Guild Wars 2

Hey so i just had the volcanic fractal on a guild run. Personally i dont really find shaman that kitten thief and war ive spent time learning how to melee him so i know most of his tells. My group was having a hard time on the bubble phase tho, and i was wondering if its possible to skip it by ice bow freezing him right before hes going to transition? Also any other tips on getting through it besides reflects. I think someone also said it doesnt matter whether you target him or not during the bubble phase and that any skill you use will take off one of the shield stacks…altho not sure if thats true.

If you deep freeze him before he phases and push over the 25% boundary he’ll just use the bubble after the stun ends so you won’t get much out of it. It best to use when he comes out of the bubble so he won’t do anything but his firestorm during his enrage timer which increases his dmg by roughly 2×.

And for the shield stacks you need to target him to take them down but as long as you have 1 staff ele either shouldn’t be a problem since they can chill him for a rather long time with frozen ground giving you plenty of time to deal with the adds.

you can signet of might and pindown on warrior too.

metabattle have a build for warrior to use for imbued shaman.

I still havn’t seen anyone soloing imbued shaman on 50. there is a duo video up though.

Oh didnt know that. Ill try freeze after bubble…no wonder everyone was going down.

yeah i play the staff ele in the group and i manage to always chill land ice bow 4 and land meteor shower…no idea why the rest of them die lol.

I’ve seen him skip a phase once on fractal 20. Don’t know how we managed it though, the only thing I can say for sure is, that he only bubbled twice before he died. Could have been, that we froze him before 75% and pushed him below 50% in the freeze. Don’t think that is possible on fractal 50.

I think the first phase 75% is unskippable. If you do so much damage really fast, like 4 icebow full might you can skip the 50%, and maybe even 25%.

There is youtube video about it. Need to search for it.

Oh that makes sense, instead of blocking the phase change just burn through them. Dam that definitely takes some organization tho

In order to bubble the Shaman has to use a skill, which has a cooldown. Skipping bubble phases happens if you have enough DPS that you push him over the boundary where he would normally bubble before the skill comes off cooldown. Once the skill comes off cooldown however he will use it immediately regardless of health.

You can kill him straight after the 1st bubble even at 50, but its easier at lower levels. Skipping just one bubble phase is pretty reliable at any level.

I honestly doubt people that have a hard time killing the boss is able to skip phases.

A suggestion is if your not in danger of the boss diving into a villager, try to kill as many elemental as possible before popping the boss bubble(it is suggested by guildwars2 dungeon.net)

Aldarn.4650:

In order to bubble the Shaman has to use a skill, which has a cooldown. Skipping bubble phases happens if you have enough DPS that you push him over the boundary where he would normally bubble before the skill comes off cooldown. Once the skill comes off cooldown however he will use it immediately regardless of health.

Do we have any idea what the cooldown for that skill is? One minute?

That’s definitely true. Some better advice than trying to skip phases might be to look at how you approach the bubble phase.

I think the most useful thing to know about the bubble phase is that you don’t need to attack the Shaman at all to break the bubble. Stacks are removed by using a skill while you have the shaman targeted. That means you can focus on killing the elementals with ground targeted AoE and melee cleave and the shamans stacks will be removed while you do that if you keep him targeted.

At least 1 staff ele is tremendously helpful also, Meteor Shower absolutely wrecks the elementals while Frozen Ground buys you time. Make sure your team supports your eles, they’re going to want some condi removal after the Meteor Shower as they will have picked up burning during the channel. You don’t have to rush between bubble phases so changing to Water to lay down some water fields to blast can help a lot with keeping your team’s health pools topped up, especially if your team knows to watch out for them to use their own blasts on the field too.

Get your team to watch their positioning as the bubble phase nears, you want everyone close to the Guardian so they can make it to his Wall of Reflection right away.

Get the Guardian to save an aegis to use as soon as the Shaman’s Bubble pops. The Shaman is enraged at this point and anyone getting hit by an arrow will most like go down, worse if someone gets caught by the firestorm at this point they could easily end up fully defeated as its not easy to res someone in a double damage ticking AoE like that.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Do we have any idea what the cooldown for that skill is? One minute?

I’ve never timed it but based on where my skill cooldowns are when he bubbles again I would hazard a guess at 45secs (if unchilled). I have a bunch of recordings I can check when I’m home from work to give a better answer

Edit: Wow four-five-s is censored

I think DnT did the record of this fractal boss. As far as I remember, they skipped the second and third bubble phases by chilling the boss and burnt through his 75% to 0% HP. I have not saved the link but I think Nike or someone else may have it.

Thought KING had a video of a 75% to 0% kill in one of their frac 50 runs. Or am i imagining it?

Edit: Nevermind it was their all time submission. And it was only to 10%. But they seemed to slack a bit on the AOE burst so they probably could of pushed for a full 1 phase burn.

You can pretty reliably get him down to somewhere between 1-15% at 50 in a good group with the occasional kill. We don’t reliably kill him in one but its not too rare either,.

Edit: Uploaded one http://youtu.be/qx3pyyoiO7k

laokoko.7403:

I honestly doubt people that have a hard time killing the boss is able to skip phases.

A suggestion is if your not in danger of the boss diving into a villager, try to kill as many elemental as possible before popping the boss bubble(it is suggested by guildwars2 dungeon.net)

Yeah i dont think we’d be able to skip phases atm, but im just trying to pick up some tips for when people get a little more used to the encounter. Its one of my favorite bosses in the game, but i dont know much about it since i rarely get it. My team is in full zerk however and we run the best builds possible so its not entirely out of the question for us to burn through phases if we get more comfortable/ can stack might during the fight

Aldarn.4650:

That’s definitely true. Some better advice than trying to skip phases might be to look at how you approach the bubble phase.

I think the most useful thing to know about the bubble phase is that you don’t need to attack the Shaman at all to break the bubble. Stacks are removed by using a skill while you have the shaman targeted. That means you can focus on killing the elementals with ground targeted AoE and melee cleave and the shamans stacks will be removed while you do that if you keep him targeted.

At least 1 staff ele is tremendously helpful also, Meteor Shower absolutely wrecks the elementals while Frozen Ground buys you time. Make sure your team supports your eles, they’re going to want some condi removal after the Meteor Shower as they will have picked up burning during the channel. You don’t have to rush between bubble phases so changing to Water to lay down some water fields to blast can help a lot with keeping your team’s health pools topped up, especially if your team knows to watch out for them to use their own blasts on the field too.

Get your team to watch their positioning as the bubble phase nears, you want everyone close to the Guardian so they can make it to his Wall of Reflection right away.

Get the Guardian to save an aegis to use as soon as the Shaman’s Bubble pops. The Shaman is enraged at this point and anyone getting hit by an arrow will most like go down, worse if someone gets caught by the firestorm at this point they could easily end up fully defeated as its not easy to res someone in a double damage ticking AoE like that.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Do we have any idea what the cooldown for that skill is? One minute?

I’ve never timed it but based on where my skill cooldowns are when he bubbles again I would hazard a guess at 45secs (if unchilled). I have a bunch of recordings I can check when I’m home from work to give a better answer

Edit: Wow four-five-s is censored

Thank you for the advice, this is really helpful. Yeah usually we manage to stack in wor but we get shaman out of the bubble before the elementals get killed. Ill try to get these to work with my party next time around.