Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone,

I recently been running AC explore and last night ran Howling King to the Burrows part(group couldnt complete) & Colossus to Burrows part(group couldnt complete). The gw2wiki says burrows can be downed in under 10sec. However range players get Obstructed constantly and melee get “Miss” “Miss” “Miss”. Is there a secret to getting constant hits to a Burrow or is this a bug?

I haven’t had a problem with getting “Obstructed” when I shoot at them from ranged (at least not consistently), but they are definitely really fiddly when it comes to attacking them in melee – and the same goes for almost every non-enemy ‘object’ target in the game.

Your best bet, until the game is patched to make those easier to hit, is just to circle-strafe them in melee and look for a sweet spot where you can actually connect. Either that, or switch to ranged (you shouldn’t be Obstructed constantly, without a good reason).
It sucks, but that’s probably the best you can really do.

I find if you stand at just the right spot with my Mesmer Sword, I can sometimes get a hit on them, but most of the time not.

The correct solution is to bring a party of four elementalists and one warrior/guardian. Have the warrior/guardian on defense, and the elementalists on the burrows. Each elementalist can destroy a burrow with a single Meteor Storm. If you’re not an elementalist or a warrior you’re SOL.

We had a Elementalist, and I am a Warrior. I “miss” constantly on burrows and Burrows are taking like 15-20sec.

working as intended, it’s part of the the challenge!

We spent over 1hr on the Burrows part on both paths. I just had a friend uninstall because it was such a bad time.

Bear in mind that, at least on the Howling King path, the idea isn’t simply to kill the burrows as quickly as possible (You will almost certainly be overrun). The trick is to notice that A) New burrows only pop up when an existing burrow is destroyed, and Each destroyed burrow triggers a particular new burrow, in two sets of three, so you can destroy one set, catch your breath while there’s only one burrow up, and then deal with the final three one at a time.

In that path, there is plenty for a Warrior to do in melee mopping up the Gravelings and protecting the researcher, without having to worry about blitzing down the burrows as quickly as possible.

(Not that it makes the core issue of melee targeting versus inanimate targets any less terrible.)

Right but with Howling King the burrows took too long to drop because constant “Miss” and this is with strafting around to find a sweet spot. In a game where Dodging is key if i get a nasty graveling on me I need to move. Then I come back, lost that one sweet spot where the Burrow didnt bug out and by this time its Game Over and then we rinse repeat the same fail all over again.

Same thing happened to me last night with a group. First I went hammer, but would miss a lot. Then I went rifle and at first it seemed better, but soon after, I was obstructed constantly. I even tried standing on top of steps, where there should logically no obstruction at all, but that didnt help. It seems like I’m being obstructed by the gravelings themselves because it would occur more frequently as the graveling mob grew in size.

We did get very close, and we were patient, but we gave up after an hour. This is why I’m here, looking for tips.

Our group was 2 wars, 2 rangers and thief.

I agree with the content designer. During the first weeks of GW2, my siblings and I discovered this problem as well but I managed to figure out the solution. Stationary attacks will not hit the burrows. AOE will usually work but not all classes will have a substantial amount of aoe. For melee classes running around the burrow and attacking it will work, 90% of my attacks will land. The misses probably occur from me becoming stationary for a second or running off too far. As a warrior I could solo the burrows and at the same time kite the larger mobs that came out, so there is a bonus with the running around in circles. The warrior skill that throws the 2h great sword will also work against burrows. All the burrows in AC seem to work this way once we figured it out. Good luck hunting!

I had some trouble with these formidable burrows on my ranger. Compare and contrasting the efficiency of hitting them with longbow and shortbow… longbow wins due to what I suspect—a more curvy trajectory. It seems that the closer arrow’s incoming angle to the burrow to vertical, the easier it will hit. So stand on a higher ground than the burrow, or keep maximum range will help.

And of course, this bug still need to be fixed. Failing the dungeon a few times to figure out this trick is rather unsatisfactory.

Did this last night, was very annoying my ranger could not hit the burrows at all with short bow or long bow.

A single staff elementalist can destroy a burrow with meteor shower+lava font+ some fire autoattacking in roughly 10 seconds. I wasn’t even specced into damage (only 5 trait points in fire) for that.
The place requires a lot of coordination, but with 2 eles nuking the burrows we managed.

They’re also easier to hit in melee if you don’t have them selected as your target. I crush burrows with Hundred Blades on a regular basis, but it is silly that I start missing 100% from the same position I was just hitting a burrow at just because I selected it as my target.

I didnt read all the above slots but as a melee:

jsut MOVE while hitting and you wont miss EVER, it makes it so easy and now I can down burrows in practically less than 10 seconds on my own since I knew about this ( fix) just move while hitting and its easy.

Hope it helps

I jump on them and move left and right and hit em

as a thief, i have serious issues damaging any structure with my daggers, and firint my bow or pistol gives me “obstructed”.

structure/object collision is really iffy, and gets in the way of being effective.

Im gonna go on killing spree if this is not fixed , with my elem i can solo the burrow with meteor shower in like 5 seconds , but with my guardian i can be standing for a minute.

They can be downed in 10 seconds, no problem. There is a secret tho. You gotta keep attacking them with melee weapons, while you are on the move around them. (you don’t get a miss if u are on the move)

Make sure to have people with AOE/at least weapons that have good AOE. On my warrior and necro, if I use melee and stand still I get “miss miss miss”, but if you strafe around it you will hit. Then again, just spam longbow or your AOE wells and it will drop fast as well.

This is a huge problem on thieves and I recommend using the shortbow +Clusterbomb spam and posion fields. I also use Needle trap and caltrop so the adds can’t run by me and a crippled while i circle strafe around. As for the anet members response to running around solving the issue. It doesn’t.

Your missing because the hitbox changes as the burrows take damage. Thats why melees have to move around to consistently hit it (you will notice not only the shape of the burrows changing, but also where the numbers pop up when you hit it. Ranged has to do this also (i actually find range weapons tend to “auto correct” itself better than melee).

Another huge problem imo with burrows is when they die, the burrows “push” you away from the spot. This can easily glitch you; i’ve gotten stuck in walls twice and once i went THROUGH a closed door into an area that i should not have been able to enter. Luckily the waypoint system makes it easy to unstick yourself, but if you get stuck early, your locked in combat and can’t really help.

You also might want to balance the different between elementalists hitting the burrows with fast respawning AoE skills which destroy them quickly and a melee character who, even if they reliably hit them, will do significantly less damage and they have to sit in the one spot hitting the burrow while being closer to the threat. I’ve seen elementalists easily destroy burrows in seconds with Lava Font, Meteor Shower, Fire Storm etc while my ranger has to switch to melee (I’m normally shortbow with axe/warhorn) and has to deal with getting mobbed by gravelings while dealing a puny amount of damage compared to elementalists who I suspect could solo this encounter.

Imbalances like this one will lead to groups strongly favouring elementalists (or classes with similair abilities – traps don’t work) to do these paths. Groups without them do it real tough depending on their party and spec set ups. I’ve also heard engineers have a terrible time with flame throwers but grenades are easy mode. The imbalance is dramatic. Another point worth looking into is condition specs who obviously can’t DPS the burrows as well because they are immune to conditions. This makes sense flavour wise but it puts a lot of people in tough spots because builds which should be viable for this content are not. Note, this is a problem throughout the entire game, but it is especially obvious for this encounter, especially when your group is struggling to finish it.

How about we post in this thread skills which would reliably hit the burrows. I’ll add mine: guardian scepter, number 2 skill and torch number 5 skill.

Shiren…you obviously haven’t the slightest clue what you’re talking about. Fast respawning skills? Like what? Why dont you roll and ele and try to solo a burrow when your meteor shower or frost bow is on CD. Christ….

Any sky-to-ground AoE that deals more damage based on the surface area of what’s under it (cough Elementalist spells cough) makes short work of burrows.

You don’t need no elementalists. I’ve done all 3 paths for the last 5 days and had no issues with this.

Don’t use the 2-5 skills, just auto attack and move around the burrows. My auto attacks always hit when I’m moving.

Huge pro tip for melee users: Turn auto-target off. Just stand in front of the burrow and hit it, do not target. Easy peasy, you won’t miss another hit ever again.

Also, Robert:
Could you tell me if you’ve changed anything about the number of burrows in Tzark’s encounter? I’ve done it today and it felt like there were way less burrows than usual.

Normally, my group would barely keep up with killing newly spawned burrows. This time around, we had to wait a couple of seconds for each to spawn. Just breezing through them.

I have been doing AC Explore for the past couple of weeks. I have had a lot of success when I do melee them. I stand directly on the top middle of them. The best option atm is to use a ranged weapon though, or an aoe skill.