Guild Wars 2

Hi,

10 people that do not raid very often because of RL, but have raid gear, raid classes, raid team composition (according to guides) have tried several times Vale Guardian as a group but never with succes.

So these people ask themselves: Is Vale Guardian the best (or easiest) choice for a group of 10 people that are inexperienced with raids and had never killed a raid boss?

What do you think?

What other bosses/wings would be easier or better?

Thanks.

Escort is easiest encounter in game atm.
Second boss in W4 is stupidly easy.
Trio is doable if you know the mechanics.
Rest of the bosses would be issue if you can’t complete VG.

Personal experience of order of difficulty:

1st order: Easiest
Vale Guardian, Escort
2nd order: Easy with a good team, everyone needs to pull their weight
Gorseval, Trio, Cairn, Samarog
3rd order: Some difficulty, don’t expect first run kills
Sloth, KC, Sabetha, Mursaat Overseer
4th order: Requires serious practice and a good team where everyone works together
Matthias, Xera, Deimos,

I have doubts whether or not to call Gorseval 1st or 2nd order, he’s technically easy, but you need either a very good DPS setup, or a good tank with communication. And either way you need good CC for the ghosts, so you can’t slack there.

If you want easier encounters than VG, you should look at
Wing 2 second encounter: Trio
Wing 3 first encounter: Escort
Wing 4 second encounter: Mursaat Overseer

These three are by far the easiest raid encounters.

VG is a boss of typical difficulty for raids. Most bosses you see will be of similar difficulty to VG. So if your group can kill VG, you should be able to do most bosses with practice as well. The only more challenging ones are the last bosses for all 4 wings.

I want to comment on the Trio, though, as it’s really easy, but relies heavily on a good and clear distribution of the roles. You need someone dedicated to the mortars. You need someone dedicated to keep saboteurs away from the cage, etc. So a well organized team can steamwaltz through it like it’s the easiest boss, but a team that relies only on dealing damage and surviving, will have a 100% fail career

If you are having problem but are with 10 friends/guilds, you really should not use meta comp.
Take 1 rev healer and then an Auramancer as second healer.

Take 2 Hammer DH to keep perma protection on everyone plus aegis can save people from blue circles for example. If you have only 1 Hammer DH take one Power Rev and make him keep Facet of protection up all the time and just spam sword 1 ( as its main source of damage anyway)

This kind of things is what i do when i command training runs, and because of these comps i would say that 4 out of 5 times the training run end with boss kills.

Make sure the chrono tank have like 2000+ toughness so both the rev healer and the ele can take healing gear with toughness to get something like 1800+toughness, so they can focus on healing the dps without ever needing to use their heals on themselves.

Rev healer + auramancer is so stupid that on Cairn you can do this:
Put 4 markers around the boss ( make a PLUS sign with the markers ), everyone stacks on one marker, the other 3 people with agony go to the other markers, you dont need a kitter, this a commom strategy but here is the catch with this comp.
You dont go to circles with the boss attack, everyone dont stop dpsing, Rev healer and auramancer just heal everyone throught the attack, Rev can cast heals even when he is CCed by the attack and auramancer well auras are always ticking.

For the DPS DONT take eles. Take as i said the hammer DH, power Rev, both PS should be condi as its easier rotation and higher dps. For cond damage take necro/ranger.

I doubt if you do this you will fail again on VG, just try it. And if you are on NA server feel free to add me and i would gladly help you guys sort the easiest comp for each boss.

Zok.4956:

Hi,

10 people that do not raid very often because of RL, but have raid gear, raid classes, raid team composition (according to guides) have tried several times Vale Guardian as a group but never with succes.

So these people ask themselves: Is Vale Guardian the best (or easiest) choice for a group of 10 people that are inexperienced with raids and had never killed a raid boss?

What do you think?

What other bosses/wings would be easier or better?

Thanks.

Well personally I think VG is one of the hardest raid bosses you could do as a group, it has ridiculous pressure compared to other raid bosses. As such running more defensive comps with protection is probably a wise thing to do. Having said that what bosses could be better for your group depends on a few things: Do you fail DPS? Is it tanking? Is it health issues? Is it the green mechanic?

Personally I would advice you to do the first three bosses of wing 4, trio ( gated behind slothasor) and escort, they are relatively low pressure fights without any dps checks. You only have to deal with some mechanics but nothing to chaotic.

Gorseval and KC are easy bosses if you have dps, though if you cannot get past VG I guess you would have to find an opener for gorse. Sabetha, Xera, Deimos and Matthias are probably difficult if you cannot clear VG. However rest assured if you manage to down VG you can pretty much succeed at any fight!

As said above for the easy bosses, and I’m going to claim it works in general, if you believe a certain boss is hard, try going for a non meta comp instead, specially if you’re 10 people who already play together regularly.

The meta is optimized for fast kills/speed runs with several minutes remaining on the enrage bar. This is achieved with a combination of properly moving around during key moments of your rotation (with seaweed food) and everyone performing their rotation to the letter with nearly to no mistakes. If you still have to deal with learning the mechanics though, why push yourself into a speed run?

Take guardians instead of Elementalists for example. Ele is too hard to rotate with and any DPS meter will show you how much most people don’t even know how to trigger the seaweed buff properly. It is also very squishy and puts pressure on the druid to bring extra protection and search and rescue to resurrect your sorry kittens. By bringing guardians you put less pressure on the druid (he/she can now bring burning with spirit because you supply prot, for example) and adds actual damage to the table, because the rotation is so easy and hard to mess up. It is even easier to practive the seaweed buff because most of your attacks will not halt your movement by channeling and you don’t have to worry about overloads and such.

If you’re the tank, you also don’t have to bring full berserkers at all, as your damage will always be small, and there is no incentive to give that extra edge to a team full of guardians (that will 80% always be competent enough to deal enough damage for a kill). You can go on full Minstrels and leadership runes and I doubt anyone will complain about the extra healing, and that allows you to focus on your boon uptime. It also doesn’t hurt to pick an easier rotation (or come up with an easy one yourself) even if it has less total boon uptime, because there is nothing worse than a Chrono trying and failing the optimized rotations and giving us no quickness at all. If you can give less but at least give some, do it.

Lastly, for the healer (as PS war is so simple that it just works in any setup), keep in mind that if you’re a druid healing is secondary to keeping Grace of the Land up. The extra % in damage is that much worth it that you should actually go into celestial avatar everytime you can and spam your team with heals in spite of them being already full. Do not wait for low bars to do it, as the real advantage you bring as a druid is the damage from stacking Grace. Also, by bringing a sword/warhorn and/or the sylvari hound, you can heal solely by stacking high amounts of regeneration (complemented nicely by the guardians). Should you actually want to play a healer and not a damage buffer, bring an elementalist instead. Whereas they are hard to do damage with, they are the absolutely best healing class there is (albeit not much in the way of buffing damage).

W4B2 might be a lot harder for a group that struggles with raid bosses than people think. If you lack add control (I recommend new groups bring a necro) and the people with the special skills don’t know their role very well it can go south quickly. I’ve been in a number of groups where a shielded jade lights up all the platforms because dispel is on cd and protect is running willy nilly all over the place. This is compounded by you having 10 new people in the group, so there is nobody to teach the fight. I’d recommend Escort or Trio over W4B2.

That being said, it is still easier than VG. Vale Guardian is one of the harder bosses. People just think he’s easy because he’s the first boss and so everybody has done him a lot.

Do wing 1 to start with for training .. escort from w3 do them weekly and trio from w2 to collect your li as they are easy usually with pugs

VG is not the easyest by far. I’d recommend the following bosses:

Escort (first b"boss" in wing 3). More like an event then a boss. Have your mesmer bring portal, and its super easy. Just do it slow

Wing4B1, he is also super easy. Just focus on staying alive. Bring 1 or even 2 full tempists. And it will be super easy. Ignore the timer. Enrage at him dont matter.

Thats by far the 2 easyest bosses. Besides that, bring a heal temp. it is the best carry, something like: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQFAWn0XC9XiVYCOYCcYilNAjYFkCOju31/6hd4BEAugA-TxxGQBtRHgiU/ZI7PULlfk7BAAgLAgHVCSKA/2bB-e

play it super easy. Stay in water ALL the time, use 3+5 and AA and overload… thats about it. Best part. It have toons of passive healing, so even if you are ressing someone or something, you still heal others passivly. And the heal is so strong.

When I teach mathias, I always come heal temp, it make thing so easy as all have full hp all the time

The last skill mastery truck(8 pts) opens if u defeat VG or any random boss?

VG is hardest for pugs imo. Out of all the starter bosses. (if the whole group has never killed one, and you will start from the beginning of a wing anyway) It would be whether Wing 3 Escort, or Wing 4 Cairn.

Wing 3 Escort is more about clearing the path as fast as possible (as mobs start spawning more and more the slower you go, needing a few dedicated roles. Back Warg control, Baby Sitter, Towers, and main group) Main Boss afterwards is just stacking at the door and Dps’n

Wing 4 Cairn has less individual responsibilities. Mainly needing up to 3 kiters to take on Agony away from the main DPS group. The rest is just boss mechanics.

@Pavlarian. You just need to beat any boss to unlock.

Escort is really easy, but you need a chrono with the raid mastery unlocked.

For Trio and Mursaat you’ll need an opener and I’m not sure how easy they’re to find for these two bosses.

Cairn may be a good alternative for training. It’s not too difficult and you neither need an opener nor the raid mastery.

If some of you have more time to play (especially your chronos), you should join some training runs or Escort without requirements (preferably not as chrono) to get some additional practice and with some luck the mastery unlock.

Rhiannon.1726:

Escort is really easy, but you need a chrono with the raid mastery unlocked.

For Trio and Mursaat you’ll need an opener and I’m not sure how easy they’re to find for these two bosses.

Cairn may be a good alternative for training. It’s not too difficult and you neither need an opener nor the raid mastery.

If some of you have more time to play (especially your chronos), you should join some training runs or Escort without requirements (preferably not as chrono) to get some additional practice and with some luck the mastery unlock.

There’s a way to avoid the cave entirely assuming it didn’t get patched out.

Ayrilana.1396:

Rhiannon.1726:

Escort is really easy, but you need a chrono with the raid mastery unlocked.

For Trio and Mursaat you’ll need an opener and I’m not sure how easy they’re to find for these two bosses.

Cairn may be a good alternative for training. It’s not too difficult and you neither need an opener nor the raid mastery.

If some of you have more time to play (especially your chronos), you should join some training runs or Escort without requirements (preferably not as chrono) to get some additional practice and with some luck the mastery unlock.

There’s a way to avoid the cave entirely assuming it didn’t get patched out.

you can still lightninghammer jump. But might be easyer for 1 chrono to have the raid mastery already.

Samarog.

Extremely forgiving enrage timer.

Very simple mechanics (break every 10%, knockback small guy and spam immobilizes, 2 selected players stand near each other away from group)

Extremely telegraphed attacks.

Sigfodr.9576:

Ayrilana.1396:

Rhiannon.1726:

Escort is really easy, but you need a chrono with the raid mastery unlocked.

For Trio and Mursaat you’ll need an opener and I’m not sure how easy they’re to find for these two bosses.

Cairn may be a good alternative for training. It’s not too difficult and you neither need an opener nor the raid mastery.

If some of you have more time to play (especially your chronos), you should join some training runs or Escort without requirements (preferably not as chrono) to get some additional practice and with some luck the mastery unlock.

There’s a way to avoid the cave entirely assuming it didn’t get patched out.

you can still lightninghammer jump. But might be easyer for 1 chrono to have the raid mastery already.

Maybe. I was only suggesting that in case there’s a group where nobody has beaten a boss or event before and wouldn’t have the mastery line unlocked.

I know it’s not the popular answer but

VG.

It’s easily the best way to learn pretty much how to raid. It teaches positioning, roles and teamwork the best out of any fight. It’s not nearly as intensive as SAB/Xera/Matt but not as braindead as the other fights either. Secondary shout out to my boy Sloth for teaching people the value of dodge and blocks.

I totally agree with TexZero. In my casual guild I am running some raid trainings and we are usually doing the escort encounter for some easy rewards and after that train on Vale Guardian. Depending on the previous existing knowledge of the people we kill it or not, but it is really good ‘raid training’.