Guild Wars 2

Subject Alpha. One of the most poorly designed fights in the entire game and you have to fight him 3 times in every path.

His biggest problem (and the biggest problem with ALL dungeons.) is that his abilities are not well telegraphed at all. Overlapping red circles are NOT a good way to telegraph abilities, arenanet.

The next problem is that his giant cluster kitten of red circles will one shot you if you get hit. Oh, also you fight him in relatively small areas so that giant cluster kitten of red circles fills up about 70% of the room with about 2 seconds to react to it.

He also has imprisonment crystals that completely prevent your character from being able to do anything until someone breaks it down. These things have a decent health pool and they don’t protect you from damage. Everyone is too busy trying to figure out which places are safe from the cluster kitten that they don’t have anytime to damage the crystal. Also the crystals can happen at any time which means you can get imprisoned and then have that giant, poorly telegraphed AoE under you right as you get imprisoned so you get instant killed with nothing you can do about it.

He also has a line of rock spikes he’ll shoot at you. You’re too busy trying to deal with all the rest of this bullkitten to even try to dodge that. This fight is a constant wipefest full of poorly telegraphed AoE instant kills.

Not to mention hes a legendary mob with a ludicrous amount of HP and guess what? You get to fight him 3 times in every path.

I raged pretty hard at Subject Alpha the first time I fought him. After that, I was like “oh, this isn’t so bad.” Honestly, my biggest problem with him is the ginormous health pool.

Firstly though, you should probably get past the mentality that downed = killed. Any coordinated team can get you back up even if you do get a really unlucky crystal prison right into an aoe. Secondly, the crystals take about one second of focus fire from an average team before breaking in my experience, so this sounds like another coordination issue. If your team fought him already in the path, they should know his attacks well enough by the time the second fight rolls around. It’s not very hard to hit the crystal while dodging the aoes if everyone is properly spread out – hell, I usually break them with heartseeker instead of ranged attacks, which should be twice as safe.

Alpha is an annoying boss until you get used to him, for sure, but I think you’d be surprised how easy he is with a decent amount of coordination. CoE in general is one of the easier dungeons once your team understands his attack patterns, imo.

Edit: Also, if you’re playing a class with a teleport stunbreaker (Lightning Flash, Shadowstep, Blink), you can jump out of the crystal without waiting for your team.

Editx2: My thief doesn’t get oneshotted by any of Alpha’s attacks, by the by. Are you running a pure DPS (Berserker gear, etc) build? If not, you’re probably being hit by two aoes at once.

Well my biggest issue with this fight and dungeons in general is. The poorly telegraphed abilities. Overlapping red circles are not a good way to telegraph an attack. Like if rocks are about to shoot up in a circle have the circle start rumbling before the attack. If the entire floor is about to be covered in ice (first boss of HotW story) have the floor start to ice up except for the area that is safe to stand in. Don’t throw a bunch of overlapping red circles around and expect people to be able to tell where to stand and where not to stand using that.

Alpha shouldn’t be creating any Venn Diagrams of Death unless your team is bunching up. The concentric double circle attack doesn’t count, since those aoes don’t overlap each other really.

Edit: I sort of agree about the HotW story fight though. There’s a safe spot on the far side of the room in the barrels/crates however, which invalidates most of the difficulty. You can stand there and not get hit by either the frost floor or the ice nuke. Not an excuse for the rage first time groups experience on that fight, though…

I’ve learned that his AoEs are delayed, so I try to run towards a safe area (without a circle) and dodge like 1-2 seconds after (evades the delayed AoE attack even if you happen to be stuck in the circles). It certainly feels awkward compared to the usual circle telegraphs that tell you to dodge quickly (i.e. Adelbern’s foefire).

I do agree that the telegraph is not that helpful. Maybe they can make the inner circle blink or something?

Venn Diagrams of Death… I rather like that lmao.

Here’s Alpha, really simplified.

If he’s using Dragon’s Tooth and you’re far enough away for one to appear, just walk out. This should never be a problem as long as you’re up. Don’t waste endurance.

For the line of spikes, watch who he was facing towards during his previous casting animation of whatever attack he threw out. He’ll generally throw the line of spikes at that same person. Judge whether or not you’re going to be in the way of that; if so, roll. if you need to. If you have to eat an attack, it should probably be this one as everyone can usually absorb at least 2-3 hits of this (though beware, one cast can hit you twice depending on where you are).

For the circles of earth spikes and singular ice spikes, coordinate with your group to either keep a good distance or to stack on top of each other. If you see no mist forming in the air over you, stay still; you won’t be hit inside the smaller circle. If you do see mist forming in the air, walk out of the inner circle, because an ice spike is coming. If there happens to be a lot of overlap, just dodge roll for the evade.

If you have a blink (ex. Lightning Step, Steal), just blink out. Invulnerabilities are good for buying time, too.

Something more and more people are picking up on now is that if you’re right on top of him with your teammates, you’re pretty much safe. His line of spikes does not start out from his center; this means even if he’s targeting you with it, if you’re close enough, you can just walk into him and the attack’s starting point will be behind you (and you should have time, because he stop walking for a moment before casting it). If everyone is stacked up on top of him, then everyone’s safe zones are overlapping and there’s no need to dodge. And since he doesn’t drop a Dragon’s Tooth on anyone who is in melee range, there’s no danger from that (though you do need some okay regen to counteract the PBAoE burn he inflicts – with a healing shouts condition clearing Warrior build, I can pretty much negate this for my whole team). Just watch out for any ice spikes that you may need to use endurance or whatever on. It used to be pretty rare for me to see any PuGers meleeing him, but people are learning how he works, thankfully.

I basically just two manned the last fight of Subject Alpha with a Guardian who was running the front door path for the first time, but listened to my instructions. And I’m in glass cannon armor, aside from my Soldier’s runes (full berserker exotic armor and accessories), so it’s not like I was just sitting there tanking hits with my defence. It just takes a little know how and attention.

Though I agree that having to fight him 3 times every path is pretty tedious.

Done teleporter/Sub path.

Subject alpha is one of the better designed fights imo. Even stacking during sub path is still better than other fights The thing that ruins it are that RANDOM no reward stop gaps.

Take the robot with turrets fight. Takes forever – no reward – not considered a “boss”. Hell there is a REAL event (hacking) which is insanely fun right after him. Not sure why hes there only to say "hey take “X” minutes on me!".

Just took a PuG who were entirely new to this and they said the robot was a waste and irritating, but were thrilled when we did all hacking with 0 deaths on their first run. More fun events w/rewards – less meh events with nothing for it.

IIRC First SA fight doesn’t reward a chest either. Please devs I know this magical number 3 chests is something important, but if your going to make a boss we NEED a chest reward at least.

Worse part is the dungeon is actually really entertaining and tests some dodging/knowledge skills. Shields/parry are VERY nice to have as they can negate most of SA’s skills.

Alpha is surprising very simple once you get the timing of you dodges right. Note that you’re mostly immune when you’re dodging. With that said, when you see red circles throughout the room, you have to time your dodges right and you’ll be able to avoid his attacks with no issues. Give it a second of two before you dodge.

The tricky ones to avoid would be the crystal prisons and the frontal earth spike attacks, but all his other abilities are mostly avoidable.

Subject alpha is actually one of the -better- designed fights. Requires you to to pay attention. The more you fight Alpha the more you learn and the patterns become a lot easier. I only go about 1 time per fight, and haven’t actually died in a long time since first learning it.

Granted I wish there was more variety to him in the 3 paths, but its still a good fight.

Or just stack the boss, wait ~1 second and dodge roll THROUGH him. Easy. You’ll dodge all the AoE and if anyone goes down, everyone is right there to res them up. If someone gets crystaled, the AoE hitting the boss will drop it in half a second.

Imma start an “I <3 Alpha, but Hate Pugs” fanclub, who’s in?

It’s broken?

This is news to me since I’ve been PUGing it constantly all week!

Have you thought maybe the problem is on the user’s end and not the dungeon? Crazy notion i know.

I’m playing one of the squishiest classes in the game (thief) and don’t get one shotted by Alpha. My suggestion to you is don’t play a glass cannon if you don’t know how to dodge effectively.

I ran CoE enough that I can get at least two attacks that get thrown at me, the dragon tooth and doughnut earth strike. That third earth breath thing though I still don’t usually see coming. Course both sub and teleporter don’t have that attack in subsequent fights, so only have to make it through the first time.

But really in general those red circles are both really thin and the places you fight really small. Also counts banners and illusions as valid targets so in those cases more than 5 circles can spawn.

Feel like an old man reading these…

“Back in my day, Alpha had twice as much health and you still had to run twenty miles uphill in the snow to get back to him when you died…”

Learn the fights- it’s one of the most well-designed boss battles in the game (and they knew this, which is why you fight him in a recurring battle in all paths).

For starters, the concentric circles of death aren’t really something that you should be hit by very often. When you see them, count “One, two, dodge” and you’ll get the timing down pat.

Second, he doesn’t have the same set of abilities in all paths. The spike thing makes him by far the most dangerous because it isn’t telegraphed much, but staying to his sides or back the wwhole fight makes it much easier.