Okay so my buddies and I just 80 and got some decent gear. we want to run some explorables but a lot of them are just kicking our asses. now, i know gw2 dungeons are a lot harder than wow or star wars (where we come from in terms of mmos) and there is certainly a level of l2play going on. we're still pretty new. however, after doing some research i've discovered our group comp is just awful -
condition necro
dagger theif
support ranger
shatter/utility mesmer
????
our 5th is generally a pug since the guy who was going to play guardian with us is leveling slower than a mo'fo. from what i understand speed runs are generally some combination of warriors, guardians, and mesmers. for easy-mode pve rangers, thiefs, and necros don't have much of a role. now i'm not saying i want the game to be faceroll, we love how much harder it is, but we've got to figure out a way to make this comp work for dungeon runs that don't take 2+ hours. not asking for 30 minute path clears, we'd just like to be able to knock out 2-3 explorables a night instead of wiping out because of crazy moves like that arah illusionist beam every other pull. We spent 4 hours in p1 arah and didn't even beat Giganticus Lupicus (or whatever). A lot of that was learning, granted, but we have more problems than that. Our thief gets blown up if a mob looks at him funny, our necro somehow manages to hold aggro on EVERYTHING (and gets destroyed) and our ranger does negative damage since shes managing buffs 90% of any run. when we try to build support characters to make up for the gaps we have then nothing dies because nobody can do any damage. when we go for damage nobody has enough stuns or interrupts to peel for the necro. as the mesmer, i'm the only one who feels like i can do decent damage and offer utility.
i know a lot of people will come in here and say "X class is fine ur just bad", believe me, if I were more of a vet I'd say the same thing. But! Reading a lot of forums, the general consensus is over half our party is just bad - especially since we'd eventually like to do fractals. i know we *can* make it work - the question is how (other than the learning when to dodge and what to focus stuff, thats all just experience and we're quick studies). thats why I'm making this thread.
l2play issues aside, when we get a warrior or guardian in as our pugs everything goes 10x smoother. however, we can't always rely on having one of these classes. is there any way we can make this team work. certain builds our classes can use to make up for the lack of aegis spam (for example) or is it just time for some of us to reroll? and how the fuck does threat work? our necro does great damage when he isn't tanking every single mob in the game.
we're really enjoying the game so far, but our necro and thief are starting to get frustrated and if we can't figure something out i'm afraid they'll quit! any advice you can offer would be appreciated.