Guild Wars 2

Hi,

As you may be aware of, the Volcanic Fractal often blocks a team. People will play sometimes for a long time in fractals #1 and #2, only to get to volcanic as #3 and be unable to beat the end boss.
I know that for any decent team with skilled players, this boss shouldn’t be a real issue. But the reality is that the number of teams which fail there is too high, which is bad : amount of time spent for “nothing”, people raging, leaving , loss of motivation do play in fractals …

The idea is to implement a slight change that will not change the difficulty for decent teams but will still prevent average teams from being blocked there.

Here it is : There are 4 villagers around the end boss fight. Have this be a final number, ie they shouldn’t respawn neither during the fight nor when the boss resets if the team dies

So, when a team comes to the boss, the fight is still the same : we have to put an end to his stone bubble before he reaches a villager, or at least be able to survive for several more ‘25%hp+elems spawn’ phases.
But if the team has a too hard time doing this, the boss will kill 1-2 villagers per fail. After some time, there will not be any villager anymore. Now the team can focus on elementals (still needs to be able to survive them !) before taking care of the bubble : boss doesn’t fight with his eles, and there is no more time pressure. Any team that is not too bad should now be able to beat the boss if the “normal way” fails too much. Teams that are really bad and have nothing to do at this level will still fail as they should.

What do you think about this ?

Eowyn

ps : don’t forget to click the +1 button if you like the idea

to be honest i’ve been very lucky and played fractals with very skilled players, so i never failed this boss more than once in a run.
one thing that i noticed is that we fail when there is no guardian or sometimes when there is only one not focused on support and heal.
and that is not very fair since it prevents random group with random profession to succed, but that is my experience, not a statistic.

there are few suggestion i have for this boss:
1 the stone babble is hit based and not damage based so it disappear as faster as you can hit, with my mesmer i switch to scepter and pistol when the shield is up because attack numer 3 and 4 do multiple hits and if any of my clones is up they hit too.
ignore the lava elemental when the shield is up, destroy it as soon as possible
2 when the shield is destroyed focus on lava elemental the more aoe you can use the better. stability so they won’t block you, condition removals and any heals you can get to keep you up. i noticed that people focused on dps tend to be downed easily unless they are very skilled at what they do
3 reflection skill on the boss are important because you can redirect to him the fire bubble, if you don’t have any try to dodge his attack. when you are hit by the fire bubble don’t go close to friends in order to avoid burning them
4 never stand still, but that’s granted
5 only the person with no aggro should ress downed players and it’s better (unless the ress is almost over) if only one person do it while the other keep the boss busy, you have to be smart enough to interrupt ressing to dodge, heal and cleanse condition in order to avoid you to be downed by something.
ressing dead people during the shield and the lava elemental is suicide.

that said it is a very hard fight

As I said in my op, I know that this boss can be beaten (and is beaten more often than failed even with random teams), I know his mechanics and the strategies that help fighting him.
So, ty for the suggestions about how to fight him, but this thread is more about how to prevent him from blocking teams that have trouble there (more than you seem to think. I didn’t get blocked often, but there are often teams who lfm for him)

I think the above guesstion (bold part) will let the fight as-is for the first 2-3 tries, having us have to use the usual strategy you described; but if a team gets in too much trouble the fight will become much easier. And it’s just a small change

I kinda agree. It’s a good solution to keep a hard boss very hard but have it become a bit less hard after 2 wipes.

As for engi tips: I bring elixir gun for extra aoe heals, and #3 is useful to bring the shield down fast. After that it’s aoe’ing your kitten off. It’s a hard boss. I like that.

I support this idea and I really hope that they at least will implement a kind of mark on player (like Caudecus’s Manor) when the boss is going to shoot the arrow to let you know when to dodge or reflect missile. Its really annoying right now…

I was more hopeing they reward people after the fracs which are comming for me the most annoying fractal is the drege one. It needs so long like swamp and Fire fractal combined. The bosses are a joke there but those dam mobs which are immun against blind and hit so hard that they instant can down u