Guild Wars 2

The first encounter is pretty easy, as long as no one forgets to kite the ooze around the bosses while they have the blue mark.

ahuba.6430:

The first encounter is pretty easy, as long as no one forgets to kite the ooze around the bosses while they have the blue mark.

yeah we did that, but the toxic crap ended up killing us every time eventually no matter what we did.

We kited the ooze, that didn’t really make any difference at all.

We tried stacking, we also tried kiting as a group while 1 kited ooze away. Everything we did failed, that fight is ridiculous and is way too hard. it’s way harder than any other boss in the dungeon and its the first encounter. makes no sense.

reading this forums now and then makes me really sad.

The first boss is very easy, if you have the right tactic.

careful spoiler:
One of the team random get a debuff, with that debuff the ooze runs towards you and follows you. The norn shoots oil around, and every oil in the room cause the damage over time debuff. You want to get rid of those debuff, and you easily can, with pulling the ooze right into the oil paints on the floor, the ooze will absorb the oil, and therefor remove the dots.

Teutos.8620:

The first boss is very easy, if you have the right tactic.

careful spoiler:
One of the team random get a debuff, with that debuff the ooze runs towards you and follows you. The norn shoots oil around, and every oil in the room cause the damage over time debuff. You want to get rid of those debuff, and you easily can, with pulling the ooze right into the oil paints on the floor, the ooze will absorb the oil, and therefor remove the dots.

yeah no duh. We tried that about 20 times and it never worked.

Only reason we beat it was because I somehow pulled spark to the entrance and the ooze and slick boss didn’t follow.

we must have tried it 20 times legitimately and it never worked. We tried every strategy and nothing worked. The other bosses were incredibly easy compared to the first one, which angers me. First boss is not balanced at all. If anything spark/slick should be the last boss, not the first.

Teutos is right, it is fairly straight forward so long as everyone realises as soon as they have ooze agro that they are in cleanup duty. My pug party wiped about 3 times before we got it right but that’s how it should be with randoms and no voice comms.

bradderzh.2378:

Teutos is right, it is fairly straight forward so long as everyone realises as soon as they have ooze agro that they are in cleanup duty. My pug party wiped about 3 times before we got it right but that’s how it should be with randoms and no voice comms.

?? Bullcrap. The thing hits like a truck when it absorbs oil (it 1 hits you) and if you aren’t standing in the oil to begin with what diff does it make cuz you’re not taking dmg anyway.

It took me a lot longer because every time we wiped someone would ragequit. It was tedious, but eventually we made it… only two of us had been there the entire run and we had cycled through about 10 people.

My PUG only had a problem with the last boss, but man, that took forever.
The rest of the dungeon was pretty easy.

Shelledfade.6435:

myself and 4 other randoms beat it. We weren’t exactly a dream team but yeah… I have a few things to say about this dungeon.

I won’t do this path again, just like I only did f/u path before it was removed one time only.

The very first boss encounter “SPARK AND SLICK” is the hardest encounter in the entire dungeon, the other bosses didn’t even compare to it.

In fact is, the only way my group beat spark and slick was by somehow pulling spark out of the doorway and we ranged him down and it died, then we were ported inside after that and we killed slick when it was by itself, otherwise I don’t know how you’re actually supposed to beat that because its way too difficult.

Regardless… at the very end the reward was bad and there is a chest underneath the water in the dungeon after you beat last boss, only apparently you have a limited amount of time to get to (or something??) because when we found it, it was blocked and we couldn’t access it.

This dungeon, despite the ridiculously annoying ooze sync and the asininely annoying electric floor puzzle thing… was decent. I mean, it wasn’t that it was difficult, it was the fact that it was ANNOYING and I do not understand why the first boss encounter was the HARDEST. Why is the first boss harder than the last boss I don’t get it. The last boss was a joke all we did was stand there and melee him and then back off when he was invincible, rinse and repeat.

Incredibly lame though that we could not get the last chest because it was blocked for some reason, the one that was under the water. Very lame. took like 3-4 hours to beat that and yeah…. I won’t do it again because the reward isn’t worth the effort.

Even if I had an organized team on VOIP I don’t think I would do this dungeon. That first boss encounter (spark/slick) is way too hard. I got lucky by somehow pulling only 1 boss at the doorway while the other stayed behind. We could not beat that part legitimately and it was way harder than any other boss in the dungeon… I wonder if they even playtested this because I don’t understand why the first boss was the hardest. Please PLAY TEST your own dungeon….!

The reward for doing this was not worth the effort at all. Especially when the kitten chest in the water was BLOCKED….. awesome.

stay stacked up on boss 1, the oil will always fall on group and quickly be eaten by ooze, keep kiting, kill slick first. Sparki will do damage to you if you stop moving after slick dies so split up and kite the ooze and you range sparki down- took 1 try with this method and was ridiculously easy.

Least you didnt have a hunter aoeing both the whole time…

Asudementio.8526:

Shelledfade.6435:

myself and 4 other randoms beat it. We weren’t exactly a dream team but yeah… I have a few things to say about this dungeon.

I won’t do this path again, just like I only did f/u path before it was removed one time only.

The very first boss encounter “SPARK AND SLICK” is the hardest encounter in the entire dungeon, the other bosses didn’t even compare to it.

In fact is, the only way my group beat spark and slick was by somehow pulling spark out of the doorway and we ranged him down and it died, then we were ported inside after that and we killed slick when it was by itself, otherwise I don’t know how you’re actually supposed to beat that because its way too difficult.

Regardless… at the very end the reward was bad and there is a chest underneath the water in the dungeon after you beat last boss, only apparently you have a limited amount of time to get to (or something??) because when we found it, it was blocked and we couldn’t access it.

This dungeon, despite the ridiculously annoying ooze sync and the asininely annoying electric floor puzzle thing… was decent. I mean, it wasn’t that it was difficult, it was the fact that it was ANNOYING and I do not understand why the first boss encounter was the HARDEST. Why is the first boss harder than the last boss I don’t get it. The last boss was a joke all we did was stand there and melee him and then back off when he was invincible, rinse and repeat.

Incredibly lame though that we could not get the last chest because it was blocked for some reason, the one that was under the water. Very lame. took like 3-4 hours to beat that and yeah…. I won’t do it again because the reward isn’t worth the effort.

Even if I had an organized team on VOIP I don’t think I would do this dungeon. That first boss encounter (spark/slick) is way too hard. I got lucky by somehow pulling only 1 boss at the doorway while the other stayed behind. We could not beat that part legitimately and it was way harder than any other boss in the dungeon… I wonder if they even playtested this because I don’t understand why the first boss was the hardest. Please PLAY TEST your own dungeon….!

The reward for doing this was not worth the effort at all. Especially when the kitten chest in the water was BLOCKED….. awesome.

stay stacked up on boss 1, the oil will always fall on group and quickly be eaten by ooze, keep kiting, kill slick first. Sparki will do damage to you if you stop moving after slick dies so split up and kite the ooze and you range sparki down- took 1 try with this method and was ridiculously easy.

…. the ooze 1 hits anyone near it after it absorbs oil. So stacking doesn’t really work, we tried that every time and the kitten ooze just 1 hit people. Then when someone goes down we took too much dmg getting them back up.

Trust me we tried everything, and it just didn’t work. It was freakin lame. I have no shame in the fact that we somehow bugged it so we only had to fight slick after. I don’t really care, I won’t do that dungeon again until spark/slick is nerfed because its too kitten dumb and really it shouldn’t require voip in the first place, because if it was supposed to then they should have voip to the game itself so pugs can easily communicate. There are way more pug groups in this game than organized ones anyway.

What would I honestly stand to gain by lying to you… It’s completely doable, just kite thg ooze through the oil slicks. Nobody said you had to stand in melee and eat his powerful attacks…

FYI my group killed sparky first. We felt it was easier to control the oil when they were not getting lit on fire by sparky.

bradderzh.2378:

What would I honestly stand to gain by lying to you… It’s completely doable, just kite thg ooze through the oil slicks. Nobody said you had to stand in melee and eat his powerful attacks…

why would you kite it through the oil if nobody is standing in the oil to begin with.

Shelledfade.6435:

bradderzh.2378:

What would I honestly stand to gain by lying to you… It’s completely doable, just kite thg ooze through the oil slicks. Nobody said you had to stand in melee and eat his powerful attacks…

why would you kite it through the oil if you are not standing in the oil to begin with.

To let the ooze remove the oilfield. The one with the ooze buff has to kite through the fields. It is important to remove this fields because every field gives you a DoT stack and with too many fields the DoT stacks high enough to kill the entire party.

sigh First understand the bossfight mechanics before you complain.

I think when sparky lights the oil slicks it makes lots of toxic fumes. Don’t quote me on that but the first few attempts we didn’t mop up enough oil with the ooze and found no matter where we stood in the room (not in oil) we would be getting at least 10 stacks of the fumes dot causing a wipe.

did it with a pug also i had a fhew rage quiters until we had the right party this pug was awesome. we failed alot but we learned from it

Walhalla.5473:

Shelledfade.6435:

bradderzh.2378:

What would I honestly stand to gain by lying to you… It’s completely doable, just kite thg ooze through the oil slicks. Nobody said you had to stand in melee and eat his powerful attacks…

why would you kite it through the oil if you are not standing in the oil to begin with.

To let the ooze remove the oilfield. The one with the ooze buff has to kite through the fields. It is important to remove this fields because every field gives you a DoT stack and with too many fields the DoT stacks high enough to kill the entire party.

sigh First understand the bossfight mechanics before you complain.

We didn’t understand where the toxic damage was coming from, I guess that’s a lot simpler then. Either way we never realized that so I apologize for that.

But yeah, this dungeon is too long and annoying regardless. There’s a reason nobody did f/u because it was tedious, so they go ahead and replace it with something longer and even more tedious.

Meh. I don’t get it. Waste of time, and either way it still wasn’t/isn’t worth it. Nobody even got anything lol… we finished some achievements and big deal. Reward sucked. When we found the chest under the water, it was blocked… so yeah.

Everyone wasted their time.

F/U was not ‘tedious’, but heavily bugged towards the end.

2 necro cycling blind, 3 war zerk them down without killing the ooze, when someone have the mark, he move the ooze on the back of the group in the blind zone. Necro are both cleric healer, so the blood wells are keeping the zerks alive.

Asmodeus.5782:

F/U was not ‘tedious’, but heavily bugged towards the end.

Was never bugged, it was just tedious. You had to do annoying things to finish it, like have 3 guardians and kite and all kinds of lame crap.

It’s the same thing either way, tedious content is tedious content. I personally don’t want to fight annoyingly lame bosses that are just tedious.

I don’t get what the point is of the electric floor puzzle and the ooze puzzle part, those things just make people leave the dungeon after they get frustrated by tedious mechanics that shouldn’t be there.

Frustrating content is not fun content. I enjoy difficult content. I guess there’s a fine line between hard content and tedious content, either that or ANET doesn’t know the difference between them.

I’m not sure if it was a ‘waste of time’. I didn’t pay attention to what rewards were actually given as a result of completing this path because I found it fun and challenging. The dungeon does a good job (IMO) of slowly introducing you to mechanics you need to kill the final boss.

The dungeon was long I will agree with that, but without accurately knowing the rewards amount off the top of my head I can’t comment on whether or not it is worth repeating often. At the very least, completing it once was worth it. I think things will go much more smoothly when I get together with guilders instead of pugging it.

Well OP is welcome to his opinion, but to me it seems clear that the mechanics are not nearly as aggravating as described, and I know for a fact that F/U doesn’t require particular builds as we just ran it the other night with pot-luck of professions and I don’t recall anything particularly annoying or tedious about it.

A dungeon has to have some sort of fight mechanics to make it worth participating in. Perhaps OP can suggests to the forum what type of mechanics he/she finds “not frustrating” and “not tedious” while being “difficult”. Please… provide examples.

Shelledfade.6435:

Was never bugged, it was just tedious. You had to do annoying things to finish it, like have 3 guardians and kite and all kinds of lame crap.

It’s the same thing either way, tedious content is tedious content. I personally don’t want to fight annoyingly lame bosses that are just tedious.

I don’t get what the point is of the electric floor puzzle and the ooze puzzle part, those things just make people leave the dungeon after they get frustrated by tedious mechanics that shouldn’t be there.

Frustrating content is not fun content. I enjoy difficult content. I guess there’s a fine line between hard content and tedious content, either that or ANET doesn’t know the difference between them.

3 guardians and kiting, ah ok. I thought you were talking about tafu.

Shelledfade.6435:

Asmodeus.5782:

F/U was not ‘tedious’, but heavily bugged towards the end.

Was never bugged, it was just tedious. You had to do annoying things to finish it, like have 3 guardians and kite and all kinds of lame crap.

It’s the same thing either way, tedious content is tedious content. I personally don’t want to fight annoyingly lame bosses that are just tedious.

I don’t get what the point is of the electric floor puzzle and the ooze puzzle part, those things just make people leave the dungeon after they get frustrated by tedious mechanics that shouldn’t be there.

Frustrating content is not fun content. I enjoy difficult content. I guess there’s a fine line between hard content and tedious content, either that or ANET doesn’t know the difference between them.

Well said sir!
Just logged in and came here in hope of a “heads-up” about TA.
I don’t get this game design any more. Lately, most things ANET does is just annoying crap disguised as hard content.
I don’t think that line is so thin, but I do think pushing out content at this rate forces lazy design that is more often on that more frustrating then hard side.

I had a pug group, we beat it.

The first encounter we did a sort of stack method, we were very close to each other so oil spills were close if not stacked on each other while the ooze person kited threw oil.

The last boss however, what a piece of work that is. We spent half the time figuring out what the stacks ment and how to get them removed. After about 10 times almost to the verge of quitting, we run in guns blazing and take his health to 50% and slowly finish the rest off. With absolutely no coordination other than rezing each other.

I will only do it again when guides are finished to get my full achievements. I do not recommend pugging

Serophous.9085:

Least you didnt have a hunter aoeing both the whole time…

That would be something I would address before going into in every dungeon – ranged need to be instructed or at the very least given an expectation not to pull more than one, not to AOE more than one and to pay attention to the downed player – ’cause traited right a Ranger can keep you alive while you melee, when played correctly.

Not everyone knows how a dungeon should work – many never communicate and so many frustrations could be stopped if communication was tried at the beginning so everyone knows what is expected and what is ‘coming up next’ to be able to follow a good team as much as possible.

Not everyone wants to rez a dead player no matter what – so that would also need to be laid out if that were a “rule” in the group.

Again, it comes back to communication, some are willing to speak to other players, but far too many will not.

The topic poster is right. Worst fight since Frizz…I’ll just have to watch a video at this rate. More bad gimmicks, more constantly dying trial and error until everyone figures it out, and even then if one thing goes wrong, everything goes wrong. What a waste of time.

did it with pugs as well, never again

i especially love where blue buff appeared on few ppl at the same time and amount of kitten gears at last boss :s

if you don’t run build with condition removals you are pretty much kitten

Took us about an hour to complete on our first attempt. A lot of the mechanics made sense once you just looked at the descriptions. On further runs, we can probably get this done in 15-25 minutes since we won’t be running around trying to figure out the mechanics in each fight.

F/U was fine except for the spider spawns if you wiped on the end boss. Path could have been fixed fine if those spiders just despawned if the room was deagroed. Just because you didn’t run it doesn’t mean no one else did.

Ok so you kill the S&S bosses without knowing any tactics, ignoring a key element of the fight that is probably dealing 75% of the damage to your group, and come to the forums and say it is too hard? If you have trouble killing the boss with perfect tactics and a sensible group then it is too hard. If you can kill the boss while ignoring tactics with a PuG then it might even be too easy.

We all want fights with tactics. The forums cry out for fights where people need to do things as a team to defeat a boss (rather than just dodge). Here we have a fight that will probably be easy for groups with tactics and impossible for some PuGs who come through first time without tactics. That’s harsh but ok, in the big scheme of things. Challenges can’t all be easy.

You should avoid the ooze in the first boss fight completely. As the oozes by the fire he deals big damage which will kill you with 1or2 hits. Even without oil(not sure if it does anything)
The person with the ooze buff should just pull him through the oil so it gets absorbed.

What annoyed me more were the lifepoints of the norn. Felt like we needed ages to kill him.

I started with a PUG as well (because ppl in guild couldn’t log so soon after patch) . My only requirement on the path description was: min 10 000 AP.

Team composition: 2 guards, 2 warriors 1 necro. Went very good, we wiped once I think (40 min overall) . Then I did it with a guild group and it was even faster (we were all on voice and I already knew how to do it).

Bottom line: who ever needs 3 hours to complete this dungeon path needs to take a hard look at himself and his PUG composition, before raging on forums.

This dungeon is absolutely doable without voice comms and with randoms. Minimum requirement: BRAIN.

Will i do this regularly? probably not, there are more effective ways to make money, and none of the TA rewards are appealing.

Are you kidding me? It hasn’t even been a day yet. I cleared it today with a far from perfect PUG. It just takes some coordination and communication. For the Sparki and Slick fight you have some one pick up the ooze attraction buff from the flower (yes you can do this, it doesn’t have to be random) and kite it. They have to kite through AoEs to clean them up an prevent the DoT from building. As far as the bonus chest at the end, you have a limited time to get them. The bonus loot is crap but you new all five for an achievement. L2P before complaining about it being too hard. God forbid Anet makes a challenging dungeon.

The problem we had was PUGs not kiting the ooze (some even wanted to DPS it after we had explained the mechanics), working alone, did nothing when they had the pheremone.

Not because they are bad, but because this content requires most importantly time and communication tools that are just not available in pick up groups. The remnants of our original group had to give up after a few clockwork heart attempts because we had job/school commitments. We must have worked through 40 or so people by the time we finished (some did just give up after failing attempts twice, but you will never please that kind of player).

I appreciate difficult content, I am in the camp that says Tequatl is fine as-is. A Tequatl fight takes, at worst, ~2 hours. This isn’t really difficult – it artificial lengthening of content via cheap RNG death (e.g. Clockwork Heart can be an unreliable kite at times). Once again: harking back to the Spider Queen in AC (which will occasionally kill experienced player because, buddy, bad luck).

Dumb it down for the duration of the LS fortnight, then ramp it up to insanely hard again for those who want to tackle it.

- The “ooze race” only needs one or two players who are proactive. It’s probably fine.
- During the Slick and Sparki fight make the Ooze prioritize the player who uses the pheremone plant. We often had situation where 2 (sometimes even 3) players had the pheremone buff (and no, that was not caused by us using the plant). That just makes the event unpredictable and annoying. The mechanic as-is marginalizes, discourages and outright punishes the act of socializing with new people for this event.
- Have Clockwork Hearts 30-stack smackdown hit you for 75% of your health. Or add some form of an acquirable resistance to that attack (maybe potions?). These are players who have never played together before, expecting them to do it all perfectly is completely unreasonable.

Overall I like the dungeon – you just need to make it more forgiving for the PUGs this fortnight. At some point I would like to do and organised run, but that has a scheduling problem and is best left to after the LS fortnight.

tenniswood.8534:

For the Sparki and Slick fight you have some one pick up the ooze attraction buff from the flower (yes you can do this, it doesn’t have to be random) and kite it.

We tried this. It didn’t work – others still got the pheremone and the ooze ignored the player who used the plant. Maybe it’s a bug.

can i have title TA battle healer of the year? i don’t think i ever rezzed so many ppl and myself in one dungeon =.=

Sparki and Slick are so easy.

Go after Sparki first. the one who has the blob aggro simply runs to the oil slicks. Done.

next challenge please.

“Work harder, not smarter!”
- Slick

You don’t even have to ‘get’ the agro. You can simply have 4 party members stay away from the ooze, while one person always refreshes the lure debuff on themselves by going to the plant in the room and manually refreshing the debuff.

It was easier with that method because understanding that everyone but that guy should stay away from the ooze is much easier than everyone knowing what to do with the ooze when debuffed.