Guild Wars 2

Because someone thought this enemy wasn’t tough enough.

He can now use an ability to turn everyone into Scaled Drakes for a few minutes, and summons Risen Acolytes to heal himself, rendering the last 5-10 minutes of effort pointless if you don’t have enough people to kill them before he heals back fully.

Was this really a change people wanted? The Priest could already insta-down players with that spin move, and had a few area attacks that could be annoying to avoid. And now this?

What do others feel of this change? I obviously think it’s one of the worst changes made recently. This could become like Grenth, where no one can ever get through it, and simply because of the annoying gimmicks they added. And this is worse, since while Grenth’s statues aren’t really that dangerous, Melandru’s statues pretty much mean a death sentence if you go into their area.

This is not all that new. I saw it nearly a month ago. The break point seems to be about 6-8 players for downing the acolytes before he regenerates to full. Can people do Lyssa with 8? Balthazar? With the new chest rewards, it shouldn’t be that hard to entice people in zone or from players’ guilds to come.

I find the mechanic more interesting than just ablating his health bar while trying to avoid his AoE. While he is not the most complex boss in gaming, this is a step in the “more interesting” direction. I’m sure that in a diverse community you will find people who like the mechanic and those who don’t. I think of it this way: the fight was made more interesting without making it more deadly. Grenth on the other hand is both.

This may be a server issue, but mine is hardly a high-pop server and we regularly clear Melandru.

This isn’t a new trick at all. I believe its an ability that changes (loses or gains) dynamically based on the number of people at the event. Most of the Melandru fights I’ve participated in have included the drake, but a few times when there were a very large number of people, there were never any drake phases. He was finally working again on my server again last night after being “Unavailable” for the last 2 weeks and we had maybe 12 people doing the event and we went through the whole drake morph a few times.

It’s nothing new at all. In fact, it’s a very old scaling.

Counter transformation with another transformation. It’s true for most events involving transformation.

There is a pair of diving goggles in the temple, which is a transformation effect. So, use it to counter drake transformation.

Tonic is another transformation that can be used as a counter, but I don’t know if it’s been patched or not.

FYI, the priest of Melandru is extremely easy to solo. Just shoot him from the top of the tree without him seeing your feet, and you’ll take 0 damage for the whole fight without even having to move at all.

As a matter of fact, the whole meta event chain can be soloed. The only hard part is the 2 veteran acolytes in the last wave of the escort to the temple.

Melandru has always been like this except for the patch that bugged him out.