Guild Wars 2

The Cliffside Fractal is incredibly difficult to complete without using the standard trick/exploit (leave one Chanter at the nearside seal alive; otherwise the next wave of spawns repair the seal incredibly fast).

It seems to me that the developers did NOT intent this exploit to be a requirement to complete the puzzle. The reality is that the rate of DPS even in a decent party can barely keep up with the Chanter’s repair rate on the seals. I’ve been in around 10 PUGs that have outright quit when someone killed the nearside Chanter, because even though we were mostly staying alive and hitting the seals, the mobs just rezzed them as fast as we could hit.

Compared to other fractals, this one seems not properly tested and balanced. I’d love it if the devs would revisit this one and perhaps just tweak the repair rate on the seals so that a typical PUG can complete it without ragequitting.

I’ve been curious about how the devs intended us to “handle” that particular sequence as well, aside the obvious tactic of leaving one behind or stacking by one of the entrances.

Even at fractals <20 they repair the sigil way to fast unless you do flawless manouvers back and forth. You cant exactly ignore the mobs either because some of them hit pretty kitten hard.

Not to mention its sort of wierd to have a dps race in a dungeon that heavily promotes gearing towards staying alive.

It’s almost impossible to break seals fast enough to counter a couple of Vets on one side repairing. However mobs do not repair the seal if they are attacking you. Make sure that one side is always aggro’d on the party and it’s quite easy to do even at high levels as they won’t repair that side.

BTW if you look they have a very distinctive animation when they are repairing the seal, they reach out with their arm towards the seal as if they were communing with a place of power. If you see that you need to make sure that mob is pulled.

Also it’s most definitely not about DPS. A couple of team-mates with good AoE DPS in the corridor helps, but you need a couple of survivable people to run onto the platform to pull mobs and hit seals.

It is possible even 48+.
you need to aggro one side all the time.
4 people stay in the tunnel, aggro and fight one side while the other runs with the hammer, standart procedure. Now, with aggroing one side all time, this side will not regenerate.
finish the seal and the whole party moves to the other side to “kill” this, probably full reg, seal.

Xeraion.1582:

It is possible even 48+.
you need to aggro one side all the time.
4 people stay in the tunnel, aggro and fight one side while the other runs with the hammer, standart procedure. Now, with aggroing one side all time, this side will not regenerate.
finish the seal and the whole party moves to the other side to “kill” this, probably full reg, seal.

Yeah, I was pretty sure it would be. I always do this fractal as if it’s failed, IE. I always agro mobs as soon as they spawn on one side and pull them into the corridor. At 48 we normally end up with both seals going down practically simultaneously, as neither are healing.

It’s always amusing to see what is not common knowledge in fractal. Top ones include

1. Throwing the Crystals is not the only thing that hurts the Maw. In fact killing Tentacles does far more damage. So don’t worry about it targeting pets.
2. The Seals don’t magically repair themselves, the mobs repair them.
3. If you enter the Dredge Cage carefully and only fight on one side, without stepping near the panel, the Dredge don’t respawn. So you can preclear one side.
4. You get burned on the Grawl Shamen if you stand still (really people don’t know it, I watched a Ranger at level 38 fall over tonnes of times to fire, and he had done enough fractals to get to level 32 never knowing this.)