Guild Wars 2

A boss of the Citadel of Flame 1st Explorable Route, the Legendary Searing Effigy, is broken (in a bad way). His crystals provide no counter play because of the drop rate and timer (the time from circle appearance and crystal drop is lower than seemingly every other AoE in the game). Also, his flamethrower’s range is beyond that of the particle effect, which gives the player a feeling of being hit by something that doesn’t exist. What is ultimately frustrating and broken is the lack of counter play options in the entire fight. If people focus on the crystals, the dps isn’t high enough to out-damage the few stacks of regen aura, and additionally the

The first phase of the boss (100%-60%hp) is perhaps a bit easier than intended because a group of 5 people in melee range can burst him down in that non-healing range easily. Fortunately, the second phase of the boss (60%-30%hp) is balanced due to the reasonable crystal spawn rate. Sadly, the third phase of the boss (%30>hp) is where the fight becomes unreasonable. Without a party spec’d for full dps/conditions the regen becomes too much coupled with the crystal drop rate (which seems to vary anywhere from 10-25 seconds based on RNG, so a group who completes the boss past this stage most likely got lucky with crystal drop rates/had a bug where his regen did not stack despite crystals being near him and him consuming them.

The boss is do-able and I’ve seen videos of it done, but in the theme of GW2 (no party is perfect or imperfect, everyone can contribute equally) this boss is broken. I have no tried the 3rd route but having seen this one I see no incentive to do anything about the 2nd, Magg, route.