Guild Wars 2

I have a question for the Copper boss in Red keep in Silverwastes.
As many people, I have noticed that the boss actually started to be failed when people started to yell on chat “NO AOE AT RED NOOBS”.

Before that the fails mainly came from boss resets due to having nobody in the arena.

However yesterday I experienced the boss differently and I’d like to have a bit more understanding on how it works.
Basically in the first run, when I arrived somebody lured the boss at the entrance so that everyone was at range. I decided to jump in the arena to see if I could attract the offshots and kill the bubbles before they reach the mob. Offshots got on me but as I was alone in the dirt pool I couldn’t kill the big bubbles by myself … but they in fact bursted on me / in the middle of the pool (far from the boss, so no heal)… perfect run

Second run as I arrived first I attracted the boss close to the entrance but nobody jumped in the pool with me. Basically the bubble came close to the boss to burst and I think I moved it far enough from the aoe range because the husk received few heals. Perfect run too.

My question is : how do the poison bubble work ? From the wiki or other guides I found they should explode by themselves when in a 200 range and heal in 200 radius. I think this is what happened in the second run but in the first one I’m quite sure they were further than that before exploding (almost always in the middle of the pool) but they were not killed by players around either (or I could have missed one player really really strong).

Has anyone here well understood how they work and could share his valuable knowledge?

For the large bubbles, they will either move directly towards Copper or the middle of the room. If they head for Copper, they will bump into it and pop shortly after. If they head to the middle of the room however, they will simply pop as soon as they reach it.

For the smaller bubbles, they simply wander around aimlessly.

Thank you for the reply.
Is there a way to “control” their target (husk or centre) or is the target of each bubble randomly chosen when they spawn?

I have no evidence to support this other than a couple of relatively hectic runs where I was the person kiting the Husk (the other times went as expected – swarm of ‘1’ pressers at the entry, usually resulting in a huge number of heals). It felt that most bubbles would pick a spot where the husk is at the moment the bubble is spawned, then move to it and explode at that spot. The only time it felt that they behaved differently is when you dragged husk in the 200 range of them, which would make them prematurely explode.

This is based on the fact that I successfully kited Husk in a circle around the room with no bubbles healing it until I lost aggro.

The reason why Copper fails a lot nowadays is because:

1. Nobody’s in the arena with him, so he resets.

2. Nobody kills the bubbles. The BUBBLES are the ones that are giving him his big heal spikes (about 2% of his total health). Ironically, the bad advice about not using AoE is precisely why so many of the bubbles are surviving to reach Copper. If there’s enough AoE pounding down around Copper, the bubbles usually die way before reaching him.

The little husks only give Copper a few boons if they are killed near him. This includes Regeneration, but the health gain from Regen is inconsequential compared to Copper’s massive health pool, and you can simply have Mesmers/Necromancers strip his boons.