Guild Wars 2

So i just hit 80 earlier this week, and decided to give Dungeons a go. Not to mention the gears looks really awesome.

Well for the sense of completion, i manage to complete AC & CM Story and Explorer mode with random pugs.

TA story mode was rather straight forward, no complains there, but TA explorer mode was seriously tough ( measured base on repair cost).

1st run with Pugs -
I grouped up with four lvl60 -ish, and i was the only lvl80. We got wiped several time at the Wurm boss before calling it a day.

• I later know this dungeon difficulty was meant for level 80, which is way above the recommended level requirement of level 55. I reckon this is why i sense a sudden jump
  in difficulty ( i might be mistaken, please enlighten me if so).

2nd run with Pugs –
Manage to gather a bunch of lvl 80s pugs. We manage to down the first Wurm boss with a couple of deaths. We later proceeded to choose forward/forward path ( i was later told this was the most difficult path choice -_-). The real boss in this path are the mobs. Along the way we lost some players and we mainly a 4-man team through to the end. So after several deaths (about 10+ to 20 silver worth of repairs), we got to the Boss Laurent(couldn’t recall the name). We try to employ kite & reset strategy, but ultimately failed due to the 2-3 Knights’ chain Aoe Stun leap. The initial person that aggro the mob seems impossible to escape this chain attack. We tried stealth, dodge teleport, etc ( seems like no way around this). Also Kitting too far in will automatically trigger a reset & auto heal themselves.

**Need advise on the Laurent Boss, i am unable see any strategy to get around this.

3rd & 4th run with pugs –
Down the Wurm boss. Some experience folks told us to do the Up path.
He guide us through, and this is mainly by running pass mobs and basically everything and to only fight boss. We manage to complete it Yeah!

• From my 3rd & 4th run i came to the conclusion, that running pass mobs is how it is supposed to be played. Reason being flowers are respawning really fast and the mobs takes too long to kill. Path with a Chain of Wurms is not encouraging you to stay and fight it out.

• on the 4th run. We cleared the spider boss. But for some reason all the Eggs hatched later on in the game ( i was certain no one touch anything). I did not encounter this on my 3rd run. Running pass the spiders is close to impossible. When you Aggro 1 of the spiders, you seems to be pulling all the spiders in the room. Anyone else experience the Egg auto hatched?

This is not a QQ thread. I just want to know how people get around TA explorer, and also to learn if some of the mechanics are working as intended.

The only QQ i have is that the dungeon stated lvl 55.

tried this dungeon in explorable two times so far, never got past the worm boss at the start. like you, i’ve also been wondering if it’s working as intendend, because the nightmare vines (the smaller mobs, not the flowers. i guess those are meant to respawn) respawn through the entire fight even though it says “6/6 nightmare vines killed” or something.

We try to employ kite & reset strategy, but ultimately failed due to the 2-3 Knights’ chain Aoe Stun leap. The initial person that aggro the mob seems impossible to escape this chain attack. We tried stealth, dodge teleport, etc ( seems like no way around this).

i didn’t get that far into explorable mode yet, but this sounds like a case for stability.

Having done all pathes in TA I might be able to help you out a bit.

You don’t need to skip Trash but it might be helpful in a pug because the communication often is really lackluster.
One ranged person can easily keep the flowers destroyed while still dpsing.

The Wurm Boss:
Pretty easy with coordination … hard as nails without.
You can do this boss without anyone being downed.
Our strategy is to keep one ranged for flowers, we focus the first vine down in like 10-20 seconds hop to the next and repeat that until the boss Wurm spawns.
At 75% the Boss spawns an additonal Vine, focus fire it down NOBODY stays on the boss.
The same at 50%.
At 25% just burn the boss down if you have the necessary dmg otherwise focus fire one of the two spawned Vines first then the second one after that the boss.

The Up-path:

Malorna is pretty easy just stay clear of the one-shot AoE.
It’s hard for melee to get the hang of it but it’s pretty doable.
Nothing special about the boss.

Fyonna (?):

Clear a few eggsacs around the boss before pulling here to get a good fighting area.
Nothing special mechanic wise.

Nightmare Tree(UP):

Get a few players to destroy the plant turrets and healing pods!
All others focus fire the boss.
Avoid the spikes from the tree they WILL kill you!

The Forward-Down path:

Husk Boss:
Dodge to shake off the bee’s!
Try to dodge the long windup attacks as they hurt quite a bit.
Nothing special here as far as I remember.

Mesmer Sylvari Boss:
This one is HARD!
Try to stop damage while Chaos Armor is up.
Don’t attack while retaliation is up it hurts a LOT with high attack speed!
Avoid the chaos storm.
You prolly need some Condi Removal… Boon Removal would be awesome.

Nightmare Tree(Forward-Down):
Another tough one.
TWO options, easy cheese tactic or chaos tactic:

Cheese:
Clear a few spiders in the room and range the Tree till he dies. EASY and BORING!

Chaos tactic:
get people to focus spiders, kill the hatchlings FAST and effective.
Don’t pull an unnecessary amout of spiders they will demolish your team, kill those that need to be killed.
Other than that it’s chaos everyone needs to be on their toes for this one.

The Forward-Forward Path:

Teleport Room Boss:
Easy and funny, no real threat there.
Just use the portals and be surprise where you are

Laurent:
A hard one!
You CAN pull the adds from him without getting Laurent itself but that requires some training or easy pulling magic “Scorpion Wire”.
On to Laurent itself … if you thought the Nightmare Warders on the way to Laurent hit hard beware of him.
He is a damage machine, it’s a rough one for melees but doable just be extremely wary of his attacks and dodge as many as possible, there is no shame in retreating to range for a bit to regain some health.
If you have a ranged only team, just kite him and he becomes easy as pie.

Nightmare Tree(Forward-Forward):
Quite easy possibly the easiest Nightmare Tree.
He spawns !!3!! Veteran Ancient Oakhearts, you can kill them but they will respawn almost instantly!
Get one/two person/s to kite them as best as possible, everyone else focus fire the boss , as all Nightmare Trees he has quite a low healthpool.
Destroy the roots fast to get rid of the immobalize.

Trashsection:

-Try to fight in places without flowers when possible, if it’s not possible get one person to destroy the flower fulltime
-Be careful around the Stonetouch spiders the Paralysis is lethal.
-Warders can easily be kited if your melees can’t handle them good enough.
-Nightmare Vines are REALLY easy in melee range, they don’t “spit” in melee range.
-Big Nightmare Court groups can be tricky, try to focus the high damage mobs, as always Focus Fire is the key here!!!
-Some Husks have an attack that gives a bee debuff, you can get rid of them by dodging once.
-Be careful about the Nightmare Hounds, the leap can pin you down for a LONG time!

I guess that’s all, hope I could help a bit!
If there are any questions I’ll try to answer them as best as possible

I think they can stand to thin down the spawn rate of those volatile blooms. They’re really small and show up really frequently, especially in that worm fight.

Nice tips Jindrael. Thanks.

But seriously , avoiding those crazy flowers is harder then it sound. In the forward/ forward route there are times you might only find a small area at a corner to do this. Finding a small patch was just part of the equation, as knights and necromancers does aoe attacks. Someone will always die it seems.

For the up path. Do you clear the Wurms alley before fyonna?
It was tough because the Wurms at the back, was able to aoe our melee killing the Wurm in the front. Not to mention there are flowers around, it makes things even tougher. If you where to dodge the aoe for the Wurms shooting at the back, chances are you will trigger the flower’s poison aoe.

Btw my group discover that pulling the nightmare court into water, make them easier to kill. It was in the room after 1st Wurm boss. That don’t quite matter really, as I later realise you are able to just dodge pass them and head on to the portal boss room and there are no other water area to utilise for killing the nughtmare court mobs. .

@ Asterick, I reckon the spawn rate is fine even if it’s little crazy. It’s the dot damage output kills really fast.

It’s the mix of dodging the clouds and the spiders at the same time, and messing up on either means death.