Guild Wars 2

So as we all know by now the Colossus Fractal is rather messed up. Between the Chanters not spawning or the Fanatics and Veterans infinitely spawning or the seal resetting constantly as well as the Archdiviner’e health, it’s just plain painful.

Well…I am here to say that I think I have the messed up changes figured out.

Completing the Fractal takes patience, a little understanding, and the willingness to run, hide, or disappear.

Start the Fight

Start the fight by killing the Chanters first. Leave all but ONE alone. Let him live and then attack the Archdiviner. If you kill the Chanters surrounding him first, he will not aggro. By leaving one alive and then attacking the Archdiviner, it will be alive at 75% of his health so you can use the hammer he drops if he does not spawn mobs during his first invulnerable stage.

After the first seal hit when he comes out of his invulnerable stage, he will begin to spam an AOE Agony field. This is avoidable at maximum range but can be a quick killer if you get hit more then once in a row. You’ll find this ability in Fractals above level 10. Below that level you will not have to worry about it.

Stage Two

At this point things will seem to be going well. Trust not your surroundings however. As soon as he gets to 50% and goes invulnerable again he will begin infinitely spawning Fanatics. At this point all heck will break loose. Your BEST bet at this point is to reset him by dying. If you all die the seal will reset as well as his health. HOWEVER, the main point here is to get the GATE open where you entered. Once he and the seal are reset, the gate stays open for the remainder of the fight.

Stage Three

Once everything is reset you’ll notice that the room is filled with mobs. They will continue to spawn even after you kill them. At this point your objective is to use the Hallway that the open Gate now allows access to to cull NPC’s while you DPS the Archdiviner. Use them and his hammer to break the seal and then go back to the Hallway and kill NPCs while kiting the Archdiviner back and forth.

Important Points to Note

• If your ENTIRE team dies and you have to reset back to the Waypoint, the seal will be fully repaired and the Archdiviner’s health will reset to full, thus making you start over from the beginning.

• While you are culling NPCs in the hallway and kiting the Archdiviner it is important to make sure no matter HOW BAD IT GETS, SOMEONE needs to live so that they can rez any dead party members. In doing so, the seal will never reset back to full and you can continue to use the hammer on it to whittle it down.

• The hallway is KEY to getting past this fight. By using it to your advantage you can pull a minimal amount of mobs into it and kill them as the Archdiviner runs back and forth.

• ASH LEGION SPY KITS can be used to drop aggro and save members of your party. Get them as SOON as you can. They provide 10 seconds of invisibility and will allow u to reset the mobs if things get to hot and heavy.

• When you get the seal down to next to nothing, as in it looks like the seal has NO HEALTH LEFT, all it needs is a little DPS from an AOE and it will be destroyed. This is the ONLY time the seal can ever take any normal player damage from spells and attacks.

• Everything mentioned here is the best way I have found to get past this heavily bugged Fractal. While I hate the fact that we have to use tactics and strategies that I am SURE are unintended, until this fractal is fixed properly, there is no reason why this fractal should be a team killer and stop you from progressing.

To the guys and gals working on the fixes for this Fractal, I hope that this information can be used to finally fix the problems this Fractal is experiencing. I’m sure you’ll get it right and everything will go back to being good again. Thank you

Cheers for the constructive and helpful post!

Thanks for this post but Anet needs to get on top of this and fix this particular fractal as it’s broken big time.

They fixed up the exploits and caused further bugs and now the colossus fractal is majorly borked.

Well first of all, thanks for the post. I really think this is currently the best strategy.
I was in a group yesterday and without having read this, at some point we figured out that this was our best strategy to get to the boss.
The problem was, though, that, apart from hitting you with aganony, the boss also has the ability to teleport you into one of the cages standing around on the map, which made your chances to stay in that hallway (and with your group) very slim.
So ultimately, what we experienced was that someone would get ported into that cage and either die there or upon freeing themselves pull all the mobs from that corner into the hallway, causing a wipe for the group.

After having tried this for a good hour, we decided that this fractal is currently pretty much impossible on higher levels and skipped it.

I really think that ANet has done a good job with some of the fractals, like the swamp or the underwater level, which seemed to be pretty unfair in the beginning, when nobody had an idea what to do and people were constantly skipping these levels but they actually rewarded you with a satisfying learning curve. But the idea behind some of the levels just seems to be to spam the players with more and more mobs, to the point where it becomes impossible to beat them all, which I personally find rather dull and anoying.

Thank you for the post. Will try this tomorrow for certain! We almost had this but, couldn’t get past the infinite spawns. For me, as a Warrior, I’d pop Vengeance and run back to the entrance and drop dead as far from the action as possible for an easy rez. A party mate was a thief so he had no trouble coming back to rez me.

I had a Whispers spy kit I think. The ones you’ve mentioned seem much easier to get. I’m also guessing the hallway you’re speaking of is the one we enter through? It was great using a rifle with piercing down the hallway, that I do know

Thanks again for the help!

I did this with a pug @ 16 for daily last night, probably one of the best pug groups Ive been in, as we almost managed the whole thing in the room with the insane trash spawn.

What we ended up doing is destroying the cages before people were put in them.
We pulled him to the large room to the right of where he spawns, one or two adds will invariably follow you in there, leave them alone until the hammer is dropped then kill them, run in hit the seal and run back to the boss, you will draw one or two more adds with you, and can pick the boss up again as he runs back to the main room.

Rinse and repeat.

From my experience, AOEing the darn seal still works, albeit it has more “health”.

Keep colossus, remove grawl.

Grawl is doable with good team class selection and a few wipes, colossus is impossible for high lvl.

PlaneWalker.8346:

Grawl is doable with good team class selection and a few wipes, colossus is impossible for high lvl.

I’m not saying there aren’t bugs or any tuning required, but…

A lot of bugs and shortcuts are going to be fixed in the coming weeks. The challenge will rise and, as was always intended, players will find there is a maximum level of difficulty at which they can complete fractals. Impossible is part of the design, so it is very possible that with current skills and gear progression is not meant to be possible at these tiers.

An easier workaround is to leave the 4 chanters alive and kite the diviner into the 2nd room off to the side. Once he gets to 75% and drops the hammer you can then kill a single chanter you left alive in the main room. Afterwards run back to the side room to repeat the process allowing you to avoid the mass numbers of spawns if they do arrive at a later point in time

Remember to also have stability or some sort of stun break either to use before you hit the seal or after depending on the ability you use so you arent locked into position if there are mass numbers of mobs :P

There was a game update today that: “Fixed an issue where the Cultists would not reset correctly on party wipe at scale 10+ in the final boss fight.”

As I have not done any Fractals yet today I am unsure what the changes may have fixed.

Todays fix only removed the adds that remain after a wipe, mobs do not disappear after hitting a seal and continue to spawn while attacking boss.

It is a pity all this work has to go into getting around something that clearly needs to be fixed.

A great guide btw.

Doesn’t work anymore. Way too many mobs are spawning now and they follow you all the way, no matter where you go.

lkhdemonslayer.2967:

Doesn’t work anymore. Way too many mobs are spawning now and they follow you all the way, no matter where you go.

^ LKHdemonslayer and I, just tried now.

Encountered the fixed version of cliffside tonight. The mob spawns are so numerous and random it really is a shame.

I run with a group of 5 players, and we have not had any issues with fractals at level 20 for the past few weeks. All of the sudden tonight we are fighting the boss in his 2nd form (white light blasts), and it spawns in 6-8 vet novices during the middle of the fight. We should not have to hid in the hallway and worry about breaking aggro and clearing the room around him.

Until you guys have a working version of the dungeon boss why not just return it to the working version that was possible?

I reluctantly attempted level 17 Colossus fractal tonight, and as stated previously, it seems unbeatable in its current state. The aoe blast has greater than 1500 range, which is bad enough, but trying to kite around 9 chanters during the whole process is just impossible. If anyone has any idea of how to complete this awful fractal I’d like to know. The strategies above do not seem to work. Pulling the boss away from chanters and into a hallway results in the entire party wiping to aoe blasts. There is just no way to escape his range.

Fildydarie.1496:

The challenge will rise and, as was always intended, players will find there is a maximum level of difficulty at which they can complete fractals. Impossible is part of the design, so it is very possible that with current skills and gear progression is not meant to be possible at these tiers.

Well right now it seems to be easily possible on lvl 40+, provided that you get the right fractals. On the other hand, you can get stuck on level 10+ if you’re unlucky. We’re currently at a point where players are seriously discussing strategies on how to avoid certain fractals altogether (as in: every player enters the dungeon solo until they land in a fractal they want to avoid, then leaves the fractals and rejoins the group), rather than how to tackle those fractals. This can impossibly have been the intention behind this recent patch.

This is the Giganticus Lupicus of fractals, especially once you get to 20 and above. I wish there were some upgraded loot or something to reflect the fact that this fractal is the hardest and it takes more than twice as long as some other fractals.

I think what most ppl will do now is: Get Cliffside on first Fractual, reset.

What is ironic is that, Cliffside will now have a higher probabillity of appearing for the 2nd and even more for the 3rd since Fractuals can’t repeat. I seriously doubt the spawning of mobs during the fight, when he is not dazed, is intended.

With the fixes added to the Cliffside Fractal..this guide is obsolete. Each stage of invulnerable sees infinitely spawning mobs but once the Seal is hit and he comes out of it, the mobs stop spawning. This seems intended now and this is easily beatable with a coordinated team.

Siliconhobbit.4361:

This seems intended now and this is easily beatable with a coordinated team.

Ye right, on lvl12 maybe

Did this fractal earlier, and I noticed that I’d dodge his Nova blast, but get killed by an ability called “Swing”…at over 1000 range away. Has anybody else noticed this?

He bugged up bigtime last round. We lost 3 guys and boss run back to his position, we rezzed and now it got really messy as every attack he did resulted in agony 24/7… =/

Retried from checkpoint and it took like 45 min to do it safely… This really need a look on. It worked nice when you introduce the dungeon, but when you fixed the bug with seal, why make it hard as kitten

The endlessly spawning fanatics and venteran chanters are too much. Everyone groans when this fractal pops up now. And sometimes the hammer bugs out and doesn’t give you a #4 after you have tagged and killed a mob.