Minion

The Basics to Consistently Smooth Dungeons

The basics of team-based games are generally quite obvious, yet time after time people complain that dungeons are either too difficult or PUGs are too stupid. This idea will start to create an elitist mentality over time and develop requirements to enter dungeons; equipment checks, achievement points, GREATSWORD GUARDS ONLY. To stamp this out early on, here are most of the common ways to keep a party from swaying from glory without resorting to cheap gimmicks and exploits.

Firstly, skill synergy isn't important. You can run with five thieves or five mesmers and as long as they all know what to do, how and when to dodge, they won't die horribly and your target will die rapidly. No messing about with that setup.

The key to smooth dungeons, anyway, has six steps:

1)Communication.
The most crucial of all. Team communication is key to the success of any dungeon run. You can enter a dungeon with four teammates having never entered the zone, but as long as you can command and explain what to do, where to stand, etc. you will be fine. Tell them what to look out for (i.e. kholer's golfswing needs to be dodged, tell them to save their endurance for it.). If there are multiple options to do one event- skip or complete, then let them know, especially if they're pugs.

2)Focus.
Team synergy doesn't really exist in GW2, but the more enemies there are, the more chance they'll down one of you. You want to have a designated caller to call targets and have everyone smash it. Professions with heavy single-target damage suddenly become relevant when you understand individual foes need to die faster than a whole mob. Don't feel like you're bossing the team on what to attack; it benefits every profession. Focusing conditions onto one target will then make a necromancer's Epidemic even stronger. With Binding Chains, a guardian can gather everything together and you can enjoy spiking out single-targets while everything else also gets hit by unfocused AoE from greatswords, elemental spells, bombs and clusterbobombs. The outcome is everything dies faster.

3) Duck, Dodge, Dip, Dive and Dodge. Dodge, dodge, dodge, dodge.
It would be best if everyone knew what the dungeon held in store for them before entering, but that's not always the case. However, you *know* that this game is all about evading attacks to stay alive. Toughness and Vitality do little more than make it more likely for enemies to aggro you; if you get hit, you're still likely to go down. Dodging is key, and once you're out of dodge meter, you best make sure they're not going to attack you. Kholer in AC is a good example; you should always save one bar of endurance for his golf-swing animation, which is when you dodge to evade instant misfortune. Look for the tells in the animations and it's easy. Once the whole team understands this, you can run full glass-cannon setups and it doesn't feel any different to 3 guard, 2 war teams, etc. Take who's available. (albeit necs op)

4) Reviving team mates The Importance of Rallying.
Reviving the team isn't always the best idea; it can cut into your already limited DPS after losing a man on the field and leave your team up a certain creek without a certain instrument. Having a focused target means it's less likely to die after downing. Keep attacking the target if the enemy is not focusing you and have enough health to out-live it; bandage is the last resort. If you see an enemy with lower health, call it and hope your team switch. This prevents you from becoming too much of a burden on the team, limiting their DPS, effectively, by 2+ players. This is more important than ever now; one does not simply respawn immediately after death.

5) Luring.
Don't underestimate the importance of luring; especially bosses. Pulling single bosses can mean life and death, for example in TA pfwdfwd, hotw p3, SE p1, etc. Take those encounters slow and remember that prep doesn't take as long as respawning

6) (i herd u liek) mobskips.
Skipping content to avoid long or difficult encounters is performed in almost every party these days, to optimise runtime and therefore earn more from the chests and bosses over time. All professions can run past any mob reliably. The thief has the greatest mobility of all, with AoE stealth/regen, many shadowsteps and a perma +25% IMS signet. The mesmer is quite similar with the shadowsteps and cloaks/decoys while the guardian can bruteforce spam 0s cast heals and Retreat for Swiftness/Aegis.  

When attempting to run past mobs, prepare your utilities that offer the most swiftness, damage reduction, regeneration and at least one stun-break. Remember:
   a. Never waste your dodges because bored; use them when being fired at.
   b. Use your IMS upon entering a mob, not to simply speed up your run (if it's a far distance).
   c. Prepare to use your stun break or stability if anything goes tits up.
   d. Travel as a team, ensuring everyone's safe-journey.

Happy dungeoneering.

We're a clumsy group of individuals who all put 10k+ hours into Guild Wars. We don't care about your feelings, either. This is a care-free guild where you can say what you like, as long as the context is right and you don't get butthurt. We would, however, consider the guild as a whole to be "mature", regardless of our name and attitude, but I can't stand the QQ and carebears.

[Fap] do dungeons. WHICH Euro server you're on doesn't matter too much. Currently we have  24 members, with a strong core of active players who manage to keep the guild chat filled with critical nonsense.



So, to sum it up, we're looking for:
-dungeon fans
-players in the US or UK timezone (About half and half, activity wise)
-Thick-skinned; no carebears or idiots, please.
-Must like huey lewis and the news' album Fore!, Centipedes, boku no pico and Goosh Goosh
-Expect real world discussions; if you're opinionated, don't get butthurt when you have opposition.

If you want to ask anything else then feel free to PM me ingame or here.
IGN: Esclavo

Cheers,
~HM

For the sake of all Guild Wars players, ANet: Please PLEASE change the name of Sorrow's Embrace back to Sorrow's Furnace as it was originally titled in the original game.

There are two benefits to doing this:

1. GW vets will love you and care for your babies because SF was the first dungeon to be implemented in the game.

2.SE stands for Slaver's Exile, and that's in EotN. I know it's a different game, but it's the same map! Please let the suffering end!


So, /sign or Like or whatever if you agree.

If you haven't played a thief before, you might not know what this mechanic is.

"Revealed- You cannot stealth for 2 seconds."

You are afflicted with this condition every time you drop out of cloak. This is used to prevent "perma cloaking" or "chain cloaking" but that is stupid. The problem is this:

There are two types of melee thief builds; DB spam/condition heavy, Stealth Backstab/crit heavy. They both play completely differently, even though they use the same weapon set. However, there is a problem. Some will argue the DB spam build is dull/weak, but it provides high defence, high damage over time (very helpful for solo play since you can rally more reliably) and the AoE range is immense. The most important factor is that it's proactive in that you control how much initiative you gain according to traits, attack chains and precision-based gear. So the amount you can spam Death Blossom is based on something you control. You can spam it as much as you want until you are drained. Stack all that bleeding. All that AoE damage to trigger Dynamic Event points/loot without even having to kill.


The last point is why Revealed is a terrible mechanic. It's controlling. It prevents good players from being able to use opportunities which may require stealthy action. It makes backstab builds mediocre when they don't have to be. Cloaking is still nice in PvE because of mob resetting, etc. but the single damage we put out does not = the AoE damage and DoT that DB can potentially put out. We are limited, even after paying 6i for a cloak and dagger to proc backstab. That means we can only use CaD twice before having to wait about, as opposed to DB who can use three, maybe four with Signet Use and watch the mob(group) drop together.


So, compare DB spam with cloak/backstab:
High single-target damage from both cloak and dagger and Backstab
Must wait 2s after backstabbing to use Cloak again, even if "thy initiative runeth over"; relegated to more low, single-target damage.
It's ALL single-target, direct damage.
Cloak and Dagger costs 6i. Vulnerability lasts 6s (DB's bleeding lasts 13s, one stack per hit)

I think you can straight away see the imbalance and contrivance of the Revealed mechanic. Fear not, for I have the solution:

The reason Revealed was added was to prevent maintaining stealth; not that stealth is a game-breaker, really. But you only have so many stealth skills and only so much initiative. There is already an obvious way to prevent stealth chaining without the revealed mechanic.

Already set in place, when you deal damage when cloaked, you are taken out of stealth. The enemy can now see you and you can flash back into stealth as soon as you break, as long as you have enough initiative for cloak and dagger or hit a foe or wasn't already in stealth. if you use a cloaking skill while already in stealth, it will break your stealth. Alternatively, if you feel there needs to be a downside to spamming Stealth, you can change the revealed condition to "vulnerable for 2s" with several stacks of vulnerability. Far more reasonable. Being unable to improve a build further because of a contrived mechanic is terrible. It removes the skill curve completely for these kinds of builds.

This keeps everyone happy. It doesn't make backstab/cloak thieves overpowered but more in stead with blossom spam. It doesn't break sPvP and especially not WvW, since AoE damage is far more popular there anyway with shortbow, etc.

TL;DR: Revealed sucks, Anet- plz remove.

It is time to resign to the fact Leaping Death Blossom's name was changed from BWE1, and basically reverted back to the Guild Wars original name of Death Blossom. Leaping was rather redundant.


The name of the skill is Death Blossom. The abbreviation is DB. k? k.