Guild Wars 2

I’ll start off by saying, this is some of the best trash design that can be done. No one likes doing trash because it feels like a waste of time. It really serves no other purpose. What better thing to do with trash than to teach the players new mechanics quickly.

My group realized they were meant to teach and not to challenge pretty quickly. After defeating the blue guy and the green guy, the observant of our group picking out the mechanics of them, we spent the rest of our time pulling the red guy multiple times to try and figure out what his mechanic was, because we knew that knowledge would be useful for the actual boss.

We actually couldn’t quite nail down the red guy. We eventually just burnt him down with many dots (conditions), but since they were tutorial mobs, and the boss would have a timer, we knew that burning him down with conditions took too long for the method to work. We think the intended way is to destroy the seekers on top of him, but the seekers have a lot of health and despawn very quickly. The boss has the seekers in an altered form in phase 1.

The blue guy was simple; we had a chronomancer with sword, so stripping the shield kind of just happened. We also were able to stack on top of him, so none of us noticed how the AE attacks worked until the first attempt of the boss where the mechanic returns in an altered form in phase 1.

I’m still not sure what the mechanics of the green guy was. He has a displacement, but seems to have no other mechanic than that. The boss, of course, has this mechanic in an altered form as well in phase 1.

Perhaps this trash should be a bit more difficult so players don’t zerg through them and disregard their mechanics. If they are there to teach the raid the mechanics, they shouldn’t be ignorable, and to a certain degree, they were.

We were kicked from the instance like everyone else; but 8 of us were able to re-enter and try again. I wasn’t lucky enough to get back in, but we walked away pretty satisfied with the apparent difficulty of the actual boss. We didn’t really even put a dent, but we were 8 manning the boss, so perhaps it’s difficult to judge properly.

Awesome feedback, I have a similar thread, but could only really speak to the green guardian: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Raids-RGB-Guardian-Difficulty

Just tagging that here, since it’s on the same topic and this thread is better

I’m also very confused what the green guardian was supposed to teach. You mentioned a displacement, do you mean the blue AoE? I thought maybe it teleported me once, but honestly it was easy to avoid so I only stayed in it once due to a lag spike (which also made it hard to tell if the attack ported me, or if I was just rubberbanding).

I loved the constant blue projectiles (bullet storm). It made it important to keep moving and kept things interesting.

It sounds like figuring out the red mechanic is gonna be the trick to beating this encounter in time.

I think the Blue Guardian should have enough “boon stacks” that an autoattacking mesmer couldnt dispell on his own.

Let’s make it a conscious decision and not a passive one.

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

I think the Blue Guardian should have enough “boon stacks” that an autoattacking mesmer couldnt dispell on his own.

Let’s make it a conscious decision and not a passive one.

First time when I saw him I honestly thought that in order to remove his boon you had to kite him into the aoe which will strip the boon and will give a short damage boost against him. But NOPE. You just boon strip and hit it till it dies and aoe turns out to be just additional busy work for ranged builds.

Crystal Reid.2481:

This is really well constructed feedback, thanks for posting. I can tell you I’ll be changing their portraits to be Champions instead of Legendary to clear up some of the confusion over these guys being the boss, and looking into some of their numbers to make sure they feel sufficiently threatening without becoming a horrible slog.

I would also suggest upping the damage on the Blue guys AoE attack to force people to know the mechanic better. Because right now it barely deals any damage thats significant at all and can be ignored at the beginning.

Another great suggestion (IMO) from the other thread on this is to add some sort of gap closer to them. They’re way too easy to easy-mode kite, and adding closers would make soloing them much less trivial.

Out of curiosity, what is the green guardian mechanic that we’re supposed to be learning there? It seems it could be better messaged. I’d suggest moving him to be the first guardian encountered. He’s much easier than the other two, as all you have to do is avoid the Bullet Storm and AoEs while smacking him down.

I thought the green one was the first encountered? Or is it random? For us it was green then red then blue. But we killed red last because we thought there was some mechanic other than vulnerable to condi damage and wanted to figure it out.

They seem to be random at the moment, spoj.

Viiktor.7523:

I would also suggest upping the damage on the Blue guys AoE attack to force people to know the mechanic better. Because right now it barely deals any damage thats significant at all and can be ignored at the beginning.

It one-shots glassy eles. Consider the difference in hp between necro/warrior and ele/thief/guardian.

Does Rebound work for glassy eles?

Ahh, interesting that they’re randomized. For me, it was blue → red → green. Ignore my comment about reordering them, then :P

Rebound has cool-down.

Crystal Reid.2481:

This is really well constructed feedback, thanks for posting. I can tell you I’ll be changing their portraits to be Champions instead of Legendary to clear up some of the confusion over these guys being the boss, and looking into some of their numbers to make sure they feel sufficiently threatening without becoming a horrible slog.

As much as I understand the idea of the Guardians teaching you the mechanics for the actual boss, I still think they should be somewhat threatening or challenging. So my feedback is that I definitely agree that they shouldn’t be a slog fest because let’s be honest, no one really loves trash mobs all that much lol, but they should feel somewhat threatening. I mean, someone has already solo’d one of the guardians (although it took much longer).

Perhaps making them attack more frequently, hit harder, or maybe have more mechanics? I’m not quite sure what you guys have the resources to do, but I believe it would be better for everybody if the mobs who weren’t the final boss weren’t giant HP sponges but at the same time were not a cakewalk.

TL;DR- No one likes non-boss mobs with high HP but no one also likes non-boss mobs with no real threat.

Crystal Reid.2481:

This is really well constructed feedback, thanks for posting. I can tell you I’ll be changing their portraits to be Champions instead of Legendary to clear up some of the confusion over these guys being the boss, and looking into some of their numbers to make sure they feel sufficiently threatening without becoming a horrible slog.

Not only threatening; but their mechanics noticeable and important; you could perhaps shave off some health in favor of more damage pressure on the raid. I wouldn’t be against punishing groups that ignore their mechanics; doing the fight right should feel refreshing.

We had an abnormally tanky group with only 1 zerker warrior; and on one of our scientific pulls of the red guardian we just stacked on top of him to try and burst him and his seekers down. I don’t think being able to stack in all of those seekers was intended.

Once again, I applaud using trash as mechanic teachers; I hope this type of design continues throughout the rest of the raids.

Crystal Reid.2481:

This is really well constructed feedback, thanks for posting. I can tell you I’ll be changing their portraits to be Champions instead of Legendary to clear up some of the confusion over these guys being the boss, and looking into some of their numbers to make sure they feel sufficiently threatening without becoming a horrible slog.

In my opinion elite enemies would make more sense. At the moment both champions and legendaries are considered bosses.

I just did raids, and for sure they felt to weak to teach.

In fact, I believe their numbers should be the SAME as the boss. The seekers should do the same damage as the ones on the boss, the AoE teleport same damage and frequency, and the stacking should basically wipe the raid if they don’t do it. Because at that point, you can NOT ignore it.

The part that makes it easy is that you do one mechanic one at a time. The boss combines all 3, and I think that would be challenging enough for the first time anyway.

And in the future, please consider not hard gating damage to favor only one side of damage and being basically immune to the other. The benefit should usually be that power does more damage, but can’t be done when the boss is dodging / block / invul / invis alot, but the condi damage keeps ticking during those phases to even it out. To just basically have 999999 toughness and low HP is kinda meh. Or at least tone it down so that power can still kill it but it would have been faster with condi. Hard gating like that is not fun and keeps party composition limited to run certain setups.

Condis can’t do damage when boss is dodging ,etc. either.