Guild Wars 2

Over the past few days I have noticed multiple times that Belka fires her blue projectile thingy even while you’re in melee range.
As you can see on the screenshot I included, the danger indicator circle of her blue projectile is on me while I am standing against her.
I am the only person in the dungeon, so it’s not because there’s somebody ranging her.

I hope somebody can look into this, because it makes fighting Belka a pain

Like most projectiles, it tracks player movement. Which means if you move towards her as she is firing the projectile, it can land much closer, such as right on her. This is a novice mistake that generally occurs after someone gets knocked back by her.

With that said, the projectile is also buggy. However, this occurs very extremely rarely (I can’t overemphasize how rare this is) so there’s nearly a 100% chance that your problem is the intended projectile tracking, and not the bug with the projectile.

Zui.9245:

Like most projectiles, it tracks player movement. Which means if you move towards her as she is firing the projectile, it can land much closer, such as right on her. This is a novice mistake that generally occurs after someone gets knocked back by her.

With that said, the projectile is also buggy. However, this occurs very extremely rarely (I can’t overemphasize how rare this is) so there’s nearly a 100% chance that your problem is the intended projectile tracking, and not the bug with the projectile.

As you can see if you look at the cooldowns of my skills, my GS rush is already 5 seconds into cooldown, and whirlwind even more.
She just randomly fired the projectile in between her autoattacks while I was already in melee range again for a while.
If this occurred due to projectile tracking, it would have tracked me for 5 seconds before she actually fired the projectile.
I wouldn’t say this isn’t possible, but if this was the case, I would say that projectile tracking itself is bugged.

Also might worth noticing is that when I get knocked back by her, I always dodge before I use GS rush to prevent kitten like this from happening, but I’ve never seen the projectile so close to her before

Something tells me this is just a troll referring to Necrid bolt hitting in melee…

Heh, probably, but just in case…

It’s been this way since launch, and we’ve told them about it dozens of times (many, many threads and we put it in the feedback threads they asked for), and we just got the standard ArenaNet reply of “…”. So don’t expect it to change. This is another fantastic case of “learn to work with the buggy bullkitten, because it’s here to stay.”

The issue doesn’t necessarily have to involve mobility skills like Rush or WWA — just running at the moment the AoE appears is enough to make it miss its mark. So if you’re moving towards her when she launches it, it can end up in melee range. Mobility skills can make this worse, especially teleports, since they can cause the ball to basically act like a PBAoE, exploding immediately when she launches it, before the AoE can be reacted to.

Other fun facts about Belka’s Big Blue Ball of Bullkitten:

- The AoE doesn’t tell you where it will land, just who is being targeted/tracked. React to the AoE by changing direction away from where the targeted player was headed when the AoE appeared.
- The location that ball hits the ground doesn’t mean anything either. I’ve watched it come down on the opposite side of the arena and still oneshot me. I haven’t quite figured out what causes this.
- The animation timing seems accurate, so if you dodge when you see the ball land (regardless of how far away it is from you), you can reliably avoid taking damage.

So the ball can land in melee due to the tracking thing. Now, if she’s targeting you and launching it while you’re in melee range, that would be a new bug (still won’t get fixed, though).

I’ve had it happen hundreds of times where the orb simply explodes in melee and kills you instantly. I can’t tell you how many p2 solo speed runs were ruined because of that bug. :< But yeah this has been around for a loooong time. I’ve said many hundreds of kitten words because of it.

I don’t have a vid of it, but the best i’ve seen with the orb is it targeting me after I wp back to the entrance (due to getting knocked into it and dying first). And of course, sometimes she rapid fires the orb.

Reflecting her orb, while she has a reflect up will probably kill you since reflects cap at 2. Generally avoid reflecting the very first orb she fires, bad things usually happen.

Projectiles leading there targets has been around since release, any slow moving projectile can be avoided by changing direction after it is fired, this allows you to kill the arah turrets without a reflect, chill at cm p3 end boss, fight risen elementalists without taking damage on a class without reflects, etc… It’s one of the reasons they updated necro staff, the auto projectile speed was so slow pvp players could completely avoid it with direction changes, likewise with the ranger trait for longbow velocity, the projectiles move slow enough without the trait that you can avoid them at long ranges, especially when the ranger picks up the +300 range trait..

SlyDevil.3952:

Reflecting her orb, while she has a reflect up will probably kill you since reflects cap at 2. Generally avoid reflecting the very first orb she fires, bad things usually happen.

Projectiles leading there targets has been around since release, any slow moving projectile can be avoided by changing direction after it is fired, this allows you to kill the arah turrets without a reflect, chill at cm p3 end boss, fight risen elementalists without taking damage on a class without reflects, etc… It’s one of the reasons they updated necro staff, the auto projectile speed was so slow pvp players could completely avoid it with direction changes, likewise with the ranger trait for longbow velocity, the projectiles move slow enough without the trait that you can avoid them at long ranges, especially when the ranger picks up the +300 range trait..

And what does that have to do with the original post?

bladex.9502:

Also might worth noticing is that when I get knocked back by her, I always dodge before I use GS rush to prevent kitten like this from happening, but I’ve never seen the projectile so close to her before

From your post, it does sound like you may have actually experienced a bug with the projectile if she fired it while you were in melee range (and nothing else she would target was outside of melee range).

With that said, dodging like you’re doing is utterly pointless, and if you’re dodging in toward her is one of the ways you can end up killing yourself via projectile tracking. Instead, you should try to predict the knockback arrow and dodge that (it’s not perfectly predictable, but you can predict it more often than not) because getting knocked back is a big DPS loss, and since you have plenty of extra dodges, you could dodge some of her autos as well if you really felt like it (although there’s barely any need on warrior if you’re at max melee, gogo healsig).

I’d additionally recommend that you take signet of rage over warbanner, drop shake it off for signet of stamina (with average RNG and good play plus stamina signet, you’ll only need to run out to reset your health once), and take FGJ. Your call on whether you want to take banner of discipline or signet of fury (with good play, banner will be superior).

Another tip for while you’re learning the knockback tell — bring Dolyak Signet (if traited for signet cooldowns) or Balanced Stance. It can be helpful to pop the stability before starting a hundred blades, just in case. Plus you’ll have another stunbreak when the knockback does hit you.

Otherwise you can do pretty well just waiting until after a knockback to channel 100b and slot more DPS instead of stability.

inb4 zerk or gtfo reread my first sentence