Guild Wars 2

Subject Alpha needs some serious balance tweaking. Here are the serious issues that need to be addressed:

AOE

• Currently his earth AOE is MASSIVE, and is spammed WAY too often. The AOE circles themselves are HUMONGOUS, with 3-5 spread out across the floor in a way that leaves little room for dodging/avoiding the spell. More often than not you will not be able to dodge these massive circles, and even if you do dodge once, maybe twice, the third time you will certainly be killed because he spams them like crazy and you have run out of endurance.

• The spell itself does so much damage that it kills a player instantly. I can live with this if the AOE was easier to avoid. But atm, one mistake will cost you your life.

• Because he spams so much AOE, regardless of where you are in the room, and because of the MASSIVE damage each spell has, reviving your team, unless with an instant spell/move, is out of the option.

Crystals

• Boy are these a pain in the kittening kitten Not only does he crystallize you, making you frozen and helpless to his AOE spells, your team can never break them down in time because they have too much health and armor. As an Engineer myself, my weapons are useless and miss far too often and do little damage when they hit.

• Now lets say, by some kittening miracle you manage to break out of the crystal, he more often than not puts you right in another one. There needs to be a cool down for the same player to be crystallized so many times in a row.

• Lets say you dodge these, sometimes the crystal is 10-15 ft away from you and you are still crystallized. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve seen myself and others dodge these only to still get crystallized.

Resetting

• A few times Subect Alpha resets and either starts to regain his health, or resets completely and regains all his health. Nothing worse than bringing a boss down to 25% only to have him reset while your team is fighting him.

Walking the Green Mile

• Boy is the walk back to Subject Alpha LONG! So long that by the time you get back the remaining team members are dying or dead. An additional way-point is needed on the map, preferably near the Husk Boss.

There is a difference between a challenging, rewarding experience that values a players skill and ability to cope and learn from a difficult experience and an experience where you can clearly see that the boss is overpowered, untested, and unbalanced.

Subject Alpha is clearly OVERPOWERED and UNBALANCED.

Now I want to be as clear as possible, this post is intended to draw attention to the flaws/problems of Subject Alpha. He has SERIOUS flaws and needs to be tweaked/balanced. I am NOT asking the devs to put him on easy mode. A challenging and difficult boss is always great thing, but an unbalanced and overpowered one is definitely not. I am refereeing COE path 2 last boss fight for most of the points listed.

Here’s how to easily kill Alpha:

Teleporter Path:

4 Melee stack on top of each other and wail on him. The earth AOE hits a ring so if all of you are on top of each other, you won’t have to dodge at all.
1 Ranged character stay back and shoot him. This is because Alpha uses one ice spike skill that needs to be dodged. The ice spike will always be targeted at the ranged character.

Saving players in crystals is very easy. If a melee gets caught its not a problem at all. If the ranged gets caught, someone needs to help (a few hits should do it), just remember the person helping cannot stay in the middle of the ring since ice will strike there.

Non Teleporter:

Alpha uses this very fast cast earth spike attack. Pretty much unavoidable. However, he always uses it right after he casts his earth ring skill so the four melee stacked on top of him need to dodge immediately after they see the earth ring pop up. Then they stack again and continue.

Mmm, not sure what’s going on, but a bunch of friends and I went to that dungeon yesterday, before the patch, and we cleared all 3 explorable routes within 3,5 hours or so. It was our first time there. I don’t think it was all THAT unbalanced and overpowered. The thing which was important to figure out quickly, was to time your dodge skill with the AOE that Subject Alpha uses. If you time it right, you evade everything. On last path, we’ve could dodge basically every of his AOE. It’s just matter of getting used to the mechanics. And we are not some ub3r pr0 hardcore players.

I would let it be as it is, it was pretty rewarding feeling to be able to dodge everything and stay alive all the time, right in front of him. If things get too easy, it will be just another regular PvE content, which won’t deliver to players that feeling of achievement. That’s my opinion though.

Alpha is probably one of the best fights in the game, next to Lupicus.

Honestly, almost every problem you listed is easily preventable with a little bit of observation and creative thinking. I mean, wow. kitten near every one.

Can’t revive your allies? Slot insta-revive skills or rally off the risen/tendrils.
Dying to AoE? Learn to dodge or bring blocking/invuln skills.
Crystals giving you problems? Most classes have a way to break themselves out.
Can’t dodge earth spires? Look for the tell.

The earth line drive damage isn’t usually lethal and you can soak a hit and heal. Spread out a bit and it’ll only hit one person, no big deal.

Crystals aren’t lethal half the time and you’ll simply come out of them. The other half of the time, throw a combat rez.

People in this game have the idea where they think if they execute perfectly they’ll never get downed. You expect to go down on Alpha and receive a combat rez.

I would actually love them to buff the crystal so that no one could just teleport out of it.

Perfectly normal boss with all this action is going on. OP just need to calm down and watch with the eyes for what he is doing.
I’d prefer more bosses like this one.

I’ve done all the paths multiple times now with random PUGs. The only issue with Alpha (and pretty much most of the dungeon) was the amount of health they had, and according to patch notes that has now been fixed. Gonna have to go try now.

Only problem I have with him is his Earth Spike chain that gets bigger each hit. After having done the dungeon 6 times (and thus fought Alpha 18 times), I can pretty much predict when he will use it, but even then it is very hard to dodge it. It should either be made a bit slower or have a more visible cast animation, in my opinion.

Rest of the boss is fine. It’s a really skill-based boss. Some people die the whole time, and others don’t get downed even once during the fights with him.

He’s difficult but not broken, did CoE teleporter path today also. the final encounter he bugged out from 75 to about 25% hp and just stood there not fighting back which was weird too (when he unbugged tho he went nuts and started spamming everything nonstop which killed a few of us).

Honestly, they threw us a bone in that encounter literally, by having those random bone whip things spawn. Just make sure to get them low and save them for rallys if you run out of endurance and get downed by an aoe.

I do feel like it still has too much HP though, that fight is very long and annoying.

OP needs a serious Overhaul on his skills. QQ post is QQ

Kurp.3207:

I’ve done all the paths multiple times now with random PUGs. The only issue with Alpha (and pretty much most of the dungeon) was the amount of health they had, and according to patch notes that has now been fixed. Gonna have to go try now.

I totally agree.
I think it is the most fun I had battling a boss in the dungeons as he’s tough but can be managed by observing him to learn how to evade his attacks without becoming simple.
The only fix I would have made to CoE was to lower a just a bit his health.

If you stack some toughness and vitality and not only power/precision you can easily survive the crystal. I survive the crystal -when it hit me- with my elementalist even without teleporting out unless I’m low in HP.

The circles are quite big, but the fight is certainly not impossible.

As for the crystals, I was happy to see a raid style mechanic. We had no trouble at all breaking people out, so I don’t know what you mean there.

Seriously, you are so wrong it’s actually sad.

Circles – so what if they are big? You just need to learn the timing, and evade as the aoe is about to pop. You can be in the very middle of the circles, but if you are dodging the same moment spikes are up he can do you squat.
If you run out of endurance you are dodging too often. There are circles that cover most of the room, and there are circles that cover only small areas. If you dodge the first and run out of second all is well.

And the fact that mistake cost you your life (well almost – with some luck there is option of ressing) is the ultimate joy of this fight.

Crystals – they are a bit of RNG indeed, but they aren’t that bad. Some classes can teleport out of them, others can stay in them and still survive while the party frees you.

Resetting – yeah, on this one thing you are right. It’s a bug, it should be fixed.

Waypoint – again stop trying to make awesome and challenging fight easier, by just running back all the time. It’s supposed to be far, so that you actually pay attention to what you are doing instead of mindlessly dying and running back.

You are trying to nerf one of the most fun fights in this game for what reason exactly? So that you can feel better that you cleared it after the nerf? To get tokens? To get achie? Seriously, there are tons of easy dungeons where you can get your tokens, so don’t try to ruin one of the most amazing fights just because you have trouble with it.. Go HotW for easy tokens, and leave Subject Alpha alone :[

Even if an AoE took up the entire space of a room, you could still dodge roll the damage.

Like many others have stated, Subject Alpha is hard but not impossible. People keep making threads like these like they’re soloing the dungeon alone and there are no one there to help them.

I did CoF everyday for a few days before the patch and I never fail a single one of them. Regarding the AoE circles and dodging, you don’t have to dodge out of the circle to dodge it, you just need right timing and dodge as the AoE is about to hit. Even if you’re still in the circles, an evaded is shown. And even if you’re down, you can use the tentacles to rally almost 70% of the times. I’m pretty sure that’s why those tentacles are there. So if you’re down, don’t lay there and try to revive yourself, hit something.

About the crystals, where are your teammates? When someone get traps in a crystal, it is needed that everyone start to target the crystal right away, don’t just keep hitting the boss, god…

The only thing I’d agree to an extent is the waypoint. It is pretty far from the boss and due to his nature, sometime if you’re unlucky and everyone died at almost the same time, you would lose the boss as no one there to aggro him.

Yea, they really should add another waypoint for Teleporter and Submarine path on the last boss, as for Subject Alpha he’s okay as it is.

Only complaining that his abilities target clones and illusions as well as other players. Needs to only target players.

It’s one of the few bosses that forced me to rethink my playstyle and ultimately for the better. Maybe I don’t boast big numbers, but I bring a lot more to the table in conditions, support, and endurance regen…. I feel like dungeons have helped me create a more balanced character as well as hone my skills.