Guild Wars 2

Did they remove the 4-1 spark feature?

Kelaedin.8106:

I don’t know what you mean by 4-1? Is there some key mechanic we missed to the boss fight?

I wouldn’t say ‘key’, but this feature works as follows:
1. Start fight as usual, let her stealth.
2. While stealthed, one guy traps 4 sparks.
3. Let her regen to 100%, she should destealth.
4. DPS her down to 50%, she will stealth.
5. One guy grabs one spark and runs to the spot ASAP as possible.
6. Nuke, nuke, NUKE her down with every DPS ability you got.

I was wondering whether or not they removed this feature. I know she can’t be DPS’d down while stealthed anymore.

Why do I get the feeling nobody that can make a difference will view this post simple because it seems sarcastic?

They’re celebrating Christmas while not removing features and adding unnecessary invisible walls to dungeons.

Disregard that, she’s unkillable thanks to idiotic spark AI.

They patched the fing Iechova is writing about. Now when she regens her health back to full sparks just disapear from the cage and the encaunter resets.

Kelaedin.8106:

The sparks just spawn around the alter now and you can’t even pull them with skills or pull abilites (frozen grasp, thief wire, guardian GS).

Surely you jest. Do they still have their ranged attack?

Tell me, does Randall still melee Lupus and feeds him grubs?

If I recall correctly, that always was the case. They are simple invulnerable to all damage.

Hmm, once again i have to add something – grubs does spawn on Randal. You just have to be lucky with that or kill him before the second try (if you won’t kill lupi at the first one).

haviz.1340:

If I recall correctly, that always was the case. They are simple invulnerable to all damage.

Didn’t they just reduce all your damage to 0 instead? If so you could at least pull them in.

Iehova.9518:

haviz.1340:

If I recall correctly, that always was the case. They are simple invulnerable to all damage.

Didn’t they just reduce all your damage to 0 instead? If so you could at least pull them in.

No, they were always invulnerable. They have aggro based on proximity.

Just completed path 4 with my guild maybe an hour ago and all I can say is that it is extremely frustrating, but it is doable and just requires a ton of patience.

Here’s how we went about doing it, first our party consisted of 3 warriors, 1 mesmer, 1 elementalist. Had 2 of the warriors specced for damage in mostly a combination of berserker’s and knights gear and the last warrior was a more balanced defensive build. Mesmer in all rampager, and elementalist in mostly clerics.

Then we assigned tears to elementalist and everyone else on dps. Before we started the fight one of the warriors aggroed one of the initial sparks in the room and just sat there while the rest of the team gathered tears and placed them all around the center shrine thing till we had probably over 150 tears stacked around it. Then once we were ready we pulled the 3 initial sparks onto their pads and started the fight and damaged her down to 50% where she then dissappears.

The next part is as someone mentioned where we did the 4-1 spark method where we took the 4 of the 5 sparks and placed them onto the pads and let Simin heal back to full and then we all attacked her again when she reappeared and took her down to 50% where she then stealths again but this time you only need 1 spark placed to pop her out of stealth. Once that happens everybody but the dedicated tear thrower should be burning all their highest dps skills/utilities and mainly mesmer time warp is burned here to take her down to 15% where she automatically re-stealths.

This next stage of the fight is where we had a lot of trouble since it is heavily reliant on running sparks quickly and accurately and instead of relying on all 5 people to each run their sparks which takes way too much coordination we had 3 people run them and had the 2 people who were constantly holding Simin’s aggro hug the wall west of the shrine. Then 1 person grabs the 2 southern sparks, another grabs the west and north sparks and 1 person grabs the eastern spark. And we returned the sparks in the order of speed, person who grabbed east spark ran it into 1 spot (same spot every time), 2 southern sparks we placed into the southmost spots and the west and north placed into the final 2 spots.

Then Simin would pop back up at maybe 40-45% hp and we’d dps her back down to 15% and she’d loop this way constantly, we were stuck on this loop for maybe 6-7 times and I believe that the only time you can get past the 15% stealth trigger is if you are quick enough with sparks that she unstealths at 30-35% and when we perfected spark running and she popped at 30-35% we dropped Timewarp and killed her.

Several things of note:
First our elementalist pointed out that you can actually get the timing down for when when Simin petrifies people by watching their buffs in the party window and only have people petrified for maybe .5 seconds rather than sitting there and spamming tears or waiting until petrified and then responding.

Another thing is that once you’ve perfected the 4-1 method but you still cant bring her to 15% after a few tries, you may not have enough dps and will have to rethink your group composition/specs. And if it takes too long to return the sparks and her health regens back above 50% its better to just let it reset and redo the 4-1 spark method.

We also waited until time warp was up combined with a perfectly executed spark run before trying to dps her for the kill.

One final thing that I have to say about the dungeon is that it requires quite a bit of coordination, voice chat, patience and straight gold investment into dps gear if you don’t normally run with it. Luckily for me I had a full set of berserker armor just sitting around in my bank, but the other warrior had a drop 12-16 gold on several pieces to increase his damage. But that’s not me saying the dungeon is good as is, I still think the boss is kitten hard but luckily we got her down on our second try after our first 4.5 hour failure where just had too little dps

Fearys.9026:

Hmm, once again i have to add something – grubs does spawn on Randal. You just have to be lucky with that or kill him before the second try (if you won’t kill lupi at the first one).

That, or you can trigger the cutscene and then get Randall killed outside, which is what my party always did.

It requires coordination, it isnt something I would do with pugs, unless they were willing to come onto voice chat. I did it with 4 guildies today 2 of which had never been into arah before, and none of us had ever even entered p4 before.

For the priestess we just had 1 person agro the south 3 sparks and 1 person agro the north 2 sparks, while the other 3 players hugged the wall and waited. The 2 players with spark aggro just placed everything in quickly. Our ele also noticed that you can watch the buffs to see when somebody will be petrified and so time the tear.

We didnt have any timewarp or quickness, we were 3 guardians, warrior and ele. We were however all dps specced with very good specs and everybody knew how to do their role.

We didnt have to glitch a single thing or time anything, we just triggered and took it to 50%. Did the sparks, took it to 15%. Did the sparks again, it unstealthed at about 35% and we just finished it off with normal dps. We did however take about 15-20 mins to figure out the mechanics, but once we understood we just reset the fight and did it pretty easily.

I would say this boss is tuned for organized groups/guilds. The kind of people who would be willing to enter a raid in a different game and do it comfortably. Its interesting and I like that, personally I think more fights in the game should be like this, but I can appreciate that this makes it impossible to pug which prevents farming.

Honestly if you want to farm just do p2/p3, p4 is nicely tailored for coordinated groups, and we didnt need to glitch anything or “get lucky”. Our 2 guardians can place the sparks in under 10 seconds with a very high consistency, there was nothing random about what they did or the agro of the sparks.

(I did this about 3h ago, so I didnt abuse anything that has been patched, we simply did the mechanics as Anet intended)