Only got one pull on the boss, so I’ll ignore him for my feedback. This is feedback on the 3 trash mobs leading to the boss.
They’re health sponge enemies. I was in an awful pug that probably had people in pvt gear doing 1000dps each, but they still took too long to kill. So let’s go in depth.
For the first one, who’s immune to direct damage, it took my group with 2 condi users over 5 minutes to kill. This means that 8 ppl in my raid could’ve went afk for 5 minutes and it would not have impacted the speed at which we killed that trash mob in the slightest. Ok, maybe all those residual bleed and burn procs would’ve shaved off a few seconds, but in all honesty, it probably didn’t make a difference.
Next, that mob does nothing significant. Those orbs that run around aren’t deadly enough on their own and since there are no other mechanics to handle for the raiders, moving away from the orbs is basically something you keep in mind instead of something you focus on. Even if you don’t pay attention, the orbs won’t kill you because they do so little damage. In other words, the orbs are a mechanic that you can basically ignore and it’s the only mechanic on the fight. This makes for a very, very boring fight. And going back to my first point, most of your raid does nothing while your condi users do all the heavy lifting, compounding the issue of the fight being extremely boring to do. I can’t stress enough how bad this is for the first mob you encounter in the brand new and shiny raid content. TL;DR: nothing happens, this is boring, why is raiding boring in Guild Wars 2? This is what people are going to think when they first pull that mob and realize there’s basically nothing happening for a few minutes.
Make the orbs deadlier, reduce the mob’s health and make it partially vulnerable to direct damage so that non condi users are incentivized to attack the kitten thing.
The second trash mob was different. It had a clear mechanic that did a lot of damage. But there was no indication on how to deal with it (not that my group tried, it was a pug after all). Since the boss used the same mechanic, my guess is that this trash pull is supposed to teach you how to deal with the boss’ mechanic. But that’s not how you teach raiders how to learn mechanic. Here’s an analogy: teaching mechanics through trash is like training a puppy. If your puppy takes a crap in the house you’re supposed to grab it by the collar, bring the puppy to where the poo is and use a stern voice and showing it to the puppy so it understands that it can’t do that. What you guys did with this second trash pull is use the stern voice on raiders without showing them what they were doing wrong. And that’s not how you train raiders to deal with mechanics that aren’t meant to be subtle. So if you want raiders to figure out how that orbital bombardment-like mechanic works, make it PAINFULLY obvious that it is something that has to be dealt with somehow instead of the mechanic being an in between of “this hurts but we can’t do anything about it” and “ok we’re definitely doing something wrong and we have to figure out how this works”. Also, reduce that mob’s health, takes too long to kill. On the plus side, it’s fairly clear that you have to boon strip it in order to kill it, so good job on that.
For the third mob, it’s just a big health sponge enemy with fairly insignificant mechanics. Reduce the health on it and make the mechanics more deadly.
Overall, the trash leading to boss left a very poor first impression. The trash doesn’t prepare you for the boss. The trash has too much health. The trash is boring to kill. As someone who has spent thousands and thousands of hours killing trash in MMOs, all I can say is work on it.