Guild Wars 2

With the amount of dredge we are forced to face at the breakable wall section and the boss room that follows with the set number of Dredge respawns, I have to ask; are we expected to fight this kind of force through normal means? It’s irritating to feel forced to perform suicide bomb runs just to get the gate down just because the Dredge apparently breed faster than rabbits. I am sure perhaps some class combos can do it, but it is such a mess that it is highly unadvisable to do it normally.

The second part at the boss room just after the gate is equally frustrating. The spawning mechanic itself is easy enough to manage given the line of sight exploit people often (always) use, but if done normally combined with the boss with the excruciatingly painful shockwave attack is pretty much impossible. There are so many Dredge that it is just down right impossible to see that attack coming!

My point is, the fractal is punishingly difficult if done what is considered the “normal” way. I just have to ask; is it actually expected of players to suicide bomb the door and LoS the trash till it simply expires? It makes the encounter as a whole feel kind of cheap. Just as it was back when we were able to zerg rush the bosses in dungeons. That was eventually fixed, but now it feels like we took a step backwards IMMEDIATELY after making one forward!

It’s not as hard as it sounds…though you might die a couple of times when practicing it. This is how we do it.

The bombs always spawn in exactly the same place. We all know which bomb we’re going for. We run through, and place our bombs by the door, wait till they blow and run all the way back. Wait for the bombs to respawn. It can’t hurt to have either a mesmer portal or some sort of invisibility on the way as well, but you can do it without it.

Remember you only have to stand there long enough for the bombs to blow and some damage to be done on the door, then you hightail it out of there far enough to break aggro.

The second part, the boss room is much easier. Once you get by the bomb part, just stand outside the door in the corner. The boss never comes outside the room. Well he gets to the edge and dives under the ground and disappears.

Have one guy run into the room and pull with range a group of guys, then duck around the edge of the door, so you’re LOSing the guys in the room. A handful of dredge run out on top of you, and you AOE them down, or kill them any way you want. It’s not hard.

Repeat until they’re all dead and the bar on the right of the screen is full. Then you go and take out the boss. If you leave one vet alive with him they don’t respawn.

Hope this helps.

I don’t think you quite understood my post. I am asking the question if this is infact how we are intended to do this fractal. Something about breaking aggro and line of sighting the boss to reset w/o his trash seems broken to me.

@Vayne Thats the typical approach the OP was hating, as it feels (and probably is) like cheating.

For the bomb door?

An alternative, and likely MEANT to be done, method is something I’ve done at odd times. You rush the door, but do NOT set any bombs. You clear the Dredge until most of them respawn and do not aggro you due to distance. THEN you set one bomb followed by killing the Dredge that pop up due to a bomb going off. Rinse and repeat until the door is open.
Suicide Bombs on that door is just a simpler method in that it requires a heck of a lot of teamwork plus can’t really be kittened over by one person but at the cost of very likely repeated deaths. The “alternative” method can go horrible if someone doesn’t follow directions and sets a bomb too early/at start, or goes too far from the doors and aggros more of the ever-spawning Dredge until the door is open (Not to mention the difficulty at higher fractal levels, as the last time I did this was in the 30s).
(Note, you could potentially do a multi-placed Bomb drop that is group coordinated after one or two bombs done this way. Similar to a certain CoE security control panel activation.)

For the second part? There are ways that doesn’t involve LoSighting the adds, or triggering the boss’ retreat range while pulling the adds to slaughter. Such as someone distracting the Champ while everyone else slaughters the regulars, or a group kiting approach that leads that kills any ranged dredge followed by attacking the boss until more ranged dredge spawn. Its honestly been a while since I’ve done that (and never above a 20-tier fractal), but its possible. I just dislike the approach, as suddenly its usually my Mesmer that misses out on the potential LOOT! drops that comes from all that.

You raise a good argument MLieBennett. That does sound like a viable expectation the designers might have had. It is a shame though about the loot. That would be rather disadvantageous for you. Well, I feel a little better now at least knowing there is logic to the madness. I just wish I didn’t feel dirty every time I went through the dungeon for going against it… You know, besides the part where I am groaning over how freaking long the fractal tends to take. However, that’s another subject entirely.

We have it down to the point where we almost never have any deaths doing it the way I outlined.

It’s not broken, that’s the mechanic. It’s doable.

Admittedly I never tried it the other way, which also might be doable.

Is it a great mechanic? I don’t think so. But you shouldn’t be dying, or at least you should have little chance of dying at that point.

Now the difference is, I don’t pug. I run with a guild and we’re all communicating on mumble. So maybe that makes the coordination much easier.

But I’m not thinking that content that requires some coordination is necessarily bad. Like I said, usually in two passes, two bomb drops, we have the door down without anyone dying. The whole thing takes two minutes or so.

I didn’t see it as that big a deal.

We usually do the door by mixing refuge and ports so we can ignore trash, killing the boss is not that hard though… we do him normal instead of the typical glitching bs.

You can kite while doing w/e and focus the boss down pretty much.. you shouldn’t be paying too much attention to his lackeys but more him. You should not be having any problems dodging it after you’ve killed him a few times.

A lot of stuff in this game is seemingly impossible until you get it down, idk why ANet loves to design that way but it is what it is. Helps not to be in a PuG…

Without a trinity system, you really have no difficulty threshold for how much opposition you can throw at a team. They have to design content that can be done by a group of Engineers, Rangers, and Necromancers just the same as Mesmers, Warriors, and Guardians.

With this structure missing, it’s really just a shallow zerg of enemies to make up for the lack of mechanical depth from the encounter design. In GW1, creatures had player available skills so it made it clear cut how to build to counter certain areas and mob dynamics. Here, it’s so casualized and homogenized that it doesn’t even matter. More akin to a hack n slash than MMORPG group combat.

The point is, without this threshold, they are basically designing blind with no way to gauge how hard an encounter will be for the entire player base. There is no healer role, no tank role, everything is broken up into DPS or be DPS’d. Nothing is specialized or distinct based on class design and the lack of trinity.

That’s why we will never have dungeons that accent the skill system depth or class-skill interplay because they are not designed with that in mind. They are designed around shallow gimmicks as a result of no trinity system. Bring these bombs to the door without dying, well there’s no healer, so it’s up to each individual. This creates problems because without roles to fulfill, everyone is vying for one role. This is where class imbalance comes in. A Guardian is going to have a hell-of-a-lot easier time running those bombs up the step than that Ranger. Since roles aren’t specialized, you’d expect the Ranger to be able to do just about the same as a Guardian, but no.

There are still roles, but they are homogenized almost to a point of nullification. Flat out, a Guardian will fare better at this type of gimmick than a Ranger. But a Guardian’s role is homogenized because he can’t purport his usefulness onto another class beyond aegis and some other trait related bonuses that are simply not enough. No role is distinct enough to matter like a healer or a tank and that’s why there are class imbalances. The game is one-dimensional. Why take a Ranger when a Guardian will do it better 10 times out of 10? If there were proper roles to even design encounters and dungeon content around in the first place, you wouldn’t see such major disparity in difficulty between types of content.

What needs to happen is ArenaNet needs to define class roles a lot more. They need to flesh out a direct healer class or if not, then each other class’ roles should be defined a lot more. (For example, a Ranger has more Precision inherently than a Necromancer, therefore making the Ranger obviously more suited to a DPS role than support) [Not saying they should do it to this degree, but i thought that would be an easy example to get the point across] They need to decide what role, for example, a Ranger will play consistently in a group and what role a Guardian or Warrior will play consistently in a group. Right now, this jack of all trades horse kitten just marginalizes what role variety there happens to be. A warrior can heal, but can’t be a direct healer, as no other class can. A guardian is probably the most proficient at team support in the way of healing, but the role is not defined. They need to give things structure and definitive purpose to be able to design around it.

Unless they seriously think about why their combat falls flat, their design is imbalanced, you’ll always see this huge difficulty gap in the content. It’s because there’s no inherent class structure to design around, therefore they must rely on gimmicks to engage a team that often have nothing to do with the depth of the combat or skills systems. They are just that: gimmicks. So, better hope you have the classes that are more fit to handle the ridiculously over-tuned mobs and mechanics because the classes are imbalanced too and there’s no healer role to mitigate damage to your Ranger and make you as viable under pressure as a Guardian or Warrior.

I agree, removal of tanks I can handle but without a prot or heal monk everything is so shallow imo especially since monk was one of my mains and then ANet just goes lol whelp too bad we removed that completely so have fun with your 5k self heals and 200 regen ticks whilst getting 1 shotted.

Right now we are all glorified DPS with tiny amounts of support and I emphasize the tiny when we are hit with such insane damage. You’d be better off with 2 more dodges and the complete removal of a self heal because dodgedodgedodge, heals are pointless when you are downed in 1-2 hits.

It’s only really hard when the members of he group are trying to speed run it and not working as a team. I personally don’t find it fun a all either way but then again I think the fractals are a complete waste of time and can’t figure out why they even introduced them.

The way it’s intended to be done is to bomb in sections, while it may appear to be an infinite spawn of dredge, it’s not. All of those enemies that spawn infinitely are actually just regular mobs and not veterans.

You’re supposed to bomb until you see veterans spawn… then you kill them in sections and then start bombing again. If you continue to bomb the door without killing the spawned veterans, it’s almost a certain party wipe.

People have that perception that because the mobs never stop, there’s no reason to kill the enemies at all.

It’s actually quite surprising on how uninformed people are about the mechanics of fractals, even in the higher tiers. People tend to follow what works for them, even if its not efficient. So when subject to a different strategy, they tend to get arrogant and disregard it.

Chase.8415:

The way it’s intended to be done is to bomb in sections, while it may appear to be an infinite spawn of dredge, it’s not. All of those enemies that spawn infinitely are actually just regular mobs and not veterans.

You’re supposed to bomb until you see veterans spawn… then you kill them in sections and then start bombing again. If you continue to bomb the door without killing the spawned veterans, it’s almost a certain party wipe.

People have that perception that because the mobs never stop, there’s no reason to kill the enemies at all.

It’s actually quite surprising on how uninformed people are about the mechanics of fractals, even in the higher tiers. People tend to follow what works for them, even if its not efficient. So when subject to a different strategy, they tend to get arrogant and disregard it.

Or, you can run a thief and mesmer and not have to do any clearing.

At 48 It takes ages to clear dredges anyways unless you stack warriors. I swear some of those dredge veterans have more HP than AC bosses.

lothefallen.7081:

Without a trinity system, you really have no difficulty threshold for how much opposition you can throw at a team. They have to design content that can be done by a group of Engineers, Rangers, and Necromancers just the same as Mesmers, Warriors, and Guardians.

I will say the issue is not lack of trinity as such, but that traiting for anything but DPS is a waste of points more often than not. The trinity is there, but it is supposedly a soft trinity in that any profession can take on any point by shifting around traits and gear. But because of synergies, DPS outperforms any other.

This is then compounded by aggro, that appears to even further punish a defensive build (weak healing yet massive mob attention when building defensively).

And even more is piled on because while offense is passive (pile on the traits and gear, click a target, pew pew pew for crit after crit), defense is active (hit this key to dodge, this to block, this to CC for a couple of seconds, die when out of endurance and have everything else on cooldown).

lothefallen.7081:

With this structure missing, it’s really just a shallow zerg of enemies to make up for the lack of mechanical depth from the encounter design. In GW1, creatures had player available skills so it made it clear cut how to build to counter certain areas and mob dynamics. Here, it’s so casualized and homogenized that it doesn’t even matter. More akin to a hack n slash than MMORPG group combat.

Did you even play GW1? Even if you want to pretend GW1 is a trinity game, it clearly did not stop Anet from using enemy zergs as a primary means of creating challenges at the top level of difficulty. So either way a lack of tanks and healers has nothing to do with the prevalence of zergs. Unsurprisingly, simply increasing the odds against the players is a universally, mathematically reliable way of making things harder.

Btw i wouldnt recommend pullling mobs away from Rabsovitch it takes forever to kill them that way just pull rabsovitch to the left side of room, kill mobs who comes with him then kill rabsovitch and after that you can just stand at the car and kill rest of the dredge forces.
As for bombs iam thief so i stack invis with blinding powder and refuge on my team, then we go and its usually 2 runs and doors are blown out….

In my book infinite spawns in dungeons are the cheapest of the cheap game mechanics.

Basically its the devs cheating players and then acting suprised that players try to find ways to circumvent these and may even call it exploit if the alternative turns out being too effective.

And….Immersion = 0 (where do they all come from, endless breeding room or what the…aaawww…)

And btw, breaking line of sight to lure a ranged mob by using obstacles is 1×1 in gaming and certainly not an exploit.

If it wasnt intended then the leveldesigner was just very sloppy to say it mildly.

Apart from those seemingly endless spawns in that dredge fractal, I quite enjoy the rest of it.

Yes, I said it!
:)

Dafomen.7892:

breaking line of sight to lure a ranged mob by using obstacles is 1×1 in gaming and certainly not an exploit

whatever you call it, its exploiting inferior AI. even if its massively accepted.

what would self-aware human player with ranged weapon do, if his melee opponent ran behind obstacle? certainly not run close to it. ranged player would circle obstacle around keeping his distance, and/or shower it with aoe attacks.

why self-aware human? because there are always plenty of those stupid ones, who get one-hitted by frenzied destroyer behind the corner (lineage2 anyone?)

P.S. i wish gw2 ranged mobs could nuke the obstacles players are using for abusing their LOS.

Saulius.8430:

what would self-aware human player with ranged weapon do, if his melee opponent ran behind obstacle? certainly not run close to it. ranged player would circle obstacle around keeping his distance, and/or shower it with aoe attacks.

I understand you disappointment in current AI technology.

Thats one reason why people prefer PvP

The “game” you may be looking for is an tactical combat simulator (like the Arma series).

This is just another RPG which are not focusing on realism in combat.
And….there are no magic spells out there …

Dafomen.7892:

And btw, breaking line of sight to lure a ranged mob by using obstacles is 1×1 in gaming and certainly not an exploit.

Breaking LoS to lure range is a sound tactic, which can logically be used even in real combat. However, doing so in order to fight them without the boss they were clearly intended to be fought with, is an exploit.

LinkR.6190:

Dafomen.7892:

And btw, breaking line of sight to lure a ranged mob by using obstacles is 1×1 in gaming and certainly not an exploit.

Breaking LoS to lure range is a sound tactic, which can logically be used even in real combat. However, doing so in order to fight them without the boss they were clearly intended to be fought with, is an exploit.

Pulling stuff out of a room to fight it away from the boss is a strategy, not an exploit. We did stuff like this in Guild Wars 1 all the time. Pulling is simply part of the game.

If Anet didn’t expect this to happen, they wouldn’t have made the boss leash where he does, while letting others run further.

It isn’t uncommon to have bosses live on a short leash. Unless there is a given reason for the boss to SAY why he refuses to fight with his allies outside of his safety room, then it just seems like a kitten encounter to even include the trash.