Guild Wars 2

So, CoE front door path is almost impossible to do without pretty much praying to one of the six gods for luck. I imagine it’s doable, but with certain bosses, like Subject Alpha and the Inquest Specimen, I find it hard to believe. And with the dungeon changes, we don’t even get tokens for attempting to try to complete it.

Subject Alpha’s damage is unreal on the front door path. I consider it to be way harder than the sub path’s version of Subject Alpha by far. The first time you fight him is okay, though very difficult to keep the constant dodging up depending on what class you are. The second time you fight him, however, I wanted to throw my monitor out the window. You fight him in a smaller room, with the hallway as a bottleneck, so if anyone stands there for even just a second, his ice aoe will be there. Also, the destroyer boss. I mean the premise sounds kinda neat, but in practice it really isn’t.

You have to coordinate with your other party members to fire lasers onto the shield to take it down. This sounds easy enough, but when you take into account that someone has to dps the boss, then it gets complicated. You have to traverse platforms to get within range of the boss, not to mention dodge the falling shards. If you get hit by the shards at all, it’s time to take a bath in the lava. Given the bosses high HP, this fight once you do figure out and trust me…you won’t like the solution, it takes FOREVER to do.

Our solution was messy and less than perfect and ideally, I’m sure the devs want you to do it the way they intended, but in order to do, they must tweak that fight. After that, you face subject alpha again…in a smaller space…with his gigantic ice aoe circles that more often than not overlap each other and give you no room to dodge. If you get hit, it’s almost always a instant down and your party members won’t be able to get to you before another round of aoe. Combine that with the tendrils that like to smack you around…I swear this path was not a pleasant experience.

If we would have quit at the destroyer boss we wouldn’t have gotten anything to show for putting in all that time to get there. I guess tl;dr, I’m calling for a nerf of content there. Anyone else have similar experiences or even some tips or tricks to make the next run less horrid?

Edit: Oh and I noticed a glitch with mesmers in the 2nd Subject Alpha fight where you can actually blink out of the crystals. It treats it as a stun, however, it only seems to work for mesmers. Working as intended?

FWIW, the larger rings of Alpha’s ice circles seem to be pointless – they don’t seem to hit you. Only the inner circle and a slight area outside the inner circle does.

Other tips: when he’s doing his ice circles, just keep running, then if he’s facing you, dodge the stalagmites. If you can’t focus down the crystal, some invincibility-type skills will protect you from at least one thing. And if you’re downed inside the crystal, being rezzed frees you from it. Mesmers aren’t the only ones that can protect themselves in the crystal either – guardian aegis works, our thief houdini’d out of it a few times, and an elementalist with S/F or D/F can switch to earth and use obsidian flesh to dodge an attack. Lastly, try and lower some of the tendrils’ hp. Then even if you get one shot, you can potentially rally off them.

The destroyer boss doesn’t regenerate any damage and his health pool is small compared to most bosses, so he’s really not that bad. (Would be pretty disgusting if he did though.) I quite enjoyed this route, although I was complaining the entire time, ha.