Guild Wars 2

In Ascalonian Catacombs path 3, Warmaster Grast seems to never pop his bubble shield when Colossus does his ‘global’ AoE falling rocks skill. My guild has patiently attempted this boss fight a few dozen times with different strategies with no success. Is this a bug? In my party, we only saw him pop the shield once in 10 attempts. Stability (Signet of Dolyak for me) did not seem to be a key element of this, either.
Let me know if its a bug or not, so my guildies and I can know whether we need to keep trying!!

PS-On behalf of the Sanctum of Legends, thanks for your hard work and unparalleled support. We love being a part of such a breathtakingly vast and dynamic world.

-Siri Nietzschens (SOL Legend)

If the bubble doesn’t work, your next action is to attempt to interrupt it using knockdown and dazing abilities on the boss. That should work. If not, then running really far away could do it, as long the boss doesn’t reset.

Yea it’s buggy, that’s why our guild groups rely on interruptions instead which gives more control to the actual player to “avoid” the rocks.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

I’ll look into it and try to make sure Grast uses the bubble properly, but we also made the roar he uses to summon the boulders interruptable so a focused group could stand a chance if Grast died or ever misbehaved.

Thank you so much! I didn’t even think about interrupting! The guildies and I shall try again today, I will let you know how it goes!

well the issue is yes he dosnt use his bubble 100% of the time but also he happens to weild a hammer. if he is a key NPC to the boss fight why is he up in the bosses face? and yes im a mesmer i half to run pystal and great sword because of the bosses AoE for interupts but once he starts his animation is when the bolders fall and they happen to knock down allies and down them quickly. id rather see the NPC bring out a torch or war horn for that boss fight. cause i hate having the guardian or ele put a 24/7 buff protect or healing so that the NPC can be up in the bosses face.

i love the dynamic of the boss fight but its just to annoing and buggy sometimes.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

I’ll look into it and try to make sure Grast uses the bubble properly, but we also made the roar he uses to summon the boulders interruptable so a focused group could stand a chance if Grast died or ever misbehaved.

Grast also get’s killed pretty easily if the boss decides he’s annoying.

Can we also get a fix for the current cheese strategy on this boss? Standing in the corner of the pillars so that he never triggers his rumble attack and can only ever hit one person at a time is seriously pathetic.

Sadly, I’ve been kicked twice from groups for not wanting to do it. =(

Robert Hrouda.1327:

I’ll look into it and try to make sure Grast uses the bubble properly, but we also made the roar he uses to summon the boulders interruptable so a focused group could stand a chance if Grast died or ever misbehaved.

Totally disagree with that one. Sure, maybe interrupt once or twice, but CR does his roar so quickly, there’s no way even the most focused of teams can get rid of the 4+ stacks of defiant after every interrupt plus manage to interrupt the roar consistently over and over.

This mechanic doesn’t promote tighter teamwork – it promotes exploit discovery.

Changing Grast’s weapon or skills will solve most of the problems. The charge on his hammer smash prevents him from getting the bubble up in time far too often. His HP is fine, he isn’t that hard to keep alive, an aoe heal every now and again is enough.

The thing is, it’s very hard for a party without a mesmer or a guardian to get rid of those stacks of defiant in order to interrupt him at all, especially if you’re a PuG group with only the game’s chat system to rely on for in-combat coordination.

So, while there are some issues with the timing of the shield and the fact that he dies so easily as a melee fighter compounds the issue of not having the ability to put the boss into a position where he can be interrupted.

hehehe. i tried AC also. and yet again, the design team fail totaly.

now you have to depend on a npc, to finish a boss.
realy great idea, since your npcs are normaly buggy and weird from begining.

I could say where its safe to stand, and not even care about the stupid buggy npc.
But i wont. or A-net just screw up about the only way to do this place.

The problem lies simply from Grast continuing to charge an irrelevant attack and getting knocked down before the bubble goes up. That’s bad design because the NPC does no damage to the boss of any consequence, so having him continue to channel the attack makes no sense. Thankfully the groups I run with figured out how to do this without the kitten

Just like to say, soooo annoying. But after 13s of repairs, we finally managed to do it. What we did was to stack aoe heals and regen. and by Ogdin’s hammer, it worked! :o

I mean, I’m still blown away. Aoe healing. who knew right??

One thing i’d like to suggest is that whatever the npc is doing (charging, knocked down, etc) so long as he’s not dead, he’ll pop the shield bubble along with the falling rocks. this way, people will reliably know grast will pop his bubble and will try their best to heal him up.

I only ran this new revamped path 3 once. Grast always popped his bubble too late, after the rocks had fallen, and the boss could not be interrupted. Somewhat tangentially-related, much more recently ran path 2 and Detha just stood there in the centre of the final Ghost Eater chamber. Didn’t go to fix traps.

Do the developers even test the dungeons out after they decide to revamp them or are we supposed to be the disgruntled guinea pigs wasting hours upon hours just to uncover a whole series of glitches to report and end up with no reward or reimbursement for our time?

It is rather annoying that a key mechanic of this boss fight relies solely on this NPC. I believe it would be better if we had this changed to something like Path 2, where the players can activate the cannons, and in this case shield, themselves. This would negate all the hassle of watching the NPC race in and die repeatedly, or delay activating his shield.

There’s a safespot ’’under’’ one of the pillars where no rocks fall. =)

You don’t need the NPC to do this path and you don’t need to use an exploit. There are 2 spots where now stones fall down. If you stay in these spots while it is doing it’s uber-attacks you won’t get hit at all. In the “safe” phase you just go out lure him a little away from the safe spots and hit him. That’s how you can do the boss easily even if the NPC is bugged/dead/whatever.

PS: @ANet – I encourage you to make dungeons harder. Most people fail at Bosses not because they’re too hard but because they don’t want to listen or don’t get the boss mechanic. – bugs of course need to be fixed but otherwise i would love to see super hard dungeons where you need forever to figure out the strategies.

Well we eventually beat Colossus Rumblus by pulling him into the tunnel where no rocks fall, but I find it really hard to believe that all these ‘safe’ spots were intended.

Dresden.1736:

This mechanic doesn’t promote tighter teamwork – it promotes exploit discovery.

Pretty much this. There are already three spots I know of that you can stack at and kill the boss while being completely out of the way of the AoE. As a result, almost every group I do AC Path 3 with will attempt to cheese the boss and succeed because it easily works and makes the otherwise buggy, painful boss fight a breeze. I think the whole “interruptable shout” thing is a moot point. Despite the fact that Defiant mechanics are very hard to coordinate in groups that are not familiar with each other (as probably 75% of AC groups are) due to the lack of an in-game voice chat, the window for interrupting the shout is frustratingly slim and still only prevents the AoE half the time it is interrupted.

swiftpaw.6397:

It is rather annoying that a key mechanic of this boss fight relies solely on this NPC.

And this! So many times this! Warmaster Grast has usurped Magg as the most frustrating NPC in the game. My experience in the game has taught me not to rely on NPCs because of their very weak AI and Warmaster Grast only cements that frustrating sentiment.

I mean, what was the point of changing to boss from Howling King 2.0 if he was just going to be made into Grenth 3.0?

lcpdragonslayer.7895:

Do the developers even test the dungeons out after they decide to revamp them or are we supposed to be the disgruntled guinea pigs wasting hours upon hours just to uncover a whole series of glitches to report and end up with no reward or reimbursement for our time?

Heh, I thought it was a deliberate snipe by the developers at disgruntled players. “Rocks fall, everyone dies.”
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RocksFallEveryoneDies

Kanako Davis.5364:

You don’t need the NPC to do this path and you don’t need to use an exploit. There are 2 spots where now stones fall down. If you stay in these spots while it is doing it’s uber-attacks you won’t get hit at all. In the “safe” phase you just go out lure him a little away from the safe spots and hit him. That’s how you can do the boss easily even if the NPC is bugged/dead/whatever.

PS: @ANet – I encourage you to make dungeons harder. Most people fail at Bosses not because they’re too hard but because they don’t want to listen or don’t get the boss mechanic. – bugs of course need to be fixed but otherwise i would love to see super hard dungeons where you need forever to figure out the strategies.

IMHO that’s precisely what’s wrong with this encounter. I’m all for making things harder, but not to the point where you can only defeat the encounter if you know or figure out the one “trick”. That’s not encouraging players to learn strategy, that’s railroading.

Ideally there’d be multiple ways to get around the falling rocks, like say, one or two available to each class. So (assuming Grast’s shield doesn’t work – bad to have the player’s survival dependent NPC AI) you could try to interrupt, but it it failed you could pop your one skill which deflects the rocks or whatever. But no, if you fail, the inescapable rocks of death fall.

In general, insta-kill attacks are very bad in a game. If you use one, be sure to give players plenty of ways to avoid it. That way if they fail and die, they feel like it was their fault. But if you don’t give them tools to fight back, they just feel like it’s a stupidly designed encounter, which this one currently is.

I’m guessing guard’s shield bubble thingy doesn’t work on the rocks here?

penatbater.4710:

I’m guessing guard’s shield bubble thingy doesn’t work on the rocks here?

I tried Shield of the Avenger and it doesn’t work, but I’m not sure about Sanctuary.

No, because the rocks don’t count as projectiles. Even if they did, Sanctuary wouldn’t last long enough.

Kanako Davis.5364:

You don’t need the NPC to do this path and you don’t need to use an exploit. There are 2 spots where now stones fall down. If you stay in these spots while it is doing it’s uber-attacks you won’t get hit at all. In the “safe” phase you just go out lure him a little away from the safe spots and hit him. That’s how you can do the boss easily even if the NPC is bugged/dead/whatever.

PS: @ANet – I encourage you to make dungeons harder. Most people fail at Bosses not because they’re too hard but because they don’t want to listen or don’t get the boss mechanic. – bugs of course need to be fixed but otherwise i would love to see super hard dungeons where you need forever to figure out the strategies.

I am very happy with the amount of replies to my post, thank you all for your input.

I have to agree with Kanako, I love a challenge. As long as its not BUGGED, anything is possible through practice, patience and teamwork. I dislike that they nerfed the ‘trash-mobs’, especially the hallway after the spider queen. Even that short encounter took a high degree of coordination.

We have not tried p3 again yet, but the other paths are fine. We have 2 shout healing warriors in our dungeon group along with the usual guardians and d/d eles (that we love) and we will try these new strategies suggested above. Thanks all.

-Siri Nietzschens [SOL] Eredon Terrace

penatbater.4710:

Just like to say, soooo annoying. But after 13s of repairs, we finally managed to do it. What we did was to stack aoe heals and regen. and by Ogdin’s hammer, it worked! :o

I mean, I’m still blown away. Aoe healing. who knew right??

One thing i’d like to suggest is that whatever the npc is doing (charging, knocked down, etc) so long as he’s not dead, he’ll pop the shield bubble along with the falling rocks. this way, people will reliably know grast will pop his bubble and will try their best to heal him up.

You are totally wrong. I wouldn’t normally bother to point something like that out, but for the sake of making sure less experienced players aren’t following terrible advice, I felt the need to.

If Grast gets knocked down… He. Will. Not. Deploy. The. Shield. I can’t make this any more plain. He will lie there and die like the rest of us. Healing has absolutely nothing to do with whether he deploys the shield properly or not. Most of the time, the idiot will just be using his ridiculously slow and pointless auto-attack, or be in the middle of hobbling back into melee range to complete a queued attack when the ceiling caves in on him and kills him.

Now that I think about it, getting around him getting KD’d isn’t hard, it’s just troublesome. Stability out the wazzoo is what it boils down too. Specifically, one person will have to not participate in the fight, since I believe shouts are limited to 5 people as well (true?), two guards would be able to stack “Stand Your Ground!” and Hallowed Ground pretty much endlessly if done right, but that’s a pretty annoying work around.

Leads to another point though, all crucial NPC’s to a quest, event, etc have either permanent Stability or Unshakeable/Defiant, why doesn’t Grast?

penatbater.4710:

Just like to say, soooo annoying. But after 13s of repairs, we finally managed to do it. What we did was to stack aoe heals and regen. and by Ogdin’s hammer, it worked! :o

I mean, I’m still blown away. Aoe healing. who knew right??

One thing i’d like to suggest is that whatever the npc is doing (charging, knocked down, etc) so long as he’s not dead, he’ll pop the shield bubble along with the falling rocks. this way, people will reliably know grast will pop his bubble and will try their best to heal him up.

This is wrong. I don’t know where you came up with this but it’s totally divorced from reality. You obviously are not being honest here because anyone that’s actually done P3 after the patch knows that doesn’t work.

Regens and heals will not work if the overlapping aoes knockdown and kill your entire team in 2 seconds. Even if you chain stability with 3 guards the raw damage will still kill you.

The only way is if grast deploy the bubble OR you interrupt the boss shout.

The problem is grast’s ai is really shoddy and he doesn’t deploy the bubble half the times and the other half he is in the middle of a long attack animation that causes him to not deploy, at which point the ceiling caves in and knocks down and kills him and the rest of your team.

The problem with interrupt route is unless you have the right classes interrupt his shout is very difficult since after each interrupt he gains a bunch of defiant stacks which makes him immune to interrupt for that many tries.

Sometimes he will just simply shout 3 seconds after being interrupted, while all the team’s interrupts are on CD, at which point you basically are basically stuck trying to dodge and guaranteed to lose 1-2 players if you are lucky to the rocks.