Guild Wars 2

I’m having a very hard time with the Sylvari personal story quest “a tangle of weeds” on my thief. The lich is all fun and games until he spawns his adds. Then it goes downhill. It seems that my extra company gets blown to bits by merely looking at them, so it’s basically me and Traherne on our feet. I try and roll and dodge and whatnot while firing away at the adds, but they are rather overwhelming to me in a group. The big issue for me however is how the lich resets as soon as he’s out of combat. Wich means if I’m the only one standing he’ll reset if I heal. Or if I die. Which means that the adds will be spawned back in as I take up the fight. It’s rather circular and frustrating, and I’m obviously doing something wrong.

I did this fight as a Mesmer, it’s pretty tough.

First, some good news – if the fight resets, he won’t spawn any more adds even if you get him below 25% again.

During the fight, try and keep everyone up at all times by using res, and kill all the adds first.

His ranged attacks are comparatively weak and can be dodged by movement (i think) and rolling. His close nuke (which fears) is pretty short ranged so if you stay at range and spam 2 while moving you can survive a decent amount of time as well.

If you end up in a 1v1 situation, run around and try to res someone, even if you die you can usually make it back before they die again.
If you die before you finish reviving, that’s ok too, just come back and continue to revive (the progress bar will stay up).
Take slots that can defend against projectiles to give you protection while you try and res (my Thief is only level 7 or so, but looking at abilities on the wiki probably Smokescreen is a good one to get.

Edit: the other thing is his DPS isn’t actually that high, so once you kill the first set of adds you can take your time and make sure the whole team is up again before you push his hp low enough for him to spawn the 2nd set of mobs

He spawns adds even after resetting, which is what has me the most frustrated and makes it so circular.

I`m playing a ranger so that mission was pretty annoying for me, seeing as you could only fight with the sword and without my pet. First time i lost pretty bad (boss had 35%hp left).
Second time i reset the instance used the trashmobs before the boss to get a feeling for the skills. In the fight i constantly went into melee range, spammed my aoe heal as soon as it was up (allowed most of the npcs to stay alive). Additionally i used my two knockdown skills on the boss as soon as they were up and killed adds as soon as they spawned (you need to run around otherwise they kill you fast, the adds got knockdowns).
This strategy worked as i finished the encounter the second time. Hope it helps.

Anka.3675:

He spawns adds even after resetting, which is what has me the most frustrated and makes it so circular.

Dang that sucks, I guess I was lucky he didn’t do that for me!

I just completed this as Elementalist after failing once prior.

My tactic:
Attack #2 is a ranged attack. Keep your party back from the graveyard and quickly run forward and pull the mobs in the graveyard one at a time out of the graveyard, before your group can run in guns blazing. Clear out the graveyard without aggro'ing big-bad. Once graveyard is clear, repeat this but go around the side and range pull from there, that way, by time you aggro him and your compatriots begin running to him and he runs at you, you meet roughly at the exit of the graveyard. Now you can use the edge of the graveyard as a line of sight mechanic to dodge his attacks and get him to move when he's targeting you and not one of your people. Combine this with dodging and the knockdown and your class 7,8,9 slot abilities. Put the ranged attack on auto attack after engaging him, then whenever you dodge away or pull back for a breather or to try and pull him, you're doing constant damage.

Note the above tactic I described does not ensure a zero-death completion. I still died a couple times and respawned, but he never reset and I was able to complete with only 2 deaths.

Third (or maybe fourth) time is the charm. Managed to drag him out of the graveyard after the adds were dealt with (one being ever so kindly to trip my thief trap before dying) and thus had a bit more room to manouver and something that kept him in battle when I hit my heal.

I played a mesmer for this quest. At level 30 I was failing pretty badly. So I waited until level 32 and a couple of karma gear upgrades before going back in. I barely killed him. I was dreading the face-off and let my npc followers regain full health after tackling each group. Then I focused on only damaging him, basically playing the tank for the npcs so they'd last longer. When the adds came I mostly ignored them, and then realized I was doing what Cai said… “Try not to waste any time on anything else” or something to that effect. I died once and for some reason his health didn’t reset, maybe an npc was still attacking him but I just ran in, hacked away again, and squeezed the last bit of hp out of him while in a downed state.

I think another thing that might help is making sure none of your utilities will be wasted or inappropriate for how you plan to tackle this guy. You don’t do any condition damage with Caladboge for example. I went for passives/defensive illusion on my successful attempt.

I’m trying to do this as a level 28 ranger and find it impossible. My gear is all lvl 25 stuff and all of it is gem’d. A BIG problem is that I’m forced to use a greatsword and my pet is taken away. The ranged effect of the great sword doesn’t do a lot of damage – probably 95-120.

It’s the adds that are the problem. All of my NPC’s die to them and if I die, he resets – if I leave the cemetery, he resets – his adds of course don’t reset nor do my NPC’s. If I try to take the adds on in melee range, I die almost instantly. I don’t think I’ve ever not died to the adds so he’s always reset on me leaving me the remainder of the adds and all my NPC’s dead.

My healing spell is Healing spring which is a circle of healing that will also effect my allies. My other skills are Spike trap, signet of stone, and stone spirit; all of these are aimed at survival.

I’ve tried this for about 4 hrs now. Even after he resets, I can generally take on the adds one at a time outside the cemetery and clear them and then get the NPC’s up one at a time. They do start attacking the second they are res’d though which makes it a bit harder. I run into the same problem though, he’ll summon adds at about 50%. The NPC’s alone can get him down to this percentage but it doesn’t matter if both they and I die at that point.

A single brute can kill me if it gets close enough because of the stun they have so it’s no surprise the entire group kills me every time.

I had a similar problem when I tried the quest Mirror Mirror with the destroyers and the golems — I ended up waiting 2-3 levels and then doing that one again and I guess I’ll be doing the same to this one. Is the ranger that much weaker than the other classes or am I doing something wrong? Or is this quest just universally hard at the recommended level?
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OK after writing this, I tried one last time and did it. I did die but he didn’t reset this time. Only thing I did differently with the adds was just continuous kiting and hitting the ranged effect of the sword constantly and didn’t try to attack with any other ability — apparently this kept the NPC’s up longer to do more damage on the boss.