Guild Wars 2

Nerf!

Subject Alpha is way too difficult.
Aoe radius is rediculous… no room to kite and evade half the time.
If the crystal goes on someone and you cant manage to kill it, the person is downed.. awesome lets res them, NOPE Subject Alpha spawns aoe’s around the body instantly with a radius of a million miles.

Dying and constantly running back to the boss was the only way to do it. You spend 40 silver on repairs for a run for a rubbish return which is now also nerfed.

Not only that, all three options in the dungeon take almost two hours anyways. I’m sure everyone’s going to run the first 5 tokens over and over again.

All members in party have exotic dungeon gear so its not like we need better stats.
Anyone else tried this? It was bugged before the last patch but its fine now.

Side note: The dungeon does look pretty. gw on that.

This is simply not true. My static group has been clearing crucible now for a week with only 1 or 2 deaths in all 3 paths total. This dungeon is one of the better ones out there .

On a side note, when are all of these WoWians going to learn that GW2 dungeons aren’t about burning kitten down and DPS? Its about coordination, cc and combo fields.

My static tonight just finish path 1 thru 4 of Arah dungeon. Took us 5 hours or so to run all 4 paths. Good fun fights. Well designed. GG devs.

5 hours or so to run all 4 paths. That’s borderline speed clear. AND you had FUN?!?
Why’d you tell Anet? They’ll make the fun go away for you too.
Anything that your “static group” has done before tonight don’t count; you were significantly rewarded at the time and it was easier.
If it was so easy why not offer a suggestion? Or some helpful tips? Instead of being a kitten bag and just bragging about it, and blaming “WoWians”?

Alpha’s definitely not my favorite boss, but he’s tolerable with a good group on the same page. The only complaint I might have is that his health pool is just a little too much. It usually just comes down to attrition, even with a minimal rate of error.

I’m not happy with this dungeon at all.
Yes, i was farming CoF prenerf and it was ok, but i got bored by doing the same thing all over again. So i deiced to give it a go with CoE cos of nice skins and to change the environment.
But CoE is just madness. Run takes over an hour with excruciating pain. We took frontal assault path which was strange since 1st time i did frontal assault i encountered alpha guy. But since one of the players, who completed all 3 paths said its the easiest one i decided i should give it another try.
I know we are supposed to farm dungeons for gear, but c’mon over 1h for 20 tokens. it will take forever to do it. And the alpha boss damage… it is just ridiculous. The fight turns into ‘’run back to the boss’’ fest. Very disappointed. Waste of my time and i dont think i will be doing this dungeon unless something changes.

I hear toughness is good.

This is a decent dungeons it’s hard but doable. I never died on subject alpha. If something has to be done it’s certainly not it this dungeon.

I have run all 3 paths on explorer and my group has finished every one of them on the first try and every time since. We have not ever failed to finish this dungeon.

Never made it through story mode. The room where you have to defend whats her face while she hacks the golem was stupid. The exact same mechanic they have and buffed in CoF and were trying to tell us the right way to do it was killing the spawns. lol

Besides that something about that dungeon tanks my fps. Outside or anywhere else in the game I’m usually at 40+ fps. But in there it was in the teens for no reason that I could find.

Alpha is manageable. Only bad thing is the instant crystal attack. But that is offsetted if your party don’t die in 5 seconds there and can help you destroy the crystal. Me and an engineer just managed to duo him. My other party members were just being one shot at the entrance.

The 0.1% should not speak, honestly they shouldn’t…When less than 1% can manage content it needs a nurf!

Subject Alpha is an awesome boss and if you think it is too hard, then you are missing something really elemental about this encounter. I won’t spoil it, but if you do find out, it is one of those things after which you scream how you could have died so often and miss this. Double thumbs up for Subject Alpha.

FourthVariety.5463:

Subject Alpha is an awesome boss and if you think it is too hard, then you are missing something really elemental about this encounter. I won’t spoil it, but if you do find out, it is one of those things after which you scream how you could have died so often and miss this. Double thumbs up for Subject Alpha.

Are you talking about how to avoid the crystal? If yes i do want to know about it :P. It just seems an instant, no tell move.

It is not the crystal. The crystal is just one of those moments where the group is challenged to act as a group and focus fire instantly. Except when Alpha catches my Ele, in that case, I teleport out of it, or use mist form, or obsidian flesh, or some other trickery to annoy Alpha.

I talk more about avoiding all the other damage without much effort.

My experience running CoE:
I ran this with a pug from lions arch. We ran the 2nd path to the experimental teleporter. It took about an hour to complete. We had one person who had done it once, but for the other 4 of us, it was our first time. The run was pretty smooth(1-5 deaths per big fight) until we had to jump over the lasers. I broke all my armor trying to get across, but I was the first one able to make it besides our leader. Next time I’m taking my armor off for this part. I had a repair canister from a chest on me so it didnt cost me anything. Then, the run went fairly smooth until the final boss I died about 6-8 times.

As soon as the final boss (alpha) turned attackable I was encased in a crystal and could not move. Then red circles appeared all around me and the boss ran over to me. I died without being able to do anything. I ran back to see some of my group fighting the boss. I helped a teammate up from downed state and started working on the boss. Except there were only 2 of my teammates with me now. 2 were running back from also dying. The fight took forever. After the first time I saw him heal, I thought I should use my shortbow’s poison to try and hinder the boss’s healing when the slimes went to him. I think I figured out that the crystal prison animation is when he does a hop in place in the air. Although I would still get caught at the end of my dodge roll and be frozen mostly out of the crystal with only my toe inside of it (bug?). Also, when I was trapped inside my “roll for initiative” (stun breaking ability/dodge) wasn’t greyed out, but it wasn’t usable either (bug? same image).

When I did get crystal prisoned 25% of the time I would just die without being able to do anything. 50% of the time I could come out in downed state, but still usually die. I did rally off the tentacles/teammates a couple times. The last 25% i would take no damage and escape unharmed (even with the same red aoes all around hitting me I took no damage).

This was the first dungeon I had run since the CoF buff. My first time ever being in CoE. Yet, upon completion I got only 6s and 15 trophies with a 10s repair bill. I don’t think I was supposed to only get 6 silver. It was over an hour and I had not done this or any other dungeon in 2 days…

Tips:

This was only my first run. It should get easier as I farm it more. I liked this dungeon even if my first run was bad/hard. I think it has potential for pugs to farm it. Although its nowhere near as fast as CoF. I thought the difficulty was perfect. Just the reward of 6 silver was my only disappointment…

anubis.4870:

[..]
Dying and constantly running back to the boss was the only way to do it. You spend 40 silver on repairs for a run for a rubbish return which is now also nerfed.
[..]

now where did i see death zerging causing an “increased repair cost”-patch again? ~~

i hope we don’t get the same treatment here as well, in addition to the bugged diminish returns on dungeon rewards.

honestly tho this dungeon is one of the more fun ones, with mechanics that actually incorporate something other than “hit the boss for an excruciatingly long period of time”

Ruien.9506:

On a side note, when are all of these WoWians going to learn that GW2 dungeons aren’t about burning kitten down and DPS? Its about coordination, cc and combo fields.

Hits Shield of Wrath. Stands in AoE. Block..block..block. Yep real hard.

Ruien.9506:

Its about coordination, cc and combo fields.

It’d be nice if CC actually worked on bosses (The biggest time kills in dungeons) but they don’t as they have CC immunity so it really comes down to combo fields.

I remember a time, when ArenaNet publicly demoed the game and dungeon bosses did not have CC immunity. It was a slugfest during which no boss ever had the chance to do anything. They were just drowned in CC and died. No challenge whatsoever.

FourthVariety.5463:

Subject Alpha is an awesome boss and if you think it is too hard, then you are missing something really elemental about this encounter. I won’t spoil it, but if you do find out, it is one of those things after which you scream how you could have died so often and miss this. Double thumbs up for Subject Alpha.

- make sure you’re evenly spread out or stack on each other
- dodge the ice aoe on the inner ring
- move out of the fire aoe
- don’t be in his front
- kill crystal
- kill tendrils if necessary

I’m sorry, but “move out of voidzones and kill his CC” is hardly awesome. ok, maybe for you, but I’ve seen plenty of it in wow/rift/tor/tsw – with a way better implementation that is. in gw2 it’s just tedious and borderline annoying, depending which route you choose.

FourthVariety.5463:

I remember a time, when ArenaNet publicly demoed the game and dungeon bosses did not have CC immunity. It was a slugfest during which no boss ever had the chance to do anything. They were just drowned in CC and died. No challenge whatsoever.

CC (blind, stunlock, cripple/chill to kite) is one thing, reduced weakness/vulnerability another. the first makes sense, the latter not.

Nebilim.5127:

FourthVariety.5463:

Subject Alpha is an awesome boss and if you think it is too hard, then you are missing something really elemental about this encounter. I won’t spoil it, but if you do find out, it is one of those things after which you scream how you could have died so often and miss this. Double thumbs up for Subject Alpha.

Are you talking about how to avoid the crystal? If yes i do want to know about it :P. It just seems an instant, no tell move.

The moment someone gets crystal on them, the rest of the team should target it and destroy it. It’s not hard to break by any means.

Managing Alpha’s AoE is actually pretty easy.

Oolune.4357:

Nebilim.5127:

FourthVariety.5463:

Subject Alpha is an awesome boss and if you think it is too hard, then you are missing something really elemental about this encounter. I won’t spoil it, but if you do find out, it is one of those things after which you scream how you could have died so often and miss this. Double thumbs up for Subject Alpha.

Are you talking about how to avoid the crystal? If yes i do want to know about it :P. It just seems an instant, no tell move.

The moment someone gets crystal on them, the rest of the team should target it and destroy it. It’s not hard to break by any means.

Managing Alpha’s AoE is actually pretty easy.

This is exactly what you should be doing. You can defeat Alpha without anyone dying, you just have to pick the correct skills and work together. It seems you cannot dodge the crystal, as I have been frozen multiple times mid roll, but you can escape it. For example, the thief’s shadowstep, steal, and maybe infiltrator’s signet (haven’t tried it yet) will teleport you out of the crystal. Mesmers have similar escapes and necros can pop death shroud to stay alive. Really, it only takes 2 people burning down a crystal to save a person. I would recommend that everyone save their burst damage for the crystals. On this boss, you really can’t afford to be dying to the AoE. On the teleporter route you have plenty of time to escape them.

If someone goes down, do not try to revive them. Focus down the nearest bone tendril to give them a rally.

What Ruien said, you’re just doing bad.

Ice AoE can be dodged with ease. Fire as well – you can even walk out of it. Earth doesn’t do much damage but if you observe the patterns you can avoid it too. If your group does everything right, crystals will go down quick.

Even if you’re in a crystal, use tendrils as rally fodder after you are downed.

Bring an invuln. You can cheat your way out of a crystal once in a while with it.

Finally, look when Alpha spews 4 green globs in different directions – where they land, Alpha essences will appear. If you manage to kill one of them(focus one), he’ll be stunned for good 10-15 seconds.

There are many imbalanced, horrible things in dungeons(like defending collectors from gravelings in AC), but this is not one of them.

TL;DR: Learn to dodge.

bottom line is you need to learn to time your dodges. I’ve been working on that set, and I rarely if ever go down on alpha. you can stay in the circles if you learn the timing.

Did this with 2 guidies and 2 randoms

2 ele, guardian, ranger and something else that I dont remember (I think it was engineer?)

first impression? Holy god gunners are just… young felines…
No seriously, you gave them UNLOAD? that was reserved for a boss mechanic in a previous dungeon, and these guys are packing it and there’s 2 of them? Christ.

Second impression. Oh god mega blasters are the funnest trash we’ve faced. However go kitten yourself if you’re melee because there is jack all you can do vs them

I dont think we had any trouble with the bosses. The first one was long and completely forgettable.

Protecting zojja was done first try with no deaths. Its important to note that the first golems that attack arent silver ringed, so me and the other ele basically took a dump all over them. Then we just ran around a lot, at one point zojja started coming under attack, and we just basically started to spam our heals on her. I think she finished with about 25% hp left.

Rest of the dungeon is meh, at one point someone dc’ed and we still went forward, getting all the way past the room where the dragon monsters are.

The kudu fight was… stupid.
The powersuit likes to stun you even when you’re not in his fields, and 1 shot you if he catches you. But he waskitten easy to dodge. WAY TOO MUCH HP
Kudu was just bullkitten. The first time he kill shot me, he then did it again 2 seconds later to put me from down to dead. I told my team to lookout (over skype) and my friend goes “wait what?” and then he’s downed and dead too. There’s no windup that we saw at all, so it was literally just burst him down ASAP before he could kill people before whoever was dead got back.

The final boss was… I dunno, I guess for me it seemed easy as I never died or went down. Getting trapped in a crystal meant we’d rescue you in about 4 seconds. They really did not have much hp. The boss on the other hand had way too much. tbh though, still not hard, at least if you’re good at dodging. Me and my ele friend were having a casual conversation while fighting the boss and dodging everything, only to realize that everyone else was dying to his AOE’s somehow.

I give this story mode a 6/10
suggestions to anet:
1. change gunners to be less stupid
2. lower the hp of the bosses, as it stands its just tedious
3. give kudu some telegraph for his killshot
4. add some new mechanics to the first few boss fights. They were really just… unforgettable
5. The final final final boss dude was pretty much perfect besides his tons of hp. Plenty of variety to his attacks, that changed as you did damage to him, and everything was dodgeable with skill besides maybe the crystal, which I dodged with sheer luck. So basically, if you plan on changing content, try and make it reflect this guy!

Suggestion to players
1. accept that gunners will probably kill you
2. Make sure you have burst damage and heals for the zojja part
3. get good at dodging? I’m usually not one to say this, but, maybe go try playing an ele to 80. It’s a sure fire way to get better at dodging (because you will need to be doing it constantly)

Our guild has cleared every path in Crucible. It is not too difficult, you just need to dodge when he uses ground-targeted AoE. It doesn’t matter where you dodge to so long as you have the timing right.

i always have SO much trouble finding people to run this! i don’t know why nobody wants to either :/ if anyone wants an 80 necro for a group pm me in game hah

People need to stop crying, the dungeon is fine. My guild can clear this dungeon within 25-35 mins with no death.

Riaky.8965:

People need to stop crying, the dungeon is fine. My guild can clear this dungeon within 25-35 mins with no death.

and what path are u taking in this dungeon?

We killed subject alpha with 4 people….

Alpha isn’t particularly hard, just a bit tricky.

And here’s the tricky part— knowing when to dodge Alpha’s attacks. Unlike most red circles of death where you have to dodge on impulse, Alpha’s warnings are a bit delayed. You’d have to wait at least a second or two before your hit your Dodge. So far, I have been able to complete it with a guild group and some dedicated PUGs just fine, only dying because I of a mistimed dodge. Other than that, I would have to say that trying to get out of the Crystals is the tricky part.

Did this dungeon for the first time yesterday.. submarine path.. wasn’t that hard.. I personally didn’t have probs with Subject Alpha, since Phase Retreat on staff mesmer just teleports you out of the crystal.

Only issue we had was with the boss that you have to get to charge those pillars.. he didn’t want to do his charge move after a bit.. so we had to DPS him down through his super defense, doing like 1-2 dmg per hit… took us more than 1 hour to burn him down.

My group clears each route in about 30 minutes.. We pretty much do every dungeon on every route once a day already. With the new rewards, this is a joyous occasion for us.

Like mentioned, you either stand in the middle of the aoe to dodge all damage, or you evade after 1.5 second of red circleness if you have the endurance. This boss is actually the most fun and easy thing about the dungeon.

Did the explorable sub path.

My only complaint was the third alpha fight he decided to stand in a corner by the boxes.

This made it impossible to stand behind him.

Which made it impossible to dodge the earth spike attack he does (the telegraph on this means you are taking damage from it unless you’re at a super long range, or behind him. Both of which are impossible for melee players)

Which made it super dumb.

Honestly the purple crystal is fine. The dragon tooth is fine. The flames around him are A-ok. But jesus, give that earth tooth move an extra half second of telegraph before it smacks you for 10k. That’s all im asking anet.