Ascalon Catacombs, help please?

So my first run in AC was a complete disaster, we made it hot to the Romeo and Juliet fight, and just couldn't beat it.

The make up was me as a dagger backstabbing/ stealth thief, 2h guardian, dual wield warrior, fire and air species elements list and I think a dot focused necro.

The trash mobs were brutal, we kept having issues trying to keep the melee away from the squishies and the focus of trying to eliminate the ranged characters proved to be very difficult.

I've recently retooled as a valor/radiance guardian using a shiel and mace build focusing on survivability via a lot of HP and toughness.

This should allow me to roll with the hits a little more and allow the melee to focus on taking out the squishies such as rangers and mages.

My question is, two fold. Should we try this setup where we kite the melee members and focus on the deaths of ranged targets, mages first followed by rangers. Two such as the harder hitting warriors and such would go after the Mage and ranger while the friendly elements list would focus on maintaining health and cc backed up by the necro making sure the melee characters are in a crippled state to prevent them from closing in on the casters.

Larger pulls I imagine will make this more difficult to accomplish.

Second, is there an ideal make up for these dungeons, my brother who was the elements list said that he was always having trouble with agro, and most attempts to try and drag them off of the squishies didn't work to well.

What methods can we use to mitigate this?

dang. i you were on TC i'd come help you out, i haven't done that dungeon yet.

Ive heard the dungeons are hard

Which is friggin awesome

Im level 25 now so almost there

I lost count after 30 some deaths in our team. Everything pretty much hits like a vet NPC, and the bosses are no joke either. As a squishy sometimes you could get one or two shotted. Rangers and mages can wipe your entire party with o ly a handful of shots. Expect to die....a lot...

i did the level 40 dungeon (Caudecus's Manor), its quite challenging, expect to die or be downed quite often. i haven't tried the 30 yet (Ascalon Catacombs) but ive heard a lot of players had trouble with it, one guy said he lost 40s in repair costs to that dungeon.

I find it easy as hell to stay alive with my Ranger. Only time I get hit is if I do something stupid.

Majority of us were melee, also was this the first time you did the du from and was it the first time everyone else had done it as well? My brother did it once and had a group thy really knew what they were doing, granted they also had an engineer p help with CC. We didn't have that, CC was harder for the most part.

Further more, agro works by proximity, the enemy will prioritize the squishies over the melee until some distance is opened up, after that they will combine the dps of a target on top of their proximity and attack those as appropriate. This is why ranged characters that get careless or melee that don't pay attention or don't know about this mechanic get into trouble. It's also why I found myself as a thief on the unfortunate end of trying to soft tank a warrior (that wasn't working out too well).

Your group probably had experienced dungeoneers. Most of mine were noobies including myself. Many of us I thi k suffer from the wow mentality and old habits are hard to break.

Yea there is no trinity and I still dont think people have grasped that idea yet.

You see it in the world boss events too

Sorry for all the spelling errors my phone likes to fuck up my posts

BTW we cant help you, man

Different servers....

I'm not asking so much for help but for advice in dealing with this and learning how to adjust my play style accordingly. So far I'm working on leveling my armor smithing so that my gear is up to snuff. I'm currently sitting at 100 armor smith and have just made it to iron. I was a little surprised at how little over 600 some pieces of iron ore yielded me in terms of bars. But such is the way of crafting. I'm just glad I kept saving it up. Only got I think 300 some bars of even that

Still new a mess load of low level materials, it kind of sucks how damn expensive crating can be.

I hardly ever do crafting.....I might be gimping myself

I did some reading, man

It seems this is one of the more melee un friendly dungeons in the game.

Sym... you are not gimping yourself at all. im only using quest reward loot and vendor'd items and im level 75. once i get to 80 ill get a ton of karma gear and stick some Sigils and Runes i've saved up and be a pimp-ass mofo.

Crafting can make some great items, but doing events, dungeons, quests and hearts can gie just as good items

You get a lot of experience if you go the discovery route, from the 18 points I had in AS, all the way to 100 I jumped a level and 1/4 I believe from doing discovery with the crafts, not to mention you can tailor the the weapon or armors stats to your liking.