Guild Wars 2

We’re having a LS set in Kessex hills, but we aren’t going behind the tengu wall or into the wizards tower – I think this really sums up what’s wrong with the direction of the LS atm. There’s so many intriguing, unfinished stories already in the game, and yet we are getting a failed joker-type villain who has long overstayed her welcome.

Leaving instead of kicking the guard was kind of unnecessary. Whispering him afterwards was just mean for the sake of it. So yeah I’d say your being a scumbag. Kicking someone who isn’t keeping up is fine, but gratuitous insults aren’t particularly constructive. Some people call me a care bear for that attitude, though.

1. If you are getting kicked for being new, it’s very likely your own fault for joining and exp group and/or not being up front about the fact that you are new. I was never once kicked from a dungeon when going for my DM title, and that’s mostly due to the fact that I was careful about the groups that I joined and made sure I said at the get-go that it was my first time.

2. If you don’t make the skip, ask politely if someone will run with you. If you’ve already told them you’re new and they’ve allowed you to stay, chances are there will be at least one person who will help you through.

3. Keep in mind that having an experienced player take you through is a favor, not a requirement. It’s very possible for a group of 5 new players to make it through any of the dungeons, especially now with all the guides out there. Since you are asking a random stranger for a favor, you should follow his lead and keep questions to a minimum. If you don’t like following, the start the group yourself and lead.

Part of the problem also I think is that engi is a really underplayed class, so while many people will recognize the ele fire field, it might not be obvious that the fire bomb is a fire field. Same with healing turret and its water fields. Unless you’ve played or played a lot with an engi you probably recognize those as fields, since they are so short and don’t have an obvious radius. You could attempt explaining it, but I’ve found in general pugs are allergic to suggestions about how to play their class.

I feel your pain though. I usually console myself with the fact that at least he’s running wells, and not minions. I’ve all but given up on getting blast combos off in pugs, which is why I run staff on my ele and not s/d.

Since it’s bug it a little finicky, and you have to make sure everyone is right up against the tree, but pretty consistently (for me at least) the champion won’t attack. The vet usually dies too quick for me to notice what he’s up to.

Exploit – TA Up, behind the tree before the last boss. It causes both enemies to do no attacks, and stand perfectly still.

Not an exploit – AC, stacking for spider, causing her to do her melee moves rather then ranged moves. As Nike pointed out above, some bosses have more punishing melee attacks (the butcher from hotw also comes to mind), some have lethal ranged attacks. Getting a boss to do their most manageable move set is a strategy, not an exploit.

PvE

1. Condition caps/unshakeable, making debuffing viable.
2. Tradeable/salvageable fractal skins and rings
3. Dungeon final gold reward re-evaluation. (Example: ACp3 should not reward more than SEp2

The ruby orbs were more because I’m cheap, rather then optimization, but I’m saving up for scholar. I think I have an irrational fear of not slotting blink, but I’ll play around with it. Quick question, is feedback long enough for lupi’s entire barrage when untraited?

I was also thinking of taking offhand sword for the block, which seems a lot more useful then the daze on pistol.

For utilities I was thinking blink, feedback, and mantra of concentration. One mesmer I ran with earlier today was running with was also running the mantra heal and traiting mantras, I’m wondering if that might be more worth it over ether feast.

I run mesmer, 0/30/0/30/10. Ruby orbs and and still only exotics, except an ascended pistol. Usually run s/f and s/p, but I’ve been playing around with offhand sword.

Soloing is ok, which path do you think is easiest to solo up to lupi? I was thinking path 2.

I’ve gotten to the point in my dungeon career where I know the dungeons well. I know the mechanics, I know what I need to do, and I can perform fairly consistently. However, I have a lot of room for improvement, and I want to take the next step.

Most of the pugs I run into, everyone ranges lupi. I’ve only been in a few groups where there was someone willing to teach, or a few who just solo melee’d. I join in melee then, but I usually die rather quickly because I need more practice recognizing and timing his animations.

I was wondering if you all had any advice for how I can find a group to practice melee’ing lupi? I don’t want to impose on experienced groups, but I also don’t want to go it alone if I can avoid it. I am a good listener and willing to learn, I’m just not confident enough in my skills yet to join and elite dungeon guild. How should I take the next step?

I use to take one with air for open world roaming when I didn’t want to use up a utility slot with signit of air. Now this trait is completely useless, instead of mostly useless. 1.25 seconds of super speed is like an extra dodge roll with out the evade. I could just take 10 points in arcana and pick up vigor on crit to get a superior effect. I honestly don’t know what this change was trying to achieve.

+++++++1 to female asura armor. I got the arah pants for my guard just because they looked a bit skirt-like. The new ponytail hairstyle also helps her read as feminen. The problem is many of the female armors, particularly light armors, are sexualised in reference to human anatomy. Think about the winged light armor – it would need to be totally redesigned to make sense on a charr or an asura. I don’t think they need to do it for all the armors, but give us at least a few options (cultural armor especially) to look more girly on non-humanoid characters.

It seems that in today’s patch, closest enemy targeting was changed to prioritize champion mobs even if they are farther away then vets. I found this out today while doing the harpy fractal, where I would try to target the golem closest to me, only to find myself constant targeting the invulnerable raving asura. And again at malcore’s leap, I was targeting the invulnerable malcore and not the enemy closest to me.

Besides the obvious issue of prioritizing enemies which can’t be damaged, I don’t believe this is the way closest enemy targeting should work. Tab targeting, which cycles through enemies, could benefit from prioritizing champ mobs, but there are times when I simply want to target the thing close to me – and that’s what closest enemy targeting should be. I hope this change is reconsidered- for the moment I’ve resorted to click targeting because as the targeting works now, too often I end up targeting something I did not intend.

I don’t understand why anet keeps these balance changes secret until the day of the patch. LS I get, they want to keep the story a surprise, but I don’t see a reason to not announce changes maybe a week or a few days ahead of time.

Their attempt at transparency in the pvp forums was a joke. All they said was that blood magic was getting “some buffs”. That tells me nothing, it’s literally non-information, I have no way to judge if the change will be enough, too much, implimented in the wrong way… The dev was pressed for more specifics, and all he would say is “trust us”. He didn’t seem to get why we would be suspect of vague promises of future buffs, after getting burned few months ago, so to speak.

I’ve said it before, but I really thing anet could benefit from a pvp PTR. It was brought up in the last SOTG, and the idea was dismissed because it took a month or so on live for people to figure out the power of warriors after they got buffed – so a PTR wouldn’t necessarily “catch everything”. All I could think with of with that statement was a writer going to a publisher with an un-edited manuscript, and when the publisher asked if he would have his paper edited, he would say, “No, I had some editors once but a few spelling mistakes slipped through, so I think it’s pointless.”

At least it’s not an unintentional nerf. And for the sake of being reasonable I’m going to assume that the discrepancy between the hype and the actual numbers is a lack of understanding on anet’s part,and not some attempt to decieve. And I think that’s probably true – in the months I’ve been playing my necro and watching the balance changes, it really seems like the balance team doesn’t have a clear understanding of the necromancer class. I’m glad this change wasn’t as disastrous as the last one, but it’s still is a blunder in my mind.

My very very least favorite is SE path two, mostly for the same reasons people are giving for hotw. The first room is just massive hp bags,with the added annoyance of them being dredge. The icing on the cake is after you clear the room of the millions of dredge, you have the joy of watching the npc walk all the way across the room to get a rock, and walk slowly back.

I don’t really like AC p3 tbf, but only because of the timed graveling event. That whole dungeon path is probably easier then CoF P1, but it takes 3 times as long because the essence collecting event is much longer than it should be.

There is no direct correlation between AP and skill, obviously. But as was said above its a decent indicator of how long someone has played. And so yes, there will be people who have played for 2 weeks who are already very competent in dungeons, and there will be people who have played since beta who are awful. But in general, people who have been playing for a while will be better then people who are totally new. You have to think of pugging as rolling the dice – if someone joins your group with <1k ap, the chance that they will be good is very small, whereas someone with 2 or 3k AP is much more likely to be good. I’d rather bet on rolling a seven (metaphorically speaking) then trying for snake eyes. It’s nothing personal, it’s just risk management.

The first few weeks it was pretty much a crap shoot. Now I’m getting about the same proportion of good/bad parties as I did with gw2lfg. Haven’t touched pugging fractals with it yet, though.

If there was no demand, there would be no sellers. It’s entirely the fault of people who take sellers up on their offers that this exists. Like guang said, be angry at the people who are too lazy to do the dungeon rather the people taking money from willing fools.

Brayzz.6524:

30/10/30 has 100% crit chance… use Warhorn 5 and wells go in DS 100% crit.

It has terrible crit chance when using dagger 1, which is where a lot of dps comes from.

If you’re looking into harder pve stuff such as dungeons, I recommend getting dagger/warhorn. I’m not a big fan of axe- the dps is not as good as dagger , the range is not great, and its single target. It stacks vulnerability pretty quickly, but that’s about it. It is, however, our only other direct damage-focused weapon, so it is an option for your swap. I prefer to take scepter for those times I need to get a quick breather out of melee – I’ll use feast of corruption (which scales with direct damage), then go into DS till I can swap into dagger again. I run 30/25/0/0/15 personally, but as long as you take 30 in spite and stay away from death/blood magic, you’ll end up with a decent power build. For utilities I always take consume conditions, and usually go with well of power, well of suffering, and blood is power. Signet of spite, well of darkness, and the spectral skills are all situationally useful.

Bhawb.7408:

Pendragon.8735:

The reason why I want those things is that because face-tanking has little to do with skill. Without consistent stability, dodges, invuln, you are pretty much eating burst regardless what your strategy is, and thus fights just come down to if your stats/build is good enough to outlast the damage, instead of having something you can actually do inside the fight, skill based, or reactionary, that can mute some of the damage to turn the tide.

Face tanking doesn’t have to be non-skill based, its just about how they implement it. Frankly, the way they’ve implemented damage avoidance is even less skillful, how much skill does it take to press 3 on a thief, with constant dodging? Yet on other classes, the abilities are much more well designed.

It all comes down to how they do it, and I don’t want them to band-aid fix us by slapping vigor, stability, and other boons all over our skills and call it a day, killing all of our flavor in the process.

I just don’t see face-tanking as viable in something like 48 fractals. There are traps in dungeons that will insta-down you, regardless of your HP, that require some form of complete damage mitigation. It’s clear that there are environmental hazards and boss attacks in high end pve that were designed with block/evade/distortion/invulnerability in mind. Unless we are given monstrous HP/DS, I don’t think face tanking will be a realistic strategy in those scenarios.

The only thing I imagine they could do is maybe a special ability with spectal armor or DS that granted protection, scaling with the damage relative to the percent health you would lose. For example if you were to take 25% of your health in damage, it might mitigate 15%, a 50% hit might be reduced by 30%, 75% by 60%, and a 1-hit KO would be completely negated. (obviously not the perfect numbers, but you get the idea). So it wouldn’t help against sustained DPS, but the bigger the burst the more you would absorb. That might preserve the face tanking flavor while still giving us some form of one-hit damage immunity.

Mentioning in a livestream a day before patch that an entire dungeon path is getting nuked, and explaining the reason for it in a minor subforum is not what I would call adequate communication.

It’s more like they blew up a city park and replaced it with a big industrial complex, at least from looking at the trailer.

There’s a difference between non-optimal and just plain stupid. The level of stupid a condi spec mesmer with scepter in a dungeon is equivalent to trying to hard carry a team in LoL with a philo stone and 5 warmogs. It’s not creative, it just bad. You have to either be trolling or not understand the mechanics of the game on any level to play a build like that. I don’t expect the devs to be perfect, but I expect them to have a basic understanding of their own game.

The decision was made to replace Twilight Arbor forward/up with the new, level 80 dungeon. I personally strongly disagree with this decision, but I’ve read and recognize the reasons Anet gave. However, there is one part of this that is very frustrating – we are being told less then 24 hours before the patch.

As much as that last boss drove me crazy, the path itself was may favorite of the three. The mesmer boss was a genuinely tricky fight, and the water spouts was an interesting little puzzle. If I had known it was being deleted from the game, I would have set aside time to enjoy it while I still could. I would have taken through some of my friends who hadn’t done it yet, who will now never get the chance to experience it.

Next time a dungeon path is being permanently removed, I’d like to ask anet to give at least a few days warning. I understand wanting to keep the living story a surprise, but logging in to find a dungeon path completely removed is not the sort of surprise I enjoy.

WereDragon.6083:

I never even played the path, yet I have little care it’s being removed….

If you haven’t even done the path I don’t rate your opinion on whether it should have been removed or not.

I love that his reason for removing this path is that it’s one of the “least run” dungeons.

CoF p1 is one of the most run dungeons, but it is absolutely awful. An explorable (read: challenging, end game, intended for coordinated groups) dungeon that takes 10 minutes to complete with 5 necros in blue gear is much worse than a tricky path with some interesting mechanics and puzzle elements but slightly borked final boss. The number of people running is a horrible metric of dungeon quality. It just tells you which are the most farmable/exploitable.

When they say they read the dungeon forums, they mean they scan the topic titles every few weeks. Unless they some how interpreted “The final boss needs some tweaking” to mean “this path has no worth and it needs to be removed from the game.”

And even if you aren’t willing to do something as simple as make the spider adds on the final boss despawn, who cares if its the least played path? Is the content so horrific that it needs to be deleted from the game? What in the world is so wrong with having 4 paths of TA?

This is the kind of stuff I wish they would be more transparent about. Having a cryptic message in the dungeon subforum a month ago from Colin about TAkittenbeing “high on the priority list for revamps”, and then the day before patch day finding out that revamp =nuke and replace is frustratting beyond belief. There is zero communication between the community and the people working on dungeons atm, and updates like this makes it clear why that is a very bad thing.

Please, please devs, read and post in the dungeon subforum once in a while.

Open up the contacts page (default bound to Y), and click the second tab – the LFG tool. Click on Ascalonian Catacombs, and look for a group doing “story mode”. If you don’t see one, don’t be afraid to list your own. As stated above, if someone else in your group opens the dungeon, you just need to be in the Plains of Ashford and you should see a pop-up window allowing you to enter. (Sometimes it bugs, if you don’t the pop-up just relog and it will come up.) To open the dungeon yourself, you will need to go to the dungeon entrance.

I wonder if he also harasses people who wander around mining nodes and getting vistas. Or is that a part of “his game mode” more so than the occasional organized fight?

Sanderinoa.8065:

Arc DLad.2194:

i’ll give you all the fractal eapons in my bank (18 of the 19 available in doubles) for a fractal sword which i have been trying to get since fractal launch.

sincerly,
an unlucky thief player

I would just wait for the higher levels and potential fractal weapon boxes to be released, everybody suffers from the fractal curse.

Sincerely,
A lucky mesmer who had to salvage unwanted fractal weapons for inventory’s sakes.

And then you can get a cleric weapon box and have a sword you never use

I am almost positive that the top 3 servers don’t out number the 21 other servers combined. If anything, T1 is part of the “vocal minority”.

Berner.7289:

mexay.3902:

People here are missing the point. It’s not about being ‘elitist’

It’s about people reading and allowing the group leader to accept invites. Plain and simple.

As soon as you use the LFG tool, its not your group and you’re not the leader. The sooner you learn that, the less whiny you’ll be on the forums.

It is my group, that’s why I have the option to accept or reject your offer to join. If I don’t like you, I’m going to kick you. I’ll kick you at the start, so we don’t waste each others time. If that really bothers you, block me. Instead of shoving your ideas of what pugging should be down my throat and co-opting my group, why don’t you let me play my way and ill let you play yours?

mexay.3902:

So I’ve already had significant difficulties with the LFG tool. It doesn’t work. Sure, the functionality is there and it’s great, however…

The people using it are not using it correctly. People put up posts with nothing in it. People simply join groups without reading the post.

We need to place better restrictions on it. Hell just something like accepting people before they join. I had FIVE different players join my group multiple times for Arah Path 2, just now and they clearly hadn’t read the party message. It clearly stated:

EXP ONLY. 3k+ AP path 2 Arah. Speed run. . No PVT.

Now, I don’t like to be ‘that guy’ but I’m one of those players who likes to get things done with minimal kitten -ing about. That means I ask for experienced players who know what they’re doing, running decent gear, who are likely to understand mechanics.

The lfg tool functions, but it doesn’t work. I should be able to accept someone before they enter. Let me see their class and achievement points before they join. Chances are if I’m looking for an Arah P2 run and someone with 500 achievement points joins, they aren’t going to know the run.

The tool is, in it’s current state, a Pile of Putrid Essence for anyone who is looking for an experienced group.

You have the option to kick them – don’t feel bad for kicking people who can’t read.

Check their achievement points when they join. Ask them to ping gear. If they don’t comply, or there gear is not what you want, kick them. It will take approximately 15 seconds longer than if they couldn’t have joined in the first place.

Anet doesn’t want to “encourage” a gear-check culture, so they wont officially implement anything like that, but you have every right to form the party you want, whether it be “zerk only meleeing lupi” or “~~all classes / newbies welcome~~ <3 <3”.

Rockin a much more traditional shaman look now, I love how the wings match the Malefacterym dagger.

Feathered headpiece, avian shoulders, shadow chest-piece, tactical gloves, tactical leggings, arah boots. malefacterym, godskull dagger, deathwish.

Pugs have a harder time changing things in their skill bar then dodging alfa’s aoe, for some reason. I can count on one hand the number of times anyone in a pug group has used a reflect skill without me requesting it. The idea of leaving someone in a cutscene is utterly absurd to them, and most of the time someone has run in and triggered it before you have time to explain the strategy. It’s not an impossible path, its more that the most commonly run paths of AC, TA, SE, COF and COE are all very, very easy for pugs.

Kain Francois.4328:

Do we STILL not know what the hell Atherblade motivations are? And not one of the prisoners told us ANYTHING?

Oh wait.. We do? “Because they don’t want Scarlet to kill them”? Wow, that’s kinda unrealistic in a world where everything else is trying to kill you anyways. It doesn’t really seem like a good way to raise an army.

Terrible, terrible villain…. I hope she’s not in the dungeon path.

We don’t know yet, though there are some theories out there. The one I like best takes into consideration the fact that the aetherblades are composed of charr, human, and norn – the same races as were displaced by the molten alliance. Scarlett may have orchestrated the molten alliance not only to build her weapons, but perhaps to raise an army from the desperate, displaced masses (who had no idea that Scarlett was the cause of their homelessness). Some have asked, why then were molten alliance fighting alongside the aetherblades in Scarlett’s invation? They actually never fight “side by side”, the aetherblades are teleported in only before or after a wave of molten alliance minions.

That’s all still speculation, but the point is, there is definitely reason to believe there are compelling motives, just not ones that have been relieved yet. It may be right to object, though, that they’ve been stringing it along too long, to the point where most people have lost interest in following the story.

From a necro : +1

If conditions were made relevant in pve, you could stop playing wack-a-mole with trait lines trying to force build variety by treating the cause instead of the symptom.

Nilkemia.8507:

Not again. You could’ve brought back Faolain, and instead you bring back her? Come on.

Sad thing is, Scarlet is pretty much a Faolain clone except with magitech instead of mesmer powers, and minions whom are technology based instead of nightmare based.

In fact, they could’ve had Faolain be the mastermind behind all of this rather than Scarlet. She could’ve used her mesmer magic (or one of her courtiers) to play middleman for getting the Dredge and Flame Legion together, she could’ve been involved with the Aetherblades since the Nightmare Court and Inquest were working together already, and while going to Kryta would be quite a stretch, I could see Faolain just trying to mess up other peoples’ celebrations just because she could, since she also seemed to have the same “for the evulz” attitude that Scarlet has right now.

Well…as long as we can still play the old dungeon paths as well as the new ones, it won’t bother me so much.

Faolain >>> Scarlett. I like to believe there’s some evil mesmer shenanigans going on with Queen Jenna and Countess Anise, so tying that in with Faolain might not be such a stretch. Reading Scarlett’s backstory, she really has this mary-sue feel to her that puts me off a bit.

In terms of the dungeon, twilight arbor has some of the most unique and beautiful environmental design. So many of the other dungeons are dark and grim, but TA is quite bright and verdant. I would hate to see it become so much like SE.

We’ll have to wait and see if it really is a replacement. If it is…I guess its a step up from 2 week dungeons, but nuking old dungeons to simply replace them isn’t exactly what I was hoping for in terms of permanent content. I was nervous when the dev came in here and said TA was one of the first on the list for a “revamp”, because like Nike said above it’s just the final boss that needs help….but I’ll try not to worry until we get more info.

Darek.1836:

???

Exactly.

Not that I don’t sympathize with your point, but it doesn’t help to start your argument with “I haven’t played, but”. Try playing it first, this will give you some evidence to present rather than speculation.

I could bearly stand Scarlett’s voice for the 10 minutes it took to do her playhouse thing. If she’s going to be a permanent addition to the TA explorable mode….. :/

TheAmpca.1753:

Whatever size server you are on you will always being playing with similar sized servers

Huh?

More blue weapons

Sounds like miscommunication between pr and devs to me, but it’d be nice to have some clarification. :/ though for that you’d probably need to post in GD.

Punny.9210:

rfdarko.4639:

Punny.9210:

I know it’s a bad for other servers but it’s pretty good so far in my tier lol.

SoR always play full map blob but this patch force them to split out their blob which help BG a lot because we are consisted a lot of small / roaming guilds…..

I personally would love to keep it like this ….. I’m tired of full map blob …

Of course its fine in T1, you have a nearly even match up. The problem with the bloodlust buff is that it makes blow-outs even worse, and makes even small scale skirmishes imbalanced. It’s great that T1 is having fun with it, but that’s 3/24 of the servers.

I understand but i’m curious You think without bloodlust you would have won the match ? I just feel like if you already lose it’s just not gonna make any different anyway due to the numbers

Yeah, so lets just give the winning team arrow carts that do 4x damage and golems with 4x health because hey, they’re just going to win anyway, right? Who cares? Let’s continue to make matches even more uneven because its a totally lost cause.

T1 is a totally different world – PPT actually means something, people are actually invested in the weekly scores. In lower tiers, most cases the match is decided at reset. If winning was what mattered, why would anyone on the loosing team bother to play when they’re getting pacmaned? At least before the buff, I could gear up and eat my food/wrench buffs and find some pretty even fights. In 2v2s or 3v3s, giving your opponents a few ascended trinkets worth of stats can make a difference. We can overcome it, but it’s just one more thing, more salt in wound. It’s the opposite of what we need.

Punny.9210:

I know it’s a bad for other servers but it’s pretty good so far in my tier lol.

SoR always play full map blob but this patch force them to split out their blob which help BG a lot because we are consisted a lot of small / roaming guilds…..

I personally would love to keep it like this ….. I’m tired of full map blob …

Of course its fine in T1, you have a nearly even match up. The problem with the bloodlust buff is that it makes blow-outs even worse, and makes even small scale skirmishes imbalanced. It’s great that T1 is having fun with it, but that’s 3/24 of the servers.

Nice job everyone! Amazing to see so many people in our mumble, thanks for everyone who came in and organized with us.

(not my screeny, this was posted on the fb page)

The buff/stomp ppt seems to have created an interesting meta shift in T1…. But pretty much just T1 for what I can tell. In pacman match ups the buff just further reinforces the imbalance, and has the added effect of making even small skirmishes more one sided (which was really the only thing you could look forward to on weeks you were getting stomped). If I had any reason to believe the league system would make for more even match ups it might be ok, but it seems exactly the opposite. The imbalances will be worse, and we’ll be stuck with that and the buff for the entire season.

It ruffles my feathers a little that the introduced this huge change, and then are “locking it in” after only two weeks. Two weeks is enough time to tell if things are (or aren’t) as bad as they seem – but then there’s no time to fix anything significant. I can only hope this plays out very differently than I expect, because we are living with these changes for the next few months regardless of feedback.