I don’t totaly agree, but I agree mostly with you. We DO need hard mode of some kind for dungeons. Just like diablo has inferno mode which people could not beat for a while (mostly because of equipment, but whatever). I want that feel! Something hard like hell but with slight possibility to get a really good reward.
Diablo 3 Inferno was beaten in less than a week btw. But I do agree the current exploration mode needs a complete uplift if this is the pinnacle of GW2 PvE challenges.
Doors already exist, such as Alphrad in Mursaat path of Arah exploration.
That door doesn’t prevent you from entering after the encounter starts. It just takes an extra 5 seconds to get in there.
Never said it prevents you from entering, it is a fairly large oversight and obviously unintended for that jump to be there. Already opened a bug report regarding that issue almost a month ago.
Again, my point still stands that there are doors, wish they would just make more of them so CoF Magg/Gigantipus etc would be done the intended way
The strategy to this boss never changed during recent patches. It has always been DPS the boss until he gives loot, they just drastically lowered the DPS requirement to compensate for all those missed out on those sick 12 min Magg runs.
It would be enough if the closest waypoint to the boss would get contested as soon as the fight starts. There don’t need to be any doors that magically close as soon as you attack a boss and then open again when you died.
Doors already exist, such as Alphrad in Mursaat path of Arah exploration.
It feels like they are trying to implement this, but they are not being consistent with it.
I really love the design of Simin, but it’s obvious that the boss hasn’t been tested properly, as it’s buggy as all hells. Once they fix the bugs she may become one of my favourites.
Really?
A boss revolving placing sparks with unknown aggro mechanic into 5 circles is your ideal design of a boss encounter? Its almost a 100% tank and spank otherwise, with moving out of circles that does less than 10% of your health in damage.
This encounter is very lackluster, absolutely no depth, and extremely boring after 1st kill.
There are plenty of better designed bosses in this game, although they are tuned very poorly, nevertheless they are far more engaging and fun than this disastrous encounter.
TL;DR – Stop crying about difficulty, and stop going into explorer arah with full berserker gear. The only path that isn’t puggable is Seer, mainly due to Simin & her bugs requiring proper coordination to kill her. I’ve pugged every other path without more than a few wipes.
Speed clearing Arah with full party wearing Berserker’s/DPS gear, not a single problem here.
End game PvE in is fairly shallow atm. No incentive to continue running them after you got all the tokens. Chances for some instance specific skins on end bosses perhaps?
The health pools are outrageous.
I’m an 80 Guardian and I do use stability.
Boss fights only taking 5 minutes? Seriously Kevin? What ever you’re smoking I’ll take some.
What encounter takes longer than ~5-8 minutes if done correctly?
The timeframe is virtually irrelevant. The fact that bosses have burned all their easily avoidable and uninteresting mechanics in the first thirty seconds so the rest of the 5-8 minute fight is just plain boring? That’s not okay.
One of the most common solutions to this is to have fights with several phases to serve as an anti-boredom measure. I would welcome a change of that nature, so I actually have something to do on most of these fights.
Of course, there are still a few encounters that are supposed to be more interesting than their current incarnation, but are not really working as intended (Effigy says hi) and have become unfun zergs as a result. Those need fixing too.
You are being unrealistic if you want interesting and fresh boss mechanics through out the whole encounter, especially for a $60 game.
Repetition is fine, if its on punishing mechanics, Gigantipus or the more annoying version of Alpha is a good example.
Make the door closes when encounter starts, just as it opens when you kill the first two elites outside of it. Simple fix. This allows you to add more way points to make learning easier too.
Its a very poor way to prevent encounter zerging, it promotes exploits and punishes learning an encounter for the first time. I’d much prefer enrage timers and doors.
There exists a problem when there are virtually no DPS requirement for any encounters in the game, until this boss. There are almost no lock outs (there is one in Arah as far as I can remember) and no enrage timers. Combined with lack of performance measurement (damage meters), players that built and geared towards survival are able to grind and wear down most encounters even way point zerging some at various points. Then they ended up facing this boss, the first wake up call on their lax and poor DPS rotations (pressing 2-3 buttons off CD zzz) and non-optimal builds/utility setups.
This encounter is not the best designed sure, but it is not even close to 6 hour/3 day or w/e marathon as people make it out to be. The most (not counting learning) we have ever spent on this encounter is 10 minutes, spark mechanic is frustrating at times sure, but when you can down 50% of her health bar in 45-50 seconds, it doesn’t take more than few rotations til you hit 2 relatively smooth spark run.
I’d like to see you post a video of you DPSing the whole event Kevin because you kitten can’t. The last guy to post a video here of his group trying ended up kiting most of the spawns past the 80 second mark.
Try it again with a group of 75s Kevin.2176
I’m gonna disagree with the “almost any group” part. You’ve gotta have either WAY higher single target damage or good AoE damage plus someone that can do a pull like guardian or mesmer. Otherwise you end up running around too much to get to each of the ranged mobs and losing a lot of time needed to kill things.
I like how you went from “you can’t do it period, show me a video” to “you did it at level 80, do it with a bunch of level 75s” to now “you can do it, but only with very specific group composition”. Whats next? do this encounter with only 2 skills and my arm tied behind my back?
The things you listed are pretty much covered in some aspect by one class or another, either in very good single target damage or melee AoE cleave. Majority of the classes has some sort of push back, and guardians are not that hard to find period. Considering the actual difficulty of this encounter I’m going to flat out and say its doable with any five intelligent players playing any professions.
This game’s current PvE content is laughable in comparison to many other games (its fun for sure, but not very difficult). I’m honestly surprised you are still arguing about the difficulty of this encounter. I guess its always easier to blame outside factors than attributing to poor play.
The health pools are outrageous.
I’m an 80 Guardian and I do use stability.
Boss fights only taking 5 minutes? Seriously Kevin? What ever you’re smoking I’ll take some.
What encounter takes longer than ~5-8 minutes if done correctly?
I see no problem with most bosses’s health pool. Most fights are around 5 minutes. None of the exploration bosses are longer than ~5-8 minutes in total fight time as far as I can remember.
There exist a problem when there is no performance measurement native in the game.
You can never accurately tell how optimal your build is and how much damage you are outputting aside from recording it and analyzing it via video length. This causes people the false illusion of doing “decently” when in reality they are dragging the group down. This also causes social loafing when optimal DPS rotation and high DPS time is not rewarded, and poor performance is not frowned upon.
I’m glad they removed the holy trinity in this game because the holy trinity takes away a lot of the responsibility from certain players while putting the majority of it on tanks and healers. I love that the responsibility is equally shared amongst party members and everyone is responsible for themselves and each other. It means that everyone in the party has to pay attention and be skilled enough in order for everyone as a whole to succeed.
Sorry for OT.
If the encounter is tweaked optimally, (few have done so in the other game), all three parts of the trinity shares just as much responsibility. Tight enrage timer is a very good mechanic where the failure of a DPS can easily lead a wipe.
It is not really luck when this is getting close to double digit repeated kills on two different servers, with different group compositions.
Our DPS for getting her from full to the first stealth part is less than 50 seconds, with no CDs poped. Spark behaviors is annoying yes, but it only makes the difference of maybe 5 extra minutes.
When you do it without a Mesmer i will be amazed. Now it just proves that the Mesmer is the best buffer in the game where everyone should be equal.
Here ya go, same group, no mesmer, frapsed way earlier so people had less gear.
If this encounter is almost doable without armor, I’m fairly certain its doable with any group composition and non-perfect gear.
Ruined City of Arah – Forgotten Path – Bosses and trash (~25 min run)
Ruined City of Arah – Mursaat Path – Bosses only (~40 min run)
I will render the other two paths if there is any interest, they are really long in comparison so I wanted to show these two first.
With the lack of enrage timers and room lock outs there are plenty of things you can do to bypass the intended mechanic, however you picked the wrong instance to pretend you can solo it.
Retrait and spec for survival, rather than glass cannon pure DPS.
My whole party is traited/geared for pure DPS and our kill is 1/4 as short as yours.
Learning to dodge his attacks and damage mitigation is far more important, also shorter kill time allow shorter phases and less chances for mistakes.
Hardest part of this encounter is rolling the auto-attacks during phase 2 and phase 3, there can be some tricky situations where he drains and auto-attacks you right after, other than that most every other source of damage can be avoided.
Here is a video from the main charge and drain target’s POV. Hope it helps.
(edited by Kevin.2176)
Path 3 can be done under 30 minutes since most trash are skippable. Path 1 and 4 however is another story.
We have ran into this problem before as well.
Sadly, only solution we have found is just to reset.
It is really random at times.
On some of our kills she would spawn exact amount of sparks every single transition, we would take 3-4 rotations before actually getting her down, on some other times she would alternate spawning 6 or 5, which would result in way faster kill.
She would heal for the full duration if there is an extra spark, however her second resurface would only require 1 spark.
There’s no such thing as 0 armor. You have 916 base defense @ lvl 80.
0 armor as in wearing no armor, read the follow up sentence, it is fairly obvious you understood what I meant. Nice try tho.
Perfect setup? the fact that you mentioned setup really makes me hesitate to continue reading your post.
Do you understand what 0 armor means? This means you have no defense from gear at all (not counting the massive stats loss), you won’t be able to take more than 2 full auto-attacks from 1 single mob. Pay attention to the HP bar movement, so you will have some idea how fast a guardian can “tank” with no armor.
Technically speaking a “random pug group of care bears” shouldn’t be able to clear anything under Anet’s stated design philosophy. As exploration modes are tailored towards organized groups. If this is the direction that you want the game to be heading, aka any random pug group of carebears with no class knowledge and 0 communication should just walk in and 1 shot, then I guess you are correct that this encounter is overtuned.
Try it again with a group of 75s Kevin.2176
Are you serious? do you actually go around to find people that are barely the level requirement for the exploration modes and attempt to complete them?
We did actually try this encounter again, just to see how difficult this encounter is when you are extremely undergeared.
We tried with no armor slot pieces at all, just weapons and jewelry. To give you an idea this is actually lower total stats than having full blues in every single slot, you also have 0 defense. Here is the result.
I dont mind difficult encounters, but the type of difficulty presented by this encounter is just inexcusably terrible in terms of design. Any encounter that demands the death of every player in the group at least once and others two or three times is just the epitome of poor design.
Maybe that is not the actual design?
I strongly recommend people to actually use some consumables and try to complete the encounter the proper way, the difference food/potions makes is night and day.
The changes to Magg actually made the intended strategy much easier. Majority of the changes have been tuning difficulty down or fixing current exploits. Changes only made dungeons harder if you are using unintended methods of completing encounters.
(edited by Kevin.2176)
I guess I’m the person you spoke with, we have killed him previously with no extra sparks, and our kill tonight was with no extra as well.
The encounter is longer (added an extra 3-5 minutes to the encounter) when you don’t receive the extra spark. However it is still very much doable, just more annoying.
Encounter doesn’t complete unless all mobs are dead by the time timer runs out, extend timer by extra 20 seconds. No more running around, you either can do it or you can’t.
Its a design flaw due to such a circumventable objective. All you really need is a more concrete goal to fulfill that original design intention.
Enrage timers/doors are also an amazing thing to prevent waypoint zerging bosses. At this point I’m just assuming they intent the waypoint running back to be a part of it.
(edited by Kevin.2176)
There is a difference between challenge and grind. Content should be challenging (difficult) but not grindy (tedious).
Some exploration mode bosses are perfect example of this difference. They are simple and relatively quick in duration, but challenging in execution.
There could be a number of ways to keep the viability of the challenge in this room, while making it more feasible to do.
For example, as opposed to 3 elite foes, one elite and two veterans would provide a sufficiently possible challenge with the current pace of enemy spawns.
Alternately, keep the 3 elite spawns, but give the party more time to defeat them.
How do you maintain the viability of the challenge, while nerfing the challenge. What you just suggested is just to make the encounter easier (which probably will happen due to the sheer amount of complaints).
Like you said snowball effect is the biggest part of this encounter, party damage taken is exponentially increasing if the party fails to tackle each pack at its designated rate. What you suggested might seem small in change but will severely reduce the difficulty.
AOE blinds is a very good way to deal with these dogs.
As a guardian I can ensure three AOE blinds on engage and enough blocks and follow up blinds to last until rally range.
We usually skip everything in the instance beside those dogs, as they are extremely annoying to run past solo.
There are other means to obtain exotic gear.
You can easily make up the stat difference between rares (which are extremely cheap and very obtainable) and exotics with just a food buff. A potion of that respective mob type would grant you close to enough stats increase than two additional pieces of exotic gear.
We had two people down total during our first attempt at this strategy (even with a good amount of downtime in the middle), while majority of our group isn’t close enough to be in full BIS. I can for certain see this encounter as doable with lesser gear.
@Kevin. Glass cannon ranged players can “slightly” get away with not speccing/gearing into too much defense due to them near-max ranging every fight. When they get attacked they stop almost all dps and start running around in circle. Their range is their defense.
Melee dps is superior by a pretty large amount to ranged dps, but going melee you need some sort of defense from your gear, or utilities, or traits, or a mix of all to be viable. You can dodge big attacks all you want, but if your character gets eaten alive by auto attacks, then you’re not doing any dps.
So like I said, it’s all about balance. Ranged can skimp a little on defense, but ranged does less dps then melee anyway.
Melee does not need any extra defensive gear/utility/traits to be viable, to make the game easier sure, but viable no. You mind as well alt-tab and auto-attack if you are a ranged DPS gearing for defensive stats.
I’d like to see you post a video of you DPSing the whole event Kevin because you kitten can’t. The last guy to post a video here of his group trying ended up kiting most of the spawns past the 80 second mark.
Haha Kevin you troll. I totally agree with you Dynamite. There is no way you can kill them or survive in that area for the whole duration. So i’m guessing the way to do it is taking turns to die and trying to survive long enough for the others to res and run back to die again. If this is not the way to do it please someone tell me and the community with proof of your success or results. If this is intended then this is lazy, no effort very bland and very boring design.
Sure, here is the video of our first time doing this.
Our warrior at the time barely hit 80 few days before, and I’m sure not a lot of people in the party were “best in slot”.
There is a reason why Anet made this encounter the way it is, there is another encounter in this zone that is similar to it but spawns slightly more mobs. The DPS output of this encounter is even less than some trash packs in Arah.
(edited by Kevin.2176)
Perhaps try the encounter the intended way?
The fight is a lot easier just by killing the mobs. There is even down time for out of combat regeneration if you are doing the encounter correctly. No idea why people feel its necessary to suicide their repair money away.
I don’t think you understand my point, you do not need a designated slot in your party for this support role. Everyone should be contributing to what is needed during an encounter.
You can easily toss down your Healing Rain for that three second condition removal, same goes for the warrior in your party to switch his utility to Shake it Off. There is absolutely no need for someone to heavily build and gear themselves to fullfill this role. It definitely should not be a 1 person job.
You anecdote experience is great and all, but I have far more success running with 5 strong DPS that is capable of providing the necessary utility depending on the situation.
1. Your gear/traits/skills. 9/10 when people complain and I ask them what they’re running, they’re running a glass-cannon build, sometimes even melee glass cannon, wearing green/yellow MAGIC FIND gear. This alone makes most dungeons extremely hard.
I have to disagree about the part regarding glass cannons.
I feel gearing towards all DPS promotes far better play. I understand there are a lot of unavoidable damage in this game, however there are very few that are punishing enough to down you without a warning. Pure DPS builds and gear makes mistakes more punishing and thus you are forced to be aware of a lot of mechanics and how to avoid them.
As a melee DPS that cleared all exploration modes with base toughness and less than 14k HP I feel there is no reason why a ranged DPS should be gearing towards any survival stats at all (keeping few pieces for Giganticus maybe).
The problem with Arah design is that not all paths are equal.
Which is understandable to some degree for dungeon designs, however when all 4 paths differ so heavily in length there is a problem. For example, Warden path is the shortest out of all the paths, with all trash being skippable it take around 30-45 mins for a full clear. However all other options takes almost double as long for the same reward.
The problem with rewarding tokens per boss is that resetting dungeons is very easy in this game, players will soon default back to finding one or two easily clearable boss and chain resetting for tokens.
I don’t understand why people advocate the concept of “support” so strongly. The only real necessary support in dungeons are condition removal, which can be provided by every single profession with a switch of a utility.
Healing stats scales extremely poorly and you are sacrificing too much DPS to make up for other people’s poor play.
To be effective in dungeons you just need intelligent players that is capable of swapping utility and major traits depending on encounter, tailoring a build to a fit some predefined “role” is a very poor mistake.
She only heals when she goes hidden, our poison is from necromancer’s auto-attack and I’m fairly sure it falls off when she goes hidden.
High stacks of bleeds are just from elementalist/necromancer’s DPS builds, as I believe its the highest single target DPS for their profession.
The main thing I would recommend is make sure all members are properly equipped with potions/food, fortunately the damage output of this encounter is very minimal and you can get by easily with a full DPS setup.
Here is a video of our most recent kill.
High DPS and efficient spark completion is pretty much the whole fight.
Sometimes you receive 1 extra spark than the allowed circle, in that situation you would just have to wait and let her heal up. However, her second resurface would only require 1 spark within the circle.
There is no doubt this boss needs a little more work.
However, you can still manage to produce a kill in a short amount of time if you tweak/min max your play. Poison on boss, have players with set positions for spark pulls and swiftness, get into position before the boss disappears (you can tell by her debuffs on spark spawns).
If there is an extra spark than the set circles she would heal more, but her next appearance would only require 1 spark. Having players get into position and ready to pop DPS cds would be vital in that situation, save your DPS cds for under 50%. I believe it took us 3 rotations to produce a kill, fairly straightforward.
Overall this fight took us 20-30 mins to learn and kill, and it is easily reproduceable with a bit practice.