The new Colossus Rumblus fight is broken and here’s my argument:
My party tried the fight six times, out of the six times, only once Grast did his job as intended. The other 5 times, he died 1-2 minutes into the fight ergo no bubble and thus party wipe.
1) In general, a dungeon party’s skills, knowledge of their individual professions , and overall team coordination, should be the main factors for success in bringing down a boss.
2) In this fight, the success of the party largely depends on another variable i.e. Warmaster Grast’s performance.
His consistency in putting up the bubble in a timely fashion (with an allowable margin of error of only 1-2 seconds) will determine whether a party gets wiped or not. Why do I say that? If Grast fails to put up a bubble (due to knockbacks from boss, incorrect/delayed AI response in Grast), party wipe is almost certain since by design, players would be huddling with Grast for safety in the first place. However, a party wipe is far too great a penalty for a mistake an NPC makes, it’s not even the fault of the players they get wiped. The success in getting the boss down is delinked with the party’s direct dungeon performance.
If it is by design that Grast must be kept alive by players in order to defeat the boss, then this means that the fight favors support classes. An ideal dungeon design should not be biased towards any classes IMHO. This problem is just like Arah P4 Simin, albeit in a different form, rangers are almost exclusively disadvantaged in P4 due to pets triggering spark aggro.
Anet devs, pl do look into this. I like the new idea, but it has to be further refined, perhaps by beefing up Grast or allowing players to mitigate the penalty should a bubble fail to appear.
3)
It should never depend on the NPC or AI