Check list required for doing dungeons:
1) Bare minimum of 15 silver in your inventory that you dont mind burning away (may need more at higher levels due to increased repair costs)
2) Patience, and up to 4 hours of free time at least on your first run.
3) GUILD GROUP with people who know how to at least swap weapon sets and not zerg. Melees should focus on killing trash and swap to ranged for and gold / purple named bosses. Pugs especially with first timers will not go well at all.
On my first time in both AC and CM, it took over 3 hours even in guild groups, but fortunately everyone stayed until the end. In random pugs people cannot believe or tolerate the difficulty and time required and start rage quitting. In AC one of my guildies was in a group with 4 random pugs (I missed his guild chat message asking for more people due to being AFK because I want to do dungeons all the time). One person quit after 2 bosses so he asked in GC for one more and I joined. Then we lost two more people while failing at the Lovers (the absolute hardest boss fight EVER!) - one person wasnt prepared for how long it took and had to go, the other quit cos we failed just 3 times (on the third time we had one boss at 20% health, and the other at 40%, then we all wiped and they reset), and they got replaced by 2 more guildies and then we succeeded on our 4th attempt at them.
We were constantly throwing boulders at them to knocklock and seperate, most people dont know that you need to do this to win without 1 hit ko massive AoEs. When the bosses auras overlap, they deal insane damage and overlap massive AoEs that = wipe unless they are seperated and knocklocked with boulders.
The good news is that once you can defeat the Lovers, you should be prepared for everything this game has to throw at you, its a great boss fight to break people into the dungeons.
4) Constant kiting, evading out of red circles, preperation to die and party wipe an awful lot. No tanking in GW2, you cannot stand still, you cannot take damage, you cannot hold agro. Whenever I see people specifying that they need a tank for a dungeon in map chat I just facepalm.
5) Good gear (this is not GW1). I went into level 45 explorable CM at level 48 with a full set of level 46 green + 2 yellow armor pieces mainly specced in Honing with 40% crit chance, 32% crit damage and over 1000 power, and the green level 45 staff from personal story, and I was still nothing but a pure gimp
6) Again - NO TANKS IN GW2!!! Ask for / require a tanky specced character, and you kill stuff slower and get wiped more. I played a few times with a vitality / toughness focused guardian, and he still got 1 shotted by the same stuff that killed my squishy power / precision ele. I also played around with 10 points in Earth traits for my ele for increased condition damage mainly and +5% melee range damage perk, and no the +100 toughness did absolutely nothing to help me stay alive any longer.
7) Stuff has like a billion HP, all 5 people need to be DPSing as much as possible, while casting any support skills on recharge (I would swap into Water attunement to cast the AoE heals, then swap between Earth for the AoE + Shield spells, fire to drop nukes, Air for blind + knockback, repeat, repeat, repeat, and after 10+ minutes of trying something finally dies).
8) When dead click on the nearest waypoint and run back asap. Dont wait for people to res you, it takes to long. When low on health / downed, do everything possible to keep yourself alive as long as you can - run around like a headless chicken, cast shields, invulnerability, keep moving and dont stay still. The reason for all this is that if the party fully wipes, the mobs reset their HP just like you do when no more enemies are agroed. You cannot wait for regroups without them resetting, you need to keep people in the fight all the time, and you need to keep alive / downed as long as you can while other people are ressing and coming back so the mobs dont reset.
9) Enjoy it before everything is either dumbed down, or characters are over buffed / power crept to a level where you can do all the dungeons with your eyes closed.
Wow, There is a lot to take into consideration but i'll make sure i'm prepared for it next time!
