Guild Wars 2

I just had a very frustrating experience in Twilight Arbor Explorable tonight, on forward/forward path. I’ll admit that we didn’t have the best group make up, since it was late at night and we couldn’t be picky about who we took. So, we had two casters, and three medium armor wearers but we made it to Leurent and his four knights.

Unfortunately, this is where we hit an absolute brick wall. We did everything we could to attempt to pull only one or two of them at a time, but as soon as we had two, we were pounced on and knocked down and downed in a matter of seconds, and if we did manage to get one, he reset before getting down to even 50% health. The reset range on them feels very short, which makes it very difficult for a group without a heavy plate wearer/tank able to take them down. From my understanding of the design philosophy, certain professions shouldn’t be necessary for success. Even with all of us equipping stun breakers, using support skills and attempting to keep out of the way of the knockdowns, they moved too quickly and had such a short leash that if we dodged away, they reset, and if we stayed close we died.

I understand our group wasn’t exactly optimal, but again, my understanding is that while some group configurations will be optimal, all group configurations should be able to be successful if the individuals are competent and organized. I’m not suggesting the entire dungeon be changed around our experience, but I feel this particular mob needs examining.

I’ll be honest, I’ve done Leurent with 2 elementalists, a mesmer, me (thief) and an engineer.
None of us were tank-specced. It’s all about timing your dodges.
I will say, however, that the pull is way too hard, and either the knights standing around him need a nerf, or they need to be spread out so you can pull one at a time.
I have yet to see anyone be able to just rush in, kill them all in one go, without resetting /wiping.

If it was easier to pull just the one and keep him pulled long enough to take them down one at a time, it would have been challenging but certainly doable with the group we had. Our problem was indeed that they just couldn’t be separated. I agree, either they as a group need a nerf or allow us to pull them more easily to get them on their own.

Detail: Leurent as boss is forward forward not forward up.

Those knights are the hardest ennemies in TA, including all bosses, which is surprising considering they’re only silver “trash”.

This is one of the harder parts of TA and the only time I’ve managed to reliably pull one at a time is when we chain pull, e.g. I do necrotic grasp and a thief standing behind me does scorpion wire immediately after. Of course I can’t say I’ve run it without a kiting ability as I only have one character high enough to do it and it’s a necro.

Nevertheless generally you aggro all 3 knights and Leurent when you pull one – doesn’t matter even if you have necrotic grasp or scorpion wire; they all come running – you have to have the whole party focus on the one knight. Sometimes that one knight you had initially targetted will start walking away and regenerating HP but another knight that was drawn to your group is busy smashing someone to bits – your group has to quickly switch targets to pin that knight down and take care of it.

You don’t necessarily have to pull the knights back too far – in fact they don’t come out too far before they reset, so you want to stay fairly close. As long as you’re fixated on damaging the one knight and dodging and ignoring the others, they will reset on their own.

neck.2159:

Detail: Leurent as boss is forward forward not forward up.

Those knights are the hardest ennemies in TA, including all bosses, which is surprising considering they’re only silver “trash”.

Oops, you’re right, I get the two paths mixed up. I’ll edit to change that.

ANet made those changes. Around a month ago or two, it was possible to pull only one at a time using the wire without aggroing the others. When the CoF exploits started people started trying to exploit TA as well and when they changed TA a bit they also changed that part, making it nearly impossible to do. I’m not exaggerating when I say that when I run fwr fwr I pray that we make it.
Never the less it it doable. When i run it with my normal TA group we always make it, ad we also don’t have any “tanky” people in it.
Like someone above said, the chain pull works, but no always. As long as you have people that won’t quit after dying once or twice you’ll find your way to deal with those.
Tips:
If you have a thief and an Ele, all the others say waaay back so they don’t aggro the other knights. Have the Ele pull and immediately after use Static field on the other 3.
The thief pulls again and then focus on killing the pulled one, repeat.

The encounter is fine the only suggestion I have is to remove the poison flowers that are around that room just to give people some more space to spread out and make the encounter more doable.

It doesn’t matter what professions you are. You just have to all coordinate your CCs (crowd control for the uninitiated) skills which every profession has to shut them down before they can shut you down. If chain them correctly, you can even do it without pulling by completely shutting down their attacks, but that’s only for competent, coordinated teams and not something a PuG could achieve

Also, you are hitting another misconception: warriors and guardians will get destroyed by the knights if they take the two hit combo. What you can do to tank is use blocks or invulnerability mechanics to negate damage and take the hits instead of the party until the two-attack combo is off cooldown again which mesmers and eles can do equally effectively but they all can’t maintain it indefinitely.

Thieves can spam Black Powder with pistol offhand to keep them perma-blind, use tripwire to knock them down as they leap over or immobilize with devourer venom.

Engineers have access can have blind+immobilize/daze or knockback + plenty of other knocks be it bomb kit, turret or gadget.

Rangers rely on pet Ai to land their pet’s CCs so are pretty meh in that department but still have snares from muddy terrain and entangle, try entangling before they leap though else all the roots will just get destroyed if timed wrongly.

Necros have Well of Darkness and the other wells also serve as combo fields for more blind spamming opportunities and fears to keep them shutdown.

Mesmers can spam interrupts through daze/knock/pulls and if all else fails, Moa one of silvers and that 10 second should be plenty of time to kill the other knight(s).

Staff eles can pre-blind with lightning surge to make the first earthshakers miss then chill/cripple/immobilize so their Earth shaker becomes more obvious as the knights reach the 600 leap distance. Dagger offhand ele can interrupt with earthquake+updraft and focus offhand can tank with obsidian flesh and interrupt with daze.

Try looking at your skills some more and try different things. These skills are on such a long cooldown because they are so powerful when used correctly. If you aren’t on VOIP you could try planning saying I’ll use X then you use Y etc etc these dungeons are meant to test your coordination.

Fay.2735:

The encounter is fine the only suggestion I have is to remove the poison flowers that are around that room just to give people some more space to spread out and make the encounter more doable.

I think the blossoms are meant to be there so you can hit ’em to rally should you fail to CC/dodge and get two-shotted into downed state. The Earthshaker is really easy to dodge though once you get the timing right, the telegraph is the WHOOSH audio cue and the knight flying across the screen (dodge then!) with a short delay before he lands with the SMACK.

So what happens when your CCs run out, hm? Due to the massive amounts of HP most mobs have, they will simply outlast your CCs, then it’s back to the grinder.
The only question is whether you have enough overcompensating gear to brute force them, otherwise you have to kite like an episode of Benny Hill.

Stop pretending there’s any strategy here, there’s too much HP to allow this.

You’re obviously not stacking any might/vulnerability or using fury at all if any trash mob takes more than 30 seconds to kill. You should be able to squeeze out at least 10 seconds from each party member so there’s plenty of leeway. And FYI Interrupting/negating the Earthshaker component puts it on a 5 second. There’s even a dodge button/free blossom rally for when you mess up!

So you’d rather have the mobs die in 10 seconds and have no challenge at all?

Ah yes, here we go. “Do this cookie cutter build or you have nothing to complain about”.
Maybe I want to stack toughness and be support, apparently that makes me unviable for dungeons?
Isn’t that flying in the face of Arenanet’s supposed design philosophy?

Moreover, trash mobs are just that. Trash. Leave the challenge to the bosses.
Artificially high HP is not a challenge anyway. It’s just tedious.

Stacking might on allies and vulnerability on enemies isn’t a form of support now?

Melee/tankish support. If I wanted to use a staff I’d roll a caster.

Every class also has stability. you are able to redo your traits as long as you are out of combat at any point. redo as in pick different major traits any time out of combat. people forget this feature. many of us have said over and over, going glass canon and dungeons just dont mix well. Anyone ever consider making a build with the foresight of thinking, well this major trait works in 90% of all situations but if I pick this other traits line, if i have to change for a specific encounter, ill have this other major trait for it.

Also it cost 3s to respec. Might want to when doing a specific dungeon. its a lot of work right? Sure beats wasting 2 hours on a dungeon because no one has the abilities to handle mobs in that dungeon.

“Leashing” is the only way I’ve seen these beaten Cleanly

Those knights are the hardest ennemies in TA, including all bosses, which is surprising considering they’re only silver “trash”.

I’d say they’re the hardest hitting enemy in any Dungeon. Every one of their instant-activation attacks seems to one-shot most players. People will claim you can dodge them but what those people are actually doing is anticipating the attack b/c they’ve died to it so many times that they have the “Rote” memorized. But me, I don’t do TA anymore and they’re one of the biggest reasons …and it’s for the same reasons I don’t “Jump through Hoops” to repeat content that’s bugged, b/c it just reminds me that this is a game that was released 2 months ago. It’s not just “unpolished”. It’s a big ugly Goiter. I can’t enjoy that level of un-professionalism in game design, and I couldn’t really get into Gw1 very much either until around 2007 b/c in 2005 & 2006 it still felt so unpolished.

Look at my skill suggestions again. The weapon CC’s are a core mechanic and swapping in. And refusing to swap out even one utility skill when you know is just plain stupid. But if you DON’T know what every skill does I’d suggest experimenting more on your profession instead of being hard-headed.

If you want to use a staff you’d roll a caster? That’s just plain refusing to use your character to full potential given every situation. I personally carry every weapon possible, it can even be green, not being flexible is just terrible in the dungeon environment where they want you to be able to adapt.

As a guardian, you can easily shut down two of the leaps by interrupting with Shield of Absorption/blind with Ray of Judgement/Binding Blade’s pull/Ring of Warding or Line of Warding. That’s easily 10 seconds worth of the encounter through weapon skills alone.

You don’t have to use a cookie cutter build, just learn to play more efficiently.

Adaptability is emphasized in Anet’s dungeon design philosophy, just been hard-headed alone already means you are in for a rough time.

Asagi.1405:

Melee/tankish support. If I wanted to use a staff I’d roll a caster.

Fair enough. ANet’s supposed design philosophy might be to play how you want and use a build that suits you. But they’ve given each class X amount of traits and Y amount of skills, and some of these are more useful in dungeons than others. You don’t even have to retrait if you don’t want to run to the vendor and spend the few bits of silver, but you may have to swap out one or two skills or use a specific weapon that would be more effective in particular instances.

The reason you are able to swap out different skills as long as you are not in combat is so that you can be flexible and put in your best, using the skillset that would be most useful for the part of the dungeon you’re about to approach. I would never use necrotic grasp in normal PvE environments but it’s constantly sliding in and out of my utility slots in TA.

Being stubborn and sticking to your unique non-cookie cutter build is like saying ANet gave my class 3 main hand weapons, 3 off hand weapons, 3 two handed weapons and after evaluating all my options, I’ve decided to bring a butter knife to a gun fight.