Guild Wars 2

Ran this dungeon path twice now, the first time was with a random group consisting of a thief, mesmer, guardian, warrior (me) and another warrior.

Second time was a guild group consisting of 3 warriors, an elementalist and a ranger.

The first time running this dungeon, we were completely blind, had no idea about anything but still managed to successfully finish the dungeon, the final boss was a tough fight but we managed to brute force it with mass DPS, totally ignoring the crystals.

This was most likely helped by the fact our thief kept poison up as much as possible (-33% healing effectiveness) and our mesmer kept Time Warp for the important burn phase from 30-0%.

On our second run with a guild group with access to team speak, co-ordination was spot on, we didnt die once and cleared through to the final encounter in record time, but could we kill him.

Not even remotely close, the crystals just spawned too fast and without having a thief/mesmer for the poison/burst DPS, we couldnt even dent it’s health.

So we attempted to do it the proper way, by destroying the crystals, we tried with 2 on the boss, 3 crystal killing. Couldn’t do enough damage to the boss. So we tried 3 on the boss, 2 doing crystals. Crystals spawned just as quick as we could dispatch them.

4 on boss, 1 on crystals. Pointless, couldnt do enough damage to offset the healing.

This is so far out of all the explorable modes I have tried the only one which demands a very specific group make up to even be possible. Without a Thief and Mesmer for the poison and 10 second double DPS increase, I just don’t see this encounter being possible.

Anyone care to prove otherwise, I’d be very impressed if you did it without one or both of the above mentioned classes.

As a Ranger class we can provide poison via Poison trap with low CD, Poison valley from Shortbow/Sword+Dagger sets. This will be enough to keep 100% uptime of poison on boss. What ure ranger was doing meanwhile?

So maybe our ranger could have been a little better prepaired for this encounter. Would it have made a difference, probably not.

Still would have lacked the DPS increase offered by Time Warp. As a defensive warrior I carry 4 weapons with me. mace, shield, hammer and rifle.

But none of this detracts from the fact the encounter is poorly designed. I would personally love to see an ArenaNET video of this one encounter being done in house without using a thief, mesmer and ranger.

Ran that path for the first time with guildies, and it took us 2 hours to finish, and roughly 20s in repairs each. We could probably shave 30 minutes off the next run, but I have no desire to run it again.

We tried bursting the final boss a few times, and then destroying crystals, then we bursted again, and apparently got lucky and won. I don’t think it would have been possible without the 2 thieves.

I have heard of rumours that crystals spawns are luck based, if you get lucky on the number and frequency of spawns you can win. That in itself is a major issue. Encounters should never be luck based, specially in a game that’s advertised as being skill based!

MadMossy.8715:

I have heard of rumours that crystals spawns are luck based, if you get lucky on the number and frequency of spawns you can win. That in itself is a major issue. Encounters should never be luck based, specially in a game that’s advertised as being skill based!

I guess you are right. I think this path wasn’t alphatested enough by Anet.

Thank you for mentioning the Mesmer + Thief idea. My guild had the same situation as the second run – except we never finished it. The crystal spawning was so insane we just couldn’t do it. Will be adding in warbanner for the stability and try this again tonight.

That’s exactly how we did defeat him the first time though, brute force using a thief and mesmer. Without them we couldn’t even dent his health.

This to me goes against the design philosophy that ArenaNET told us all about, that dungeon’s while difficult and require good team work, will be possible with any class combination. This clearly, isn’t the case if it requires you to have a thief and mesmer in the group.

Two suggestion’s I can give to make this fight possible though are.

1. Reduce the frequency of crystal spawns, and the number of crystals spawned or
2. Reduce the health of crystal’s so that they are able to be taken down in 2-3 hits.

Also add an extra delay on when the circles appear and crystals fall, because as it stands its almost instant which makes dodging them very difficult.

Other than that, the dungeon path itself is very well done and fun. It’s just that last encounter that spoils.

<quote>There are some guides out there. Some of them I have read aren’t quite correct, but some are spot on. You’re on the right path though.</quote>

Mind pointing those out? When I google Gw2 Dungeons, you don’t want to know what comes up but I’m sure you have an idea heh

I tried to run CoF and was planning on running legitimately BUT no one wanted to go. The waypoint was contested/blocked and no one was at the entrance.

Hey Robert,

Just using this reply to give you a compliment:

- Great attitude by saying the truth and giving us advices or hints or comments about your dungeon, and listening to our feedback + promising more observation to non expected monsters behavior.

I would be grateful if devs around would do the same, as i already am in this topic.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Vithaar.8637:

Mind pointing those out? When I google Gw2 Dungeons, you don’t want to know what comes up but I’m sure you have an idea heh

I once made the mistake of searching for fan-art of the charr. Needless to say, google images can be quite NSFW with no warning lol.
But no, I’m not going to point out the correct guides for this, at least not here in the first month of the game’s release. Part of exploration is finding and solving mysteries on your own.

Mossy –
I’m not a fan of things that super hurt with no real tell. I’ll look into the crystals drop rate and frequency, and their warm-up/falling warning.
I’m not about to say this fight was tested with all class/race variations (that would take way too long). We did however test it in the following conditions related to your concerns:
-No poison
-No quickness
-Natural level 75

There’s a balance that has to be made between crystal health and frequency/amount. There has been a lot of class fixes/changes these last few weeks, and it’s very possible something could have gone out of tune. I will investigate.

Thank you for considering everyone’s feedback and looking into the matter. I personally love the difficulty but me and my party are also unable to complete it. We tried the brute force method and the splitting up with some on crystals and rest applying conditions/damage on the boss but neither method worked for us.

We were unable to strike a balance between DPS output requirement and the boss’ regen. We have 2 Mesmers, a Warrior and the other two spots were swapped during our various attemps between a Thief, Ranger, Guardian and another Warrior.

We managed to get it down once to about 5% but we feel this was more luck based and with the use of the brute force tactic. We understand the tactic of the fight but are unable to accomplish them.

Thanks, appreciate the input and offering to look into things. I actually do enjoy most of the dungeons in the game, some do require going over with a fine tooth comb but otherwise they are good fun and I for one find them rewarding enough

This topic killed whatever suprise/emotion I’ll experience when I run this dungeon in the near future. It was similar as knowing Santa isn’t real!

Haven’t ran it, but…

From what I’m hearing it sounds like whereas you can only brute force the boss using DPS cranks like time warp and poison, you’re required to brute force crystals due to their spawn rate.

That seems the problem here…

That said, some people are meeting success.

Class composition means not as much without proper gearing and trait focus. Maybe 5 warriors can defeat any dungeon, but chances are their utility set ups, weapon choices, and traits will not be the same. That’s one reason I think trait specs should be available, because it will actively promote any class composition can complete a dungeon without having to go back to town to choose a new line of traits. Gearwise is another matter as it’s hard to collect different sets of gear to which you are focused differently, but that just comes with time and dedication.

It’s the same idea of any 5 classes going in, claiming they’re doing it right, asking why it’s too hard, yet all being specced within their 30 power traitline.

I literally just posted yesterday how to do this fight. Do some research.

i recorded our speed runs of the first option in citadel of flame, it takes us about 40 seconds to kill the last boss. i dont know if this is supposed to be so fast to clear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RM-jwwCO1c&list=UUmZVMpdVwllDhFuHYknNBGg&index=1&feature=plcp

Robert Hrouda.1327:

Vithaar.8637:

Mind pointing those out? When I google Gw2 Dungeons, you don’t want to know what comes up but I’m sure you have an idea heh

I once made the mistake of searching for fan-art of the charr. Needless to say, google images can be quite NSFW with no warning lol.
But no, I’m not going to point out the correct guides for this, at least not here in the first month of the game’s release. Part of exploration is finding and solving mysteries on your own.

Mossy –
I’m not a fan of things that super hurt with no real tell. I’ll look into the crystals drop rate and frequency, and their warm-up/falling warning.
I’m not about to say this fight was tested with all class/race variations (that would take way too long). We did however test it in the following conditions related to your concerns:
-No poison
-No quickness
-Natural level 75

There’s a balance that has to be made between crystal health and frequency/amount. There has been a lot of class fixes/changes these last few weeks, and it’s very possible something could have gone out of tune. I will investigate.

Robert, we did not kill any crystals

kephir.1470:

i recorded our speed runs of the first option in citadel of flame, it takes us about 40 seconds to kill the last boss. i dont know if this is supposed to be so fast to clear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RM-jwwCO1c&list=UUmZVMpdVwllDhFuHYknNBGg&index=1&feature=plcp

It’s because you started the fight while the little animation cutscene is still going on. We always wait for it to finish so you were able to get a lot of damage in fast without the crystals being an issue. Don’t believe the fight was meant to be done this way.

Fay.2735:

kephir.1470:

i recorded our speed runs of the first option in citadel of flame, it takes us about 40 seconds to kill the last boss. i dont know if this is supposed to be so fast to clear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RM-jwwCO1c&list=UUmZVMpdVwllDhFuHYknNBGg&index=1&feature=plcp

It’s because you started the fight while the little animation cutscene is still going on. We always wait for it to finish so you were able to get a lot of damage in fast without the crystals being an issue. Don’t believe the fight was meant to be done this way.

You cant start the fight without everyone being out of the cutscene.

kephir.1470:

Fay.2735:

kephir.1470:

i recorded our speed runs of the first option in citadel of flame, it takes us about 40 seconds to kill the last boss. i dont know if this is supposed to be so fast to clear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RM-jwwCO1c&list=UUmZVMpdVwllDhFuHYknNBGg&index=1&feature=plcp

It’s because you started the fight while the little animation cutscene is still going on. We always wait for it to finish so you were able to get a lot of damage in fast without the crystals being an issue. Don’t believe the fight was meant to be done this way.

You cant start the fight without everyone being out of the cutscene.

I didn’t mean that cutscene sorry I meant the little story they play out with the worshipping NPC, should’ve clarified that but we weren’t able to do nowhere near that much damage that fast.

not too many crystals?

So there seems to be this great divide between people who were able to nuke it down in 40 seconds and people who were struggling for hours at the 30% health left bit.

From my observations the people who were able to get it down that fast or successfully use the nuke down tactic.

They either always have a necromancer in the party who can turn boons into conditions or they started the fight early while the NPC’s are doing their little ritual that or with luck and then not being able to repeat their success again.

Me and my party spend hours trying to get this fight down, We started with getting all the crystals but then we didn’t have enough DPS on boss, We then tried nuking the boss and we managed to get it to about 5% once. We then tried the splitting up tactic which is I guess the way it was meant to be done but we couldn’t find the right balance between DPS output requirement versus boss health regen.

Regardless though there’s something odd going on with this fight and not to mention frustrating how some people can just steamwaltz it and others struggle endlessly (And I honestly don’t think it’s to do with lack of skill). Either way when we do get back to trying that fight again (unless it’s patched) we’ll be going for the nuke tactic as it seems the only viable option at the moment. Which makes me quite sad because the mechanics are interesting and would be nice to complete the fight properly

Fay not sure what you mean about the ritual part the Effengy starts attacking you the moment he is attackable himself

there is no deadtime in between that. And we also did not have any necromancer.

Doodle, It’s the only thing I can think of other than the professions we had in our party because we tried to nuke it down like you guys did but he always had too much regen by the time we got to the 30% left mark. We’d be able to burst DPS him down to about 15/5% left but then all our major DPS abilities would be on CD (Like two time warps) and he’d gain back all the health up to 30% we managed to take off. So I’m a bit baffled to be honest :P Might try again with a Necro next time if we find one.

Edit: When we tried the nuke tactic we had 2 mesmers, 2 warriors and a thief

Robert Hrouda.1327:

I’m not about to say this fight was tested with all class/race variations (that would take way too long). We did however test it in the following conditions related to your concerns:
-No poison
-No quickness
-Natural level 75

you know, a LOT of questions would be answered if you’d give us more details how you actually test dungeons. because right now, given the current balance of some encounters (the “fixed” magg bomb phase for example) makes it hard to believe you don’t just cheese your way through (and it would help to understand how you guys actually see us running these dungeons).

on what criteria do you guys choose your composition? traits? professions? combo effectiveness? how much flexibility do you allow? or do you always go “we definitely need these two profession with this weapon/traits for this or that combo”? do you test it with a not absolute optimum comp for some leeway?
how “life-like” are your runs? do you test every encounter separately (which means you trait per encounter, not dungeon and change composition midway)? do you expect us to port out and trait for every encounter? do you test it with a random comp and even stacked professions (sometimes you end up with 2 guards and 2 warriors on top)?

Well, If they need any dungeon testers I’d be happy to oblige :P

In my guild-only group, we couldn’t even touch this boss. He starts the fight by spawning 10-15 crystals so we could barely out dps the regeneration. Then he spawns even more. That didn’t work. We tried killing crystals, but it went too slowly. We tried kiting the boss around the big room (which is hard because he is ranged), but the crystals spawned faster than we could kite him. We tried removing his boons, but the regeneration doesn’t count as boons so that didn’t work. We tried to interrupt the ultra-short cast animation that seemingly summons new shards, but he was immume.

I am having a hard time seeing how poison and quickness would help. When I look at that Youtube video, that’s not how it went for us. I think there might be a bug that sometimes causes him to be harder/easier than intended.

I should mention that we failed the first boss event because we tried to reset it. We were unaware that it couldn’t be reset.

After looking at the video, seems like a pretty simple fight (no I have not done it myself). As a grenadier engineer, I could see simply dropping 3 poison fields to cull his healing by 33% (he doesn’t seem to move if you don’t run away), then maintaining 10-12 stacks of vulnerability to help progress the damage (stupid Unshakable makes them last half as long). I couldn’t tell if that was just one buff he was getting or not, but throw mine could help strip it (if the buff isn’t protection, I wouldn’t really bother stripping it to be honest). This just seems like many players are undergeared and/or simply not using their class for damage potential to take him down. I’ve only got CoE, CoF, and the Seer route of Arah left to finish as far as dungeons go (that last one was bugged last time I tried it – takes 4-6 hours so I’m not finding out the hard way), and I’m only holding off because these horror stories of the dungeon clears bugging out and giving crap rewards has me sitting patiently. Also ‘cause there won’t be anything left to do in PvE once I clear them.

tl;dr poison = 2/3rds as effective healing.

@Kamahl – I’m sorry but your “strategy” post is pretty irrelevant if you haven’t tried the boss or aren’t even aware how the boss works.

But anyways to the main point ->

This one is doable without mesmer or bruteforcing actually. Our setup at the time was:

• Guardian (dunno)
• Warrior (condition based)
• Ranger (dunno)
• Engineer (dunno)
• Elementalist (Me; power, crit, cond, [insert anything] kind of crap)

Anyways we all were damage oriented in some way, with some survivability (don’t remember everyone’s builds) since we like to play as we want instead of some meta crap.

The strategy we used:

Warrior and ranger mainly stayed on boss, while assisting on the crystals that were next to the boss. Rest of us were focusing on the crystals that seemed to give the regen buff to the boss.

The important point was that when the boss had low stacks of regen buff everyone proceeded to dps the boss and when new crystals came everyone did their job again & then proceeded to dps the boss again.

There’s no need to dps all the crystals, just those that seem to give the buff to the boss. Although the range seems pretty absurd sometimes.

Anyways doing it this way took some time and we were relieved when it was finally over. We had to reset the fight few times since we didn’t know the abilities beforehand and I guess it was our third try when we came up with this and finally succeeded.

Awesome boss, ’tho not running this one again in the near future =).

Dunno if this is helpful for anyone but posted this anyway.

@Masa: I’ve killed Giganticus after just one wipe (and 4 times to date, leading different PUGs), I’m confident a boss who utilizes health-based regen is no issue. I’ll gladly march in there and prove it once they’ve remedied the buggy rewards. Hate to waste my time. People complain about CoF’s superweapon boss, when the High Priestess of Dwayna is a far larger, more problematic concern.

you could talk to Magg through the wall to break the door and get the chest? what the kitten

Kamahl.3621:

@Masa: I’ve killed Giganticus after just one wipe (and 4 times to date, leading different PUGs), I’m confident a boss who utilizes health-based regen is no issue. I’ll gladly march in there and prove it once they’ve remedied the buggy rewards. Hate to waste my time. People complain about CoF’s superweapon boss, when the High Priestess of Dwayna is a far larger, more problematic concern.

Are they not both the same problem? Learn this mechanic or this boss will out heal all your damage.

Jodiug.9713:

I am having a hard time seeing how poison and quickness would help. When I look at that Youtube video, that’s not how it went for us. I think there might be a bug that sometimes causes him to be harder/easier than intended.

There is no bug mate, that video can be and has be repeated several times over allready (with different setups i might add, not always a mesmer or 2 thiefs for example)

we are a couple of guys that know what we are doing and we know the mechanics of the fight. We also use your traits and ability’s cleverly to reduce the effectiveness of the the boss and increase our damage output and survivability as a group. And the fact that we have well built toons

there is no secret magic command to doing this its just focusing on the job and getting it done

Two things I don’t understand about this fight.

1. Why does the boss not reset to the same starting position as when he first spawns? Instead, he’ll spam-spawn crystals even when out of combat, so that groups with the misfortune of wiping on him have to start the fight with 26 stacks of regen on the boss, making it far harder (impossible?).

2. What causes him to spawn 20 crystals in under 3 seconds? Every time except ONCE when my group managed to get his stack count low enough to actually start dps, we would watch in amazement as he’d just instantly gain 20 or more stacks of regen. I haven’t seen this in any kill videos or strategy discussions and it does not seem beatable.

soulcakeduck.7036:

Two things I don’t understand about this fight.

1. Why does the boss not reset to the same starting position as when he first spawns? Instead, he’ll spam-spawn crystals even when out of combat, so that groups with the misfortune of wiping on him have to start the fight with 26 stacks of regen on the boss, making it far harder (impossible?).

Crystals disappear after some time out of combat, or at least they did when i went there.

Just posting my group’s solution. I haven’t read all of the other posts in here, so forgive me if it was already stated.

It seemed to work for us having 2 mass AOE characters go around and tear down the crystals. This reduced the regen stacks. We also made sure to keep up poison for the -33% healing. The remainder of us would dps the boss consistently. After the 2 AOE had destroyed most (if not all) of the crystals, they would join us in DPSing the boss down.

i haven’t read all the messages but idk why u saying its too difficult. u completed it with pugs = pretty much points that its not too difficult. and not being able to complete with any team configuration? thats the best part. for example guild wars 1, DoA. it needed just the right classes doing their own things to get it completed quickly. not like ur just running in with 8 warriors with healing signet and frenzy and try beat the area. this area was pretty much impossible to complete by grabbing 8 right class persons who ’’know’’ their job. didn’t hear any ppl crying over the area being too difficult there since people had actually spent time making the tactics for it that made it possible. its just matter of patience on how much ur willing to spend time, working out the problems

We just attempted this with two elementalists, a mesmer, a ranger and a guardian. Not sure if this fight is supposed to be doable with any class comp, but we could not get it down. Tried a couple methods, including the dps zerg, as well as having some players clear crystals while others dps. I like the idea of the fight, but we were a pretty competent group and we could not complete it.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

nce a thing that tends to happen with those is that people will claim we’re wearing special dev armor and dev weapons.

I thought ANET uses an entirely different profession? You know.. Commandos?

Just did this path yesterday with our group.

Warrior
Warrior
Elementalist
Necromancer
Mesmer (me)

Each one of us focusses on a role on the team, so we usually dont have mayor problems with bosses. The first time we tried this one he wiped out us witouth mercy. At the second try… well, we managed to get of 2/3 of his ligfe. It was impossible to drop it from there, even after reading the feedback of this boss.

A shame, really, my team got a little bit raged >_<

Anyway, when we managed to cut out 2/3 of his hp the cristals drop rate increased in a massive way, and very fast. Just nearly imposible to keep dogding them and his attacks.

Sorry for my english, it is not my native language.

I recommend killing crystals every other wave. It is a more consistent strategy.

This is a boss which punishes you for reviving. If you are struggling with DPS, do not ever channel a revive on someone. Instead, rally off of a Searing Crystal. You lose the least amount of damage that way.

We’ve also done this boss, not as fast as BOON control obviously, and find him easier when we have a Guardian actually.
(little video of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIgrauwveA0 )

Poison the boss constantly, quickness buffs left and right, AOE boss and crystals same time. Dodge the crystals, stability is great. Range the boss, try not to melee, although 4 pugs all melee with me range worked great.

Most important, dodge when you see the purple attacks coming from the boss, dont get doted by the burn. If you do, use a heal or ability to remove the dot.

Follow these simple steps and you will win.

Ty:)

DKP.4196:

Poison the boss constantly, quickness buffs left and right, AOE boss and crystals same time. Dodge the crystals, stability is great. Range the boss, try not to melee, although 4 pugs all melee with me range worked great.

Most important, dodge when you see the purple attacks coming from the boss, dont get doted by the burn. If you do, use a heal or ability to remove the dot.

Follow these simple steps and you will win.

Ty:)

We did all of these things and could not keep up with the stacks of regen on the boss during the third phase.

Okay, the designer is replying so….I’ll throw my 2cents in.

I wanna know then, can 5 warriors……..NOT guardians. Do this?
If so, how?

I think honestly when it comes to design to beat the ‘trinity’ idea truly the warrior, mesmer, necromancer, and ranger HAS to have the ability to 5 man team the dungeons with 5 of their class.
5 warriors
5 necromancers
5 mesmers
5 rangers

I feel like their should be more of a ‘support’ the party enforcement in groups, however the bosses arnt telling us anything, just spamming AOE damage praying to its digital ‘god’ the players just go away.

I’m not making fun of this dungeon, I like it and never have been able to do it it with a class ‘pure’ team.
So, how can we as a group of 5 warriors do this path?