Guild Wars 2

I had no problem with the oozes at all.. or anything in the dungeon. Except that horrifyingly buggy, broken Clockheart. I swear I think my guildies and I got every possible glitch that thing can hurl at you. I talked about it more in-depth here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/twilight/Constructive-feedback-for-new-TA-path/first#post2968394

It was bad. The oozes did have a habit of aggroing on people who didn’t even have the drop on their heads, but we managed it after a few tries. The Clockheart.. not so much, and I sort of dread even attempting it again.

Photoloss: Nope. I had to swap from playing with my engineer who I prefer to play due to the complexity of the class, to my faceroll-everything warrior. Because the engie was just melted by all the crap and the benefits I was giving everyone were outweighed by how badly I was getting slapped around. I went through Aetherblade Retreat, Tequatl, and countless other difficult content with my Engineer, but this time I just couldn’t do it because I was letting my team down. Also, yes, our mes did a whole lot for us.

I need to level my mes and guardian to 80, I think..

Has anyone found anything in the new path that actively favors classes other than warrior/guardian/mesmer?

Not really.
There’s a difference between reflection just being a plain ole’ option, and being the only option. It’s not like you’ve ever really had the choice to push, pull, immobilize, minion body block, stun or daze Lupicus’s Necrid Barrage, you know? That’s clearly favoring certain classes. But, Fire Elementals? Everything’s on the table.

First playthough I did was on a mesmer, and the whole time I kept wishing I was on my engi/thief/necro.

The reason is simple: the group I had was bad at pulling the holos, and unfortunately they were too far away to focus pull. However, thief/necro/engineer all have a 1200 range direct pull that can move the holo’s across the map very easily.

The thief is particularly notable, due to its ability to spam blind fields. Then, when you get ambushed by a bunch of nightmare hounds, instead of the group wiping the hounds flail helplessly at open air. The slick and sparki fight is pretty simple: go dagger/dagger, and then you can backstab the two all day for massive damage. Slick can’t even defend himself at close range, and plus stealing from them keeps getting you elixir of Heroes, so you have invincibility periods where you can just go meshugga. That only matters for sparki, though. The oozes weren’t a problem either: one off-hand pistol and you can blind them over and over again while using smoke screen and devourer venom to hold off the elementals. The limitless dodging came in handy while face tanking spur and the clockheart, and should the clockheart get off its’ mega attack, you can just spam disabling shot to avoid every attack.

As a mesmer, I felt like little more than a damage dealer. The biggest advantage being that I could maintain distance from holo’s while they blew up generator. I didn’t find wardens or feedback nearly as useful against sparki and slick, since they would usually get off one combination before dying, and frequently they would end up distracting the ooze from eating oil. The thief did more damage, though, hitting for upwards to 24k with the CnD + backstab combo, and 13k a pop with Heartseeker when they were nearly dead.

I have yet to play though it with my engineer or necro, though. The advantage with the engineer is that I can dole out maximum damage at any range (again), and I’ll also have access to pulls, plenty of control, a few reflects, and also the ability to spam blast finishers in my own water field to heal up everyone from the DoTs in the area. Most importantly, I’ll have access to a better rez skill in Toss Elixir R.

The necro might be more of a problem. They don’t have anything stellar, yet they’ll still have the tools for the job: blind fields and fear + stuns for the ooze section, a whole lot of HP and life force to absorb the DoTs from slick + sparki fight, and a 1200 range pull for the holos.

Photoloss.4817:

Has anyone found anything in the new path that actively favors classes other than warrior/guardian/mesmer? I play a mesmer myself and several times I felt like I was carrying the group through spamming gimmicky mechanics. Oozes: spam all cc and reflect sword/focus has to offer and then some. Slick: complete faceroll after Sparky dies, could tell the group to sit back and just smack him as nothing would go through 3 iWardens. Final boss we all messed up badly time and time again, but I personally saved us even on the successful attempt: focus pull holo into boss, leap, frenzy both of them while standing INSIDE! the boss. Repeat until thief has revived the others, then pray I don’t bugport into a cog again.

Now I don’t mean to brag, in fact I felt terrible because all of these fancy gimmicks are limited to 1-2 classes each. At no point did I think “man, wish I had a ranger” or “a good condi necro could really wreck those guys”. At least Scorpion Wire proved rather helpful, which it hadn’t since cheesing the T4 candidate trials.

Reflects are useful for the Ooze but reflects in general for this path isn’t as much of a necessity as in CM.

Ranger has a pull too(although I wasn’t aware of this until last night). The recharge is faster than Scorpion Wire even with the Trickster trait.

Vox Hollow.2736:

Not really.
There’s a difference between reflection just being a plain ole’ option, and being the only option. It’s not like you’ve ever really had the choice to push, pull, immobilize, minion body block, stun or daze Lupicus’s Necrid Barrage, you know? That’s clearly favoring certain classes. But, Fire Elementals? Everything’s on the table.

Still guardian cc spam and massive aoe reflects work very well. Plus a mesmer can additionally aoe immobilise, push, pull and daze, and if sword clones aren’t the very definition of “minion body blocking” I don’t know what is. Other classes can do it, true, but some have a much easier time than others. Elementalists and engineers for instance are unable to use most of their damage skills for fear of squashing the ooze.

@Blood Red Arachnid:
Aside from the hounds (which I don’t even remember, do you mean the swarm of puppies?), everything you describe sounds “selfish” (no insult intended): You maximise your own damage and therefore contribute very well, but you rely on the rest of your team taking care of themselves as you offer no direct support. Basically this all goes to hell once someone else screws up, because then you’ll either have to pull twice your weight in terms of dps, or sit in the refuge and rezz dealing 0 damage. Raw dps is certainly needed and welcome, but for such a tactic to work you either need a group full of good players or someone else in the team to provide the “support”. A guardian pretty much provides incidental support with everything they do, and a phantasm mesmer can protect the whole group, spec into aoe healing if needed, and can keep half their dps going while rezzing/running around like a headless chicken. Your thief can be replaced with most other top dps specs, but good luck keeping the rest of your team alive or dealing top dps as a ranger.

Khisanth.2948:

Reflects are useful for the Ooze but reflects in general for this path isn’t as much of a necessity as in CM.

Ranger has a pull too(although I wasn’t aware of this until last night). The recharge is faster than Scorpion Wire even with the Trickster trait.

Yes, I feel bad for the poor bandits whenever I do CM :P

Reflects thankfully aren’t necessary, but a full lockdown pretty much ends the fight on the spot, which clearly isn’t intended considering the enrage mechanic of Slick&Sparky.

Didn’t know about the ranger pull either…
Still wouldn’t have helped much as the pulling often was a clutch move while scrambling to rezz said ranger after the big shockwave. Fancy that, the thief and me survived the longest in the Clockheart fight, guess who can spam the most dodges XD
…Except I had 1-2 iDuelists up while rezzing, while as I said above the thief has to choose between dps’ing Clockheart or helping the others.

The sad thing is, I myself can’t think of any encounter mechanic that would favor rangers, or at least put them on par with guardians/mesmers. Warriors, necros and engineers might like a facetanking challenge, elementalists are good for aoe and anti-structure dps (hi there, AC gravelings!), thieves are unmatched at skipping and wrecking single targets quickly. Condition specs could be encouraged by giving enemies high armor/physical damage immunity (without shutting down crit-procs!), and the Slick&Sparky fight is the closest you can get to encourage group healing as Healing Power straight up sucks. But rangers and “creative” specs? No idea.

Lets turn them all into wonderfull ooze booze!

1) Fix the bugs/QoL like leader quit/kittenicks all.
2) Fix condi’s to work on objects & with others in PvE.
3) Add VOIP into game so we can talk to pugs. (You did say you were going to near beta, and you keep adding in content that’s totally frustrating with out it)

Oozes part is easy once you learn it and it kinda transitions into the sparki and slick part. You got debuff… pull ooze n punt fire ele. There is a 10 seconds window if one team slacks so you can run over and help.

Most failures are beacuse most players dont work as a team and some that lay coughbarragecough on ooze. This new path is here to stay and much better than the traditional “allzerkwarriormesmergearcheckbuffcheck” nonsense. With good knowledge and a little experience even PUGs have an easy time.

Egon Vidar.9125:

I had to swap from playing with my engineer who I prefer to play due to the complexity of the class, to my faceroll-everything warrior.

I need to level my mes and guardian to 80, I think..

Untrue. I could solo the boss on my staff ele (not bragging, I actually did it) so you should be fine on your engineer. The trick is to not melee hug the boss and pull the adds to IT, but vice versa. Stay near the holos, let the boss come to you while you dodge that 1 or 2 spinning gears, and when they’re both together, blow up the hologram, hit the boss a few times and run to the next one.

Once my team got the idea, we facerolled the boss instead of vice versa.

Photoloss: The fact that you honestly think the blind fields were only used on the hounds is proof of how little you actually care about the issue. If nullifying the offense of every non-champion enemy in the dungeon isn’t enough “support” for you, then nothing is. Come back when you actually care to think about the issue.

ThiBash.5634:

Egon Vidar.9125:

I had to swap from playing with my engineer who I prefer to play due to the complexity of the class, to my faceroll-everything warrior.

I need to level my mes and guardian to 80, I think..

Untrue. I could solo the boss on my staff ele (not bragging, I actually did it) so you should be fine on your engineer. The trick is to not melee hug the boss and pull the adds to IT, but vice versa. Stay near the holos, let the boss come to you while you dodge that 1 or 2 spinning gears, and when they’re both together, blow up the hologram, hit the boss a few times and run to the next one.

Once my team got the idea, we facerolled the boss instead of vice versa.

Nah, perfectly true, for me. I’m visually impaired, as in legally blind in one eye and I have poor vision in the other. This is the first time it’s been absolutely necessary, but due to the incredible amount of bugs, constant FX all over the place, low lighting of the dungeon, and needing to be zoomed all the way out, I literally could not play my Engineer at the Clockheart portion of the dungeon. I had to switch to a class with higher damage output and better survivability to have a chance in there, and to live long enough to actually benefit my team. Everyone is different. I’ve done all other difficult content on my engie, generally with little issue.
One of the only other serious problems I’ve had was in Aetherblade Retreat dungeon during Frizz’ fight, where I had severe issues seeing the telegraph for the golem’s pull move if they were any distance from me, haha.

And I do perfectly understand the mechanics of the fight; I knew them going in the first time because our group leader checked beforehand.

Mordalus.8146:

I hate Anet’s philosophy to make encounters frustrating and annoying instead of difficult. Why can’t we have difficult and fun instead of frustrating and not fun?

Liadri was frustrating and annoying.
SAB tribulation mode was difficult.

I liked SAB trib mode, i did w1z1-3 and w2z1-3. did all of it, then threw all 3 green coins and 3 yellow coins into the trashcan. destroyed all 6 of them. why? because the skins were 2gold each. f**k that s**t.

oozes aren’t that bad, just have 2 heavies with you, they pull and tank the fire ele’s at the door, not the cogs where u gotta take the oozes, but at the vine entrance where u go into the room, then have 2 people walk the oozes. simple and easy.

Shpongle.6025:

Liadri was frustrating and annoying.
SAB tribulation mode was difficult.

Other way around, mate.

Trib mode was almost perfectly designed to annoy me.
Liadri was a good challenge to sink my teeth into.

muh opinions

Actually, the ooze represents ANet’s philosophy, but not why you think.

It is designed to be frustrating and annoying if you lack communication and don’t know what you are doing, but difficult and rewarding if you do.

Kinda like Tequatl.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Photoloss: The fact that you honestly think the blind fields were only used on the hounds is proof of how little you actually care about the issue. If nullifying the offense of every non-champion enemy in the dungeon isn’t enough “support” for you, then nothing is. Come back when you actually care to think about the issue.

I’m sorry. The way you phrased it made me think you only tried it/found it useful for that one encounter. That actually sounds like a really nice way of shutting down Thumper+Taskmaster squads, and you probably have a stun or 2 to spare for those ever-annoying Strikers too. Does this need a specific build to work properly or do you only need the right utilities+weapons?

Just an off hand pistol for what Blood is talking about. The ranger offhand axe is what has both a pull and a reflect (It got that pull like 2 months ago?) yet so few rangers use it. =/

With the pug group that I ran with, I found that the mobs would have rarely been packed tight enough for a black powder to disable them all. From a mesmer’s perspective, reflecting the confusing bolts and the stunning shield boomerangs was basically what let me carry my team. Interrupting the back breakers and stripping boons was icing. I was the only full zerker melee while my team was mostly ranged. If I took a break between a fight and they charged in, they always wiped. If I ran in first, it was all good. I was also able to solo one ooze side (about 30% chance of success).

With all that said, I feel like most classes can contribute as much as I did on my mesmer. It’s just that most players don’t understand the full potential of their class: for example, the lack of offhand axe wielding rangers.

interestingly, in our group of 5, the side that had 3 people was the side that kept failing while the 2-side kept getting the ooze all the way. I think the number of elementals scales with how many of you are there.
also, get rid of all your zerker builds. you need mob control above everything else (stun, kb, pull, blind, etc.)

There are already lots of pulls, I use my ele earth shield all the time on the cc heavy fights. Same with my engi tool kit, guardians and necros also have a pull, when I first did twilight assault we had the 2 necros chain grasping mobs to pull them out of the groups they were in.

Thief and mesmer also have pulls.

A pull followed by a cripple, immob or chill is basically a taunt, for all intents and purposes, removing an enemy from where they want to be, and keeping them away.
Sometimes this requires a bit of cooperation.