Guild Wars 2

Since I’ve been getting different information from different guides, is there any situations where you shouldn’t use AoE on the boss provided it increases your DPS?

I was under the impression it’s perfectly fine to use AoE, since the adds’ regeneration stacks in duration only and is negligible, and bubbles heal the boss if they’re not popped anyway.

I’ve read something about a second type of add that starts appearing at 20% and delivers some minor direct healing instead of regeneration.
I don’t know neither it’s true or not (I never go against husk) nor if the amount of healing is large enough for players to avoid using AoE attacks at that point.

Altair.8402:

Since I’ve been getting different information from different guides, is there any situations where you shouldn’t use AoE on the boss provided it increases your DPS?

I was under the impression it’s perfectly fine to use AoE, since the adds’ regeneration stacks in duration only and is negligible, and bubbles heal the boss if they’re not popped anyway.

You are correct. It is about high enough dps to counter the regens and bubble heals. Ive seen small groups, with aoe do just fine here.

One of the problems here is when the boss resets, either through a bug or by people standing too far back on or beyond the room lip. That health reset is wrongly blamed on aoe. Any heal caused by aoe tends to be quite low.

It is about sensible judgement calls rather than setting an all out yes or no rule, altho a good strategy is often to kite adds away from boss and remove the problem completely.

just focus tne AOE attacks so the healing bubbles nneeed to move through the full AOE flied tro get to the husk instead of focus AoE-ing the husk itself. The detonation of those heals will be outside the range where the husk would be healed. and AOE will be usable once more, of course 1 or 2 melees focussing the bubbles will be very usefull as well, especially when equipped with cripples.

Found this on reddit.

Yeah this is a topic that still has hate over it it seems when put into practice in game. zerg aoe’s boss but boss is A: not kept away form zerg, downing/killing mass players which staggers the damage output hard or B: the boss is kited too far from the zerg and become unable to dps him the entire fight.

These two things are far more inhibiting on the fight then focus of single/aoe combat usage but people ball and whine ‘NO AOE YOU IDIOT’ and other such rude remarks, when aoe vs single target makes no real difference.

So long as copper is poisoned and the zerg doesn’t lose players to do damage there won’t be a problem provided the players keep their damage up be it single or aoe.

I personally load up both null field and TW before the last defense event before copper so i am ready when breach opens. That way during copper i can call kitten the start and assist the zerg for heightening damage for a quick burst then drop null field on the zerg all throughout the fight.

Why null field and not feedback some might wonder? don’t call me an idiot i have reasons, those reasons being null field is an ethereal field type. Many of the zerg who shoot the boss will be using projectiles. This will cause combos to produce confusion with those attacks, increasing damage even more against copper as he is rather mindless and will easily swing attacks while holding 10 or more confusion stacks

So final verdict yes aoe is just as reliable as single target, as long as the boss is kept in range of the zerg but not to close as to cleave the zerg in half. Keep poison on him and make full use of call cd’s long and short you shouldn’t have trouble with killing him.

There’s been a decent amount written about the topic on the GW2 reddit. This might be a good starting topic. Searching the reddit for “Husk Copper” might yield more results :)

Basically, in an ideal world you’ve got people kiting the offshoots away from/murdering the bubbles before they get to the husk and a group burning the husk down. Bubbles are the bigger priority than offshoots for kiters, but if you can get one or two people kiting the offshoots, that’ll leave a nice big space for husk aoe without the bleed stacks of doom from dead offshoots. A big problem is when the people on the ledge are the only ones aggro’ing husk, which’ll cause him to reset (from what I’ve seen). That means it’s worthwhile for there to be a pit fighter, as well, though usually the kiters will give husk a few hard hits between bubble spawns/cleanse and dodge clusterkittens. I would theorycraft on when it’s more appropriate to use aoe but I agree with those in the many threads who say they saw copper go down more reliably when people just used their highest dps skills and shouted “yolo” into the desert wind. Still need people trying to kill the bubbles away from the husk, though. IMO, that’s the most important thing.

If you’re kiting in the pit, you’ll need lots of control skills (for the bubbles) and condi cleanse (for yourself/your pit group) – those offshoots like to stack enough bleed to bring down a herd of elephants. Also you are doing Traheasus’ work, so bless you. Your zerg should be helping to support you with extra condi cleanse, but often they will just ranged autoattack and then yell at you if you get downed, ha.

Power Users need to be popping bubbles. Condition users should be maintaining max stacks of everything.

As long as the bubbles die before they reach the Husk, the fight is ridiculously fast.

Part of the problem is that not everyone is up to date on current popular tactics or as well informed as they think they are on the mechanics of the fight. Which means you’ll sometimes get one (or more) people who mistake kiting the adds for some idiot who doesn’t know to use ranged running for his life because he’s accidentally agrroed everything, and shouting at everyone else to never use any AoE under any circumstances. (And on one occasion actually claiming they’d report any eles they saw entering Red, because apparently eles are the only profession capable of AoE.)

I imagine they’re probably the same people who still demand only warriors and guardians in their dungeon groups.

As other people have mentioned there’s also an issue where if the Husk gets too far from all the players he’ll reset to full health, which some people confuse with the (actually very minor) healing from the offshoots and bubbles and blame on AoE.

Hopefully with time most people will settle down to a smaller number of strategies and more people will get to understand not just what to do but why they do that and therefore when it’s ok to deviate from it and what the options are.

Copper is what drains from me any will to play Silverwastes…honestly…
Every time I witnessed it fail, it wasn’t because AoE, because heal or whatever, it was because it’s hp was going down SO SLOWLY that time simply was over before people could kill it. Spam the least damaging possible autoattack on an uber upscaled boss and expect it to succeed. Before the “no aoe” nonsense it was basically impossible to fail that one boss…

The last time I failed copper was hilarious.

There were a very small handful of people (including myself) down in the pit kiting the Husk and offshoots, with maybe 10-12 people standing on the ledge. The guy who had Copper agro was unfortunately not very clear on the mechanics of the fight (or was trolling intentionally) and actually pulled the Husk to the other side of the room away from the ledge. And the people on the ledge, rather than, I dunno, getting down so they could actually get into range and keep attacking, just stood there screaming “PULL IT OVER HERE IDIOT”. I mean, eventually most of them did jump down and get into range (though even at the end there were a small handful of people so stubborn that they were still on the ledge after the fight failed, pretty sure a couple were even AFK as after the event failed and the gas came in they just stood there and died) but they must have wasted 30 seconds or more standing there insisting the boss be pulled to where they were rather than getting off their duffs and adapting.

But that was an extraordinary circumstance. Its rare to fail because of something like that. In my many Silverwastes attempts, the top things that cause Copper to fail are the following….

~ People screaming “No AOE EVER!” leading to people spamming their lowest DPS ranged attacks which simply doesn’t do enough damage, not to mention it means the bubbles never die before hitting Copper and healing him. Getting rarer and rarer nowadays, which is good.

~ Resets. If there aren’t enough people in the pit to keep Copper agro’d and he starts going after people standing on the ledge, yet can’t get to them, like any melee enemy he’ll drop out of combat and start healing HP at an insane rate. Its the AI’s way of keeping you from cheesing battles by standing somewhere completely safe from its attacks. Seriously, I know you want to sit on the ledge out of all danger, but its much better if you get in there. You can still attack from range, and if you keep moving you won’t take too many hits even from the offshoots most of the time.

~ OVERSCALING. This is probably the #1 cause of fails IMO. Copper is a husk. Which means it has insane armor, which means direct DPS is less effective than usual. Conditions are the best way to deal damage to Copper, but conditions are hard capped. What that all means is that the more people you have, the more HP Copper has, but once conditions hit a certain point their DPS caps out. TL:DR version, don’t throw 40 people at Copper, it won’t end well. I’d say the “magic number” would probably be around 10, 20 at most, hopefully with at least half of them being condition-based. And whatever you do, don’t panic and start screaming “Copper needs help, Copper needs help!” in map chat unless you’re seriously undermanned (like, 4 people undermanned). If Gold / Silver and Amber finish quickly and everyone floods Copper, you’re probably boned unless a lot of people know the fight mechanics super well.