Guild Wars 2

I am relatively new to necro and at the same time am striving for my Dungeoneer title (Why you ask? October 23rd cannot come soon enough). I have come to a place where I need to run HotW regularly and P2 and P3 are great….. until the final bosses.

On land I run DS/dagger build with wells and it is shockingly fun to play and remarkably pug resistant. Once I get in the water the wells are among the worst designed pieces of crap in the game. I mean who doesn’t want a big blob obstructing your entire view of the boss that actually never gets triggered or does any damage? And 1 flipping elite and it is plague? I mean who doesn’t want to see sub 100 ticks of bleeding on a boss that has an ungodly amount of HP? And seemingly so little life force drains that I am almost never in DS.

Anyway, enough complaining…. what do you guys run on necro underwater and what sort of rotations do you use? (keep in mind I almost exclusively pug these paths so I can’t exactly rely on a solid team and min/max myself)

This was addressed by the designer of the dungeons 2 years ago. Please see here for his opinion:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Will-the-new-update-stop-skipping/first#post1205684

Where art though Robert Hrouda?

I haven’t learned to legitimately solo Lupi after the new auto attack but still sell p1 in (ch)easy mode.

Step 1 – take thief and solo up through the entities (thief is made for this part of the dungeon with stealth for easy skips, blinds for the spider mobs, dagger storm to reflect the turrets, heart seeker to close gap on Ooze and invigorating precision for the Crystalline Entities)

Step 2 – Pay for help on tar (usually 1g * 3 people) and before everyone leaves dungeon switch to guardian

Step 3 – Take guardian and one shot Lupi then run to last boss where Wall of Reflect is great supplement for reflecting crystals while fighting Jotun.

Step 4 – Get paid mad loots despite using almost no skill

I am sure most of the really good players in the forum here may shun my sorry money making technique, but if you are just doing it for the gold I can honestly say this takes very little skill to pull off and you can sell p1 in the 6-7g range on NA pretty regularly.

Unfortunately I am on NA (though mostly play with oceanic and euro friends due to my time slot).

Too bad as I would like to increase my list of friends who are bored, still looking for fun and in to trying new things. That recipe led to the best part of my dating life after college.

Being very bored with the game I did something I swore I would never do and made a necro. I felt the necro hate first hand as I was booted from a dungeon for the first time.

Of course it was because the entire group wiped in about 5 seconds and my solo of the boss was taking an ungodly amount of time (well over 5 minutes) while they all begged me to kill myself. Kicked with the boss at 20%.

I find that I am having a surprisingly fun time with the class doing surprisingly little damage. #necrolife

I am trying to download the latest update only to have it stuck on 21%. It says it has reached the “playable” state but is effectively frozen. I have tried several times to no avail.

The good news is that if you can get just two other friends with you then you should be protected from getting kicked in the majority required kick system now. The one recommendation I would make as well is when people join to verify that they read the LFG completely (i.e. say something to the effect of “we will be killing everything in here and it may take a while. Are you sure you are up for that?”).

In general the LFG is a complete crap shoot which is why you see things like “ping gear” as people are doing whatever they can to filter in/out people for their groups. Don’t give up on the game yet, it is fun and while the dungeons are old and abandoned by devs there is still a lot of fun to be had in them.

What if you could buy temporary account wide AR in exchange for an infused ring? Say +5 or +10 for the day… that doesn’t help second accounts, but at least then you can take some alts in for some fun and have a use for the plethora of infused rings you are probably using your alts to hold for you anyway.

There is really only 1 tough skip in P1 after the ooze. Ideally you would be running with your team that would include one of the above classes or mes or engi that can offer stealth and/or condi clear. If you end up needing to run by yourself I would recommend getting a boat load of harpy feathers and spy kits for just personal stealth by those mobs. I don’t have a necro so I can’t offer class specific advice, but those consumables make it easy to run this alone on any class.

Prepare for Guard light field over load as of tomorrow with Symbolic Avenger…. perhaps unwittingly some pugs guards will be more useful.

So we just successfully beat the Thaumanova boss only to be prevented from moving forward. The boss room stayed active, no chest and we could not move to the final fractal. Guess they fixed the skritt bug only to introduce a funner one.

Megaservers make it hard to tell how many instances of a map are actually open and therefore how many players are actually playing. You could be on the one instance of a map and so it seems like there are a lot because everyone heading to that map is in your instance.

Ideally they would create a Silverwastes Map with no enemies so that chest farming was much faster. Its too hard to do with all the enemies slowing me down from keeping up with the zerg.

LFG Zerk Ping Gear <1000AP

Pistol Whip and Cluster Bomb (lazy thief)

One other question…. is walling him still the way to go for phase 2 & 3? Wouldn’t reflecting his phase 3 Frenzied Blast occasionally give you a pretty big damage boost overall?

Wow…. only slightly faster than the 3 hour and 17 minute run I had. Nice job.

I joined an Arah “P1 exp” run yesterday. Exp meant they were looking for someone experienced to carry them apparently (necro, war, ele and ranger) and I barely qualify. On thief I attempted to stealth them to ooze, but no one blasted smoke fields nor provided swiftness at any point so it took us three attempts to make the run. Not too bad, right? At least they were nice people…

While I am explaining how the ooze works the ooze gets pulled. Despite multiple requests to melee, the warrior and I are the only ones meleeing which makes the bounces much more difficult. Somehow we pull it off without wiping…. again, not too bad.

Now for the rough part….. I tried to stealth the group to run to entities, but no one could make it for any amount of time when not fully stealthed. Like somehow in the 3 seconds of running without cover they would aggro and get downed. Over the course of the next 30+ minutes I ran 1 person at a time to the entities including needing to stealth rez a couple guys right near the end. The ranger kept running out of SR early and for no reason at all shooting stuff during the skip…. but we all finally made it.

I explained how the entities worked and said lets just not aggro too many and it should be easy. I went to the first light and said wait here for the fight to start. Instead they followed me to the Jotun and immediately aggroed the drakes. Me and the necro fought the entities while the other three fought the 2 drakes and 2 of them died.

We ran to tar and I explained the fight and the need for burns and ideally reflect/projectile defense… no torch for ranger, warrior didn’t know about long bow, but we can pull it off with ele I figure. I stand on the part where we are going to pull the tar after he spawns and explain the four fountains and to run back here when he appears. Before we can even stand on the 4 fountains, somehow 2 people get downed by the mini-tars. We rez them and spawn Shoggroth and then 3 people fight him and wipe in the middle of the floor while I yell “here” from the spot I had showed them a full 1 minute earlier. We didn’t have enough burns to 2 man him so we all wipe…. I couldn’t bear the thought of skipping everyone again so I left.

tl;dr; pugging Arah is not good for your blood pressure

If your end goal is to complete some of the hard content like dungeons I also would recommend against LB/SB Ranger. It sounds to me like your main challenge is knowing when to use active defenses (blocks/evades/etc). Your reflexes might not be as good as some others so you may never be soloing dungeons, but I think you should focus on learning the encounters. To do this I think PS Warrior is a great suggestion and I would throw Guardian in there too. PS gives you a role to play in the group while warrior is very forgiving even in full zerk gear and Guardian, though a bit more active during a fight, has plenty of things you can do to keep up blocks and blinds adding in condition cleanses even without requiring perfect timing. I think you will regret trying to go mostly ranged because it is really hard to share buffs and rez people when downed, not to mention that certain bosses will do different attacks when people are ranging and that can impact how your group deals with an encounter. Many groups won’t want someone in there ranging everything because even though your character may live a bit longer the overall group may have a harder time.

I think fractals can be a bit daunting for new people so I think incentivizing people to try different content is exactly the plan Anet has. I actually think it will be good to get more people exposed to fractals and then hopefully invested in them regularly. The more the broader community runs dungeons and fractals the more likely we are to see more content added in these spaces in the future. Doesn’t solve the OP’s problem, but a well worded LFG and some measurable criteria (some level of AR perhaps) could help there.

What if we could come up with some self rating system 1-5 and hope for both honesty and self-awareness? Then try to balance groups to have a diverse set of abilities.

Alternatively, maybe a series of questions… What is the fastest time you have completed dungeon path X? What traits would you use for boss Y? Can you solo Lupi or Subject Alpha or some other bosses? (Obviously these are hard to come up with but with some thought might help indicate level of proficiency).

Bottom line is it would be helpful to try to find some rating system to help make balanced teams so every team is roughly in the same place.

The times might be tough, but I have been trying forever to find a good group to teach me solid Arah chops. Put me down as a hopeful for Sunday. Happy to bring warrior/guard/ranger/ele/thief.

Good point. I hadn’t noticed the difference there, but since I only really pug I have a large amount of variables already in the mix. Maybe other people have felt a difference.

I have played both several times with no noticeable difference. My guess is there is some flawed thinking in there for the dungeons since the enemies are at the 45/75 too so they don’t have the power spike either. Different than when you are at lvl 45 fighting against lvl 46+ enemies in open world.

You haven’t had the “privilege” of playing with me when I am on ele or thief. I am awesomeNot true, I completely suck

I think in general the AP boundaries as you describe them are accurate, but that is really only broad generalizations. While it might be the slight majority that falls into those buckets, I don’t think it is all that accurate or worth using. I think the best indicator of how someone will do of the things that are visible to you either from the player’s character or party windows are a combination of weapon choices and food/utility buffs. Weapon choices are a little obvious, but not always visible until you start fighting. If someone comes in, consumes either the enemy specific potion for a dungeon or a solid DPS food/utility I find that they are way more likely to know what they are doing no matter their AP count. Anyway, that has been my experience as a steady pugger.

I’m bored and since I can’t play the content I would like to play I figured I would poke a little fun at the folks who took it away. Guess I will go back to sitting in front of Belka waiting for her to attack me now….

As Mordremoth’s corruption expands we find out that it was him that closed of the F/U path in Twilight Arbor. Well it turns out that wasn’t the only F/U he had up his sleeve. Mordremoth’s corruption knows no bounds as it bleeds all the way into Crucible of Eternity and Arah and slowly dungeons all over Tyria become closed off to our heros.

After such rave reviews of the Living Story we know what our players want. Login every two weeks for releases of LS3: The Dying Story where we slowly see where Mordremoth has infected next. Will it be Sorrow’s Embrace where where Tazza comes over and shares a communal bonfire with you instead of fighting you? Will it be Citadel of Flame as Ferrah forgets his dynamite and stares helplessly at the first gate? Only time will tell.

ANet note: We know you are worried about content being removed from the game, but fear not, only dungeons will be removed from the game and as we know this content is too hard for most of our player base and leads to a toxic community we felt like this would be a win-win. Worried about your Dungeon Master Title? Fear not, it is now on sale at the gem store for 2800 gems. Worried about those pesky dungeon tokens needed for a legendary weapon? Fear not, those are on sale at the gem store as well. Also, our “Fresh Start” changes for new players were so well received that we have applied those to all players and all completed dungeons will be reset in your achievement list so you can feel the excitement once again as you complete these dungeons.

Enjoy LS3: The Dying Story!

staring contest

Just my opinion here, but you will probably have a much easier time in pugs with a guardian that you will with most other classes. To a degree your team will “rely” on you for blinds/blocks/reflects/stability because the guard has pretty much the best defensive boons for the team. This isn’t a bad thing and don’t take it personally if you wipe or even if the team blames you unless they specifically ask you for something and you ignore it.

The thing is if you switched to any other class and didn’t have a guard in your group you wouldn’t have the defensive boons and would likely wipe just the same. The main idea here is to learn the encounters and you can do that as people mentioned above (putting in chat that you are learning on guard and looking for pointers). I made a guard with my second character and had some bad experiences with groups as I was learning (I specifically remember hearing “GUARD MORE BLOCKS!” before a rage quit). Honestly in pugs I never expect to get anything out of the other players unless we discuss first but once you learn the encounters on a guard you can do more to keep your team alive than pretty much any other class.

Bottom line is that it is a great class but just takes a little more time to be useful/good than some of the other classes (warrior for example is a really easy class to bring in parties because their party boons require less specific timing). Just keep learning and when you get better you will be able to carry bad groups through tough encounters.

P3: What if the lover’s crypt gave you the option of speeding it up. Say Tzark does his little spiel and then you have a dialog that asks “How quickly should we retrieve the essences?”. Then on some sliding scale (1-5 with one being current timing) you can choose, but the faster they collect the fast the mounds appear. Basically this would offer an option to reduce the time gate but in return would up the difficulty.

I actually doubt this would be too hard to implement for ANet developers. The pattern could remain the same even and the timing of the spawns would just get shorter.

This is going to spread like wildfire…. Just pugged p3 so I could try it myself. Two other guardians in party and without a word upfront all three of us dropped the wall on the wall for a super fast kill. Me thinks this was not coincidence…..

The easy and obvious fix that would “fix” this and perhaps to a lesser degree FGS would be to make it so he doesn’t get stuck in the wall. No need for negating reflect on another boss. That would be a reasonable fix and would make him slightly harder.

Just one thing to add… Going into dungeons means joining a team. This is the biggest difference between what you have experienced before and what you are about to encounter. The advice above is helpful, but you need to start looking for ways you can help you party. This varies greatly by class, but each class has something it can add to a party. If you are an Elementalist, look for ways to create fire fields and then blast finish them for party might. If you are a warrior, use banners of strength/discipline to help buff your party damage and use “Shake it off!” When multiple people in your party have a condition on them. As a Guardian, time you’re Aegis to benefit the whole party and not just yourself and do the same with condition clearing. Again, each class can do something to either help party damage or party defense and that is what you need to figure out and pay attention to. New people that know their class can more easily integrate into a dungeon team even if they don’t know the encounters. Gw2dungeons.net has a lot of this info laid out already so definitely a good starting point.

What to do with feelings?

I don’t really run tank builds, but Ranger has access to 12 seconds of invulnerability (15 seconds if Sylvari) has block, reflection and a bunch of evades. Makes for a better tank than you might think.

“LFG – group to provide epic fail screenshots”

I almost exclusively PUG and I will say that I have seen some progress in NA over the last month or two. Kholer has now been killed in 9 of my last 10 runs when it used to be just the opposite. Teams blindly run to the stack spot behind him even with no FGS, but at least he is being killed. I actually joined a group that FGS rushed Spider Queen in her old spot too.

It brought a tear to my eye when I joined a CoE run a week or so back and when I told them I would run PS on my warrior they said not to worry because we had 2 eles. Low and behold, 25 might stacks for all three runs….. stunning.

My guess is that we are seeing less new people buying the game and more people playing a while and continuing to learn. Upward trajectory is great. I can’t speak of the 3 AM crowd, but the 5:30 AM crowd seems to be improving.

“Ranger – Make sure to equip longbow and bear as pet…. stay at 1200 range and use point blank shot whenever mobs surround your team”

Seriously though, I could probably help out with the Ranger section even though I am not nearly the player most of these forum regulars are. At least I can give you enough of a starting point that it can be cleaned up later if need be.

So my current guild has basically taken a hiatus for the summer and/or to play other games thus leaving me almost completely on my own for dungeons and group events. I have been playing for about a year now and am really mostly interested in end game content or team activities. My main problem is that my only regular time happens to be pretty early in the morning (5-7 AM CST) with an occasional night or weekend mixed in.

What I am looking for:
I would like a guild that has an active early morning (NA time) player base that is interested in dungeons, fractals, guild missions/bounties/puzzles. My preference would be a guild that has a decent number of experienced players including some dungeon speed runners. Also looking for the group to be pretty laid back and mature. I’d prefer an NA based guild on Devona’s Rest in a perfect world, but I don’t mind joining an Oceanic or EU playing on NA group on any server if it meets all the other criteria. I would also prefer a <100% rep guild though I am definitely looking for a new main guild here and not something on the side.

What I bring to the table:
As I said, I have been playing for about a year and have done most of the content in the game. I have 5 level 80 characters all running (or pretty close to) meta builds and I am comfortable bringing most of them into any content. I am a laid back guy who plays pretty much every day to get my mind off of RL. I am willing to learn any speedrunning techniques or other high end content I haven’t done (high level fractals, guild team events, 2-3 manning dungeons), but on the flip side I am comfortable teaching most of the dungeons to newer players and anything I have learned about the classes I am playing.

Anyway, if you have a guild and think I would be a match, PM me or send me an ingame mail.

This is really just a PvE set at this point (I do almost no WvW but if this set will work there all the better). For this set I looked at my bank and chose what I hoped was a decent DPS-centric set based on what I could afford. My plan is now to take this toon into some dungeons so I can get the bankroll back up. I was just hoping I didn’t make a mistake dropping the ~20g on this only to have a set that was too far off meta or not really that useable in dungeon settings.

As a side note, I haven’t hit any dungeons with this yet, but for what it is worth, the rock dog is awesome in open world settings because he takes a lot aggro so I can side strike and backstab really easily. Kind of a nice bonus for a cheap set of runes.

Good info so far….

I was wondering how “informed” some of these PUGs are (i.e. I don’t really know what zerk only means, but everyone else is doing it so I am going to do it). In these instances I thought maybe pugs look only for zerk prefix, but it sounds like a no there.

Second, in non gear pinging situations I wondered if people would freak out seeing the rock dog show up or see a lightning strike and think “not meta”. Also sounds like not a problem.

I definitely will be changing out for full zerk ascended with scholars or strength likely, but levelling took so much gold that I am trying to get by with a reasonable dungeon build for now to build my bank back up. Sounds like force/night would probably be a worthwhile investment though.

I just hit 80 on my thief and was running out of gold so to save some money I bought a mix of assassins and berserker armor/weapons with Ogre runes, Sigil of Air/Accuracy, etc. I never make zerk only groups but have joined plenty. All my other toons are full zerk(w/ scholars) so I have never been kicked from a dungeon on those guys, but wondering if it will happen on this one.

Just curious on people’s experiences with zerker only LFG’s. How far off “zerker meta” do people have to be to get kicked from these things? I am sure it varies, but wondering what people have seen accepted and not accepted in these groups.

I think the point would be to not make it like an encyclopedia but rather bake it into early game play. Perhaps a couple of the early heart events could have an NPC create a combo field and you would have to blast/whirl/leap/projectile finish it and/or have yourself create a field that an NPC would finish. Then another heart where you would have to clear conditions from certain area NPC’s or give them boons. Then maybe another where you would try on armor with different stats to do things to training dummies (e.g. apply condition dmg, number of critical hits, etc). I think if you can add some early events that explicitly force you to use core concepts you can learn a ton in the flow of the game and not feel like you are reading an encyclopedia.

This game has so much depth and complexity to it that it is legitimately hard to know everything (I have been playing for almost a year now and learn new things constantly). I think there is very little “people are stupid” going on out there and much more “this is a complex game”. Coming from non-MMO gaming to this as my first MMO I can tell you that there were and are so many things that seem so basic to people that have played a lot of games like this, but just aren’t intuitive to those who haven’t (I tried for weeks to solo the CM story because I thought story mode dungeons were just like the personal story). The whole idea of complimentary game play and how to truly integrate teamwork is fairly unique to the MMORPG world. I think hitting players with in game challenges that force some of these concepts would go a long way to making people understand the whats and whys much better and improve the player base.

Antiqua Dignitatum [AD] on Devona’s Rest is recruiting laid back people of any class/build/style to come play dungeons and fractals (and anything PVE related). We have a small but growing group of dedicated players that can teach you the basics of dungeons and fractals as well as help you learn all about team composition and prepare you for endgame content. Already experienced? We are looking for more experienced players for higher level fractals, dungeon speed runs as well as opportunities for leading other groups through these events. Our main goal is to build a good community of people that help each other have fun and learn the game together. We have our own Teamspeak channel when we do group runs of any kind. We mainly play on nights and weekends NA time but there is a small dedicated group that plays early morning NA times as well.

Requirements – just be friendly and respectful. You only need to rep us when we play together so you don’t even have to leave your other guild(s) to play with us. Since we primarily do dungeons/fractals, we will also accept people from any server who fit the group criteria.

If you are interested PM/mail me in game for an invite.
stachekiller.2591

I actually don’t think this encourages elitism. I think it helps people new to dungeons be forced to learn some mechanics. I went with two casual groups yesterday and cleared the spider queen in about the same time as before with no wipes because we went in together to clear the gargoyles and then people actually saw the spider queen AOE on the ground and dodged out of it. I think this has the potential to make players better overall by forcing them to learn a core mechanic. “Elitists” might try to stick to the old way of doing it and FGS the thing in that corner, but to the credit of the PUGs I played with they adapted quickly and successfully. Once enough people run through it I doubt the elitist mindset your guildie had above will really resonate.

The temple bosses would be awesome too…. the new megaservers make it ridiculous. It might even be cool to have a couple of the world bosses in there for small teams to take on. I am on one of the low pop servers and it used to be that taking on Frozen Maw with three or four people was normal and it was great fun. Now there are never fewer than 30 people and it is absolutely zero fun.

Perhaps the problem is that the devs don’t look at this forum as often as others. Maybe we should move this to the general forum instead.

The Queen’s Gauntlet where you pay tickets to fight bosses gave me an idea. I think it would be great if there was a way to fight some of the dungeon bosses in a contained way. I am picturing something where you could choose from a list of dungeon bosses (Lupi, Alpha, etc.) and then be ported to a contained instance, ideally the boss’ section of the dungeon, where you could fight them repeatedly win or lose. Just have a waypoint and armor repair. It wouldn’t be for rewards or anything, just for the chance to prepare yourself for some of the fights you might encounter, try out new techniques, try to solo/duo a certain boss and things like that. I think it really opens the door to being able to learn fights and teach other people the fights as well which would make the general community better off.

Anet already has many of these concepts in place already like Guild Bounty Training and the Queen’s Gauntlet so at least the concept should be something they would be comfortable with. The entrance tickets could be something you could buy with Guild Influence or maybe even Dungeon Tokens. I might even splurge and buy some gems if they sold tickets through the gem store as well.

Thoughts?

What is sad is that I know warrior to be the easiest to skip with (at least that I have played) and yet I die on skips all the time. I did P4 yesterday and most of the skips went fine, but on the skip after Dwayna I got downed multiple times by the freaking elite shark. On one run the shark literally came out of the water completely and floated above me to finish me off… perhaps I both suck and am cursed.

There is an in game LFG tool no so that website isn’t needed. If you look in this forum there is also a Dungeon Mentor guild that you may want to join to get some pointers and a good teacher. Being a Ranger won’t hurt you per se, but being a purely ranged fighter probably will cause you some problems in dungeons. You should at a minimum bring a melee weapon with you (and be ready to use it) and be prepared to put your pet on inactive until you learn when to let them loose. The biggest thing about dungeons is that you aren’t playing alone anymore but with a team so you have to start to understand what you can do to help the teams you will be running with. Ranger is pretty solid if you trait for Spotter and then bring Frost Spirit utility as that really helps your team’s killing power. Also, when you use the in game LFG tool avoid groups that say “EXP” since they want only experienced people and tell whatever group you join that you are new. Good luck and have fun.