Guild Wars 2

Sup!

So out of all the paths in this dungeon, the Nightmare Tree boss for the forward/up path is easily the most difficult because of the spiders. Now, with every group I have done this path with we have simply stayed as far away from the Tree as possible and whittled him down with long-ranged attacks in order to avoid the spiders. Pretty much everyone agrees not to bring AoE or bounce attacks because they will aggro the spiders.

So the point of this thread is to gather some opinions on this boss. Is there a more legitimate method of fighting this boss or is spamming him with long-range attacks pretty much the only option due to the spiders, because the latter option isn’t that exciting.

I’ve ran this dungeon quite a bit but I’ve never seen a group that tried to do anything but range it down so as far as I can tell thats the easiest method. I don’t really find this boss in any of the three forms to be very exciting. The other two can be done while taking very little to no damage.

If you have a team that can keep up anti projectiles and have good DPS, you could actually just rush underneath him, DPS him, and put up anti projectiles (chain them sequentially) when the spiders start shooting at you.

Strife’s Fwd/Up Guide (~8:00 in for boss fight): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pOydGiQQDw&list=PLzYy8FVzP3HZG5KLZpSxML6qi8wikAU-a&index=4

I haven’t run TA in a while but we usually just kill the spiders in the front half of the room and then AOE as much as we like. But if you CBF and/or you know you’re just going to wipe if you aggro the spiders, then yeah, stick with ranged.

I have no idea why ranging him should be considered less legitimate: it doesn’t involve cheating or exploiting. It’s just less efficient, slow and quite cheesy, although effective.
Now, personally, I’d kill to have a decent team for once and be able to melee it all the time, but as you can see, it requires very good dps and good projectile reflections, which means, organization: 5 people with an actual brain. So… good luck with that.
Sometimes you can’t even manage to melee the easiest final boss, if the team refuses to help killing the mortars/reflecting/kiting their projectiles, for example, and insists on autoattacking it to death from 1200 range. But anyway.
There’s one thing you can do, the slowest way but maybe you’ll find it more legitimate: you can kill all the spiders or the greatest part of them – since not all will respawn – with some pulling, and then jump on the boss, being careful about the adds it’ll respawn til a certain percentage of health, if I remember well. After that it should just do massive damage.
Nothing else I can think of. Either you fight the spiders, or avoid them, or burn through the boss health and destroy it before they overwhelm you. What else can be done?

Initial waves of spiders are unavoidable. You can kill 3 of the spiderlings in front of the boss before the cutscene starts. If someone accidentally aggro more spiders, the boss spits will spawn additional spiders. Spits can spawn spiderlings or recluse and the composition is random.

When boss plants his right hand into the ground and shakes violently, spits will happen. Actual attack will happen about a sec after visual cue. Spits can be absorbed by skills like Shield of Avenger or Sanctuary but can’t be reflected.

I have done melee and ranged before. The entire party should melee or range together. Melee is basically burst it down asap. For range, if no one accidentally aggro more spiders by AoE or stray shots, the spits will stop spawning spiders and all efforts can be concentrated on the boss.