Guild Wars 2

Here are a few fights I enjoy because of the mechanics and/or difficulty of the fights:

• Giganticus Lupicus
• Legendary Imbued Shaman
• Colossus Rumblus/Howling King (before dungeon change)
• Subject Alpha
• Ice crystal on Snowblind fractal

Boss encounters I don’t care for:

• When you range the entirety of the fight
• When the boss has too much HP or it’s strictly underwater fight (boring)
• Zerg a stationary target (world bosses)
• Have more mechanics than fighting (Zhaitan fight use guns/AC path 2 boss)

The AC Detha one, after patch.

affectionaly nicknamed ‘ghostbusters’

Lupicus, Jormag

Can’t think of any others right now.

GW2 doesn’t have a single fun boss fight.

My favorite ones are:

- Giganticus Lupicus
- Alphard, Serpent of the Waves (if you don’t glitch her)
- Legendary Imbued Shaman
- Ghost Eater post-patch

That group with a prot monk and seven invoke lightning eles that I ran into yesterday. Kitten was insane burst damage.

Oh… nevermind.

1. Sovereign Eye of Zhaitan; before the nerf
2. Gaheron Baelfire (Story)

Tribune Burntclaw

• not especially difficult, but it allows for some fun challenges (“I’m going to spend the entire fight in melee range without getting hit by a single Banish attack”).
• I like the tuning in this encounter – the boss’s melee attacks are powerful but not one-hit-kill. If someone gets Downed or Immobilized then there’s a serious risk that they’ll be launched into lava, but the team can manage this risk with appropriate counter-play (e.g. Shadow Refuge on the downed person, Immobilize the boss to prevent him from reaching the target, use an AoE stability skill to counter the Launch effect, or just blind him at the last instant).
• the boss skillset makes sense. He can perform heavy cleaving melee attacks, but he’s vulnerable to flanking/backstabs. Therefore, he has a quick-activation skill which knocks back attackers in melee range and disrupts their attack patterns. He’s vulnerable to long-range attackers and evasive melee fighters, but if they’re not paying close attention then he can pin them down with Bolas and Banish them into lava. He’s a big slow-moving target who tends to soak up a lot of Conditions, and so he has a way to cleanse Conditions (arguably, his condition-cleansing ability is excessive but w/e).

Kill-BOT900

• good “punishment” mechanic. If you screw up, then you don’t simply get killed and respawn at the nearest waypoint – you get sent down to dodge a pack of bloodthirsty sharks until you can rejoin the fight (and his HP doesn’t reset in the meantime).
• uses powerful CC effects, but they can be mitigated with careful positioning of your character (rather than relying on split-second timing of dodges or Stability skills)
• learning and predicting his attacks is crucial to survival. Fortunately, the boss is big enough that the attack cues are never hidden by particle effects.

- Thaumanova Reactor’s Fire Elemental, before the bug fix and the series of nerfs (where the fire balls would hit you before the red circle appeared, and they hit for half your health, and there were piles of bodies everywhere). Just the memory of that makes FE my favorite meta event to attend.
- Lieutenant Kholer after buff

Giganticus Lupicus

It’s not even a question, he’s one of the only fights with true mechanics and phases.

The last boss from the Molten facility.
Removing that dungeon from the game was a crime!