Guild Wars 2

First off, Im just going to state for the record that I am not an elitist nor do I have that mentality. I believe that any group should be able to complete any content no matter what the composition is or the type of build people run. I am strongly opposed to people/game doing “gear checks” on others for any reason.

So I wanted to do Path 4 of Arah and after doing the other paths, I learned most of Arah. (Heck, I even tried path 2 solo, got up to Lupi and died on him for 3 hrs nonstop).

Attempt #1: So I got together with a PuG (2 ranger, 1mesmer, 2warrior; I am a warrior). We get through pretty decently with some hiccups here and there but for the most part pretty good. We got to Dwyana and after about 2hrs we got through it. However, we got to the last part and it bugged.

Attempt #2: Second PuG I join the group at Dwyana (3 warriors, 1 Guardian, 1 mesmer). Everyone in this group was in Tank builds so naturally they are going to have a problem. We are stuck after about two hours of us trying. Now, 1 person in this group really really sucks at the boss. He didn’t follow orders, and he appeared clueless half the time. FInally, he gave up and he leaves. We replace him with a Necro and do Dwyana in 1 go (5min). (Best Necro I have ever seen, btw). I warn everyone about the bug and how to avoid it, yet unfortunately for me I lag out for 30min and they finish without me.

Attempt #3: By this point I am tired of this mess. I join a group and ask if everyone knows the path and if everyone is specced DPS (2 warrior, 1 Engi, 1 Ele, 1 Ranger). They all say yes and we go off. We get to Dwayna and then we are stuck. After 2hr we find that our other warrior is not specced DPS but is specced tank. We ask him to switch to DPS but he doesnt want too so he leaves. We pick up a Guardian who is specced DPS. After another 2hr of attempts, we are on the edge of giving up. Now this is where the sour part of the story comes in. The Ranger in the group wasnt pulling her weight. She was specced DPS but insisted on doing the tears. Unfortunately she was bad at it, and people would spend 10-20sec frozen at times, she would also stand there and not attack the boss between petrifies. She also used melee and would end up getting downed when she was supposed to stay in the back and throw tears at people. It pains me to say this, but we kicked her out. I really did not want to do it, but I could not see any other choice besides giving up completely. We tried everything, every strat posted and still no good. We replaced her with a warrior (2 warrior, 1 ele, 1 engi, 1 guardian) and we did the boss in 10min. This time I do not lag out and we didnt get the bug and I finish the path.

I guess the moral of the story is that the boss is way too overtuned. Most of the people who do this path just do not have the precision to complete the boss. It takes a level of awareness the average person does not have. It also is a glorified DPS check where only certain builds or class combinations can win. It seriously needs to be made so that regen on Dwayna is halved or even more. Sparks should not aggro on pets as well.

I guess Im just happy to be done with it, but at the same time feel really bad for kicking someone to do it. Im sure Im not the first to kick people out at this part for having the wrong build or the equipment (people with tank armor cannot/should not just go spend 15g on zerkers set to complete 1 boss). Some people are also naturally “bad” at playing the game. While I do not mind playing with these people, the game should not force me to think differently about doing so, and unfortunately it made do something I never wanted to do.

The only thing overtuned with this boss is the speed of her petrify application move, almost undodgeable. Devs are improving sparks behavior this patch so it should solve most issues with them changing aggro. You don’t need 5 zerkers to do it.

haviz.1340:

The only thing overtuned with this boss is the speed of her petrify application move, almost undodgeable. Devs are improving sparks behavior this patch so it should solve most issues with them changing aggro. You don’t need 5 zerkers to do it.

The problem with the boss isn’t spark aggro. If you understand how they aggro and attack then they are a non-issue. The problem is that others do not understand how it works.

For almost every boss in this game, the average player does not have to go learn every single mechanic of that boss (i.e. telegraphed moves, how to dodge attacks, position factors, when to range, when to melee, when to aggro, when not to aggro etc. etc.). This boss completely destroys that mentality and makes it so either your group is specced in mass DPS or your group learns what to do in every single situation during the fight and still has enough DPS to actually pull that off. If you get even 1 person in the group that does not want to take the time to learn every single mechanic or does not follow directions, the fight literally becomes impossible and you are forced to kick them or try endlessly for hours and just waste time for everyone.

Why should people have to go through that? Its unfair for the party as well as the person being kicked. Im all for challenging and interesting content, but this one maybe a tad to far.

And no I never said you have to have 5 zerker warriors to do this. I did it with a necro and an engi in my group. But having everyone max DPS makes it a hell of lot easier.

Diviner.7405:

The problem with the boss isn’t spark aggro. If you understand how they aggro and attack then they are a non-issue. The problem is that others do not understand how it works.

For almost every boss in this game, the average player does not have to go learn every single mechanic of that boss (i.e. telegraphed moves, how to dodge attacks, position factors, when to range, when to melee, when to aggro, when not to aggro etc. etc.). This boss completely destroys that mentality and makes it so either your group is specced in mass DPS or your group learns what to do in every single situation during the fight and still has enough DPS to actually pull that off. If you get even 1 person in the group that does not want to take the time to learn every single mechanic or does not follow directions, the fight literally becomes impossible and you are forced to kick them or try endlessly for hours and just waste time for everyone.

Why should people have to go through that? Its unfair for the party as well as the person being kicked. Im all for challenging and interesting content, but this one maybe a tad to far.

And no I never said you have to have 5 zerker warriors to do this. I did it with a necro and an engi in my group. But having everyone max DPS makes it a hell of lot easier.

And how learning the boss fight is a bad thing when most bosses require no knowledge whatsoever? There are a lot of bosses that have interesting and unique mechanics, yet average player (even dungeon master) doesn’t even know about them and just faceroll them. I thought dungeons were supposed to be for hardcore pvers, an equivalent of raids in other mmos.

You can have 3 clueless people and 2 that knows exactly what to do. The only thing that matters is to tell them to go on the side to avoid getting aggro of sparks. Seriously, I did it yesterday with 3 people with about 1000-1500 achievement points and they were ranger, necro and thief. That can’t be that hard.

haviz.1340:

Diviner.7405:

The problem with the boss isn’t spark aggro. If you understand how they aggro and attack then they are a non-issue. The problem is that others do not understand how it works.

For almost every boss in this game, the average player does not have to go learn every single mechanic of that boss (i.e. telegraphed moves, how to dodge attacks, position factors, when to range, when to melee, when to aggro, when not to aggro etc. etc.). This boss completely destroys that mentality and makes it so either your group is specced in mass DPS or your group learns what to do in every single situation during the fight and still has enough DPS to actually pull that off. If you get even 1 person in the group that does not want to take the time to learn every single mechanic or does not follow directions, the fight literally becomes impossible and you are forced to kick them or try endlessly for hours and just waste time for everyone.

Why should people have to go through that? Its unfair for the party as well as the person being kicked. Im all for challenging and interesting content, but this one maybe a tad to far.

And no I never said you have to have 5 zerker warriors to do this. I did it with a necro and an engi in my group. But having everyone max DPS makes it a hell of lot easier.

And how learning the boss fight is a bad thing when most bosses require no knowledge whatsoever? There are a lot of bosses that have interesting and unique mechanics, yet average player (even dungeon master) doesn’t even know about them and just faceroll them. I thought dungeons were supposed to be for hardcore pvers, an equivalent of raids in other mmos.

You can have 3 clueless people and 2 that knows exactly what to do. The only thing that matters is to tell them to go on the side to avoid getting aggro of sparks. Seriously, I did it yesterday with 3 people with about 1000-1500 achievement points and they were ranger, necro and thief. That can’t be that hard.

Because the problem becomes when you have to rely on other people to get it done. Unfortunately, I cannot tell people to sit on the side as I am full DPS warrior for this path which means I am being constantly petrified by the boss since she conveniently targets the highest dps. This means you are forced to assign people roles on what to do in order to complete this thing. I should not be forced to sit there spamming “Unfreeze me” because the people that need to be throwing the tears are too clueless to take initiative and be ready to unfreeze me right after I am frozen. And no matter how many times I tell people to look for the icons, they still do not understand that.

Does that make me in the right to kick someone because they are bad? I do not think Anet should make me ask that question in the first place.

Instead of having 1 boss make the difference between a successful run and hours wasted, why not just buff up the other bosses slightly.

Balth, Mal, Lyssa, and Grenth are facerolls compared to this. You never wipe on them as 2 of them never seem to actually attack you and the other 2 do barely any damage to you that it does not matter.

Make Dwayna easier and buff the other priests to a respectable level. This keeps the challenge to the path while removing the impossible factor.

Diviner.7405:

Because the problem becomes when you have to rely on other people to get it done. Unfortunately, I cannot tell people to sit on the side as I am full DPS warrior for this path which means I am being constantly petrified by the boss since she conveniently targets the highest dps. This means you are forced to assign people roles on what to do in order to complete this thing. I should not be forced to sit there spamming “Unfreeze me” because the people that need to be throwing the tears are too clueless to take initiative and be ready to unfreeze me right after I am frozen. And no matter how many times I tell people to look for the icons, they still do not understand that.

Does that make me in the right to kick someone because they are bad? I do not think Anet should make me ask that question in the first place.

Instead of having 1 boss make the difference between a successful run and hours wasted, why not just buff up the other bosses slightly.

Balth, Mal, Lyssa, and Grenth are facerolls compared to this. You never wipe on them as 2 of them never seem to actually attack you and the other 2 do barely any damage to you that it does not matter.

Make Dwayna easier and buff the other priests to a respectable level. This keeps the challenge to the path while removing the impossible factor.

If you’re full dps warrior, until new patch comes live, you can just dodge deadeye’s stare. I

If they’re bad enough and can’t comprehend simple commands, yes, you should kick them. Someone dragging whole team down deserves to be kicked. It’s a team game.

The only problem with this boss is that it takes all five party members to pull their weight. Which in my opinion makes it the single best fight in the game.

We completed this with 2 thiefs, 1 Mesmer, 1 elementalist (not specced full dps) and me, a cleric’s geared guardian. Only me and the ele knew each other, the rest were pugs. Hardly a min/max dps group.

I handled tears, constantly throwing so our dps was never frozen. We did NOT kill the boss in one 4-1 phase, she healed like 5 times before we killed her. Me and the Mesmer would just kite in sparks flawlessly time and time again.

It was exhilarating.

We need more fights in the game to be a firm reality check for some players. My only dream is that more future encounters require the entire party to play at a high level.

Thanks to the original poster for his thoughtfull response. Me and my guildies had a similair experience. We we’re with 4 guildies and 1 pug. When arriving at dwayna, we knew we had a hard time coming. Boy, did we knew it would be so hard. First of all, the pug in our group wasn’t full exotic, no biggi for us normally, we don’t discriminate people on that. And he was kind of a beginner, but we didn’t mind. But when we got to dwayna, after two hours being stuck on the boss, we we’re forced to kick him, simply because his lack of gear and lack of knowledge, being more of a beginner. This really saddened us, that we had to do such things.

Furthermore, at that time, it was already late. So there were no more guardians or warriors in our guild online. Again, we thought, no biggie, we’ll just take another mesmer and be done with it. Again, problems occured. Since we we’re an unconventional team, 1necro/2thiefs/2mesmers, we didn’t pump out enough damage. We tried everyting, speccing into expensive food and undead potions, all possible tricks just to dps enough, chaining timewarp etc. In the end it was just void.

Now i’m sure it was because of our inexperience, but still a boss encounter shouldn’t be as bad as this. If all bosses in the game don’t require perfect skills, why should this one?

jelmew.2531:

Thanks to the original poster for his thoughtfull response. Me and my guildies had a similair experience. We we’re with 4 guildies and 1 pug. When arriving at dwayna, we knew we had a hard time coming. Boy, did we knew it would be so hard. First of all, the pug in our group wasn’t full exotic, no biggi for us normally, we don’t discriminate people on that. And he was kind of a beginner, but we didn’t mind. But when we got to dwayna, after two hours being stuck on the boss, we we’re forced to kick him, simply because his lack of gear and lack of knowledge, being more of a beginner. This really saddened us, that we had to do such things.

Furthermore, at that time, it was already late. So there were no more guardians or warriors in our guild online. Again, we thought, no biggie, we’ll just take another mesmer and be done with it. Again, problems occured. Since we we’re an unconventional team, 1necro/2thiefs/2mesmers, we didn’t pump out enough damage. We tried everyting, speccing into expensive food and undead potions, all possible tricks just to dps enough, chaining timewarp etc. In the end it was just void.

Now i’m sure it was because of our inexperience, but still a boss encounter shouldn’t be as bad as this. If all bosses in the game don’t require perfect skills, why should this one?

Were you trying 4-1 or simply running sparks?

the tacts on this boss are fine, the requirements on the dps is not! If this boss was the first one in Arah P4 it would be a lot better, right now if you go in with a group and you get all the way to dwayna after 6 hours and then all of the sudden you realize that your setup just can’t handle it and you will have to kick someone just to have the slightest chance of killing her, now that’s a problem.

At a certain moment we were thinking about inviting 3 new warrior pugs so we could have the dps we needed for dwayna and then after dwayna kick them again so we could have the 3 guildies back in and complete the dungeon. but we just thought that something like that should not be done ever.

I really hope they think about tweaking her rather good, and this time I am waiting for Thank you! posts until I attempt a run again.

haviz.1340:

jelmew.2531:

Thanks to the original poster for his thoughtfull response. Me and my guildies had a similair experience. We we’re with 4 guildies and 1 pug. When arriving at dwayna, we knew we had a hard time coming. Boy, did we knew it would be so hard. First of all, the pug in our group wasn’t full exotic, no biggi for us normally, we don’t discriminate people on that. And he was kind of a beginner, but we didn’t mind. But when we got to dwayna, after two hours being stuck on the boss, we we’re forced to kick him, simply because his lack of gear and lack of knowledge, being more of a beginner. This really saddened us, that we had to do such things.

Furthermore, at that time, it was already late. So there were no more guardians or warriors in our guild online. Again, we thought, no biggie, we’ll just take another mesmer and be done with it. Again, problems occured. Since we we’re an unconventional team, 1necro/2thiefs/2mesmers, we didn’t pump out enough damage. We tried everyting, speccing into expensive food and undead potions, all possible tricks just to dps enough, chaining timewarp etc. In the end it was just void.

Now i’m sure it was because of our inexperience, but still a boss encounter shouldn’t be as bad as this. If all bosses in the game don’t require perfect skills, why should this one?

Were you trying 4-1 or simply running sparks?

I was in the same run as jelmew and we tried 4-1 and later we tried a 4-1-5 with timewarps like 4-1-warp-warp, 4-1-warp-5-warp, 4-1-5-warp-warp

it was 1 dagger necro, 2 classcannon thief’s, 2 greatsword mesmers.
1 of the mesmers(me) was tossing the tears piled up. we had no problems with those btw, ppl were instantly back up.
the 2 thiefs ran for the sparks

Edit: btw something to note: we used ember’s to maximize our damige even more but at 4-1-5 we noticed they pulled aggro from the sparks and they got stuck.(wasn’t this fixed?:D). I also noticed that my illusions still pull aggro from them, which caused us to fail multiple times

Enektric.4527:

I was in the same run as jelmew and we tried 4-1 and later we tried a 4-1-5 with timewarps like 4-1-warp-warp, 4-1-warp-5-warp, 4-1-5-warp-warp

it was 1 dagger necro, 2 classcannon thief’s, 2 greatsword mesmers.
1 of the mesmers(me) was tossing the tears piled up. we had no problems with those btw, ppl were instantly back up.
the 2 thiefs ran for the sparks

You must be either trolling me or we have different definition what’s glass cannon. Three glass cannons without timewarp can kill her. I’ve done this path with 3 super tanky guys (cnd mesmer, support guardian and tanky ranger) so the issue is not the lack of your damage, it’s your slow speed of getting sparks at right spots.

Sometimes I join teams stucked on Simin and what I see I would rather not comment but if a guardian can get 3 sparks faster than a thief only 2 and we were fighting near one of his this is something wrong.

no we were quite fast (in my opinion never saw it faster) with the sparks the 1 was in in like 2sec and the 5 was in in around 6sec.

after 5-1 we ended up with 10% left on her.

If you’re so fast, why couldn’t you kill her? You run sparks until she drops, you have about 1 minute for next spark run if she’s in so-called phase 2.

If you play on EU serv, stuck there and some people lost motivation, next time you could pm me if I’m not doing anything important and it’s not 0am. Though I warn, I might lose patience with people being completely clueless, that happened only once in about 20-30 runs.

DPS is not the issue, we always took the health of the boss down!

(Although, you need to be fully geared up.)

Any team of experienced professions will kill this boss.

In my view, running the sparks is the issue.

I feel that this is a random event rather than based on the skill of the runners. The sparks will often not go into the receptors, and would rather seek out any nearby team member/pet(even outside a normal aggro range).

The success of the event, therefore depends on luck rather than skill.

I simply can’t see why any boss in GW2 should lead to a fail after 6 hours from an experienced (varied professions) 5 person team.

The spark mechanism is bugged. :x

I think we just still lacked dps there I am sure that if the setup was 3xwarrior, 1 mesmer, 1 guardian we would have made it.
But I am not going to level alts or hire warriors that leave after dwayna just to do this.

I will wait for the dungeon redesign and pray for improvement.
it was the same drama in november and we lost 2 of our most active guild members on that boss after 8 hours of pure torture, they just burned out on the game when we did P4.

Steppen Wolf.9413:

DPS is not the issue, we always took the health of the boss down!

(Although, you need to be fully geared up.)

Any team of experienced professions will kill this boss.

In my view, running the sparks is the issue.

I feel that this is a random event rather than based on the skill of the runners. The sparks will often not go into the receptors, and would rather seek out any nearby team member/pet(even outside a normal aggro range).

The success of the event, therefore depends on luck rather than skill.

I simply can’t see why any boss in GW2 should lead to a fail after 6 hours from an experienced (varied professions) 5 person team.

The spark mechanism is bugged. :x

I don’t even have fully exotic gear. Your teammates that aren’t running sparks go on the side, stick to some wall. That makes running sparks nothing more than a chore.

Enektric.4527:

I think we just still lacked dps there I am sure that if the setup was 3xwarrior, 1 mesmer, 1 guardian we would have made it.
But I am not going to level alts or hire warriors that leave after dwayna just to do this.

I will wait for the dungeon redesign and pray for improvement.
it was the same drama in november and we lost 2 of our most active guild members on that boss after 8 hours of pure torture, they just burned out on the game when we did P4.

I’m sure those random groups searching for those proffesion keep saying same things after spending there some quality time. Out of curiosity, why did you list a guardian? Most guardians play with rather tankish setups. Why not a thief?

yea a venom thief would be nice aswell for the might stacks that I can double as a mesmer, but the guardian was more of a random choice really:D

we sticked the boss to the right in the middle of the cave

Okay, could someone of you shed me some light on this boss’s mechanics? I just lost 4 hours with a guild party of good players trying to outsmart this. We had a voip and everything, we switched characters, builds anything, and the best we did was to get her to 30%, once. I was guardian, perma petrified. We had 2 dedicated runners who were doing the sparks extremely fast. I don’t see how could you do this boss, and what level of awareness is required. For example, most of us can solo lupicus if given the opportunity. We’ve done all other paths. Excuse my tone, but after 4 hours of trying and frustration, im exhausted, and I really want to get this over with :| So yeah, any help, up to date help, that is after the 28th of January is welcomed.

P.S: I saw you speak of achievements score – we all have over 3k

Personally, I thought this fight was pretty well made. It was fun and unique. More bosses should be this challenging in my opinion because I am sick of the no thought bosses in this game atm.

Many people have complained about this fight and most the time they complain about their team being clueless/bad. Here is a quick fix. Stop running with pugs. Find people who are good and run with them. There are guilds in this game for other reasons than buffs and zerging WvW.

BIGplays.2487:

Personally, I thought this fight was pretty well made. It was fun and unique. More bosses should be this challenging in my opinion because I am sick of the no thought bosses in this game atm.

Many people have complained about this fight and most the time they complain about their team being clueless/bad. Here is a quick fix. Stop running with pugs. Find people who are good and run with them. There are guilds in this game for other reasons than buffs and zerging WvW.

I did just that. We also had VOIP. It’s not that it mattered.

EDIT: Okay apparently you have to melee the air when dwayna goes invisible to slow down the heal. Really ANet? Really? Is that your idea of fun dungeon? To the people with superirority complex … is this your “awareness” ? Really? Swinging in the air like brainless monkey while 1 person does the sparks. LOOOOL you must be gods to ever come up with that tactic IMO Magg defense requires more wits than Dwayna …

Ravenmoon.5318:

EDIT: Okay apparently you have to melee the air when dwayna goes invisible to slow down the heal. Really ANet? Really? Is that your idea of fun dungeon? To the people with superirority complex … is this your “awareness” ? Really? Swinging in the air like brainless monkey while 1 person does the sparks. LOOOOL you must be gods to ever come up with that tactic IMO Magg defense requires more wits than Dwayna …

Are you sure you are not looking at old youtube videos? hitting the air does nothing as she goes invul when stealth.

Ravenmoon.5318:

EDIT: Okay apparently you have to melee the air when dwayna goes invisible to slow down the heal. Really ANet? Really? Is that your idea of fun dungeon? To the people with superirority complex … is this your “awareness” ? Really? Swinging in the air like brainless monkey while 1 person does the sparks. LOOOOL you must be gods to ever come up with that tactic IMO Magg defense requires more wits than Dwayna …

This has been fixed months ago. You can no longer damage her while she is invisible.

I have done path 4 now 3 times in the past week and a half. One thing Ive noticed when I did Simin yesterday is that the time she is not invincible has gotten shorter than the first 2 times I’ve done her. Needless to say we had to resort to the 4-1 method. My party consisted of

Zerker Mesmer
Zerker Thief
Zerker Warrior
Support Warrior
Mixed stats (i have no idea what he had) Warrior.

Something definitely feels different with the uptime you have to DPS her considering i struggled more with this setup than I did with my non full DPS oriented party.