Guild Wars 2

I took my level 39 Mesmer through the Ascalonian Catacombs dungeon for the first time, and used Moa Morph for the elite. It worked great for most of the fights.

But it didn’t work on the some of the Champion foes. Somehow they are invulnerable to that skill. The skill just resets when I cast it, and I can keep casting it but it does nothing. Why is that?

If I had to guess, you’re running into the Champion-associated boon, “Defiant”. Basically, to prevent Champions from being stun-locked by groups chaining together Daze, Stun, launch, or anything else that Interrupts, they have a special boon called “Defiant”. The only way to remove a stack of Defiant is to use an interrupt ( / “crowd-control”) skill on them. When the Champion has no stacks of Defiant, the interrupt will work as normal, but they regain all of their stacks of Defiant. So crowd-control skills will work on Champions, but only one for each time you get through their Defiant stacks.

What I believe happened is you cast Moa Morph on the Champion while it still had a stack of Defiant. The Defiant stack absorbed your Moa Morph, causing it to disappear into the ether, as you saw. You can get around it, though: use Diversion, Illusionary Riposte’s double-tap skill, Into the Void (the second half of Temporal Curtain), Signet of Domination, or any other source of Daze to get rid of all the stacks of Defiant. Once it’s open, THEN you can use Moa Morph on the Champion. Assuming nobody else uses a crowd-control skill before you do, of course…

Their other boon, i forgot what it was, reduces the effectiveness of CC by 90%. you’re better off using a daze on their bigger hits than wasting moa on that rather than, say, a veteran add.

I would not waste moa on a champion.

plasmacutter.2709:

Their other boon, i forgot what it was, reduces the effectiveness of CC by 90%. you’re better off using a daze on their bigger hits than wasting moa on that rather than, say, a veteran add.

I would not waste moa on a champion.

Thanks for the comments. Very helpful.

However, I don’t understand why you say you would not waste moa on a champion? So are you saying that I should just go through the dungeon and not use Moa at all? When exactly do you personally use Moa in the dungeons, if not on the Champions?

use it on Veterans throughout the dungeon, If you pull 3 but moa 1 it makes the whole thing easier. tbh though 90% of the time you’ll be better off with time warp.

yellow stang.5618:

So are you saying that I should just go through the dungeon and not use Moa at all? When exactly do you personally use Moa in the dungeons, if not on the Champions?

Never. Moa is just not a good skill for PvE, it’s unreliable on champions, and anything smaller than a champion is too weak to justify using it on in the first place.

Timewarp is the bread and butter dungeon choice, providing your entire party with a huge DPS boost for 10 seconds. As an Asura I’ve actually found the series D golem to have it’s uses, it has a huge hitpoint pool(even more so covered by an iDefender), has a tendency to take aggro and projects a shield that reflects projectiles making it a good choice to take pressure off the frontline by tanking hits for them.