Guild Wars 2

stof.9341:

Iehova.9518:

Wethospu.6437:

Can’t afk shoot anymore? How horrible!

The problem is his ridiculously high HP, genius.

The truth is the people on the cannons are supposed to jump down on the floating platforms avoiding the periodic “into the lava” knockbacks to get close to the boss, DPS a little jumping back and forth as needed, then going back up to the laser to activate it again (laser takes 15s to break the shield then 15s later it’s back up) and repeat that until victory.

Now, what can go wrong here?
- Falling into the lava and getting killed with very little hope of getting rezed cause the place hurts.
- Walking from faaaar away to come back to the fight.
- Walking through the lair of the ultimate life form : the Champion Destroyer Crab. Run for your lives! Thank god this monster doesn’t try to take over the world or else we’ll all be doomed.

Yeah 15s of DPS is worth it!

They should just make the shield stay down for 1 minute, maybe 1.5m.

going for pure DPS would help fasten the fight a bit. though that leaves you less room for error. so as mentioned, running with a coordinated group, perhaps with voice comm helps. though that being said, i feel more importantly is the timing of the lasers in a PUG.

in a group i know, even if just using party chat and typing, we’re coordinated enough to get the lasers going, all 3 of us will join the 2 down there DPS-ing and jump back up the platforms. if not, take the stairs.

with a pug the other day, i was just terrible at standing on the platform, lol. so i kept getting bounced into the lava. so i took a laser and would jump down. given i never died after, since i gave myself a good 3 second buffer to get back out… some puggies were gettinng impatient for the extra 5 seconds it took for me to get back on the laser. :/// so ended up standing there hitting F every 15, 20 seconds.

vvp.8512:

legit the worst encounter in the game and you made it worse.

(as in boring and tedious)

My sentiments exactly.

Did this path with a pug yesterday. Someone suggested attacking just from range when the shield is down, but quickly discovered that this is too slow. We then run in as a group to attack when the shield is down and then running out. Much faster at this point, with each run taking away ~15% of his hp. Boss is dead in no time.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

well, the shield is down for a total of 17 seconds, so it took them about 34 seconds of the shield being down, plus another 30-40 seconds working with the lasers.

2 tries meaning they only had to bring the shield down twice.

@ omgwtflolbll (funny name btw)
Yeah, you’re fairly correct about that. If I’m running with my dungeon group I go full glass cannon, but with pugs or unfamiliar people I tend to run a toughness spec. If you are good enough, and your group has good synergy, you don’t need all that defense, and you can play a bit riskier.

Did you consider that maybe that was an extremely good group? Theres always going to be a small number at that end of the curve who will make a mockery of balancing by being very, very good. I imagine its very difficult to design something for both PUGs and well coordinated guild groups but I hope you are taking into account that most players/groups are not as good at the game as you are, and don’t have the advantage of having an intimate knowledge of the under the hood stuff that you do.

This boss is easy enough. In my guild, a few of us actually run down there and fight it. I die maybe 1 out of 10 attempts.

I enjoy the overall complexity and challenge running down there involves. Have to pay attention to several things at once, and dying is such an easy thing to do.

If a few people can’t handle it, then Explorable is actually living up to the rep it had pre-launch. I hope to see more bosses able to make people whine like this. From the description that Explorable has, it isn’t suppose to be so farmable and easy to beat.

So I ask Anet, make more encounters like this. I want a challenge, and I don’t mean just adding more health and attack to monsters.

Getting a PuG to all jump down in the lava pit to squeeze DPS on the destroyer boss is as tough as getting a PuG to do CoF 2 Kaboomium event without suicide running. But does that mean dungeons should be balanced around PuGs?

Fact is, you don’t need to run specific builds to succeed but you do need to bring utilities that are useful depending on the situation and shredding off the needless vit/tough helps immensely. Good players in general or at least in my circle normally seek to improve their gameplay and learn to switch out survivability for damage as they get better. Vit/Tough is useless if you don’t need it.

Dungeons are being balanced around such decent players and not around PuGs and this is the way things should go. Slightly off-topic: Robert initially didn’t even mind the Arah p3 farming by the pugs with the 5-7min runs that equalled other farms. Coordinated teams however seeked to improve their methods and reached 1-min kills for ~7+g/h runs not including loot and tokens that could be turned to rares/salvaged for ectos which was much to absurd.

It would be quite interesting to have the data on what % of groups doing dungeons are PUGs or mostly PUGs and what % are guilds/friends. Also what % use some form of voice chat. I wonder if there is any way to collect that?

Ansultares.1567:

Wethospu.6437:

Iehova.9518:

You are defending an unnecessary change to an already annoying boss.

Yep, I know I’m probably in minority. But I will run this path now and see if that changes my opinion.

You’ve been talking about it without actually having run the path?

It’s annoying; it was a long, slow, boring fight before; now it’s a long, slow, and frustrating fight to PUG.

It might be fun for a well coordinated group, but aren’t all those guys off running fractals?

Encounter ran exactly as I expected. So yes, I was able to talk about it even when I hadn’t run it post-patch.

Wethospu.6437:

Encounter ran exactly as I expected. So yes, I was able to talk about it even when I hadn’t run it post-patch.

Long, boring and tedious?

It was only long because we did bad (though I’m not in hurry). Definitely not boring, however Destroyer could get some extra attacks to spice it up.

My biggest beef would be the visual feedback of the shield and the lack of a timer on when it’s back up. I’d like to see the shield’s graphics improved to better show the edges of it. Make it look like a clear hemisphere without those “pillars” going up to the center. Then add a progress bar just like shield one that shows how long you got before it’s back up. Alternatively make the shield bar slowly re-fill once the shield is down, and when it’s on 100% the shield comes back.

The logic behind this boss is biased, if a great party does good with it with obviously a considerable ammount of coordination AND experience in this very boss fight, doesnt mean that ppl who prefer or are forced to go with pubs have to suffer, i have ran this dungeon over 60 times and i dont remember the last time the fifth guy went down with me to kill this boss without dying at least once because of either getting hit by the shield or by its dragon tooth.
Its a poorly designed and implemented boss, adds nothing of value to the gameplay and benefits severly a guild group while people like me who have american guilds but are european are penalized for it as the only way for me to play this dungeon is to go with random public.

The issue with having the 3 laser operators run down to dps is if 1 of them doesn’t make it back up you need to wait for them to run back, there’s nothing difficult about this fight its just drawn out far too long.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

the reason I had to increase his range was due to an exploit players could take advantage of to afk during the fight with auto attack on and easily win it.

As for his health, he already has half the normal health of other legendary creatures, and his toughness is scaled down as well. I don’t imagine I will lower his health down any further since I have watched groups kill him in just 2 tries.

You guys would do well to listen to the community. Evolved Destroyer is quite possibly the worst boss in GW2. He isn’t challenging, he is boring. Three people literally just spam F on the laser cannon and two people do a mini puzzle to go dps him for 5secs. Then jump back into the lava and repeat….. No one wants to run coe path three due to how long and tedious the fight is.

Everything is wrong with it. How can you guys go from a actual challenging boss fight (subject alpha), to this???

At the very least, you guys should tone down the damage the lava does. Or put a closer way point if you want players to risk their lives jumping in it.

Also, Guardian spirit weapons can’t hit him. They get stuck around the platform.

Iehova.9518:

Remember, no fun.

This just in everyone: AFK Autoattacking is fun. Guild wars!

Writetyper.1985:

Iehova.9518:

Remember, no fun.

This just in everyone: AFK Autoattacking is fun. Guild wars!

We’ve been in this opera already. You cannot AFK autoattack on destroyer, pre or post patch.

Iehova.9518:

Writetyper.1985:

Iehova.9518:

Remember, no fun.

This just in everyone: AFK Autoattacking is fun. Guild wars!

We’ve been in this opera already. You cannot AFK autoattack on destroyer, pre or post patch.

Standing at the top pressing “1” or “F” is half a step away from AFK autoattack. I can hardly categorize it as “fun” either.

Writetyper.1985:

Standing at the top pressing “1” or “F” is half a step away from AFK autoattack. I can hardly categorize it as “fun” either.

It’s not AFK autoattack. Your argument is invalid.

This boss is too punishing for mistakes, so no wonder weaker groups take the “safe” way of only sending a few players DPS it.

Reducing lava damage to make it far less dangerous to fall down should be a good enough start.

Even if destroyer was damaging me + the other person during shield down phase it doesn’t matter.

As Engi I just use refined kits and elixir gun. Everytime shield is down I put down TWO healing fields that tick for 450hp each, along with 13 seconds of regeneration.

So that’s 450+450+181 HP/sec healed the entire duration of the shield down, everytime.

The boss is still boring and stupid. A good idea executed badly.

This fight is a great example of separating the good from the bad. The only thing that would be good to change is having a closer res point.

I was always doing him in normal way, eg. get 3 people on cannons, shoot lasers, get down, hit him like you mean it, get back up. Is it hard? Or more tedious and boring than ranging him with 2 people spamming autoattacks mostly. It’s definitely shorter.

Sil.4560:

I did this with a PUG post-patch last night. One person ended up leaving partway into that room, no doubt after realizing that killing the boss would take some absurd length of time. Honestly, it was too long before, now it just makes people avoid the path. It’s a good thing they supposedly fixed path 1, or the only one people would even bother with is path 2.

Nice to know. I’ll remember to stay far from this waste of time, now is so uber.

Lucas Ashrock.8675:

Sil.4560:

I did this with a PUG post-patch last night. One person ended up leaving partway into that room, no doubt after realizing that killing the boss would take some absurd length of time. Honestly, it was too long before, now it just makes people avoid the path. It’s a good thing they supposedly fixed path 1, or the only one people would even bother with is path 2.

Nice to know. I’ll remember to stay far from this waste of time, now is so uber.

This boss fight takes about 5 minutes for sub-par pug…. Kholer might take long time for those teams.

soulcakeduck.7036:

My suggestion to fix this fight is to make the jumping platforms just ever-so-slightly closer together, and possibly make the shield stay down for a few extra seconds (3ish).

The biggest problem right now is that it is virtually never worth the risk of having your laser operators go down to DPS the destroyer (for pugs/most groups). Here are the problems that lead to this high trade off:

1. WIth perfect coordination, the shield drops in one “round” of lasers but a tiny error can cause it to take two rounds. It is not always clear if laser operators should start jumping down immediately after their first round, since they might be needed for a second, but waiting for a second round that never comes means losing nearly all of your DPS time on the Destroyer.

2. Many builds have relatively low DPS, long ramp-up times, or are just operated by more “average” players. I’ve never fought this boss with a group that could kill him in 2 passes—5 was the quickest I cleared it with all 5 players DPSing. That’s a huge difference. The fight is going to be long, which makes a safer strategy even more appealing than it otherwise would be.

3. It is ridiculously easy to fall into the lava on your trip back up. I’ve tried the jumps after the boss is dead and they feel about right, meaning it is overkill for a boss fight jumping puzzle because of the combat speed penalty. Players that die have a ridiculously long run back (welcome to CoE!) which far outweighs the seconds they shave off by going down to DPS.

4. Unless you depart super-early from the Destroyer’s platform, you will not be back in position at your laser the very second they are available. This makes coordination marginally harder (if all players were in place you’d simply activate immediately), but more importantly—it is lost dps time! If it takes you, say, 6 seconds to get everyone in position and coordinated, you’ve gained very little with this high risk strategy. If you leave his platform early enough to get back, you’ll have cut your DPS time short anyway, so same problem.

5. Most ranged classes can auto attack from the top area and still hit the Destroyer, thanks to parabola trajectories at such great heights reaching far beyond their max range.

So, you have a jumping puzzle that should get most of its difficulty from the Dragon’s Tooth threats/knockbacks but instead gets it difficulty from “Nintendo-hard, jump from the last pixel, with swiftness, or die” design. This pretty much guarantees an average player is going to fall in, at least once, if your pug sends all 5 players in each time.

You lose DPS time by sending all 5 in, and especially with average players and many builds, you barely come out ahead with this strategy.

The cost of any tiny error is so high, and the payoff so low. People don’t voluntarily sacrifice 60% of their group’s DPS because they LIKE ten minute, AFK-bosses. They do because it is usually the better strategy, despite being a terrible experience itself—which says a lot.

Two tiny changes would make the fight many orders of magnitude better, without really affecting your phenomenal groups that kill it in 30 seconds. Adjust the jumping distance; tweak the shield timer.

This is spot on.

The biggest problem about the platform jumping is once you are in combat you are much much slower. So it makes jumping back up very hard. The best solution would be to make it a stair case and not three platforms.

Writetyper.1985:

>half a step away

Not surprised that you can’t read either.

“Half a step” is not “AFK auto attack”.

Can you AFK on destroyer? No, you still have to shoot the laser and now dodge his attack.
Can you auto-shoot on destroyer and watch porn? No, you still have to shoot the laser and now dodge his attack.

Therefore, you cannot AFK on destroyer. It’s not that hard a concept to comprehend.

Did I complete the dungeon without having any trouble before the patch, was it very easy to complete? – Yes

Will I ever play it again? – No

When I did this path the first time, my guild group did it what I assume the intended way, turn on the lasers and all 5 run down together, beat him up, jump back across and up the stairs, repeat.

When I started doing it to help guild mates get tokens last month, I was kinda shocked that everyone wanted to take 15 minutes to kill this thing with the 3 people do nothing but hit 1 and 2 people sit next to him and afk.

So really, this thread is nothing but people whining about their desired boring way of killing a boss being changed. Sorry you all have to be an active participant… o.O At least path 1 Bjarl is supposedly fixed, so you can farm 1 and 2 for tokens and skip 3 again. lol

xvalkyrie.6742:

So really, this thread is nothing but people whining about their desired boring way of killing a boss being changed.

This change made a boring boss just… more boring.
Changing a desired boring way into an even more boring way of finishing the boss is not the right way
Making fights actually challenging is what should be done!

BUTTERBLUME.3217:

xvalkyrie.6742:

So really, this thread is nothing but people whining about their desired boring way of killing a boss being changed.

This change made a boring boss just… more boring.
Changing a desired boring way into an even more boring way of finishing the boss is not the right way
Making fights actually challenging is what should be done!

It is only boring because you are doing it wrong.

stof.9341:

- Walking through the lair of the ultimate life form : the Champion Destroyer Crab. Run for your lives! Thank god this monster doesn’t try to take over the world or else we’ll all be doomed.

Your groups choice to not clear isn’t Anet’s fault. Don’t get me wrong, the Evolved Destroyer is an annoying, annoying encounter but the whole “let’s not kill things” on the res path for a fight in which you are likely to die is just poor planning.

No, seriously, change this boss back or get rid of the encounter.

I don’t care if your group is capable of doing this, this is kittening brutal assholish kitten to put in a game. Change the platforms to stairs or something if you are so in love with this kitten encounter.

I have legit never had any issue pugging anything in this game until this encounter after your last patch.

edit – oh look one of the players on the laser is being spammed with KO aoes, that’s kittening wonderful.

Shamrocky.5036:

BUTTERBLUME.3217:

xvalkyrie.6742:

So really, this thread is nothing but people whining about their desired boring way of killing a boss being changed.

This change made a boring boss just… more boring.
Changing a desired boring way into an even more boring way of finishing the boss is not the right way
Making fights actually challenging is what should be done!

It is only boring because you are doing it wrong.

Let me clarify this:

I do not do the boss wrong, and I might add: I am not a player having trouble with ANYTHING if I run with MY group
But the whole mechanic is simply flawed if it is NOT my group.

The boss is going down within a small amount of time with a group of players I know, playing the dungeon with PUGs will most likely not end in your desired way of killing, because:

People do not know how good everyone else is. Expecting something the person you expect it from is not capable of doing will result in failure, insults, quitting …

The change will not affect how PUGs attempt to finish the boss, why risk the above, if the safe route still available.

Besides that in my opinion the fight mechanic is boring, it is also not fit for PUGs, which destroys the experience for a lot of players. That obviously is not a good thing.

After doing a check: the fight is still same, except for the very beginning and minor burns. Boss starts attacking person at cannon placed far away from entrance (let’s say cannon #3), then goes on first person attacking after the shield fades. So cannoneers are fully safe. The only thing which changed are those tiny fireballs, they’re putting some real burn now, so fighters have to use heals regardless of successful fire tooth kiting. Still easy, just boring

This fight kittening sucks, its boring.

I don’t think the fight was all that bad (now that its behind me). I certainly wouldn’t repeat an attempt at it without my guild. I think the fight is a piece of cake for those that have done it before and know the process. We pugged it and the boss reset due to our wiping in the lava etc twice. The third and final time we were fighting the boss, we killed him in under 10minutes with just one death (I got hit by a lava spike as I was making my way down the platform and throw into the pit).

I will say however that my PUG probably killed him faster than your group because he happened to have two mesmers in the group. We were taking turns to cast time warp which greatly boosted DPS and used portals to zap back up as soon as the shield was coming back. It made a HUGE difference.

Personally I found the fights against Subject Zero to be much harder and WAY more annoying.

The fastest way i found is using two glass canon Ranger with Eagle Eye in your group and buff and keep them alive.

I must agree with most of you people. It really is boring since most people run it like: 3 on cannons, 2 range attackers nuke on sides.

In PUG group, there is NO way people will even try the thing that is ment to be done here: All attacking the destroyer after the cannons are turned on!

Potential Fix: I would recommend making 1 large plate on both sides and that there would be falling those meteors much more. This would make it considerable much more tactical and people would also go nuke after using the cannons. In this way the boss HP/Toughness could be raised or adding more skills for the boss to use.

The waypoint could also be made bit more near to destroyer boss but not sure if it would be needed if that fix would be used…

I’d change it so that falling down the platforms would be far far far less lethal but instead would stretch the fight duration a lot for each falling playerFor example, make the destroyer regen health if his shield if it’s not destroyed quickly enough between burst phases.

Also, make the shield respawn not on a timer but on set HP spots. Mario tells use the sweet spot is giving the bosses 3 HP so make the destroyer recreate his shield every 33% HP lost since last breakage :p