Guild Wars 2

Ok so I was doing AC explore with a group earlier, and we picked path three. We were able to get to the part where you have to protect the things that siphon energy, but we couldn’t get past it. We spent over an hour, highest we got was 94%. Is there some way that you’re supposed to do it that we didn’t see, or is it just ridiculously difficult?

do 3 eles, 1 guardian, 1 warrior… no other group comp will work.

kulle.6542:

do 3 eles, 1 guardian, 1 warrior… no other group comp will work.

Hmm well that’s not very encouraging. xD Makes sense though. Either way I think they should nerf that a bit. =/

Interupt the breeders when they summon hatchlings. Burn down nests asap. This is basically a fight where all you need is massive damage. Do this fast enough and you there shouldnt be enough gravelings to kill the shrines (or whatever they are).

LowfatEnvelope.5934:

kulle.6542:

do 3 eles, 1 guardian, 1 warrior… no other group comp will work.

Hmm well that’s not very encouraging. xD Makes sense though. Either way I think they should nerf that a bit. =/

they won’t nerf it since there are a bunch of keep dungeons the way they are threads… youll just have to grab the perfect group comp.

Perfect group comp is not a valid answer. Dungeons need to be accommodating for everyone or else they’re doing it wrong.

I was probably in that group from earlier.xD But yeah, that part is pretty tough…

The only thing that needs to be fixed for this is the hitbox of the burrows. Right now most melee attacks start missing when the burrow is at 50%.

The rest of this fight is fine.

Hmmm ya the hitboxes might have been it. I noticed that I was missing just about every single shot as a ranger. The only thing that seemed really effective against the burrows was our elementalists firestorms.

I’ll second that. I tried to take down a burrow by myself once and for the life of me could not get into a decent position to hit anything, cause I couldn’t tell if the numbers flying up were from the burrow or the spawns. And this is with a 1h sword on a mesmer.

Don’t listen to Kulle. I’ve been running all the AC paths with a variety of group comps, among other things 2 Engineers, 2 Elementalists and a Thief. Pretty much anything works. It comes down to the skill of the players.

On that part in AC, it’s probably one of the harder encounters in the explorable mode. My best advice is to try to keep the number of burrows to a minimum. I had a really good group that could destroy the burrows faster than they could spawn, but that isn’t possible for all groups. The best way to describe the fight is a damage race. Do enough damage to keep the number of burrows down, and it’s fine. The gravelings prefer attacking party members over the crystals.

Brewbeer is right. You don’t need a “perfect” combo. I completed path 3 last night with two Guardians, a Ranger, Warrior, and an Engineer.

It was certainly a challenge, but once we got the mound spawn pattern down, and realized that we absolutely had to kill the breeders while dpsing down the mounds, it was cake.

Have all 5 members of your group dpsing the mounds. With one focused on cleaning up anything that gets to one of the collectors. Forget about the other one. While moving from mound to mound, have melee try to grab any and all spawns. If you keep the spawns on the mounds, the AOE will take them down rather quickly.

My largest gripe, is the hit detection on the mounds themselves. As ranged, I received “Obstructed” and such quite often. I got around this by quickly strafing back and forth. Alternating A and D. It seemed to work rather well. But yeah, I hope they fix that soon.

Thanks for all the advice guys, I’ll make sure to keep it all in mind next time we try it.

Did this with warrior (me), guardian, engi, thief, and I don’t even remember the 5th. What we did was simply rush around to burrows and we’d hit any gravelings near the siphons along the way. We didn’t even pay particular attention to breeders – just burrows and killed gravelings from AoE. Worked really well.

Hmm, I just did this path again with a different group and completely obliterated the graveling part. They didn’t even touch the two NPC’s that you were to protect there.
I don’t know how, but everything went so smooth and easy… compared to yesterday’s run there.

You don’t need a specific group makeup to do this anymore (we only had a single elementalist in our group and no warrior when we did it, we used 2 rangers and a thief too). Any group makeup will do. They nerfed the hatchlings HP and damage from beta I believe. The burrows spawn in specific spots so you should pull as many on top of them and AoE them down. Guarding the spots the gravelings run to is also handy. Kill the breeder when he spawns. As long as you all aren’t running glass cannons you should be able to easily survive even against a massive amount of gravelings. This path really isn’t even close to the difficulty of some other explorable paths so if you are having trouble with this one you are going to have a hard time later on.

Like I said, it’s mainly the hitbox issue that makes this hard. I did this path 2 times today with no problems, but we had guardians using scepters and an ele. These weapon can all easily hit the burrows.

As soon as you have a team that uses swords/greatswords etc (and even bows apparently) it just takes too long to kill the burrows, because 90% of the attacks start missing after the burrow hits 50% HP.

If you just move back and forth a little while attacking the mound and you will hit with no problem. Unfortunately this does no good for rangers.

wait…what?

this is so kitten easy.

can do it with all meele all day long. takes like…no time.

unless youre trying to do this with all your party members AT level 35….

I agree with Omega. I can knock out all 4 runs of AC in about 2 1/2 hours regardless of comp at lvl 80. Its going to be stupid for the lvl 80s who want to grind for karma/tokens if they are 1 shooting everything in there because of some QQ about nerf-ing content. This is not WoW. Don’t do the exploratory mode at the lvl of the dungeon. Get a few lvls higher and some gear then go back.

For class’s that have issues hitting the burrows, have them circle the mound and keep trying to hit. This helped me with my thief with the d/d because for whatever reason the hit box is tiny.

kulle.6542:

do 3 eles, 1 guardian, 1 warrior… no other group comp will work.

Thats a complete lie, I’ve done it with numerous groups that were diverse.

Did it the other day with 1 engi, 1 ele, 1 war, 1 guard and a mesmer.

Definitely the least run Path of the 3. There’s a reason you only see PuGs recuiting for the other 2 Paths.

I had a team of partial lowbies who almost beat it … Or WOULD have beat it if not for the Bugged Hitbox issue which totally stymmied our Thief and Engie. Without that bug, it would simply have been an issue of everyone just paying really close attention to target calling…. you kill a Burrow, then a Breeder, then another Burrow, then another Breeder and alternate while one of your team members runs around to the Collectors to pull all the ‘Lings’ off it and herds them into the main pile that the DPS group is currently AOE’ing.

Very simple … but again, also Bugged currently.

In our early tryies we also had many problems with those – still some pugs have, it needs to be learned and done extremely fast.

Tactical Tips:

- Burrows spawn is a repeating pattern, they don’t spawn randomly, they do it every time in the same exact pattern, that will help You know where to run next and don’t waste precious time.

- Ignore most of the mobs, they will be eventually killed by aoe near the burrows.

- Breeders need to be controled(!) and killed right after a burrow. If You do NOT do a CC on breeding You will have ur arena spammed with mobs.

- Have some CC/Movement utilities equipped, It’s important to have CC for Breeders, and some swiftness for funning around.

- Bring Your power gear with You. Condition gear without power are really bad for fight like this. Best are Power/Vit/Toughness – even greens for karma. Burrows cannot be crit so Berseker gear is less effective than for ex. Valkyrie and for slots don’t use expensive runes use chep Orbs.

Proffestions. From my experience with professions Power Warriors, Power Ele, Granade/Bomb specced engie’s can do insane amout of damage to burrows in lowest time, played with Necro, Mesmer, Thief – it was just not effective they lack aoe burst damage.

Here is my movie from AC explo 3 burrow event 11m 19s. Hope it helps.

HOLY NECRO Batman!

Power is good, cond dmg is bad. If your team has at least one ele team lvl won’t matter too much either since just using frost bow will guarantee fast enough burrow killing with any comp and lvl.

Gear matters more then classes. I’ve done that section with an 80 war, 80 guard, and 57 engi before, I’ve ran all of AC a couple times with only 4 people as well because my dedicated group didn’t feel like finding a random.

There is a ton of buffer on the dps check for that event, if you have 5 people and can’t pass it then people in your group are severely undergeared. If you are not 80, the biggest mistake people make is not having up to date gear. If gear is not close to your current level you lose out on a huge amount of damage.

it’s just because you’re not very good

Indeed.

Elementalist is not the only answer to burrows. It does makes the work alot easier.

Once I ran ac3 with a group of pugs consisting of warriors guardians thiefs and rangers. No eles.

At first I thought it ain’t gonna work out, but the group was so experienced they clear the burrow part pretty fast with no problem at all. Gotta say I was very surprised myself.

It proves a group of people who knows what they are doing > level and class.