Guild Wars 2

I have recently fallen in love with Giganticus Lupicus! I love everything about him, from his doggy dog charms to his appropriately monstrous health pool.

Learning to fight him alone with a DPS-heavy setup is a real kick. You get better as you learn his animations and eventually you can even predict and bait out his next attacks (particularly in P1). For the most part, when you mess up you get punished for it, and while you can often recover, even if you do go down you know it was due to a mistake you can correct next time.

Could ANet possibly spare a few dev hours to give us moar solo-ish super tough bosses like Lupi? I’m certain there are others like me who really enjoyed doing this, it feels like one of the few bright spots in PvE that do GW2’s action/reactive gameplay justice.

I think one of the things that makes Lupicus stand out, is that he has multiple phases. That really ensures that the boss does not outstay his welcome. A lot of other bosses in the game just take very long to kill, and do not introduce any new mechanics during the whole fight. Lupicus actually changes his behavior, that’s good.

But there are also bad things about Lupicus. I don’t think his moves are very readable. And his instant summon grub on top of player mechanic is very illogical, and hard to see. With enough practice, you learn when to dodge. But it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and some attacks are just unclear (the devs could take some lessons from console games). I also don’t like how you don’t actually see him getting stronger, unless you are watching that tiny icon underneath his health bar that is really hard to read. That could be improved. Overall though, he may be the best boss in the game.

I’d disagree that his moves can’t be read, and the only instant grub I can think of comes in the P2 transition. Sure the hand-raise is a bit weird but it wouldn’t take a player too long to figure it out on their own even without outside help.

shimmerless.4560:

I’d disagree that his moves can’t be read, and the only instant grub I can think of comes in the P2 transition. Sure the hand-raise is a bit weird but it wouldn’t take a player too long to figure it out on their own even without outside help.

That’s exactly what’s wrong with it. This could easily be solved if we saw him cast something, and a beam landed on the player to show that they were directly being struck by an attack. It would provide context to where the grub is coming from.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

shimmerless.4560:

I’d disagree that his moves can’t be read, and the only instant grub I can think of comes in the P2 transition. Sure the hand-raise is a bit weird but it wouldn’t take a player too long to figure it out on their own even without outside help.

That’s exactly what’s wrong with it. This could easily be solved if we saw him cast something, and a beam landed on the player to show that they were directly being struck by an attack. It would provide context to where the grub is coming from.

He’s making a hella huge swing with his right hand and you get a visible green cloud on your character when it hits.

How is that not context enough.

The problem is that there’s no indication that the hand wave is something that you can dodge. In fact, it makes no sense that dodging this attack would do anything. If there was an an animation that connected the hand wave to the target player it would be a lot better.

That being said, by now everyone knows how to evade the grub spawn and it is easy to learn how to do it. All of his other attacks are fine, except I think making the locust spawn dependent on RNG was not the greatest design choice.

Phase transitions could be more obvious. The p2→p3 transition is OK but it is easy to miss p1→p2 unless you are watching his health bar (“playing the UI”).

Lupicus, while being a good fight, is a poor representation of a good 5-man dungeon boss, because he can be solo’d (with effort, I’ll give you this), in this sense it’s a bit flawed, on another hand, this is possible due to the dodge mechanic, which means the boss works great for GW2 standards (telegraphed animations are fair but punishing).

I’d love to have more fights like this, but I’d prefer for Anet to fix the current broken AI on most bosses we currently have who don’t use their AoEs properly (looking at you, spider queen, Kholer and every other bosses who use their AoEs exclusively as gap closers.. Dumb).

Bragdras.9572:

Lupicus, while being a good fight, is a poor representation of a good 5-man dungeon boss, because he can be solo’d (with effort, I’ll give you this), in this sense it’s a bit flawed, on another hand, this is possible due to the dodge mechanic, which means the boss works great for GW2 standards (telegraphed animations are fair but punishing).

I’d love to have more fights like this, but I’d prefer for Anet to fix the current broken AI on most bosses we currently have who don’t use their AoEs properly (looking at you, spider queen, Kholer and every other bosses who use their AoEs exclusively as gap closers.. Dumb).

Nearly every boss can be solo’ed. That is a good thing. A boss that can’t be solo’ed usually means that a dps team is simply bursting him down before he can rip your team apart which is horrible design. I can’t really think of any middle ground right now but feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

Just for the record, lupicus actually has a really low health pool compared to most bosses. I think.

Syn Sity.5826:

Bragdras.9572:

Lupicus, while being a good fight, is a poor representation of a good 5-man dungeon boss, because he can be solo’d (with effort, I’ll give you this), in this sense it’s a bit flawed, on another hand, this is possible due to the dodge mechanic, which means the boss works great for GW2 standards (telegraphed animations are fair but punishing).

I’d love to have more fights like this, but I’d prefer for Anet to fix the current broken AI on most bosses we currently have who don’t use their AoEs properly (looking at you, spider queen, Kholer and every other bosses who use their AoEs exclusively as gap closers.. Dumb).

Nearly every boss can be solo’ed. That is a good thing. A boss that can’t be solo’ed usually means that a dps team is simply bursting him down before he can rip your team apart which is horrible design. I can’t really think of any middle ground right now but feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

Just for the record, lupicus actually has a really low health pool compared to most bosses. I think.

You should be able to out heal any damage a boss does.

Syn Sity.5826:

A boss that can’t be solo’ed usually means that a dps team is simply bursting him down before he can rip your team apart which is horrible design.

That’s like, 90% of the bosses in this game…

Who the hell even invented this “dps team bursting down bosses before they do damage”.

It sounds stupidier than things I’ve said in middle school.

Mob’s Health in Arah:
Lvl 75 Orrians: 13.757
Lvl 80 Trash: 15.774
Lvl 81 Trash: 16.232
Lvl 82 Trash: 16.697
Lvl 83 Trash: 17.162
Lvl 80 Elite Adds: 129.776
Lvl 80 Elites: 157.269
Lvl 82 Elites: 166.496
Lvl 80 Champs: 630.960
Lvl 83 Champs: 686.460
Lvl 80 Bosses: 1.376.340
Lvl 82 Bosses: 1.456.840
Lvl 83 Bosses: 1.497.440

Mob’s health in HotW:
Level 80 Bosses: 7.284.000

Arah is accurate data, HotW just what i would expect.

Good 5 men teams should do over 50k dps against most enemies. Optimal teams about 70k dps.

+1 for OP. The fact that you have the whole range from “can’t kill, too impossible” to “we killed it in 14 seconds” to “I soloed it after trying and failing for a week straight” means that it’s highly skill and coordination based.

I love the lupi fight because it’s interesting and requires actually managing skills and cooldowns beyond rotating reflects. And I actually feel a sense of accomplishment when I beat it. The downside is, I can’t convince my guildies to run it with me =(

A boss that can’t be solo’ed usually means that a dps team is simply bursting him down before he can rip your team apart which is horrible design. I can’t really think of any middle ground right now but feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

Passing aggro across the group, group heals, group boons, utils like reflects (!!), more interrupts.

But in general yeah, it all comes down to “more effective-stats” or “more ability to spam skills at boss”. Which is boring, and with even middle-bosses having huge HP pools (HOTW P1, the guy giving the pep talk to the sons of svanir? wtf…), it cuts down on feasibility of anything other than pure zerk since it takes forever to kill them otherwise. As in, set auto attack, go eat dinner, come back, and it’ll be just about finished.

I really hate bosses that simply have so many hitpoints, that fighting them solo is simply unfeasible. I also hate bosses that do a lot of unavoidable damage, so that any solo player simply dies due to running out of heals. Those are bad boss designs. And I think that is one of the things that makes Lupi a good boss. It is entirely skill based, and all his attacks can be avoided. He’s not constantly spamming ambient damage effects, or throwing a hale of ranged attacks. He just has a few attacks, and you can avoid them all. More bosses should be like that.

The fact that he can be DPS’d to death in seconds is a problem with the game mechanics, and not with the boss. Gear currently isn’t balanced very well. Zerker gear is absurdly effective, while defensive gear does not scale well in end game content.

In my opinion, defensive gear scales too well!

Dub.1273:

Mob’s Health in Arah:
Lvl 75 Orrians: 13.757
Lvl 80 Trash: 15.774
Lvl 81 Trash: 16.232
Lvl 82 Trash: 16.697
Lvl 83 Trash: 17.162
Lvl 80 Elite Adds: 129.776
Lvl 80 Elites: 157.269
Lvl 82 Elites: 166.496
Lvl 80 Champs: 630.960
Lvl 83 Champs: 686.460
Lvl 80 Bosses: 1.376.340
Lvl 82 Bosses: 1.456.840
Lvl 83 Bosses: 1.497.440

Mob’s health in HotW:
Level 80 Bosses: 7.284.000

Arah is accurate data, HotW just what i would expect.

Good 5 men teams should do over 50k dps against most enemies. Optimal teams about 70k dps.

God bless America.

Yes, would love more bosses like Lupi.

It would be great, but I’ve no hopes they’ll add anything Lupi-like soon.
After Liadri I thought they were gonna release more cool solo stuff, but they didn’t.

People want easy-zerg content, not hard-solo content.

I only dislike one thing about this epic boss: the long walk to the arena.

Adding a waypoint could really reduce the amount of time this dungeon takes in an inexperienced group.

As it is now, the boss is a real challenge for our guild groups. We’re not very good at this game, but quite persistent. Even so: when we fail for the 2nd time, usually someone goes afk to get a drink, or stretch their legs. Then after the 3rd and 4th attempt, someone needs to hang the laundry out to dry or has to restart the game.

Our guild – Arah runs so far have ended after 4-7 hours in the game. (Yes we got stuck on path 4 due to a lack of damage.) And while I am ok with hard content, I don’t like hard content that is also very long. Since it makes it very hard to get a group together. (If someone suggest Arah at 21:00, we just have to say no, because some of us usually have stuff to do the next morning.)

I don’t really see why there need to be so few waypoints in this long dungeon?

This reminds me of my beginnings in Arah

I’d say take your time to watch the videos from the top PvE guilds, and keep trying. Try to LoS the trash mobs and gather them for easier cleaving, learn the encounters and strat dodging. You might want to play a near meta build, with zerker, ruby orbs and dps traits, all the while keeping some “safety” utilities in order to push yourself higher.

Try to have fun though, don’t push yourself too hard from the beginning

If you’re new to Lupicus try to avoid P1. The waypoint that is supposed to spawn after tar boss only spawns at the end of the dungeon because ANet are worthless at producing non-buggy content and even worse at acknowledging/fixing these bugs. If you wipe at Lupicus the run back takes about 5+ minutes which is extremely tiresome.

Try to practice in P2, which has the shortest wp run back. P3/4 are a bit longer runs back but P3 in particular is generally considered easiest of all the paths.

I personally love fighting Lupi and primarily run Arah every day for this reason. IMO he is a good test of skill. His attacks are telegraphed a bit but if you mess up you will be punished for sure. I love this fight and wish ANet would make more bosses like this.