Guild Wars 2

AnariiUK.7409:

I love the idea of incentivising the low-manning of dungeons, as I think it’s one the most enjoyable things to do currently in the game. That said, having 5x reward for solo runs seems a little too good, particularly as solo runs are usually only a little bit slower than full party runs due to a large amount of time being spent running between bosses.

Also as you say, dungeons right now seem to be full of two main types of people: experienced players going for dungeoneer and completely new players going for dungeon master. If you add something like this to the game, those experienced players will just disappear into solo instances and never show their faces on the LFG again, because let’s be honest; who wants to have to carry clueless newbies through a dungeon when you can do it yourself easily and take their reward?

Even if I have a group of 5-experienced players, we’d probably agree to just each solo the dungeon to gain a total of 25x the normal daily reward. Or even worse, just 5 man it to the end and drop out leaving one person to get the full clear, then repeat 4 more times for each member. You’ve basically cheated the daily limit to gain 5x the usual amount in just a single day.

It might work, but I think it’d take quite a large effort from Arenanet to ensure it’s not exploitable and/or damaging to lower level players, something they clearly aren’t willing to do.

1) If you think about it, 1.65g (which is the reward for most paths for soloing in my proposal) is not much at all in our current economy. Asides from the extra time needed to solo, a soloer would need to know the mechanics of the boss and not just spam all their skills like what a normal 5-man can get away with. And even if they’re good, with the lack of DPS and variety of boons/utilities that are vastly available with a 5 man group, a 30 second fight can last up to 5 or more minutes per boss when soloing, considering you encounter many bosses in a dungeon path, thats a lot of time added.

2) Most experienced players I know going for dungeoneer or farming for tokens for other reasons rather do lowmans with other experienced dungeoneers than join a full first time newb group. Of course, there are those who are willing to mentor the newbies, but i find in my experience, having newbies in the party are more of a burden than having a free slot. Those who can’t do dungeons solo (good at 5 manning but bad at solo/lowmanning) will still join casual 5 man groups just for the ease.

3) You’re right at 5 experienced players soloing to get much more personal reward, but the fact is if 5 experienced players team up together, less skill is needed and the dungeon is completed in about less time and effort required, therefore less payout is simply fairer in that sense. If they do it 5 times in a row to get 1.65g for each player, or 5g (for arah p2 and p1), then they are still rerunning the dungeon for x5 the time required for every player to get their reward, and to be honest, running a dungeon path 5 times daily for 5g per person can get stale. I can see this being exploited however, and this is a good call out, perhaps not allowing people who enter or run dungeon paths more than once daily can circumvent this issue.

laokoko.7403:

I don’t think Anet is ever that generous on giving out rewards. So I don’t find it likely.

It probably have more to do with financial reason than technical reason. If you really want to get more rewards get 4 more accounts. Anet might be happier since you need to spend money to buy 4 more copy.

If you think about it, 5g for 15-30 mins work on Arah p2 as a solo player doesnt even come close to many of the farms available out there. It is even daily-locked so you cant run the same path over and over again to get their rewards. Most paths however only reward 33 silver at this point, which if you are able to solo it, you’d only get 1.65 gold out of all the time you spent. In fact, the average soloer would probably take 30 minutes to an hour to complete a path, 1.65g to 5g an hour is not very rewarding at all. The system I propose is just to get players who are still interested in soloing to continue soloing, not completely for the rewards, but for the challenge and interest.

I just posted this on Reddit but I thought I might share my ideas with the dungeon community to see if there’s any interest in my proposal, please comment with any flaws, improvements, criticisms or agreement with this, and maybe we’ll be able to come up with a better solution and actually convince anet to do something about it :P

I think at this point a lot of people have realized that the dungeon community is basically dead and the only people attempting to do dungeons are those farming for tokens or newbies who want to try out their first dungeons. With fractal rewards being generally crappy at this point in time writing, most people with little time to spare or those who enjoy ‘challenging’ content without the need for a full 10 man party and hours of dedication available to do raids are basically screwed out of their money making sources. Therefore, I propose a few suggestions to help rebalance dungeon rewards so that people are not completely focused on farming them or selling paths for gold (which I assume is why Anet decided to ‘deincentivize’ them in the first place).

My solution: Merge or scale rewards for lowmanning.

Many veteran dungeon runners are at this point, capable of soloing or lowmanning dungeons. In fact, they’d rather solo or duo for the extra challenge. With the fancy buffing of most classes and the inclusion of elite specializations, dungeons are basically a brain dead activity for a full man party, if it already wasnt before. So, if the point of nerfing rewards because dungeons are too easy with too much payout, keep the current rewards per person, but divide the rewards from any ‘free slots’ in the party to the available party members. For example: If a soloer manage to finish Arah P2, which current payout is 1g and 60 tokens per person in a 5 man party, this person would instead get 5g and 300 tokens if he finishes the dungeon as the only person. This would lessen the incentive to sell the path because the rewards will get divided back into 5 people if he finishes the path with a full man party. Which means he’ll retain the 1g and 60 tokens that he would’ve gotten if he ran it with a 5 man.

This change would not only give people who enjoy dungeons an incentive to run them again, they would also challenge any dungeon farmers who have been running in a low skilled 5-man environment to up their game by actually learning the mechanics of the dungeon bosses. Running as a solo-duo also takes a fair bit more amount of time in completing content compared to a 5 man, and with the extra skill and time required for lowmanning, it’s only fair that the payout is increased.

Asides from that, Anet has already showed us that tweaking the rewards for dungeons is not a completely difficult task to achieve. Unlike the many suggestions for a challenge mote that requires a complete overhaul of every dungeon path, this only requires some tweaking in the dungeon reward programming that could also be used/transferred towards fractals (Lowmanning Fractals and selling them on LFG is also currently still a thing). Im not a programmer so I can’t say this for sure, but I’m fairly certain a simple tweaking of the reward balance is much more simpler than making a “Hard Mode” for all 8 dungeons.

Tl;dr:

Pros:

• Rewards people who are skilled and spends more time completing the dungeon
• Challenges people to learn dungeon mechanics and improve skill for more rewards
• Deincentivize dungeon selling on LFG
• Fair rewards for 5 man parties and low man parties
• Provides fair content for people who do not enjoy group play, or lack the time for hours of raids or HoT map metas
• For Anet, don’t have to spend that much time ‘fixing’ dungeons

Cons:

• Anet actually has to touch on dungeons again lol

ZachAttack.3957:

TheFrighteningFrenchFry.3275:

Does SW still work?

You won’t find any chest trains, but running the meta a few times can net you a lot of rares, especially if you open the masterwork bags of loot and mystic forge the masterwork gear. From there you can salvage for ectos. You can make even more if you get lucky, but that’s the basis of where you’ll make your money.

There are definitely still chest trains. Not as often as frequent as pre-HoT, but Ive seen at least one daily that lasts for hours. Chest trains is still the fastest way to make Coarse Sand (Besides that 20 mins of Dry Top Sandstorm), which you can sell for quite a bit. Otherwise, the value of Chest Farms and SW Events have dropped because of the big deflation in T5 and T6 mats.

Ryn.6459:

I finished to unlock the tempest this morning but I had to rush to my job so I was not able to play. I keep wondering how do you prestack might with tempest?

I’m not sure if I completely understand this post. Why couldnt you prestack might the same way you prestack it with normal ele? By swapping out weapons and using Scepter/Dagger/Focus if you want to start out in the right attunement?

It’s simple, Anet. Reward expac buyers, not punish those who don’t.

Gold sink hype!

I understand how the liquid rewards are affecting the economy and why it has to be balanced out. But at the same time, consider that perhaps the economy is not their main target and it is in fact the dungeon community that they’re trying to get rid of (they said they wanted to deincentivize dungeons). They received backlash from removing TA fwd up awhile back and this time around, instead of directly removing content, they are simply making sure no one plays it lol. To me, that is almost as bad as removing content. Sure, we don’t know how bad the nerf is going to be, but at the same time, they have said that it’s going to be “much less” rewards with no compensation through tokens or material drops. A lot of the people I know do dungeons because it’s fast, it’s varied (so many dungeons, so many paths) and it gives them enough gold for their time. I personally do dungeons for both reasons — if I have a good team, I do them all, get a good amount of gold while having the fun of my life. If I don’t, I rather not do them.

I think part of the reason of the inflation is because there simply has not been enough new content released in the past 3 years. People do dungeons because they have all these free time that they don’t know what else to do — they want to spend their time in game efficiently and have fun, and what is there to do? If it’s not dungeons it’s open world exploring and most people have already explored everything multiple times that it’s sickening to explore it once again. Silverwastes is a chore to most people (I personally enjoy it, am in a silverwastes guild), and most hardcore dungeon runners would rather eat their babies than do any open world content. And Fractals has been the only one updated since released (barring Aetherpath) but many people don’t do them because it’s so long compared to dungeons that they lose interest half way, also, the Fractal skins aren’t that much of an attraction (why bother with the RNG and collecting them when you can buy something you actually like off the TP), Fractal tonic is a useless trophy that a lot of people couldn’t care for, and most of the time, no one cares for the rings. And in the end what do you get out of 4! Fractal instances? — 1 measly gold.

If Anet had released a steady stream of new content – New fractal islands, new 5 man instances that could compare to dungeons, people would want to go test them out, make new achievements with them, even if the gold payout weren’t as good as dungeons themselves. If Anet could keep people’s attention elsewhere consistently, new content every 2 weeks to a month so that when people are done with one content, they can move on to another — people wouldn’t be so focused on farming dungeons all the time. So I refuse to believe that dungeons are the sole or main reason for the inflation.

To be fair I completely understand how that guy feels, been there done that, had someone on my team who just isn’t on par with the rest of the group and not in the mood to guide nobody (I do guide people at times but sometimes you just want to get the run done smoothly and quickly). But, you were right in not taking the money, he would have kicked you right after when he didn’t needed the 3rd vote to kick. I won’t take sides on this matter, because I don’t know what exactly went on in the dungeon/don’t know how bad he was playing/maybe he was using the wrong skills at the wrong time. I’m just gonna be the Devil’s advocate and tell Mr. Toxic over there : I feel ya bruh.

Hey all, thanks for the replies. The reason why I ask this question is to gauge how the dungeon community will survive with a nerf to the rewards. Not like most people, I do dungeons for the sake of enjoying the dungeon, and it’s rewards is secondary to me. I like to do dungeons clean, fast, efficient and using the latest tactics. I also only enjoy dungeons with people who are skilled and know what they are doing, not quite the average pugs, simply because I am not satisfied with mediocre performance, but the will to improve and play at the highest level. But yet, with the effort I put into doing my best in dungeons, I think the 1 gold reward is a good reward for my best and most beautiful runs, and with a nerf coming to it, I don’t think a lower reward would keep most of my go-to dungeon mates or myself as interested.

As we all know, the dungeon community has been dying out over the past few months, less records are established, guilds are not as popular or highly established as they are before, veterans are leaving/going casual and we’re seeing less and less newcomers to the scene. We also haven’t had a tournament for a year now, and the last one was a 3 man tourney. Like most hardcore players, for the past few months, I’ve been mostly doing solos and lowmans just because there simply are not as many people at a high skill level with the interest of doing dungeons for a greater purpose than money. Being said, I fear even the slightest nerf to dungeon rewards would kill the interest of people who have stuck with dungeons through all the glory of it’s buggy and stale content.

I am yet unsure about my stance on continuing or leaving the dungeon scene. As much as I would like to continue advancing in this area, I do not think that I would be interested if there is going to be no knowledgeable people to team up with or a lack of competition to keep things interesting. Whatever you feel about dungeons right now, we can assuredly say that the dungeon community has massively improved ever since it has been released and that is thanks to the overwhelming interest we have received from all of you guys. The guides released, the player-supported tournaments, the records, the websites, the amazing stunts that have been pulled off, it would never cease to amaze me how much effort that all of you have put into keeping this community alive.

So, I hope to hear more from all of you on my initial question and your opinions on this matter. Thank you all for your persistent interest in the scene and I sincerely hope that we are able to keep this community alive even after everything that we have had to endure.

Edit: lots of typos

Assume they took away the pop-up chest that gives you the 1-3gold per path. You’d still get the 24 or so silver for completing the path. Also assuming no buff is given to tokens or mats drops.

It begs the question on who are the targeted audience and what is the goal of this event? Is it to bring in more casuals? Is it to gather up the semi-hardcore dungeon community or is it a conglomerate of the current hardcore community and simply doing something fun for the elites?

Wethospu.6437:

Weekly mini tournaments

Kind of similar to tournaments. I’m not very familiar with how it exactly worked so any information is welcome.

DnT used to run these too. As far as I know, there was also a lack of participation.

I’d definitely like to see more frequent, ‘casual’ speed run tourneys that is open to the public. I think this is a great opportunity for the speedrun scene to incorporate new faces. I think the tourney sign ups should allow for full teams, incomplete teams and solo sign ups, then allow for matchmaking at the start of the week/month so that they have time to work and practice together before the tourney at the end of the week/month.

I’d also be interested to see a ‘PUG’ speedrun tourney where we get 5 random people from a pool of participants to team up and compete, perhaps with a ruling such as no more than 2-3 people from the same guild etc. This way I think more people who do not have a dedicated team would be more interested in participating. Also think it would dilute the skill pool so that the teams are more balanced, cuz as much as I enjoy rooting for my favorite teams, I would like to see more competition and creativity in speedrun strategies.

To add to this, I think that if you are doing a open/public tourney you may want to charge some ‘admission fee’ or ‘guarantee’ to participants. eg. 10g per sign up, which you would return after the tournament if the participant shows up/makes an effort but disregarding tournament standings. I think this might help lessen last-minute drop outs or troll teams which would be a waste of time for both their teams and the tournament themselves. Besides that, you might want to reserve a few ‘neutral’ players as backups in case a team is missing a player or two and can’t participate because of this. I think there ARE people in the community interested in this kind of stuff, but the problem is not being able to get into the scene or finding people with a similar mindset.

The number 2

My 2 cents in for elementalists in PvE is about the same as yours. To me, zerk eles has always been a high risk high reward class with the least health pool and toughness and little to no defensive options (armor, hp, evades, stealth, aegis, clones.. etc) and a very high aggro leashing mechanic compared to the other classes. Instead, Elementalists have to rely on clever positioning, timely dodges and a good rotation to survive. It is true elementalists have always been the highest dps class among the professions, but currently we are able to choose whether to sacrifice an amount of dps to provide ourselves with more self sustainability or the team with more offensive team support. I enjoy the fact that to be able to balance a decent amount of dps along while keeping these other things, you have to show more skill. For example, the pure dps s/d elementalist does very high burst dps and gives a decent amount of support, but in order to do so you have position yourself in order to not get hit (90% hp trait and scholars), are not allowed to dodge and still complete your rotation perfectly. Even staff elementalists follow this ideology in solo situations — compared to a dagger focus setup which has a difficult rotation in order to keep up might stacks and dps, staff elementalists in turn provides more dps with the sacrifice of the self sustain of a dagger focus but are still required to be in melee range of their target to provide optimal dps. This design is what enable players to try to get better in what they do in order to achieve perfection. Yet, Arenanet is telling us that there shouldn’t be a potential for growth by giving effortless full party support to an already easy to play class with no significant dps sacrifice or skill level requirement, and giving the highest dps to the easiest to play meta elementalist build there already is. They are removing all motivation to improve and learn because.. why should I when I’m doing better than you with less effort? Even in PvP where dd elementalists are very much support and sustain have a complicated rotation in order to pull off a good balance with their support and their dps. Often I feel like Arenanet did not think this change through, summarizing the elementalists to be very unbalanced because of it’s potential shown by players who have already spent hours mastering the class.

insanemaniac.2456:

well… on lightning hammer… the thing is, when you have a scepter ele around, you end up walking out of a boss fight with a minute of fury if hes got someone elses fire field. and you dont really need any other might stacking during the fight. you prestack might to start at 25 stacks + 1 min of fury, and the ele can maintain it by autoattacking.

i dunno. maybe the damage isnt op. but trivializing the 2 major dps boons is kinda silly. at least PS war cant maintain the 25 might with just autos and has to push 100blades every once in a while…

i have a feeling engis may start to have the same problem if mortar 1 gets that traited blast finisher and it deals dps like bomb 1. an engi can provide his own fire field and stack vuln too. maybe thats too much for 1 toon autoing.

Trivializing? A scepter or dagger focus ele has to execute their rotations perfectly in order to keep their might up at 25. The auto attack on hammer only blasts on it’s 3rd hit and if you simply camp lightning hammer on a fire field you are going to eventually see your might stacks drop faster than King Kong from the top of the empire state building. If you get cc-ed or dodge / move around too much or get your firefield overwritten by another field you won’t be able do your rotations or easily maintain 25 might on a scepter/df elementalist. Have you even tried playing a scepter ele?

I simply don’t understand this either, shouldn’t the daily system reward people who play the game however they enjoy (whether it’s dungeons or map completion or roleplay or even chestfarms) instead of forcing people into going out of their way to complete the silliest little things?

Ele: Trait for Fresh Air, swap to Fire Water and Earth attunements and cast their burst skills and swap to Air as much as possible in between. Use Sink and Float skills to disable bosses.

The plot twist in this story would’ve given M. Night Shyamalan a run for his money.

My personal experience is that people from 8/9k – 13k ap are usually pretty decent. Any more and they are ap farmers, any less and they are inexperienced/pvpers/wvwers.

DonQuack.9025:

Im not even sure If I should say this but " I think we both know that the people that need to see this aren’t here"
Not to dismiss your work but its sorta like saying

Stacking might is good. Using fear is bad*. Its sort of redundant in this forum, but I guess some lurker will see this and learn… /slap self

Since the game just had a lot of new players entering who knows nada on the workings of dungeons, I assume if anyone had the thought to look things up, the dungeon forums would be the first place for them to visit. Sometimes as veterans we are unable to see how newer players fail to meet up to our understanding or expectations when they do not have readily available resources to them.

To OP, great job on the guide, I hope this guide gets stickied or placed somewhere easily accessible to newer players instead of being lost in the dungeon forum archive.

If you’re looking at optimal composititons for speedruns, Guardian is usually preferred over Engineer in most cases. Engineers are like a jack of all trades, being able to stealth like a thief, might like an ele, wall like a guard, and solo cap on vulnerability like a boss, which makes carrying pugs a little bit easier if you know what you’re doing. If you have competent party members who know what they’re doing, all these things are usually already covered by their respective classes. Therefore, guardians make the better choice. If you want to play a meta defensive supportive role, I’d suggest you try guardian out first.

I just love it when I run in with an ice bow 4 starter and some warrior/mesmer pushes the bosses right out of that sweet dps zone >:(

Why are you so mad? Whether you get a ring, infused ring, frac wep, asc box or nothing, it’s all based on rng. No one who does fractals do them for the rewards, so if you don’t like doing 50’s then find something else to do. Just a heads up, if you’re depending on the expansion pack for more end game content, you’re probably going to be severely disappointed.

I’m looking for more people on my friendslist too, feel free to add me!

Thieves are one of the easiest classes to solo dungeons on.

moonkenzie.5218:

I presently have 25k HP but haven’t equipped any Ascended gear yet to up my Vitality, if my HP makes any difference.

Wait what, AR has nothing to do with HP/Vitality.

Ascended weapons: +10 ar
6 Ascended Ascessories with simple infusions: +30 ar
3 +10 infusion slots: +30 ar
= 70 ar

That’s my ar formula for alt accounts. No Ascended armor needed.

This is the most ridiculous topic for everyone to be all up in tears about. I’m loving it.

The game would run reasonably from 300 ping, peaking at 500 ping. I play often on the NA servers, it does not lag for me almost at all compared to my Australian friends. Your experience may differ depending on the connection you use. Since you’re already downloading it, I suggest you just try the game out. Since you’re in the SEA timezone, chances are you won’t be playing during NA peak hours, which should help with the connection. Good luck.

war-guard-ele-thief would make for a sexy 4-man

Braizake.3274:

Dunno if he walks, but did CM after the patch and as we hit him while deep freezed he got pushed about two steps away from his spawn, died after that

Just happened to my party too. He moved a little but since we were stacked he didn’t move too far back.

Purple Miku.7032:

My only problem with D/F rotation on ele is that since it’s designed for long fights, and staff is so much better DPS, I never get the chance to see it because I always take the option for superior damage unless the utility (swirling) is needed for whatever reason.

The only exception I make for this rule sometimes is grenth in Arah P4. That crap is just too boring for me to bear sometimes. Need something to keep me awake.

D/F only shines more than other builds in certain situations, but since OP is looking for fun rotations, I’m pretty sure most would agree d/f has a more active, dynamic rotation than staff’s.

There’s nothing like a good dagger focus ele rotation imo.

Don’t know if you’re still accepting nominees but here’s some stuff i see missing amongst your pool.

4. Dungeon Initiative of the Year (hmmm… not sure what is the befitting prize!)
Don’t know if Fractals fall into this, but I think KING’s fractal tourney deserves a nomination.

5. Best Visual Guide
Particlar’s Ele fractal guides.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbcZGdtw7A57JnJI61XnZ8w

9. Best Comedy of the Year (it can be anything!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8RPkGZIfLQ

A little late but i’d like to put in a word, I’ve been on EU and NA for a fair amount of time now and I find NA’s lfg tool is so underused compared to EU. On EU during prime time it’s easy to get an lfg for a dungeon or fractal, easy enough to get to be picky with the lfg message or team composition. On NA I find pugs to be generally worse or casual, it’s hard to find a good lfg even during NA prime time. If the lfg tool for dungeons is almost non-existent, finding groups for fotm on NA is worse, especially if you’re doing lower levels (1-20) as less experienced people do those. I’d if you are thinking to transfer to EU for pugging, it’s almost worth it to do it. Otherwise, I’d say NA has a healthy amount of active guilds and you should join one and play with them.

Hi all, having the same issue as Kimi.

http://postimg.org/image/tqpcnydep/
http://postimg.org/image/4m2xoa3c1/
http://postimg.org/image/kqkr3rhb5/

Have tried Stinvec’s adn Engelsstaub’s methods. Nothing works