HnRkLnXqZ.1870

- If you are a **Sword/Pistol** Thief, use Steal and Infiltrator's Strike to get into melee-range.

- Probably use a **Shortbow** as your 2nd weapon to access Infiltrator's Arrow, which is basically your best in-combat mobility option anyway. You can use it to teleport around the area as you want.

- Use your terrain. Hiding behind trees/rocks and other obstacles forces the NPC AI usually to just run towards you. It is not smart enough to just move an inch to the left and shoot again ^^.

- When in melee-range, stack up several mobs by walking in circles. Go into stealth before your first attack and attack from behind.

- If you use Hide in Shadows or Blinding Powder, you can activate it when the fight starts. Run away or get into melee-range and start attacking. By the time you HP is low, it should be off cooldown.

- Blinding Powder also allows you to recover instantly when an opponent knocked you down/away.

- Signet of Malice works great with the sword auto-attack and Pistol Whip to heal up during the fight. Same goes for Dagger Storm.

- Thieves Guild is a good option for tougher mobs and bosses, using the clones as tanks.

- Thief is by design very squishy. The longer the fight takes, the higher is your chance you leave it as a corpse. So using utility skills like Haste is great to boost up your damage.

- Smoke Screen is also quite powerful, due to its large radius. You can combine that with Dagger Storm for example, to constantly blind your opponents while you whirl around.

Some of these would eat tons of resources, others would just be funny or completely useless:

- Raindrop animations on water

- Minis can be leveled and grant passive boons to you, like MF, karma gain, gold-gain, exp gain.

- Chewing/Drinking animation for food

- /hug, /applaud and /kiss emote

- Login Screen changes depending on the race of the character, with animated backgrounds (brids, walking people, robots, animals)

- mount-riding animations for combat-tonics (including mini- and super-size)

- Falling damage for NPCs = ability to knock them off a cliff

- Customize-able death-animations, similar to finishers but for your own defeat in PvE

- Customize-able level-up animations

- notepad with several pages

- calculator-plugin

- guild-emblem animations

- /pet emote for ranger-pets, can be performed by any player

- show only favorites option for all crafting professions

- favorites/focused option on the achievement-page, enough space to fit up to 30 tasks

- customize-able content guide, checkboxes for all things it should or should not show

- ingame profile you can customize and manage view rights (all/guild/friends). Also accessible via the offical page.

- communicator in the style of ICQ/MSN/AIM to communicate with several people at once. With an additional plugin to emulate discord.

- calendar with notes/dates you can add in and reminders that pop up when you log in that day

- time-converter (all time-zones) with the option to show an alternative time-zone when hovering over the time with the mouse

- notification-system about missing/lowlevel gear on a level 80 character, like missing aqua-breather or too weak trinkets (e.g. when they are level 60)

- weekly ingame player surveys, about satsifaction in general but also to collect feedback on recent patches (optional, but with some loot as reward)

Other thought: I want those skins.

EDIT: Once again, writing it detailed resulted in taking too long >_>

You are aware of the alternative option to get the weapons? You can also pick the weapons after completing one of the two infinite Reward Tracks:

**Death to the Dominion** results in the Dominion Spoils Box, granting access to the

- Berskers's Blood Dominion Greatsword

- Assassin's Ash Dominion Pistol

- Cleric's Flame Dominion Torch

**Death to the Corrupted** results in the Frost Legion Spoils Box, granting access to the

- Knight's Iron Dominion Rifle

- Valkyrie Frost Dominion Mace

If you really want to complete that collection, focus on these two reward-tracks only. That is basically what I do at the moment. Once the achievement is completed, you can pick that track that feels more rewarding for you again.

Recently bought myself a commanders compendium after almost 8 years. Mostly to run guild-missions, as our squads recently exceeded 10 people. Most of the functions are easy to understand and the squad-menue also helps a lot. However, I do not get how that ready-check is done. The wiki is not really helpful with this issue as it basically says "yes you can perform a ready-check, but we aint gonna tell you how" XD.

Could anyone explain it, please? How is it done?

**Why do people bother about this, why do they care? Let the farmers farm and mind your own business!**

Every map which has a meta-event chain, which is literally every non-city map in the entire game, shares the same problem: player capacity. AFK farming on an empty, dead map is totally fine - if ANet promotes it, go for it. But if you happen to pull that trick on a map with an active meta-event and the player capacity is reached, you begin to ponder if this is really a good thing. Especially if you have a squad open and people complain your map is full. On the other hand you see those AFK farmers which contribute nothing to the meta-progression. That problem also exists for casual roamers and explorers, but even they are more likely to eventually join the cause. Those AFKers however will not move an inch in the next hour(s), guaranteed.

And now we can take a little look on Drizzlewood Coast. One of the common strategies at the moment is to farm the 200 % participation, then go AFK until the phase starts you are interested in. On the other hand desperate commanders and mentors struggle to get the camps up for the south meta, let alone defending the owned ones. But the AFKers got their free lot, that is all that matters. That poor soul who tries to complete the meta-chain in order to get the north-meta started, should have gone AFK as well?

This situation is not ok. Pure ignorance will definitely not solve it. The later it is taken care of, the more difficult it will be to find a solution that harms as less players as possible. When GW2 will be on steam, our player-base will definitely increase and the problem with map-capacity will be even more present.

1.) People who install it, keep it running. In Dungeons, in Open World events and other places it is not necessary at all. Every year during Halloween, we have these [word] who run the meter in the Labyrinth squads and kick people according to the data of the meter. "It is too difficult to shut it down, I just keep it running. Self optimization only, promise!" And alliances are launched next tuesday, sure. Or this topic. They may use other methods, once the meter is shut down. But it would not be that easy to bully other players.

2.) The Special Forces Training Area has everything you need to train and self-optimize. It even has a built-in DPS meter. Even the Raid/Fractal/Strikemission community highly recommends to train at the golem to learn an optimize the rotations.

3.) We get this kind of topics a lot. I sometimes engage in the attack, sometimes try to balance and even defend them recently. I do not really like to see any content getting discontinued. It is a part of the game. Probably not a part I like, but there are people who like it. With every piece on the tall stack of discontinued-projects, the game loses variety. But as Bobby said, the raid-team does no longer exist. So we are stuck with Fractals and Strike Missions for now. Those two pieces require little to no peak-performance at all. In my guild, we did T4 Fractals and Strike Missions with non-meta compositions and non-meta builds. It works. You are probably not as fast as the professionals and may have to improvise a little more. But on the other hand, we enjoy that content. Who said you should spend as little time as possible in the instances? Skip what can be skipped? Exploit every boss and every mechanic? If you do not want to play that content, do not play it! The developers made all of these wonderful mechanics to be played, not exploited by some cheap speedrunners. Never wondered why Strike Missions are so empty? Why you are demoted to gladiators in a giant arena? We started with Dungeons and LW dungeons with huge maps, different paths connected with each others. Epic lore and side-stories. Awesome maps with breathtaking attention to detail. Now we are in arena-fights, because they can be completed in minimum time. Forging Steel, the only Strike Mission that barely leans toward the old style is hated for being SO LONG and TAKING SO MUCH TIME. If you continue with this Efficiency > Everything strategy, you will end the Strike Missions as well. Another piece on the stack. If the meter gets removed, they may slow down. As long as there is a visible counter, they keep running as fast as possible to beat it.

They could enable a newbie-mode, which applies for the first 1-2 weeks.

- Access to a basic Raptor (the rent-able one from the festivals) and a basic Glider after reaching level 10 and completing the first story arc.

- A special lobby/convenience section with tutorial npcs, tutorial-tasks/instances and explanations.

- Maybe a training dungeon made of one of the LW1 instances, like the Tower of Nightmares (slightly modified).

- Cheap gear vendors with selectable stats that only works until level 60.

After that newbie-phase, players get 2 level 80 instant boosts mailed and can decide on their own if they want to continue to level normally or use a boost. Every new character gains access to the newbie-phase of 1-2 weeks, can use the benefits.

Both the basic Raptor and Glider remain available until other masteries are unlocked. Access to all Elite Specializations upon reaching level 80.

This would be a delay option I could agree with. It would slowly introduce new players, without slowing them down too much. Still plenty of freedom for personal decisions. Benefits for playing the game without the turbo. Better access to the necessary mobility masteries, removing two of the major reasons to use the level 80 boost.

Leveling builds are imo the most interesting ones in the game, because you have to deal with limitations.

If you run power builds there is one rune in particular, which you should equip the moment you hit level 39 - the Major Rune of Fire. It is one of only two runes which have a special-ability on the major rarity and it is extremely useful in PvE while leveling & mapping. 4 Runes have to be equipped.

It adds a total of 45 stat-points of power, + 6 % Might Duration which is useful as you stack might anyway and grants 4 seconds Fire Aura when you enter combat. The Fire Aura has no internal cooldown, grants might when you get hit and burns enemies that hit you.

In addition, you should run with the Major Rune of Hoelbrak for the remaining two gear-slots to enhance the Might duration even further and boost your power.

Note: Do not forget to equip the same Rune you have on your helmet on your Aquabreather. When you go underwater, the Aquabreather replaces the Helmet. If you forget this, one of the rune-effects will vanish.

As for Sigils, you can run Major Sigil of Strength and Major Sigil of Earth on the **Harpoongun**.

Traits:

Firearms = 2-3-1

Explosives = 2-2-2

Skills:

Healing = Med Kit

Utility = Grenade Kit, Rocket Turret, Bomb Kit

Elite = Supply Crate

Combat:

You stay ranged and preferably kite the enemies behind you, while you dive in circles. Similar to the FT, you can stick with the auto-attack. Your Might stacks should be very high as long as you keep attacking. Use Big Ol Bomb (Bomb Kit toolbelt) to get some distance if your enemies are too close to you. Place the Rocket turret in the middle of the circle.

For recovery, you use F1 which is your 101 heal-skill but with only 17 seconds cooldown. Running out of HP anyway?

- Use Med Pack Drop from the Supply Crate toolbelt

- Use the Supply Crate

- Switch to Med Kit (equip it) and use skill 2 Bandage Blast which will drop some HP refills in front of you, just catch them while you kite.

- Combo Skill 3 Cleansing Field + skill 5 Infusion Bomb and probably Big Ol Bomb to trigger the Waterfield+Blastfinisher instant heal.

- Use Skill 4 Vital Burst

You fight a boss/champion and want to break its breakbar?

- Big Ol Bomb

- Supply Crate

- Grenade Kit = Freeze Grenade

- Bomb Kit = Concussion Bomb + Glue Bomb

- Harpoon Gun = Capture Line (skill 3) and Net Wall (skill 5)

When the bar is broken:

- Harpoon Gun = Scatter Mines (skill 2) + Timed Charge (skill 4)

- Grenade Kit = auto-attack

Boss has Retaliation:

- stop attacking (obviously)

- detonate the Rocket Turret!

The Fire Aura from the Fire Rune helps you to dispose of trash-mobs before they add up in quantity and helps you to stack up might fast, so your attacks will become painful. The Earth Sigil works with Sanguine Array and will enhance your might-generation.

Shield mainhand, Sword offhand or Warhorn.

> @"RUNICBLACK.7630" said:

> In a nut shell we have various skills and traits that allow some classes the ability to target 10 instead of the normal limit of 5 , the most of these are for boons where they are helping squad mates but some abilities allow for the targeting of 10 enemies.

> As it stands it is very uneven across the classes as who can and can't do this, for honesty on this I generally main a guardian and they recently lower the ability of "Stand Your Ground" back down to 5 from 10 , which while from a players point of view I wasn't thrilled with but honestly from overall game play I could see there point considering Stability's impact in WvW and Raids.

>

> What I'm curious about are other players views on this.

Classes which gained the 10-target blessing are ANet's meta recommendation. They want to see a certain group composition, so they boosted those classes further than others. Other classes got fake-boosts like increasing the effect radius while still having the 5 target limit. That is not really helping.

Should boon-applications and heals be limited to 5 or 10 targets?

10 or no limit. We are stuck with the stack-meta since launch because of this mess. GW2 group-play in a nutshell: stack! Outside of competitive, playing long-range weapons is a joke. No boons and no heals.

Should attacks and damaging conditions be limited to 5 or 10 targets?

5 worked well. If they want a loot-stick mechanic, half damage per additional target hit:

- 5 targets hit = 100 % damage as in the tooltip

- 6 targets hit = 50 % damage per target

- 7 targets hit = 25 % damage per target

- 8 targets hit = 12.5 % damage per target

- 9 targets = 6.25 % damage per target

- 10 targets = 3.125 % damage per target

Farmers would pick the option, which enables 10 targets. Everyone else would stick to 5.

While we are at it. Cleaving attack = 5 targets, not 2 or 3.

Power Soulbeast might be an option. Base HP pool is higher than Guardian. You can start with Marauder's stats until you are comfortable with the class & mechanics, which gives you ~ 21-22k HP in total. There exist variants for ranged (Longbow) and melee (sword+axe, greatsword). It has a few options to support the party, not very complicated. Soulbeast is meta. If you want to stick to ranger, but increase difficulty a little you can switch to condition Soulbeast or Druid.

Are you EU or NA? The activity of those guilds usually varies. Before joining, it is good to ask what the prime-time of the guild is. This depends mostly on where the players of the guild are located (physical) and the average age. That is something you can easily check during the first pm with the leaders. Just ask about the prime-time or if there is a region most of the guild are from. Some, not all, of the social guilds rely on the leaders charisma. So you can notice an increased activity whenever they log.

please delete

If you enjoy the collections, do the Elite Specialization collections for the easy ascended weapons. HoT + PoF = 18 collections. Ascended gear might be a little overkill at first, but the skins are definitely worth the trouble. And you can switch stats of ascended gear, so they can be seen as permanent investments. You can also participate in open world group-content without participating in a group. So you can join bounty runs and tag along other events, which just happen to take place.

Stuff that is in my opinion worth the trouble:

- Funerary Armor Collections

- Bounty Hunter's Armor

- Warbeast Armor

- Elegy Armor (one of the best side-stories in the game)

- Requiem Armor (not as fun as Elegy story, but the skins are shiny)

- Mist Shard Armor

- Blossoming Mist Shard Armor (not a huge fan of the skins myself)

- Raven Armor

- Brandstone Reasearch => Astral Weapons => Stellar Weapons (imo the best animated non-gemstore/legendary skins, go for the ones you are interested in)

- Skyscale is a bit of a curse. While the game turns a lot easier, mapping and exploration lose their thrill. The first part of the questline is rather tedious and boring, once you leave the island it gets better. It is worth the trouble. With the several options to gain map-currencies now, it is a good time to start it.

- Herta and the Luminate's Backplate

- Mawdrey

- Wayfarer's Henge (another masterpiece side quest)

- Mark Y Golem (tedious at times, but you get one of the best back-skins in the game)

There is a lot to do. I still feel like I have barely scratched the surface.

Try to join a guild sooner or later. One that is comfortable with solo players and relaxed. The newbie-guilds and social guilds are great. They do group-content like Fractals & Dungeons and slowly introduce you to that type of content. Maybe you will enjoy it. It is a greater part of the Endgame in GW2 and totally worth a try.

I started with an MMORPG where both the race and the gender selection also changed your stats. More customization and you could easily spot the outmaxed players from afar. Those times are gone.

The huge problem with the HP pool, the stats are balanced around that HP pool. So if you create one base HP pool for every class, you create an imbalance. The high-risk high-reward classes may benefit from a greater HP pool, while the sturdy basic classes receive a massive nerf. Do not forget about Barrier nowadays. The size of the HP pool affects the barrier-capacity directly. More HP = more barrier. Less HP = less barrier. Take a look on the Scrapper (Engineer) and check the patches of the past year. It took them ages to balance out our barrier-distribution - just one class. They also experimented with our HP pool. The amount of work to run this scenario with every class that can technically acquire Barrier (which is literally everyone, thanks to barrier-support), they might be busy for several months or an entire year just to fix this.

The game already offers a wide variety of customization options. If you feel to squishy, you can put stat-points into vitality and toughness. You can also boost healing power to enhance your recovery abilities. If that is not the problem for you, outmax your other stats. In the end, it is a tradeoff. Damage <=> Survival. What you choose is up to you. You can balance this out or just go for one side. Having both supreme damage output and survivability is not possible, not with stats. You can achieve this goal with the correct use of skills and reflexes. There are Thieves out there who can solo a raid-boss or win a 5v1. But there are also plenty of players out there with outmaxed stats who struggle against a single Smokescale.

Speaking for EU (central European time-zones), both Drytop and Silverwastes are populated and active - sometimes. It is a bit of a gamble, there is not always an active commander in Drytop. But judging from the fact that I visit the map once per day and often run into a T3/T4 area, the situation there is still pretty good. Silverwastes is the no-brain farm hell, still. It is often run without a commander, with too less people and VW often fails when I go there. But there are still people who grind this place, like there is no tomorrow.

They solved the activity problem on most maps with the rotating daily system. Every day there is another map with Daily Events, as well as the LS3+LS4 daily map rotation. Those maps are populated during that time period. If you have got any achievements to do/complete, that is the best time to do it. If you want to explore these maps and immerse in the design, play them when they are not part of the daily. Is that design good? Well, it works.

WvW is somehow vital for the game. A lot of people still play that content actively and the bandwagon-transfers earn the company a lot of money. They keep this content active with little effort, compared to other content. Community wise? ANet earns tremendous applause for every feature they shut down. What ever they added to improve this content is seen as an obstacle.

We have no clue about the size of their teams, which content-parts even have dedicated teams, and their schedules. Without Bobby, many of us would still believe they are working on the next Raid Wing at the moment. My current guess about the WvW "team" is a the desk of one person with four drawers behind, one is labeled with "WvW." The balance team around the demigod CmC, not larger than a team of five. The support team is probably larger. LW currently smaller than support, larger than balancing. Cantha, I fear not the largest team. But that is just a random guess of a random player.

Dungeons are on the stack of discontinued projects. Nothing ever leaves that stack.

There are currently three classes that can utilize a Rifle: Engineer, Thief and Warrior.

Engineer is played like a shotgun, but not really powerful.

Warrior is played like a normal rifle, great damage and skills compared to the Engineer rifle.

Thief is played like a sniper-rifle, it is an elite-specialization weapon, obviously more powerful than the other two.

Your rifle is fine. It is not as powerful as the Greatsword, but for a ranged weapon of a melee-class, it performs better than many others.

On the other hand, you are the guys who want Discipline become baseline, so you can pick a 4th traitline. So I guess that shotgun you ask for has to hit like the GS, 2k range and auto-attack fire rate like ranger rapid shot?

Well, no. Every class out there has mechanics tied to the downed-state. Some Elite Specializations are designed to utilize the downed state in a special way. During the no-downed-state week, each of those is kicked into a trash-bin. We do not get a compensation for all the skills that stopped working.

Oh and btw. ANet is selling finishers. Good luck removing an income source in one of the two game-modes, finishers actually matter.

Dragonfall

The sad excuse of a map, the developers tried to bodge as many elements together as technically possible. It is a very nice farming-hell, give you credit for that. But it is a giant mess. The mobility-system is one of the worst I have ever seen, it can easily compete with Belsavis from ToR. How many do we have on this map?

- Waypoints

- Shrines from Siren's Landing

- Thermal Tubes from Ember Bay

- Ley Lines

- Mounts

- Skyscale pathing with volatile magic lines

Not to mention all the references they bodged together. Difficulty management is also a mess. The Skyscale treasure-hunt, requiring you to "explore" the entire map several times in a row. Regarding the final boss, Octovine Mechanic 'sigh' featuring two of the rarest creatures in the entire game, Hydra and Forgotten. Reminded me of the end of

About Tangled Depths, which was mentioned quite a few times in this thread:

The map itself is not that bad. The real problem comes with the map/minimap, you cannot rely on. The tool that is designed to aid you in every map and navigate you, confuses you in this map. The reason is quite simple. Due to the nature of the map, being so tangled and switching between height-levels frequently, the minimap always switches its view when you cross a certain vertical height. That works perfectly fine in every other map, but not there.

The different views of the minimap should be tied to the path you are walking on at that moment and only switch if you move from one path to another. Navigating through TD with the minimap feels like driving a car. Then suddenly the person next to you tries to help you and turns down the sun-shield.

If that problem was solved, the map would be a lot more appealing to players.

Hate for Warclaw instant finisher. People enjoy no-downed-week.

Idea for the next event: Heaven or Hell mode. Lifting the no-downed concept to the next level, all that matters is your speed.

> @"Miki.3862" said:

> To those still struggling with this, I fixed the problem by putting all the music files I wanted to use inside the Documents/GuildWars2/Music folder instead of directing outside of it, made the file paths much easier and assured there was nothing going wrong with that, now I did find it has an odd problem with certain files, regardless of the fact they should be compatible just something about them the game doesn't like - I used Audacity to make new .MP3 versions of the songs and they work fine now, not sure if converting the file using audacity alone will fix that issue or not though.

>

> Hope this helps!

WORKS! AT LAST! Big thanks!

You can also take advantage of the repetitive nature of these Festivals.

The Adventures for example, if you did them in the past, you can run them blind by now with gold rewards. Run them daily and you have 500 tokens in just a few minutes.

Got everything unlocked? Use the Weekly vendor to stack up more LW currencies for additional ascended trinkets or legendary collections.

A few hints about the Festival in General:

- If you plan to restock on Charged Quartz, regular Quartz Crystals may drop in price over the duration of the festival. If you do not want to gather the 25 pieces daily, or lack the time to do so, just get your hands on a couple of cheap stacks once the price drops.

- Participate in races multiple times. Once you have completed, return to the start point and do it again. The Ace Racer achievement only counts laps, not race-events. If you are fast enough, you can get those 20 extra currency at every race. The Ace Racer also seems to work with the time race, so you can use this as a filler between events.

- Did Drizzlewood Coast over the past few weeks, your storage is stacking up with useless low-priced materials? Check out the vendors at the Labyrinthine Cliffs, near the ship (water). They exchange all kinds of cheap materials for Zephyrite Supply Boxes.

- Flying Dolyak (and every guild-race): You can stack up Swiftness Before you start the race. The transformation does not remove your boons, so you can get a speed boost for the race. It is not much, but if you struggle with the completion, it may help you to reach gold.

- Griffon Adventures: If you happen to hit the water-surface a lot, charge up the booster only once and then release the space-bar. Keep diving downward. Once you reach the right level, release the dive-key as well and you will instantly fly forward and stop diving. Holding the booster (space-bar) does increase speed, but locks your movement for a short moment = cannot abort the dive. If you are too close to the ground, this can be fatal. Tested with both the Adventures, one charge up is enough to reach gold easily. There is no need to charge up twice or even three times.

- Aspects - Assisted Leap (wind): If you happen to miss the platforms, use the skill without moving and press the arrow-key while in mid air. For most platforms this works great, even during the race.

- Aspects - Light Dash (sun): The dash can be interrupted by pressing the skill again.

- Aspects - Lightning Pull (Lightning): The symbol dedicated to this aspects tend to bug out once in a while. This can be really annoying during the Flying Dolyak race. If you want to avoid these cases in general, just use the ability before you reach the symbol on the ground and just use the ground-targeting feature.

- Aspects - Combo: You can actually activate Lightning Pull while dashing via Light Dash. In this case you will be able to aim the ground-targeting mid-dash. In order to execute the Lightning Pull, you need to wait for the dash to run out. Alternatively you can abort the dash as mentioned above and rapidly press Lightning Pull with your mouse cursor already in position. This combo is extremely useful when you are at the final section of the Flying Dolyak race. Requires a little training though.

There is no positive feedback, at least nothing visible. Most of the public discussions related to raiding exist because somewhere someone ran into trouble. There are a lot of topics why KP/LI system is bad with intense destructive discussion featuring both sides, accusing each others of being intolerant and toxic. There are discussions about ArcDPS which also lean towards the same direction. What raiding totally lacks are threads and discussions talking about positive impressions of the game-mode. That is both the case for the General Discussion, but also for this sub-forum. I mean, just look at the current main-page of the Fractals/Dungeons/Strike Missions/Raids board. I found 7 topics with perceived toxicity.

When there are raid-related topics discussed in the General Discussion section, it is often negative and at best neutral, but positive? Not to mention those charming requests for higher difficulty content, which often result in destructive feedback as well. Or the rants of certain members of your sub-community, which pretty much fit the prejudice of the aggressive elitist raider. That is not helping at all and harms your reputation even more.

I do not ask you to be silent about problems. When there is trouble, we have to talk, discuss and find a solution - or at least try to do that. But you should stop shrugging whenever something works out as it should. In the General Discussion section, there are threads about why the community is great, how helpful players can be. Whenever I come up with any suggestion towards your sub-community, I basically earn a /shrug and some "too much work, not worth it" or "if YOU see a problem, YOU should solve it!" Crossing the arms, waiting for the problem to just go away.

Now I am going to do something I may regret within the next hour. Making the first move. Starting a topic in your sub-forum about positive PUG and LFG experience. It will definitely not solve the problem, but I think it might be a step into the right direction. The more replies, the better. Best would be to keep the topic active and bump it with a new post every week, so there is at least something positive on your main page.

We often read about problems and trouble related to the LFG and inviting PUGs to groups, but those situations are only a small fraction of what really goes on. The majority of these runs work out pretty well. There are even some cheering situations, where the player or the entire group end up with a better experience. I bet everyone of you has a couple of nice anecdotes of runs that turned out better than expected. It would be a helpful contrast to all that negativity that exists for this topic in general. Show us how well runs can be if the rng strikes in your favor. How you have met new players who may have joined your static groups or guilds, just after having a nice time in an instance.

I have three of these examples on my own:

The first was a boring TA Explorable run on a boring sunday afternoon, a couple of weeks ago. We formed a guild-group with 3 people and one of our team decided to run the LFG. I was not really into that idea, due to the bad experiences I had in the past and all the prejudices I gathered from the forums over the years. But I agreed to try it. We got two players who appeared to be both quite attached to instanced content, meta builds, roations and also skips. We did not specify anything in the LFG, but started to run the path as usual = killing all enemies. At first, the PUGs just ignored the trash mobs, then they decided to join us. They helped us killing them faster and even showed us a couple of hidden mob groups, we never really noticed. It was a fun experience without any single word in chat.

The second situation was Vale Guardian raid training we ran recently. It was in the late evening, two of our members (guild-run) had to go, so we decided to try the LFG once again. Two nice Guardians joined. We quickly explained the situation, told them we might fail a few more times and quit. They were fine with it. We failed three times at rather suprising situations, mostly the colored detonations where we messed up the coordination. Once our healer got knocked out of the ring. We were almost giving up. Then we gave it one more try and made it, with only one person getting defeated right after the first phase. The PUGs were happy about the easy clear, and we parted. Our members were finally able to unlock their raid-masteries. Not a single toxic chat, the PUGs were all calm and nice. (Most of our members did not run on meta-builds at all.)

The third situation happened to me when doing HotW with a guildmember. We created a party of 4 and invited a PUG who also appeared to be quite professional compared to us. He also died a couple of times, but he obviously out-damaged us with ease. Almost at the end, one of us had to leave his computer shortly. So we sat down and waited. The PUG asked about our guild and what we focus on. We told him that we are not a hardcore guild and rather focus on RL > everything, calm environment, social guild, play as you want - there are many of these guilds nowadays. Although he seemed not to be of our kind at all at first, he was quite interested in joining our guild. I gave him an invite and he instantly joined after the run. He did not stay for long, but we enjoyed his company for the time being. Calm and patient.

Those were three of my recent experiences with the LFG, situations that turned out better than expected. Countering the prejudices. We have jerks in all game-modes, but I begin to doubt there is a higher chance to run into them in the LFG. Looking forward to the next try.