Guild Wars 2

This is by no means a complaint thread – I thoroughly enjoy this fight every time I come across it. With co-ordination, it’s no problem at all and a very fun fight. However, there is something that’s been niggling me about it.

As anyone who’s fought the Shaman knows, he raises an impenetrable shield at 75%, 50% and 25% HP. You break the shield by hitting it, naturally. The main idea is just to focus on the shield to break it before he gets to a civilian and heals. On Fractal 26 (the usual daily I run), he has 30 stacks on the shield to begin with.

My Thief build runs with D/D + Shortbow. I stick with Shortbow until the shield comes up, and then I run up and melee the shield as hard as I possibly can. I was under the assumption that a higher hit volume (2 hits per Double Strike when spamming at good speed) would break down the stacks faster. However, I keep noticing something strange – Double Strike (which is the only thing that hits unless a lava elemental comes close, resulting in me hitting it and progressing to Wild Strike) only removes one stack per use of the skill. In other instances, I have tried using Unload from P/P (for the huge hit volume) and the stacks are removed at almost a slower speed than the dagger attacks.

So perhaps I could get some clarification – how exactly do the stacks work? Is one stack removed for every completed skill ie. one Double Strike or one Unload = one stack, or is there a cooldown in place on each player in the team in terms of how fast they can take away stacks? It’s just a mechanic I’ve never been able to wrap my head around. At full assault, I always expect my daggers and bullets to tear the shield to places, but it goes away so slowly. At a wild guess, I’m thinking there’s an internal cooldown on each player so that they can only remove a stack every second or something, and any hit will do the trick.

If anyone has any light they can shed on this, it would be helpful. Thanks!

I think it’s one stack removed for each hit, but with an internal cooldown of a second or so. I think. Don’t quote me on this, it’s just from observation.

Also note that provided he doesn’t have stacks of defiant, Fear Me goes through the shield and he moves at double speed, which basically gives you another 30 seconds of time to kill the adds in peace and then take down the shield.

Use bleeds. 20+ bleeds melts his shield.

I know that attacks with multiple hits don’t work on the shield … I mean, it only counts for 1 hit. For instance, if you use #1 with Ele Scepter (air or water) you are supposed to hit your target many times, which should destroy the shield, but it does not, it only removes 1 stack for a whole channeled or tripled attack, which sucks as you become insanely slow to break it.