Guild Wars 2

As a forward our run was done on teamspeak with 2 rangers,1 Necro,1 ele,and an engineer. As you can see we were able to clear the dungeon in about1.5 hrs, with most of the time spent on gearheart.

To start the dungeon is wonderfully designed visually, we were very impressed. As someone who scrutinized scarlet heavily in the past, I feel that she was carried well here and her badgering of caithe’s secret really added value to her and made us interested in the story. Well done.

-Ooze room. We figured it out fairly fast but ran into problems with the ooze burning even when they weren’t touching the walls. I recommend cleaning up the fire’kitten boxes and adding seeds players can throw at oozes to cleanse them.

-Sparki and Slick were well done. We wiped once, no issues or bugs we ran into. The ooze seemed to track reliably.

-Floor puzzle: no issues. Once we had 4 switches down we had the engineer magnet pull the holo to the door. We did feel as if the floor moved a bit too fast and the visual is hard to see. Recommend a slightly slower pace for more casual players for the floor shifts.

-Charr boss: No issues with the actual encounter. He does not drop a chest when killed though. Not sure if this is a bug. This boss had some really cool abilities but the large relfect ring that is supposed to force you into melee was not threatening. Recommend adding a stacking bleed to players outside of it to further reinforce the mechanic.

-Holo pirate gemerators: Ok these are bugged as hell. Standing on one glitch teleports you away from it. This puts people in the floor and messes up group positioning. I recommend removing collision detection from these and just letting us walk through them. When they die their wreckage causes the same glitch, which totally messes up the gearhart encounter. Nothing more awesome that being force teleported into 10 gear shredders because bugged generator wreckage. This is by far the worse problem we encountered.

-Gearhart: Awesome encounter, difficulty felt right but mechanics need polish. The holopirate resets when pulled too far from the quadrant he spawns in. Please remove tethering from him and remove pets and minions from his aggro table. He reset many times on us and goes spastic with his targeting around pets. We struggled more with pirate control bugs than anything else. Boss also needs to drop his shield and stacks after a wipe so you don’t start a new attempt by being pounded by his ultimate.

That’s all we ran into. Hopefully easy fixes for a well designed dungeon.

For some reason, I don’t know if it was lag or not, I and a few party members kept rubberbanding into the destroyed hologenerators at the final boss. This is terrible as he seems to love tossing gears into the general area, usually KOing the person who gets banded. This was the major reason for a string of wipes yesterday.

I didn’t mind the bosses, but the leading the ooze room is terrible terrible game design. It’s too rewarding for some classes/specs, and punishing for others. Make the Ooze an allied unit so that players can’t damage it.

First boss – Went fine, we wiped once because we attacked the oil dude first, where killing the girl in the dredge suit first takes like seconds and makes the fight much easier.

Puzzle was fine, though It’d be nice if they actually gave you some kind of hint instead of just FIGURE IT OUT!

The Charr commander was really easy as long as you don’t stand next to him.

The holos were pretty easy, my one complaint is they can really mess with your camera if you get too close.

Last boss we wiped probably 5 times, but that was because two of our members just could not figure out how to drag the boss to the holo or the holo to the boss, so they’d get aggro and we’d wipe. (Also, Warrior OP for this encounter, endure pain + dolyak signet means you can ignore his super power stomp if he does get to that stage)

HOWEVER, my main complaint for the entire path is that it HARDCORE punishes melee, especially the final boss (toss) and the charr boss (spin/axe toss). Way too many anti melee mechanics, while ranged weapons can just sit back and plink plink. While everyone should use a ranged weapon, it’s still annoying that melee weapons are at such a huge disadvantage.

This feedback on the generators and rubberbanding confirms my suspicions that there is a collision detection issue with them. It is probably the same code that causes issues when players stand on dying graveling mounds and end up being teleported through doors and floors.

Ahlen.7591:

HOWEVER, my main complaint for the entire path is that it HARDCORE punishes melee, especially the final boss (toss) and the charr boss (spin/axe toss).

For the final boss, if you stay in melee then he does not throw the blades of death, making the fight easier and quicker.

Bumbler.7581:

Ahlen.7591:

HOWEVER, my main complaint for the entire path is that it HARDCORE punishes melee, especially the final boss (toss) and the charr boss (spin/axe toss).

For the final boss, if you stay in melee then he does not throw the blades of death, making the fight easier and quicker.

Sort of? Or you can stay as a group of 5, avoid the blades when they come down and move to another spot, controlling where he throw them and taking 0 damage, rather than getting melee pounded.

Funny my first wipe happened at the beginning wave, still don’t know what is that 5 sec stun that can’t be remove by stun break or avoid by stability.

Ooze room is kinda of hit-or-miss, it was easy in my runs but I can see it being hard for some pugs, kinda like that hot potato puzzle in Arah.

Duo boss not that kittence figure out what’s going on, no wipe here.

Floor puzzle is fairly simple, but with an odd bug, apparently mist form onto the switch won’t cut it, everyone has to walk/jump onto it for the holo to spawn.(took us ~5 min to figure this one out.)

Charr boss is easy but his achievement seems down right impossible, figure it may need classes with no damage pull(like thief) to do this one.

The last boss is not anti-melee at all, in fact, we only manage to beat it by hugging it. If stand too far away, he will spawn these spinning things(deal massive damage when stand close) that make kiting him into holo super awkward. Compare to that, getting toss is hardly a threat, worst case you just get throw to the opposite side of holo.

ps. Also got rubberband into generator while fighting the last boss, was wondering if that’s a boss skill or something.

Oh I forgot to add, during the first half of the dungeon I was able to run it pretty smoothly, once we got to the Aetherblade part, my computer started chugging. I had all the video options to lowest, except for the character models which were low. Pretty much all other content (besides zerg WvW/overpopulated world events) is pretty easy in the computation department, but this section made it wholly unpleasant to be running new content.

My only issue with the dungeon is the ooze room.

Not sure what can be done. I think if they nerf it, it will upset some people who currently enjoy it and have been asking for more challenging content. If they don’t, then the path will likely not see much action after the two weeks are over. I for one would hate to see an update go to waste. It’s a really interesting concept for an encounter, but it has some issues.

I don’t see the Ooze room as challenging, just gimmicky. We beat it pretty quick but…ugh. It makes me want to not ever go back.

Come on, escort missions are bad design 101, and escort missions of an ENEMY THAT YOU CAN DAMAGE?

Personally, I find the dungeon not too difficult. It was somewhat challenging, and defnitely will kill you the first few times as you get used to it, but the aetherbalde retreat some time ago was harder than this. I don’t find any of the task particularly annoying but then I always run with my usual solid group.

All in all this has been quite fun. But I do agree its kinda silly that in the ooze run, the ooze we escort can be killed by us as well…

seems… odd.

So far only made to the 1st boss but with pugs its a miracle we got there.

Ooze room is insanely hard when people just don’t listen…
Tell them to pull spawn @s bad @s sparks in arah P4 but i hope they don’t put anymore escort mechanics unless it’s a basic defend the npc type.

Wipe after wipe in the 1st boss since an enlightened party member thought that killing the growing ooze was way better than going for the boss… “If it’s getting bigger it’s beacause it’s getting more powerful, we should slay him 1st” that was his reasoning.

Oh well, i guess this will be a nightmare to pull with pugs until people get half a brain.

The issues with the Clockheart not resetting absolutely needs to be addressed. It puts players at far too much of a disadvantage when he unleashes his massive attack immediately at the start of the battle.

The movement issues with the generators is also quite annoying.

For leading the oozes to the door, it’s mostly ok but I think two things should be changed:
- Players really shouldn’t be able to hit or at least damage the oozes with their skills. Putting aside accidentally auto-targetting them, having these things damageable pretty much renders all AoE skills unusable. As an Elementalist I felt like I couldn’t touch 3/4 of my skills.
- Lava elementals shouldn’t spawn so near the oozes’ starting locations that they auto-aggro on the oozes. It’s frustrating when trying to coordinate the party and do a “3-2-1 go” to then find one of the oozes is already under attack without us having done anything at all.

Sparki and Slick wasn’t too bad once we understood the mechanic and all of the players were ready to kite the ooze around properly. It’s a little unfortunate that random players get hit with the pheromone and especially that sometimes multiple people will have it at the same time. That makes it harder to have one person dedicate to leading the ooze. But I have mixed feelings about suggesting it be changed.

The floor puzzle had some annoying aspects:
- At the end of Caithe’s little speech, she said something like “get in the room as fast as possible”. So I did that, jumped on a platform (since it looked important), and then proceeded to get owned by a massive burst of damage as the room came online. Sure we don’t want players to be able to deploy onto all the platforms before the thing even starts, but is that really the best way to prevent it?
- The floor’s pattern changes depending on what platforms have been activated. Under at least one pattern, there’s no safe path from the entrance into the room. That kinda sucks if any players haven’t gone in yet.
- The speed of floor felt a bit fast. There’s almost no room for hesitation or mistakes, especially when one is still at the point where getting hit by the floor makes it impossible to jump onto a platform.
- After getting all 4 platforms activated, having to pull a hologram across the room felt kinda annoying/redundant. “We just did the hard part, now we have to pull yet another enemy from point A to point B?”

Fighting the Clockheart had some annoyances:
- The spinning cog things he throws last far too long (unless I missed there being some way to destroy them). If a player gets downed->defeated under one, he’s going to be out of the battle for several minutes, which sucks for the party and is boring for the player.
- The permanently electrified center of the room seems rather pointless, although it’s mostly ignorable. However, if a player gets knocked or thrown into it and dies, then there’s no hope of reviving them. Again, that sucks for everyone.
- Having everyone teleported into the room when the battle starts is great for keeping everyone together. But having everyone then locked in the room can be annoying when the battle goes bad. If most of the party is dead and it’s clear that the remaining one or two won’t be able to rez them, then there’s no way for them to retreat. They can either try to take on the boss alone (which is boring for the defeated players) or commit suicide so everyone can respawn.
- The occasionally electrifying floors seemed unnecessary. It was ok during the preceding stage of destroying the generators. But with the main boss active, personally I think there’s already enough challenge dealing with him without having 1/4 or 1/2 of the room randomly cut off.

Well. The dungeon is really fun and annoying and frustrating and fun. If you have good players then it will be ok but if not then.. Hmmm..

Well.. Let’s just said pubs players should really know how to read the instruction. Running several times with players who just try to zerg through. Kill ooze(s) (ooze maze and 1st boss). Keep killing aether even told them to destroy the generators.

So overall, it was fun. Really.

To add to a few bugs observed during my playthrough:

Clockheart:
- Unusual teleporting around hologenerators (after they’ve been destroyed).
- Being thrown by Clockheart toward hologenerators may cause unusual teleporting (see above).
- If downed inside the middle area, unable to teleport to target location (Thief and Mesmer downed abilities).
- Charged floor panels sporadically remained charged after a failed attempt until Clockheart’s armor is removed/reset.

As noted above, it would be ideal for Clockheart to completely reset after a failed attempt, especially when considering that party members are forcibly teleported into the area when the boss is engaged.

Otherwise, the encounter is great, challenging and fun! An excellent replacement of the old Forward/Up path (to hell with Fyonna)! My party was especially grateful that Clockheart didn’t have an unreasonable amount of heath. The pace felt right and we felt we were making progress when we needed to burst damage. I would love to see more encounters with “phases” like this between bursting and control to make it engaging but not grindy.

Thanks, Anet!

Finally beat it and my god it’s so much easier when people know what they’re doing.

I just don’t understand why the condition immunity skill from the mobs.
The dungeon was designed to hinder zerker play by not allowing skip so much, multiple puzzles and so on, also Cdmg is already so weak compared to Pdmg so i really don’t know why punishing it even further…

I love the new TA. thanks Anet I ran it twice now. And I will keep doing it each day till I or my guild/friends are bored of it. It was super fun both times.

Gave up for tonight due to nonstop teleporting generators (not hyperbole, the teleporting would not end), endure pain occasionally, mysteriously not working during the big stomp attack for me, boss not resetting, hurling me into the aforementioned telegenerators, and mesmer/ranger illusions/pets goofing things up horribly. Would have asked the mes and ranger to change characters but I’m playing with guildies and those are their only level 80’s. Had to switch from my engie to my warrior as well, which I’d rather not do, but eh. Simple fact is that he just does more damage and survives better.

Also at one point the clockheart hurled me into the air where I got stuck on nothingness and ground to death by gears below. No frickin’ clue what that was. Ah yeah, and getting hung up in the telegenerators during the electric floor.

We had no problem with any part of the dungeon besides that glitchy, nightmarish encounter and we were all having the issues save for my weird endure pain thing. It really is like the whole encounter just broke for us. Gonna try tomorrow, and hope to get lucky with less bugs.

I really like the new path. Other than a few bugs, my only real complaint is the length. I think a good dungeon (especially a challenging one) is about 20-40mins.

Egon Vidar.9125:

Gave up for tonight due to nonstop teleporting generators (not hyperbole, the teleporting would not end), endure pain occasionally, mysteriously not working during the big stomp attack for me, boss not resetting, hurling me into the aforementioned telegenerators, and mesmer/ranger illusions/pets goofing things up horribly. Would have asked the mes and ranger to change characters but I’m playing with guildies and those are their only level 80’s. Had to switch from my engie to my warrior as well, which I’d rather not do, but eh. Simple fact is that he just does more damage and survives better.

Also at one point the clockheart hurled me into the air where I got stuck on nothingness and ground to death by gears below. No frickin’ clue what that was. Ah yeah, and getting hung up in the telegenerators during the electric floor.

We had no problem with any part of the dungeon besides that glitchy, nightmarish encounter and we were all having the issues save for my weird endure pain thing. It really is like the whole encounter just broke for us. Gonna try tomorrow, and hope to get lucky with less bugs.

So many bugs with the clockwork boss, ive had all the problems you and other people have posted about. Ive beaten the path 4 times but those bugs only show themselves if you dont beat him the first time, which unfortunaly with pugs tend to be each run.

Yeah, the dev team did a good job.

My only complaint was the tethering of the holo-pirates at Clockheart as someone mentioned earlier. You know their leash should be the entire room and there’s no good reason why it’s not. I think everyone could agree on that.

I did it with a Pug tonight, and we eventually beat it, but the last boss took an hour or more and probably more than a dozen deaths on my part alone. Knowing it well enough I think I could do better, but there are some annoying bits.

First, we definitely hit the “wiped, but room didn’t clear” thing several times. The lightest was when we’d have to start with him fully charged up for his attack, the worst was one time where not only was he fully charged, but also EVERY quadrant was electrified! That’s just bullkitten!

-It should be impossible for every quadrant to become electrified. If three are charged, and a 4th is ready to proc, the first should de-electrify.

When you die in an electric field, it places you on a small square in the middle of the field. This is fine in other rooms, but come on, this is just insane in the boss room.

-If you die in an electrified qudarant, it should teleport you to the center of the nearest NON-electrified quadrant.

Not only that, but it would often toss a green death-gear directly ONTO your body, making it impossible for anyone to even attempt a rez for at least a minute or so.

-Make it impossible for Clockheart to throw gears onto player corpses, or at the very least make it impossible for him to throw them at the “center squares” that it puts you on. Ideally deathgears would be destructible as well.

Overall this is the sort of encounter where it’s very easy if everything goes well, and a nightmare when even a few things start going wrong. I agree with the stuff the others have said too, about the mob-tethering and the teleporting holo-generators.

My only big issue with the dungeon is the electrified floor during the hologenerator part of Clockheart. Imo the sections are way too big. It’s literally the only place in the dungeon where I can get frequently downed and it’s annoying.

Clockheart throwing gears on player corpses is pretty annoying too. Makes ressing a big pain.

I agree on fixing the aether tethering in clockheart and giving the oozes at the start a smidge more health or undamageable by us would nice too.

Ahlen.7591:

I didn’t mind the bosses, but the leading the ooze room is terrible terrible game design. It’s too rewarding for some classes/specs, and punishing for others. Make the Ooze an allied unit so that players can’t damage it.

I can’t agree with the rest of your post, but this is the absolute truth. I went in on my guardian KNOWING that it would be the profession easiest to beat it with, ignoring my Engineer (Main), and my Ele (for funsies).

The oozes were of particular ease for my guard, since with hammer – sc/shield running WoR, SoA, and sanctuary for the clutch allowed SO much CC that the Ooze is immune to, we had to slow it down more than once because we were moving too quickly.

There are very few professions with as many reflects/absorbs, or other sustained CC to fulfill this role in the same capacity. I say this with an engineer main, who on her best day could do about half as much CC, while being about 1/4th as survivable, while effectively having only 2 non-aoe attacks which is completely unacceptable where you can damage the ooze with any proximity attack.

Once again, Guardians are the kings of all content.

It’s ridiculous.

Montgomery.1986:

For some reason, I don’t know if it was lag or not, I and a few party members kept rubberbanding into the destroyed hologenerators at the final boss. This is terrible as he seems to love tossing gears into the general area, usually KOing the person who gets banded. This was the major reason for a string of wipes yesterday.

I’ve lagged out as well for no apparent reason since my interwebz works fine, but I got annoyed when I lost out an achievement because of that.

• It was the 3rd boss can’t remember his name thou.

The electrified center of the Clockheart’s room needs to be redesigned. It’s quite possible for the boss to either knock someone into it with his pound attack or literally pick a player up and throw them into the middle of it. Any player then downed in the center is screwed unless their downed skills include something with movement, which not all classes have.

In my last run, I was thrown into the middle and downed, but fortunately as an Elementalist I could escape before dying. On the other hand, a teammate was downed and then got hit with the Clockheart’s pound, knocking him into the middle and killing him. Short of having the remaining 4 players suicide, there was no way to help him. So that player got to “enjoy” the following 75% of the battle laying there dead.

Either dead players should be teleported out of the center or the electricity should be periodic so that there’s a chance at reviving anyone dead there.

Eventually got the path done, it was hard. (Random group.)
Some things I found buggy, some that were frustrating.

- ooze room, elementals not easy to kite. “kite the elementals” looks goods on paper, but regardless how many times you hit at it, regardlesss how much in front of it you stood, it kept attacking the kittening ooze. This puzzle seemed to be luck based, where the amount of eles spawned and the point where they spawn will determine the success.

- the charr boss will not drop a chest for you if you are dead on his defeat. It did not mattered how much dps you threw at him, if you were dead on the end, no loot for you.

- The final boss issues:
not properly reseting. After dying/trying again, we found ourselfs blasted with a massive shockwave right ahead the start

clockworks already rolling on the floor in massive numbers, restricing the movement options – these should be reseted as well, but…

all floor electrified. The hologram kill near the boss should in theory neutralize the floor, but I found ourselves fighting in a one pizza sized room exactly 2 times, 2 different runs.
Thats raid over.

Annoying boss combo: shockwave into a clockwork mine that was thrown into the pedestal right before my crash, which was surrounded by a electrified floor at the same time. (LOL???)

- chests: used 3x keys, got junk. Give me reason to replay, no thnx.

I’ll put my 2 cents, for what it’s worth. I’ve been playing new dungeon on a daily basis for about a week now (1 run per day). I had smooth runs, i had painful runs.

1. So let me start with trash packs. I guess they’re ok, those are mostly aetherblades, and so while they’re tough, because they have tons and tons of cc, hit hard and stack confusion like nobodies business in a split second, they still do not require any specific tactic, they just keep you on your toes, so not quiet MF quality, but not bad either.

2. Then we have ooze labby, by many considered to be a hard/tricky part. Challenge comes from amount of coordination required from your team, it also puts to the test knowledge of your class, it’s cc abilities etc. In my opinion it’s a brilliant encounter, very clean and neat mechanics, the more times i played it, the more i appreciated it’s design, great job there.

3. Pretty much same can be said about Slick and Sparki. Very flexible fight design, you can do Slick first, you can do Sparki first, each way challenging in it’s own way, this fight can be fairly easy with a good team, but if you don’t have one it can be painful. It also gives individual player ability to alter course of the fight by taking the teardrop buff, which will draw ooze, by yourself, not waiting for it to randomly appear above you. I was able to save the fight once by doing so, when my team mates started to slack on oils after burning down Sparki, again — great job.

4. Now, i’ll skip next boss and electrified floor encounters, they’re good and fun, but nothing to write home about. Now the Clockheart. This last boss, plus the part with generators before him, are the reasons why, while i enjoy the dungeon, i can’t call it a great dungeon. I guess it’s still a good dungeon, that is, if you don’t mind a major cluster kitten in the end. It’s not like those 2 encounters are all that bad, or they have primitive mechanics, it’s just they’re incredibly messy, too many random elements in equation, it tuned badly, mechanics are not neat and clean, they’re clunky and messy. Gazillions of holograms running around generators, people throw their aoe in every direction, floor electrifies, insane aoe damage flying around, insane confusion stacks all other the place — that’s the generators phase. You can dodge all of this etc., or you all can go ranged and try to stick really close, but still, i feel like it’s an overkill and it tuned badly. The Clockheart himself is massive, while the room is somewhat small for him, with large dead zone in the middle, plus reactors on the sides, it feels like an elephant walked into the china shop. Boss can hardly be properly pulled/lured, luring holograms can also be a little bit tricky and take some time, since they’re not only ranged, but they also channel with their auto attack. The fight can go relatively smooth if you’re in luck and people know what they’re doing, but you can wipe there multiple times, if you’re out of luck, or if you’re not in an all-stars dreamteam. The only good thing about it, is that it’s in the end, and people usually don’t leave at this point. Only once i was able to make a clean and fast kill there, and that was a guild run.