My opinion of Dredge Fractal
This boss involves a strategy that relies heavily on the lava buckets. My group and I had troubles our first few times too.
The boss only takes relevant damage when under the superheated effect. Also, under superheated, the boss cannot heal effectively because your attack will stun him. You should aim to keep superheated (via lava buckets) on him as much as possible.
Try these steps next time:
- Have the entire team range him as you lure him to an available lava bucket.
- Make sure he gets hit by the lava to trigger super heated.
- Repeat the first two steps IMMEDIATELY, keeping him under superheated UNTIL his hp is low enough for you to burst him to death (~10% or whatever you think is low enough). One possibility is to repeat this clockwise around the room. Your range damage will eventually get him low, so keep this going.
From your post, it sounds like you tried to kill him after the first bucket instead of keeping up superheated permanently, which can cause problems.
I would also add to not immobilize, cripple, chill, etc … the boss between the lava bucket spots because if you slow him down too much, he will lose the super heated debuff and will manage to regen. Keep these immo, cripple etc for when he is under the lava bucket to make sure he gets it.
Our group just puts one person on buckets, and the rest on dps. We only use one side of the room, going back and forth between two buckets. As was mentioned above you just want the debuff on him as much as possible, so having the whole group kiting him under a bucket, debuff him, then immediately move to the next bucket is a sure fire way to keep him from healing at all.
what we become later only depends
on how hard we try and how good we want to become.” -HannaDeFreitas
You need to be very fast with an interrupt to prevent healing. So if you haven’t all got a handy interrupt on your weapons or are running out of range too much, the boss is just going to heal up. It’s also a fight where you can gain a massive amount of net damage from characters staying on their feet and avoiding revives.
It is better to use 2 close buckets and go back and forth between them instead of going around the entire room. It helps the guy running the oil a lot.
You need to be very fast with an interrupt to prevent healing. So if you haven’t all got a handy interrupt on your weapons or are running out of range too much, the boss is just going to heal up. It’s also a fight where you can gain a massive amount of net damage from characters staying on their feet and avoiding revives.
Under superheated, you can interrupt him by attacking him. It’s a special quality of superheated and one of the reasons you should keep him under it.
I would also add to not immobilize, cripple, chill, etc … the boss between the lava bucket spots because if you slow him down too much, he will lose the super heated debuff and will manage to regen. Keep these immo, cripple etc for when he is under the lava bucket to make sure he gets it.
This. Keep him moving. Pets on passive.
Also make sure the person who is on switches doesn’t attack the boss while he’s running them, as the bosses might sometimes run up the ramp and ruin everything… Superheated lasts for 30 seconds so that is the amount of time you have to get him from one bucket to the next. Make sure everyone is going in the same direction so you can control him easily. Few things more annoying in this game than people kiting him all over the place, throwing off his movement. Evading their aoe attacks is crucial, especially the ice ele’s since the agony stacks. Also I generally ignore the adds, always focus damage on the boss to get him down as fast as possible. Lastly, superheated makes your regular attacks do lots of damage – don’t bother with conditions as their damage doesn’t get boosted by superheated.
Now as a warrior, I range him the whole time of course, but if you see a quick oppurtunity if his aggro isnt on you. 1. Pop endure pain (Optional) 2. 100b him quickly. 3. Dodgeroll/Rush away back to the team and range again. This will bring DPS WAYY higher.
Additionally, on guardian. Ofc, I range with scepter. When i see the right time, Boom, Whirlwind with GS, drop symbol, binding blade, etc… then leap back towards team and go back to scepter.
Do I die? Yes, sometimes the boss 1 hits me. Does it happen alot? With practice, I will die maybe 1 out of 5 times I do it and its entirely my fault due to lack of skill or notice etc… Its possible.
I always tend to do this in the ‘move around the room in a circle’ method. For myself, as the person managing buckets (Guardian), I slot a speed boost (retreat) and use the speed boost on my weapon as well (Staff #3), and I make sure I have handy condition removal incase I get chilled. My job is to keep moving and not get bogged down. My team’s job is to get the boss to where I need to drop hot metal on him.
When I’m not running buckets, it’s all about ranged damage as the group falls back to the next bucket. To me, it’s actually more important to have people in position to draw the boss then to do max damage while moving between buckets, You have a chance to apply heavy DPS when he’s standing where you want him and you have a 2-3 second window while the bucket turns over, then, back to running!
In higher level fractals, you need two things as the person on the buckets:
- To have the lowest functional value to the team during the fight.
- To be amazing at dodging all 3 hits of the Powersuit’s Agony.
Needless to say, I’m always the one on the buckets. Necromancer just doesn’t offer as much to the team as the Guardian or Warrior or Mesmer in terms of dps against the Powersuit/Ice Ele (Condition damage is not boosted when he’s superheated). Let me point out that your Guardian(s) should never be the ones on the buckets if you can avoid it; you want their reflects and support in the fray (particularly the aoe Aegis). Your Mesmer and ranged DPS attackers should also never be on the buckets for the same reason. Necromancers and condition Rangers are the best at this role because they have passive 25% movement signets and have alternate ways to dodge the Agony attack (SB 3 on Ranger, DS on Necro). Necro also has the Signet of Undeath which he should run during this event to pop up downs ASAP on the ground from range. Engineers are good too if they’re traited for permanent Swiftness.
It’s also critical to know when to dodge the Powersuit Agony attack!
The Trick: Wait 1.5 seconds after Stability pops on the boss, then double-dodge.
If you don’t save both dodges or some other blocking skill, you will not dodge them all, and you will get downed. You can actually avoid the down if you’re packing 35 AR and have max HP and your heal skill up, but either way the damage is avoidable so try to mitigate it if you can.
For the record, I much prefer moving clockwise to going back and forth. This is especially valuable against the Ice Ele, because you’re moving him one direction only and don’t have to run by him, which gives him easy opportunities to aoe Agony your team to kingdom come. A good runner on the buckets will have no more/less trouble going clockwise/counterclockwise than he would going back and forth between two buckets.
(edited by Rising Dusk.2408)
I appreciate all the tips, I will share this with my group and see how it goes…Thank you!
My problem with this is not the lava or the heal… Its the Aggro system. When I am on top I get aggro all the time, so does everyone else. This means he never goes under the bucket… THIS must be fixed.
It’s funny that you said that, that also happened to us occasionally.
I don’t have any issues with the boss. Actually both bosses (Mining Suit and Elemental) are pretty decent. What kills me is the seemingly endless stream of trash mobs that spam protection, regen, CC and AoE, and are immune to blind.
Dredge is an incredibly tedious fractal. Everyone I do 48s with hates it.
Let me point out that your Guardian(s) should never be the ones on the buckets if you can avoid it; you want their reflects and support in the fray (particularly the aoe Aegis).
Weeeeelll, this can be true to a point, although a guardian’s dps on this boss is pretty sad with a scepter compared to the ranger. Besides, Guardian has 3 speed boosts to play with – Retreat, Save Yourself, Staff 3.
I always do the bucket on my Guardian when I go up, true we don’t have a neccie in the party which is odd, think we would have picked one up by now since we usually PuG the 5th. Have stopped bothering with Wall of Reflection on the boss since his own bombs barely do any dmg anymore (considering his HP pool) – and ppl have learnt to dodge properly by now – and also have found on more than one occasion the Wall being ineffective at doing what it should do, reflect.
To the OP, just need to do the fractal a number of times until everyone is on the same skill-level page. Not everyone figures things out at the same time.
I don’t have any issues with the boss. Actually both bosses (Mining Suit and Elemental) are pretty decent. What kills me is the seemingly endless stream of trash mobs that spam protection, regen, CC and AoE, and are immune to blind.
Dredge is an incredibly tedious fractal. Everyone I do 48s with hates it.
Yeah, this ^. Irritating and tedious, the amount of time you have to spend in there….who cares about the 75 million Heavy Mining Bags – where’s my precursor, lol!!
What makes me laugh the most is when we get Dredge as first fractal and the PuG wants to skip it….and then we get it as 2nd or 3rd Fractal with the Grawl Shaman between
“I am not a complete idiot, there are some components missing still!” …
Guardian can avoid agony of dredge suit pretty easily with focus 5 too (cd match quite well) and provide boons to the party at buckets so it’s not such a bad choice on lvl 40+. They have easy access to speed boost too. In my guild group we generally have 2 guardians, one of them do buckets. I don’t grab wall of reflection now as they changed how the suits aim them. Before he would generally aim them directly at players but now they are quite spread. Feedback bubble of mesmer is still really useful but WoR not so much anymore imho.
I have no problem with last boss in dredge fractal.
What I do have problem with is that is too kitten long. It takes almost an hour to complete since it has too many mini “events” you have to complete to finish it. It suffers the same problem as cliffside. It just takes too long with poorly implemented swarm design.
If you ask me I would split cliffside and dredge in half and make 2 fractals instead of one, thats how many encounters it has.
15-20mins per fractal is more than enough simply because you have to do 3 of them in a row + bonus Maw lvl if you want a chest. More than 20 minutes is just overkill.