter).

Ends.9260:

I have raided in MMO’s since EQ. I am currently starting up in GW2 and went to AC on story mode. I expect when I walk into my first dungeon in a complex new MMO to effecitively train me in skills a bit. Provide me with examples of strats I need to know and not be particularly difficult. My experience playing AC on story mode without doing a bunch of research was a nightmare. I do not intend to revisit dungeons again until level 80. It was a very unenjoyable experience.

AC story is good training. Some traps to avoid, some aoes to dodge out of, some fights that require dungeon objects (boulders), some use of CC to make the fight against the lovers easier. Condition spamming enemies to show the importance of cleansing. yeah, it didn’t’ hold your hand and out right tell you what you need to do, players are expected to either discover what to do through trial and error, or just spend 20 seconds on google…

It was probably bad for you because you didn’t really know how to play your class, and neither did your party members. The open world is too easy and the pass/fail environment of dungeons is a shock to some players. Story modes by and large are super easy too, so if you had trouble with it you might need to look up info on how to play your class, or get some friends in your guild to help you with figuring it out.

The biggest thing you can probably learn in this game is dodge = no damage most of the time. You can’t facetank much if you want to remain effective too.