Guild Wars 2

I will describe the fight below. I will provide insight how it looks, what do we know and what are the tactics used to overcome it.

Before i do, i’d like to ask the following:
To Dungeon Designers Team: is the below tactic the intended way? Are we missing some existing part of the mechanics? If so – please don’t tell us what, just point us in the direction. Is there anything bugged, as in – should work but doesn’t? How thoroughly was this particular fight tested when it comes to various party composition, particularly not including 100b warriors?
To Players: is there anything i have missed? Any terrible mistake here? Any idea why one of the traps has shields up all the time? Any idea what is the interactable object by the statue and if it’s usable at all?

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Onto the description of the fight.

The fight takes place in a pretty big cavern. In the centre of the cavern there’s a statue of Dwayna, surrounded by 5 ‘traps’ – small glowing circles. Scattered in the cavern, there are 5 sparks that have to be dragged to the traps – trapping all 5 makes Simin appear. There are several spots with Tears of Dwayna all across the cavern.
The sparks are usual mobs, like the sparks at the Temple of Lyssa. They are invulnerable and do not aggro on hit, only on proximity. They use ranged attack with neglible damage and like to reaggro onto other targets. As soon as a spark is dragged onto a trapping circle, it becomes allied and the trap is ‘filled’ – can’t hold another spark. As soon as all five sparks are trapped, Simin appears.
Tears of Dwayna become a bundle environmental weapon after picked up, with one and only skill being ground-targeted AoE that clears petrification off players, which Simin throws pretty often.

By the statue, there is a mysterious, invisible, unknown interactable object in the ground that does nothing. It can be targeted – a cog icon appears when hovering over its spot, can be clicked and targeted, too – and there appears an ‘interact’ popup nearby, but hitting F does nothing.

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The applied tactics.

First step is to choose the spot where Simin will be pushed/dragged and fought. It is a corner far enough from sparks and the statue so that people fighting her do not aggro sparks, or she is dragged completely outside the cavern.
Everyone carries Tears of Dwayna to the chosen spot, stacking up dozens of them in one location, so they’re ready and easily available for petrification cleansing. They respawn pretty often and don’t disappear when relocated.

One person is tasked with keeping an eye on the petrified and cleansing them – usually the most support-specced one, the least damager and the least swift runner. Two people are tasked with dpsing Simin all the time, even when she is cloaked (more below) – usually the most damage-specced, best gs warriors. Two people are tasked with running sparks (more below), while dropping damage on Simin when possible – usually those with most swiftness uptime and decent understanding of the aggro/trapping mechanics.

How the fight develops:
Simin pops some AoE across the cavern, which is easy to notice, dodge or just ignore as its damage is neglible. Most of her attacks in melee range are neglible as well, she only bursts a bit from time to time but still it’s not anything as powerful as some other bosses hit. She also petrifies players, but the petrification is easily cleansed with Tears of Dwayna, and it can sometimes get bugged – even if you’re petrified, you still can freely move and attack.

At 50% of Simin’s hp, she stealths and regens her health – and does so really fast.
She is only cloaked and not invulnerable, so 3 people should still keep attacking her on the spot, even if she’s not visible, slowing down the regeneration.
Just as she cloaks, new 5 sparks spawn and have to be run to the traps. As soon as they’re all trapped, she pops out from her cloaking and stops regenerating hp.
Problem is – even if you’re fast enough to trap all the sparks when she’s on ~60% hp, she will cloak and regen again at 50%, stucking you in a loop unless you have enough raw damage to simply outdamage her regeneration. It is believed that keeping her poisoned helps, but tbh i’m not sure after checking it yesterday – keeping her perma poisoned didn’t seem to help, or was not enough without having 3-4 warriors.

So the trick used here is to take Simin from 100% hp to 50%, when she cloaks – run four sparks to the traps and let her regen back to 100%.
For some reason, after having done so you only need to run one spark the next time she cloaks at 50%, which is fast and easy enough to keep decloak at ~53% hp. She doesn’t cloak again at 50% if she’s low enough on hp – wherever the line exactly is.

Everything goes fine until she’s on 25% hp.
She cloaks then again. And you can’t do the ‘run 4 sparks, let her regen, get her down back to 25%, run 1 spark, kill’ trick – she regens all the way over 50%, making her cloak again at 50%, stucking you in an infinite loop.

The only way to beat her seems to be outdamaging her regeneration – or at least making it neglible with superior dps from 3-4 warriors spamming gs skills on her location when she’s cloaked. I suppose that gs guardian is good there, too.
This means that parties with less outright pointblank or ground-targeted damage (especially those with the unreliable projectiles) are screwed – on 6th boss, right before the end.

I believe this is not the intended way and that we are missing a part of the mechanics of this fight. I hope there is something bugged and can be fixed pretty soon or there is something we’re simply ignoring.
Has anyone tried using the reflection crystals found somewhere earlier to reflect the petrification or any other of her attacks? Has anyone tried fearlocking her? Can the regeneration be stripped or slown down somehow?
Has anyone got any idea what, exactly, might be bugged during the fight, or missing, making the fight a damagefest of warriors?

Not anything which I would know.
Last time we started with usual 4-1 tactic. Then we repeated that tactic at about 25% because one Spark went out of control. We probably had quite good DPS so anything should have worked.

I’m looking for a trick, way, mechanics, tactics or whatever that would allow to keep her from getting 25%->60%, locking you in the loop at 50% again, and not based solely on your party’s raw damage output – simply because you need a very specific team composition to get enough damage to kill the boss at all, not just do it faster or easier, as everywhere else.
It appears the only place in the game not doable without a specific team, and i’m really not talking about places being slow, harder, etc without superior dps.

Done it with only 2 warriors! But on the serious note I’m wondering if you’re not supposed to have everyone running sparks. There are 5 sparks and 5 people. But like Wethospu said, you can try doing 4-1 tactics, it might work, it did for us.

For the record – i’ve done it once, in a 2 guardians, 2 warriors, 1 thief party – we had next to no problems, the whole boss fight took us about 30-40 minutes, including 2 full resets after screwing up and considering all five of us were never to Arah 4 before.
Been there yesterday – 1 war, 1 ele, 1 guardian, 1 necro, 1 ranger – and we just locked in an infinite loop of her cloaking at 25% hp. We got her down to 25% using the 4-1 trick, she cloaked, we ran sparks and decloaked her at about 35~40% (2 people running sparks, 3 people keeping dps) only to see her cloak at 25% again. We kept in that loop for over 30 minutes – 25%→40%→25%→40%… sometimes it was considerably lower than 40% but not low enough not to trigger the 25% cloaking.
There’s no way to apply the 4-1 trick for the 25% cloaking… or is there? We tried it, got her down to 25%, ran only 4 sparks, let her pop out naturally, but then she got to ~75%, so we had to waste the ‘1 spark pops her out’ at the 50% mark again, staying locked in a loop.

It seems that the only way is to do the 4-1 trick, then keep insane dps up on her when she cloaks at 25% to keep her in the 25%~30% margin when the 5 (!) sparks are trapped, keeping her from cloaking at 25% yet again. This requires both very quick spark-running and insane damage output on cloaked Simin – the first is doable in pretty much any party setup, the second requires damage-built warriors to spam 100b on her.
Which is not only silly, but seems inconsistent with the whole game. Yes, spamming 100b on bosses is usually the fastest way to take them down, it’s also pretty safe quite often, 5man warrior parties mow through dungeons with ease and stuff, but there’s not one other encounter specifically requiring you to bring that much raw dps, and of specific type – as projectiles are nigh useless when she’s cloaked.
Not even the CoF1 Effigy is similar anymore, as you can get 1-2 people destroy the crystals if you have not enough damage output to just faceroll the boss, which is pretty easy on its own – but there is an additional mechanics.

drkn.3429:

Been there yesterday – 1 war, 1 ele, 1 guardian, 1 necro, 1 ranger – and we just locked in an infinite loop of her cloaking at 25% hp. We got her down to 25% using the 4-1 trick, she cloaked, we ran sparks and decloaked her at about 35~40% (2 people running sparks, 3 people keeping dps) only to see her cloak at 25% again. We kept in that loop for over 30 minutes – 25%->40%->25%->40%… sometimes it was considerably lower than 40% but not low enough not to trigger the 25% cloaking.
There’s no way to apply the 4-1 trick for the 25% cloaking… or is there? We tried it, got her down to 25%, ran only 4 sparks, let her pop out naturally, but then she got to ~75%, so we had to waste the ‘1 spark pops her out’ at the 50% mark again, staying locked in a loop.

Well, we’ve done it with almost exact setup in about 4 minutes with 4-1 trick but we had to use it again because one spark started to misbehaving. Also, sometimes, for no apparent reason, if you get a spark (not 5th one) to the statue, it will behave as in you would got all five and decloack her.

Overally, whole Arah doesn’t look like it was tested thorougly. There are many bugs surrounding whole dungeon.

This is the only part based on silly dps (aka specific setup) or blind luck (1 spark decloaking her without the intentional 4-1 trick).
Or is it? Maybe we’re missing a way to make 1 spark decloak her without any tricks? I don’t believe it’s just random, as in a bug that makes it possible to kill her, or just stroke of luck letting you decloak her before she hits a critical limit of X hp, locking you in a loop.

What about the shielded circle? Is it really only a visual bug or has anyone tried luring a spark to that shielded trap first and seeing if it’s enough?

Often all five circles are shielded or they appear when you imprison sparks. I’d really want a dev citation here but devs dont recognize arah as a dungeon, most likely like a failed experiment not worthy of fixing. Otherwise it wouldn’t be plagued by so many bugs/glitches/et cetera. Few bosses have really cool mechanics, much better than most in other dungs but bugs win that fight anyway.

Tbh i find all Arah enjoyable and fun, all bosses are cool and i love the design – maybe just there’s a tad too much trash and it’s too annoying… but Simin fight seems lacking a piece of the puzzle.
It’s not the ‘difficulty’ or anything bugged tbh (no bugs when running sparks – you just can’t be fast enough), more like something… missing. The question is – is it there and we omit it, or was it not implemented?

All 5 circles are shielded after you trap 4 sparks for the 4-1 trick.

.* hopes to bring Robert’s attention to this thread, since he’s stalking the forums now o/ *.

Ive done it with 3 eles a necro and a mesmer, with the mesmer being tank build, the necro not having any idea what his poison skills were (no seriously, the only poison skill he knew he had was corrosive cloud or something?) and one of the ele’s had no DPS set.

TBH the easiest strategy right now is just to burst her down while she’s healing, eschew the sparks entirely. This works best when you have poison in liberal amounts, and time warp. with the above group we couldnt DPS her during the heal, but we could stop her from gaining more than a few % of hp everytime, which meant we just kind of waited for the timewarps. took 3 of them to down her. So any group with warriors, thieves, necros who arent terrible, ETC will have no trouble.

Thanks for the input. Still, it makes a specific team setup required to kill her – you need at least one mesmer in your party, as AoE quickness is essential. Of course, it’s useful everywhere, you can mow down any boss with relative ease using Time Warp and enough dps, and so on – but no fight requires any gimmicky, specific setup like 3 gs wars or Time-Warp-on-cooldown.

This is what makes me believe we’re missing something – either we, players, omit a part of the puzzle here, or a piece is simply missing from the box…

I’ve beaten her with 2 eles, guardian theif and necro you having the guardian run the sparks and rest dpsthe when she’s invis

(My guild lures her out of the cave while one person, myself if I’m in the party, kites all the sparks to the center. With well timed dodges and swiftness, you can easily lure multiple sparks at once, getting all of them locked in sooner.)

I’d like to believe there’s a trick to being able to uncloak her with the first lured spark. I’ve tried every conceivable mechanic I could think of to replicate it regularly, but couldn’t.

I’ve tried each different circle from the one that last uncloaked her, hoping it had some sort of pattern. None that I can see however. It seems to be some form of sick Russian roulette as to whether she’s uncloaked before needing all 5 sparks.

drkn.3429:

Thanks for the input. Still, it makes a specific team setup required to kill her – you need at least one mesmer in your party, as AoE quickness is essential. Of course, it’s useful everywhere, you can mow down any boss with relative ease using Time Warp and enough dps, and so on – but no fight requires any gimmicky, specific setup like 3 gs wars or Time-Warp-on-cooldown.

This is what makes me believe we’re missing something – either we, players, omit a part of the puzzle here, or a piece is simply missing from the box…

Last time our team had 2 GS warriors (I was one running sparks), ele (ran sparks), necro and guardian. And it was so ridiculously easy.
Though some similar teams have been so slow. But players have been crap too.

What bothers me here is that unpenetrable wall of having not enough dps to drop on her while she’s stealthed. As i said, all bosses are easier and faster with enough dps and with no one dying, it’s obvious – but you can slowly kill everything else, no matter how slow you are or what your team composition is. Full support party with no warriors can get stuff done – and yes, it will take them twice as long on most bosses, it might be harder to stay focused long enough on Lupicus with kitteny damage etc, but no other boss requires considerable amounts of dps to overcome their regeneration; even the Effigy of CoF1 can be killed with no heavy users whatsoever, though it requires paying some attention to the crystals as opposed to facerolling the boss while ignoring the crystals with enough damage.
Nowhere else you will find a real progression blocker because of your team’s composition or builds you’re running – and given Simin is the sixth boss of Arah 4, if you were able to get there you should also be able to overcome her without switching onto different toons.

I don’t think we had very special team and it was so easy. So I’m wondering whether sub-par teams could do it with right tactic.
I’m not very experienced with Simin and have ran P4 ~5 times. This last run was first time when I had more or less solid plan on my mind and the team actually executed it properly.
Usually you just get people who can’t use tears, die all the time, etc.