Guild Wars 2

This is easily the longest fractal to complete, and to top it off, the Dredge Powersuit boss at the end is absolutely ridiculous.

He is way to difficult at Fractal Difficultly 1. A group of us who have already done all fractals (including the same one with the Ice guy instead), gave up, because it was not worth our time. For how annoying it was, we are probably going to skip that fractal if we ever do it again.

This is a problem. He needs to be tuned down. I would be fine if he was this difficult at like, 20 Difficulty or something, but 1 was just crazy. Its the 1-hit KO bombs, the constant aggro problems with people going down next to him, and the healing. I like the mechanics of the boss, they just need to be tweaked to make it balanced.

I do know he is not impossible, and I’m sure other people have beaten him with ease. The problem is if your party slips up, and a bunch of people go down, the boss will just heal right back up. Its crazy and requires too much coordination for Fractal Difficulty 1.

Are you running a glass cannon build or, Six forbid, a magic find gear?
I’m not asking to be rude, but an elementalist can withstand some hits there, it’s certainly not a one-shot one-kill encounter for her, and she’s the profession with lowest hp/armor pools.

Really, I had no problems with him. The bombs have a huge tell, just evade. I think I got downed once the whole fight.

Those bombs are incredibly easy to dodge, try alter your graphics settings if you’re having a problem seeing the red circles. The only skill of his which can be kind of ridiculous is his AoE repeated pound skill, which generally wastes ‘squishies’ endurance so that they then can’t escape the bombs.

He really isn’t that bad though, might be a bad experience for pugs or those who can’t coordinate easily. However if your team can work together, this is a pretty easy fight. Only problem I’ve really had with him is his aggro tends to kitten sometimes and randomly runs in unexpected directions, causing the lava to miss him.

4 manned up to 5 with zero problems last night in under 3hrs, and have yet to find anything really challenging. Maybe just try and be more aware?

This is strange… at the end of the Dredge fractal for me, the Legendary Elemental defeated the Legendary Power Suit, and we had to fight the elemental instead, dropping lava on him etc.

Is it random?

Neilos Tyrhanos.5427:

This is strange… at the end of the Dredge fractal for me, the Legendary Elemental defeated the Legendary Power Suit, and we had to fight the elemental instead, dropping lava on him etc.

Is it random?

Yea it is

Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I wasn’t the one dying. All it takes is one person to slip, which causes another to try to rez, and it can snowball out of control.

We never wiped the whole fight, but we fought him for like an hour, because we kept making little mistakes. Not to mention the bombs can be buggy, sometimes they have a timer, sometimes the circles do not appear and you just get instantly killed.

I would call us a coordinated guild group, we were also all on vent. I’m going to repeat that I know he is not impossible, he is doable, but compared to the other fractals, he is way overpowered. I’m just pointing out a balance issue.

I have to agree with the OP (in that he is way to strong compared to other Bosses).

Just played with a PUG (level 1) and we couldn’t kill him. The best we could do is get him to ~75% of his health. Yes we had horrible problems with communication but the main problem was that everyone who had aggro had a hard time staying alive.

I had 22k HP @ 2300 Armor and the Bombs did 13k. Sometimes two bombs stacked and instantly killed (not downed) one of our less geared members and even I could barely take one melee attack from him.
I know you are supposed to dodge his attacks, but you should’t get punished that hard for failing one dodge, especially on level 1.

We had to skip it and all the other bosses we had after (this Guy with the cursed Hammer, that Ascalonian Defender and especially the huge Jellyfish) seemed like pushovers after him.

He is not too bad, it just requires a bit of coordination. I had 2 people rq a PuG last night on this boss fight. But we managed to 3 man him. You just need to fall into a rhythm, we had the squishiest person running up the top dropping lava with the other 2 of us down the bottom. Keep kiting him in a clockwise direction so you are always ready to drop more lava on him when the flame shield goes away. Dodge bombs backwards, or stay at max range and they wont even hit you. The shockwave thing can be partially dodged but even if you dont it doesnt 1 hit kill.

If someone goes down and you cannot res without risking yourself, better to just let them die otherwise people keep going down dying trying to res.

drkn.3429:

Are you running a glass cannon build or, Six forbid, a magic find gear?
I’m not asking to be rude, but an elementalist can withstand some hits there, it’s certainly not a one-shot one-kill encounter for her, and she’s the profession with lowest hp/armor pools.

My team actually found him easiest with glass cannon build o.o
4 buckets needed rather than the 5-6 it took with a different guild group (ran a guardian rather than a glass cannon ele)
Took us longer to do. Was almost harder because of it.

Really? Numerous PUG groups I’ve been with have torn him up in 2-3 minutes.

1) Keep luring towards buckets
2) Take away his defiant stacks
3) As soon as he attempts to heal, stun/daze/interrupt him and take away the defiant for the next time
4) Keep a reasonable distance

You don’t need all four buckets. Found that the time for the buckets to reset is enough time to kite north and south between the rebuff wearing off.

So you can just kite one side. Made it easier to co-ordinate the PuG group.

It was also easier to ensure he went where we wanted him to go as everyone knew that after going north we’d go south. Having a ton of interupts for his heal helped too.

We had some issues but I reckon it was down to it being really late and I was pretty tired and not with it too.

Tl;dr – for pugs I would suggest keeping to one side and luring him north and south to avoid confusion. The buckets should reset befor rebuff runs out and everyone is in the right place , so that if aggro switches, he’s still being kited in the right direction

Its not about who can dodge and all that. The one single point is that DREDGE fractal is over the top compared to all other fractals. They have the most mobs by far in any fractal. The longest boss fight at the end compared to any other fractal.

And on top of that.

THE BOSS kittenING HEALS TOO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!

(don’t get me wrong, i’ve done this fight 4 times now and upto scale 9)

Have two players (or one REALLY good one) man the lava buckets. Set up FIRST before you engage. Place one player near the entrance and the other diagonal from him/her. Have three people kite the mob into lava and DPS while kiting. Move in a square. So start with player nearest to you (the entrance) – hit with lava – move the one directly over you (Have the lava runner move WITH the kiters and not sit there ), then hit with lava again. Now once that side is done the other player we placed diagonal at the start should be set. Pull ACROSS to him/her and have them pour lava, then go back towards the door (again having runner run to next bucket), then pour. Move again directly across to where you FIRST started. The lava runner should have moved with you so already be in place. Rinse and repeat a billion times and your set.

His attacks can be dodged and the only insta kill is bombs which is easy to evade. You MUST remember to kite AS A GROUP. Do NOT move astray from each other. That will pull him AWAY from lava. Make SURE lava players know when to pour lava. If on Voice comms shout it out. If no voice comms use pings on the map. If any players have relatively short term roots use them! Warrior use Rifles with the root skill to root him under lava + root skill. You can easily tell where it will fall by the scarred spot on the ground.

MOST IMPORTANT:
Lava players DO NOT AGRO OR DAMAGE HIM. Your only making it harder on kiters and he might come upstairs to pay you a visit!
NO pets (PUT ON PASSIVE)! – NO minions! – NO illusions! Let the dredge target the kiters (who should be working and kiting RIGHT near each other as a team). If you have players who primarily use those things (pets/minions/illusions) put them on lava!

**Edit: If you fail and superheated falls from him do not worry. He WILL regen (unless your lucky), but it will only do roughly 5-7% of his health. Its a lot but not fight breaking.

The only thing that really needs balance is a tad less HP and less damage on LOWEST end fractals.

i agree,

i ran this today and after an hour of trying to do the boss with a semi kitten pug. I just left, I had enough. It is too hard and requires no skill. All it is is kiteing but if you have an all mele group you may aswell just leave.

Step 1: Pour Lava on him
Step 2: Avoid Aoes
Step 3: DPS
Step 4: ???
Step 5: PROFIT!

Honestly it’s a pretty easy boss… cleared everything from 3 – 10 today with a full melee group.

His heal can be interrupted. His bombs can be reflected. At least on the lower difficulties, you don’t need to kit him between buckets at all.

Agree with OP, he is too strong compared to the others, even on higher fractals. We fought him on Fractal 9 and wiped thrice. Since it was our first, we went and repaired then tried again and rolled the same area. However, we got the ice elemental instead and we cleared it without a problem. They both use the same mechanic, yet he is so much harder than the elemental. We went on to clear the swamp and the giant, not a problem at all, just him and his attacks kept messing us up.
It isn’t that he was impossible, we could probably have beaten him if we persevered but we didn’t want to continue past there with broken armor from all the deaths.

Its my favorite fractal (mechanicaly) and I agree that the Ice elementals compared the power suit is not balanced.So what they could do is..Make Elemental stronger:D

Dredge Suit is hard ? It’s hard to me to imagine what’s the hard part in it… (got only to lvl 3 diff, becouse when someone get’s dc we have to repeat the whole diff again meh…)

It has only 2 attacks I’m afraid of:

- Bombs, easy mode to dodge… put me down maybe 2-3 times (aaaand it was my own mistake not the difficulty of the fight) on 3-4 whole fights.

- an “invisible” form of attack when I see “dust” after he hit’s the ground I dodge automaticly, also standing above him on the platform can gat You down/killed from this sttack.

And that’s it…

Yesteray I fought the “Ice Elemental” first time and notice it’s “heal” it really grat but as a necromancer… when I see him kneel down i put reaper’s mark or cast doom from death shroud.

Advantages of fear is it passes trough Deviant so I always have full control of him.
The fight is long it took us 14 min to took him down when we first encounter him, but it was not difficult – we’ll see on higher lvls.

This boss is nothing short of rediculous. Does massage AOE damage from his bombs, heals, have to get him exactly under the lava and hold him there for 2-3 seconds while the lava SSSLLLOOOWWWLLLYYY drops on him.

Got to this guy the 3rd map of the level. Wiped our group numerous times. 40 minutes he was still at 100 health and we gave up. Huge waste of time doing the level and now have to start over. Its just too hard to complete.

He’s a fun but difficult boss to fight, and definitely beatable if you have a semi competent party. I agree that his ground pounding skill is a little too annoying and it might cause you to waste your endurance, but this can be mitigated by taking the hit and having people with AoE heals dropping those in areas where you want to kite him to (like the lava buckets), additionally:

(1) Know who has the aggro. Person who has the aggro kites the boss.

(2) Person who does not have aggro and is not operating the lava bucket, go and revive the KO’d party member.

(3) If you see a red circle on you while reviving, IMMEDIATELY use your dodge.

It’s not hard, it just requires some timing and awareness.

Personally, I think that the boss is a little too powerful for low level pugs. Good ways to make him easier are:

(1) On lower levels, reduce the radius of his ground attack ability
(2) On lower levels, prevent him from throwing 2 layers of bombs (so that you do not use your dodge only to dodge into another bomb)

Meh, he just needs completely redone. The boss is really boring, really long, really annoying if he gets aggroed wrong and you miss with bucket. Got him down to less than 50% after a half hour only to have him reset and completely heal(bosses shouldn’t even fully heal from resets anyways, 75% cap would be nice for issues like this).

But if you’re having difficulties with buckets, make sure you have immobilize and get him with that when hes in place, as others have said, you can rupt heal, but its a pain to get him back under buckets 100% of the time once you lost your rythym.

with agony he’s sexy! Distortion so useful in Fractal, love it

I haven’t had any problems with him either even when my group kills him at difficulty level 10+ where agony plays a part of the factor.

Kromica.2831:

4 manned up to 5 with zero problems last night in under 3hrs, and have yet to find anything really challenging. Maybe just try and be more aware?

Under 3 hours for a fractal. You could run 6 fractals in that time depending on the fractal.

Going to be interesting to see how all these people deal with the boss when he starts applying agony. Not really sure why you guys find the bombs, of all things, to be so much trouble. A well placed reflection skill knocks them all back at him, and knocks out a considerable chunk of his health as well. A PUG group is no excuse, you just need to have someone step up and take control.

Oh, he’s fun when he starts applying agony. Just means I need to save two dodges or a shield stance to avoid his ground pound, otherwise, it’s pretty much the same.

Barionic.5904:

I do know he is not impossible, and I’m sure other people have beaten him with ease. The problem is if your party slips up, and a bunch of people go down, the boss will just heal right back up. Its crazy and requires too much coordination for Fractal Difficulty 1.

I can see how this boss would be a bit rough on a PUG if some of the members don’t really know what to do. This was a headache for me the first time running it because we had a thief on the team who refused to stop crippling him, which resulted in the Superheated debuff constantly wearing off before we could get him to the next bucket.

That said, the bombs are very easy to avoid (even without dodging), and his heal is interruptable with CC. Yeah, you need to be on your game, but no more so than, say, the dolphin segment of the Aquatic Ruins fractal.

Now, I have to point out that despite all of this, the elemental boss which you sometimes fight instead of the powersuit is much, much easier. Still, on the whole, I wouldn’t really say either need changing, and honestly I think the powersuit is, while a somewhat obnoxious (and very gimmicky – and an overused gimmick at that) boss fight, it’s not unbalanced.

Eh, this Dredge is pretty much the AC Exp. of FotM… Remember how hard that used to be.

Anyways, yeah, seriously easy but not sure why some people can’t seem to take a hint. Ran 2 fotm2 to help some friends level up and the PUGs that came with had no concept of dodging.

All in all, leave as is, L2P. In 2-3 months everyone will laugh at how easy this boss is.

The problem I have with it is the massive shockwave he creates, can easily wipe a good chunk of your HP if you’re not specced for toughness/vitality, and there’s no easy tell or way to avoid it. Otherwise the bombs are pretty easy to dodge, and if your group keeps their distance and kites him to the next spot he’s pretty easy to beat, it just takes patience.

Barionic.5904:

I do know he is not impossible, and I’m sure other people have beaten him with ease. The problem is if your party slips up, and a bunch of people go down, the boss will just heal right back up. Its crazy and requires too much coordination for Fractal Difficulty 1.

Learn the boss mechanic first. It’s actually one of the easiest fractal fights.

yup, it’s kinda pain in the kitten but still it’s ok.

all i can say is this:

1. there should be one person to man the lava, preferably someone with stealth to loss agro when he/she get it, and he she should not attack or something.

2. use range weapon and stay far away from the boss as possible, if you’re close then turn around and run, don’t backpedal because it’s slow. if you’re too close, chances are you might not be able to run far away from the bombs AoE. it’s even much safer if you just run to the lava spot or near it, then attack from there, w8 for it there until lava is poured then run to the next lava spot again.

3. when someone is down, don’t rush to resu. try to decide if it’s safe or not, let those get downed die and just wait for a chance to resu.

4. if someone is down and died, don’t rush to resu again. lure the boss like nobody died and observe who has the agro, if you don’t have the agro and the boss now is far from the dead body, then sneak up and resu while the others continue to lure and pour lava.

5. i find the attack where the boss applies agony hard to dodge, what you can do is maintain a full HP, don’t get hit by other attack. remember that you can probably heal 2 times before he execute this attack again. also, you can dodge and use skills that make you immune to all attack to not get hit by this (eg. mesmers distortion and sword #2, engineers elixir s and so on). remember that even if it’s hard to dodge and hurts bad, the time between this skill is used by the boss is kinda long.

drkn.3429:

Are you running a glass cannon build or, Six forbid, a magic find gear?
I’m not asking to be rude, but an elementalist can withstand some hits there, it’s certainly not a one-shot one-kill encounter for her, and she’s the profession with lowest hp/armor pools.

That’s only true if the ele heavily invests in earth and/or water for the increased survivability. A base HP ele would be one-shot by bombs, as it leaves you with just under 11k.

That said, the bombs have quite a long time between red ring and detonation, so there isn’t much reason to get hit by one.

If you fail the bombs wow-type dungeons are not for you.

This ones pretty easy if you have any sort of WoW experience really. Kite in circle, with everyone ranged. Use an immobilize skill on the dark spot to set up lava. Do a backwards roll when it throws the 2nd set of bombs out. If you mess up and it starts healing, interupt it (fear works well here, and so does knockback)

Its only hard if the guy pouring lava does it too early/late, and you are forced to interupt the healing multiple times in a row. It does get harder when he does agony too i guess. Most of his other moves are completely dodgable though.

One of the best boss fights I’ve ever had in any mmo. Don’t make it easy pls.

Typical learn to play case. He is a push over at difficulty 1 to 9.

He is not that hard, simply use proper tactics. I hate the stupid ice elemental, that is annoying. The Suit is fine

He’s easy, you can dodge his agony at 10+ also. I’ve made it to 20+ with 0 agony resists and have fought him 3 times 10+ without ever being downed.

I do agree the length of the fractal is way too long. They need to either take out one event or the champion boss.

Are we talking about the same boss that i and one other guy killed alone??

Very easy to dodge the bombs and you can anticipate it as he stands still with his arms spread out ready to launch them.

Also, if you have a good mesmer in your group, they can cast the feedback dome to reflect the bombs to himself.

Zoul.1087:

Kromica.2831:

4 manned up to 5 with zero problems last night in under 3hrs, and have yet to find anything really challenging. Maybe just try and be more aware?

Under 3 hours for a fractal. You could run 6 fractals in that time depending on the fractal.

Reading comprehension not so good with you? We got to tier 5 in under 3hrs 4 manning it , and have 3 and 4 manned up to tier 11 with no problems.

Strifey.7215:

I do agree the length of the fractal is way too long. They need to either take out one event or the champion boss.

This. The initial switches area is equivalent to one event, which is then followed by breaking the door, then the champion, then this moderately difficult boss. Four sub-events.

Compare to…
Ice Fractal – First and second event are basically clumped together into one, then you just walk through the forest and kill the boss.
Swamp Fractal – Basically two events (wisps, boss).
Asura Fractal – Three events (champion prison, Old Tom, robocats).
Water Fractal – Three events, and only if you consider the initial trash clear a real event.
Charr Fractal – Two events separated by a large portion of clearing.

Pretty much the only one that matches Dredge in volume of stuff to do is the giant fractal. The problem is likely that ANet considers “clear some trash while jumping/walking around” to be an event in some fractals, whereas players just blow through.

Kromica.2831:

Zoul.1087:

Kromica.2831:

4 manned up to 5 with zero problems last night in under 3hrs, and have yet to find anything really challenging. Maybe just try and be more aware?

Under 3 hours for a fractal. You could run 6 fractals in that time depending on the fractal.

Reading comprehension not so good with you? We got to tier 5 in under 3hrs 4 manning it , and have 3 and 4 manned up to tier 11 with no problems.

Maybe your reading comprehension is not that good either. Had you not had that fractal you could do others in a shorter amount of time.

It is by far the one of longest fractals. It feels like a tremendous waste of time. It can be skipped.

Its not impossible but it simply takes too long.

Zoul.1087:

Kromica.2831:

Zoul.1087:

Kromica.2831:

4 manned up to 5 with zero problems last night in under 3hrs, and have yet to find anything really challenging. Maybe just try and be more aware?

Under 3 hours for a fractal. You could run 6 fractals in that time depending on the fractal.

Reading comprehension not so good with you? We got to tier 5 in under 3hrs 4 manning it , and have 3 and 4 manned up to tier 11 with no problems.

Maybe your reading comprehension is not that good either. Had you not had that fractal you could do others in a shorter amount of time.

It is by far the one of longest fractals. It feels like a tremendous waste of time. It can be skipped.

Its not impossible but it simply takes too long.

Dude can you read english?
Hes saying he got to lvl 5 in 3h, thats a total of 14 fractals.
And no the dredge fractal is not that long, you ppl want 5 minutes fractals or what?

He is very tough as things go. I ran a group today starting at Fractal 2 and then did another run through Fractal 3. The first run through with this group, we got the Dredge suit branch, and it took us probably a half hour or so, with several complete deaths and numerous downings (but luckily no party wipes), and that was only because several of us knew the way that place worked. On the second cycle we got the ice version, and it took maybe ten minutes tops, probably less, with far fewer downings and no full deaths at all.

I think the problems with the Dredge are twofold, one, that PBAoE ground wave that seems to do a ton of damage and is very hard to avoid, and 2, those tons of AoE mines he can toss, which can also be difficult to avoid and do a ton of damage.

We never wiped the whole fight, but we fought him for like an hour, because we kept making little mistakes.

It might be nice if he had a tiered health bar, similar to the Karkas. Instead of taking him from 100% to 0% and if you stop fighting back at 5% and give him a few minutes of uninterrupted healing time, he can get back to 100%, make it so that at each 25% mark, his HP is locked in, so if you take him down to 75% and then leave him alone, he can heal back to 100, but if you get him to 74%, then they highest he’ll ever see again would be 75%. This would make the loss of progress less disheartening. Of course, if the party wipes back to checkpoint it would reset to 100%.

I do think that in general, Levels 1 and 2, maybe even 3, should not be hard. They should be the training wheels. You should not need someone who’s done it before, you should not expect to but your head against the wall until you get it down, they should just be fairly easy, hinting at what the mechanics are without heavily punishing you for not picking them up. It should only be after 5+ levels in that the real “jerk” tactics start in where failure to keep up gets you slapped senseless.

This wasn’t as important when all the “alpha dog” dungeon harcorez were running level 1 fractals, but they’ve all moved on to the big leagues and it’ll be important for keeping them viable for the later generations.

Nha it’s just the same for all the final boss/room, they are long to be done, but aren’t as hard as people think. You just need to coordinate your group so that it lure the boss under the fire, there are space without snow on the floor, then have him stick there until one of your guy activate the mechanism that throw lava on him, and lure him to the next spot, and the next until he dies. You guys just need to understand how it work, that is all.

If you’re having trouble with either of the dredge fractal bosses healing, any thief with an offhand pistol can permanently shut down their heal by spamming away stun immunity with headshots and then interrupting the heal, the downside being that they won’t have the initiative to do much else.