Guild Wars 2

Arcades Saboth.5139:

Why don’t you close the arena of the Lupicus, so it’s not possible to ress (from the waypoint), but you place the waypoint very close to the arena?
This way you MUST complete it flawlessly but the punishment for failing is not hard.
(Yes, I understand this way players who die have to wait but it’s far less frustrating then have a 10min walk like in path 1).

The problem with a system like this is people going afk while waiting for the rest to finish/die. It already happened in GW1 when people died during instances and just went silently afk while dead and waiting for a res.
(I did too sometimes, it’s just boring to lie there or wait at a waypoint for people to finish off enemies or wipe the party)

Yes, it’s tough the first few times doing a dungeon. You’ll have to get used to the higher difficulty compared to open world PvE. But once you’ve done a few dungeons you’ll see the things you’re missing now.

Red Falcon.8257:

The lieutenant in AC.
Mass pull+Mass oneshot ftw.

Lol, if I fail that dodge I switch to Earth attunement for 33% less damage and survive his combo.xD Not a 1-hit kill attack.

I’ll join on a Saturday cause that’s when I’ll have 8 hours to spare or so. If you still need it then.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

This encounter is on a list of mine to rebuild. Initial changes to it were meant to slow down the speed runs being done on it while increasing the difficulty a bit since the rest of that path is a bit of a cake-walk.

Make it so only killing mobs decreases the bar, so people can’t kite around in the room anymore to clear it?

The final boss at the end of the Jotun path in Arah instant kills you if you get hit by the blue orb. But it’s very easy to counter…

The only dungeon that could be in need of a little extra is Arah, since it takes like twice as long to finish. Maybe some extra silver, a random rare or 1 Ecto upon completion (once a day only).

Most of them (pretty much all except the 2 greatswords) look like a joke or just not legendary really.
And extreme RNG to obtain the precursor is just bad.

All in all, they’re ok for those who’re willing to go for it.

That’s hilarious. Well, in a bad way.xD

My guess is no, but who knows? ArenaNet’s been completely ignoring the numerous threads on this single encounter.

All Elementalist players should be forced to pay a monthly sub to support the staff that buffs the Warrior profession.

You are telling me Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokémon have better stories than Guild Wars 2? Cause that’s some of the games I used to play when I was young, and I’m pretty sure they have stories way inferior to Guild Wars 2’s.
That said, GW2’s story is nothing great, but what do you expect from an MMO? If I want a story I play a single-player game, or better yet: read a book or something.

Which is exactly why this encounter fails. It isn’t based on player skill. A skilled group of players won’t beat her if they don’t have the DPS. And in a game that prides itself on having combat that requires skill that’s pretty poor design.

Kevin.2176:

Just a note, hopefully this helps, her 1st restealth is % HP based, the rest of restealth is based on a timer. So yes, DPS matters a lot, it is pretty much the entirely fight (Unless you utilize the DPS her while shes hidden strategy, which in my opinion isn’t intended).

I didn’t find this to be true in my experiences. I’ve had her down to 25% many times with different team setups and strategies, and every time at 25% she would stealth.
So far I can only remember 1 single time she didn’t stealth at 25%. Happened yesterday, and it was the first time I saw her hit 10%. After that she got back to higher HP and it took hours trying things to get her back to 10% again.

Eventually we found the only way to break her 50% and 25% barrier is to:
-DPS the spot where she stealthed
-Run the sparks fast enough before she regens more than 10% back, or else she stealths again at the 50% or 25% barrier no matter how much or how little DPS you do. And the only way to do this fast enough is to have DPS hit her while she’s stealthed to slow down her regen enough to give spark runners the time to do their thing.

Kevin.2176:

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.

Yeah, I’m sure we were having kitten poor DPS with 2 Warriors and a Guardian all using greatsword and in exotic berserker gear. Yet she stealthed at 25%. She stealthed at 15%. She stealthed at 10%. She stealthed at 5%. Then she fina-kitten-lly died. And this was after hours with these people trying all different sorts of things, and finally coming up with something that actually worked.

DPS didn’t seem to matter a thing, because of her 50% barrier, and then of her 25% barrier. No matter how fast or how slow we got her to 50% or 25% HP she would always stealth at those marks.
Well, I’m wrong. The only time when DPS seemed to make a difference was when we had our DPS hitting the spot where she went invisible, to really slow down that regen of hers.

Yeah… hitting the invisible boss. What an obvious mechanic. Brilliant design. /applause for ArenaNet for coming up with genius ideas. That was the only way, combined with super fast spark runs, to get her downed.

Kevin.2176:

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.

This.
There isn’t much skill involved. It’s just bringing along your best DPS buddies and have 2 people run those sparks. Your team won’t ever wipe on this boss. Yeah, how exciting. What a thrilling encounter. It surely put my skills to the extreme limits… /yawn. More like making me fall asleep…
WTB more bosses like Giganticus and Alpha.

Coming to the next design philosophy contradiction. Reading UI elements. Yes, if you want to effectively run this fight, you gotta watch UI elements or else you lose out on a lot of DPS or time running sparks. Only by watching the UI you can tell when she stealths (it shows shortly before she vanishes). Turning into stone shows a debuff before it actually happens. So any group that knows to look at UI is at a clear advantage over people who don’t. Why can’t these things give clearer hints? Like a voice clip or animation before she vanishes. And a particle effect for those who are about to get petrified.

On to my next point. The obvious one. Over the course of 3 runs I’ve probably been there with 20 or so people. It took 20 people and reading forums and watching videos and coming up with all sorts of borderline exploit tactics to finally grind the HP out of this boss after hours upon hours of trying. A well-designed game doesn’t do that. It should be clear from the start what the kitten is going on and what the kitten we are supposed to do. It would be excusable if it were a puzzle game, but Guild Wars 2 isn’t. Compared to any other dungeon content in this game, this fight is a mystery. You’ll be sitting there asking yourself what the hell is going on with this fight. You never get anywhere, so first you think it’s luck involved when you somehow get her below 50%. Then you think there must be more to the fight, so you try stunning her to interrupt her stealth mode. But no that doesn’t work.

CONCLUSION
This fight is way too vague. This fight is not fun. It drags on for far too long. Inconsistent difficulty compared to the rest of the dungeon (or game). It contradicts ArenaNet design philosophies. It needs to get fixed-
(inb4 people claiming how they faceroll this boss for breakfast with their ultra leet dungeon guild – you don’t impress me)
tl:dr Learn to read or move along.

HOW THIS BOSS IS WRONG
Okay, so on to what is wrong with this boss, and why it needs a fix.
First of all: dungeon difficulty inconsistency. Compare her to the difficulty of the other god bosses in that dungeon. Neither of them are particularly challenging. They go down without much problems. Then you get to this boss, and it’s like bashing your head on a brick wall. Except a normal brick wall would eventually break, while this one continues to regenerate for ever… and ever… and ever.
Not only is this boss by far the toughest thing in the Guild Wars universe, but it isn’t even an end boss. I mean, if it were Zhaitan being that powerful, okay… it would’ve been believable. But a simple priestess being this hard. No way.
I’ve successfully PUG’d my way through every dungeon instance. Pretty much all of them felt like a good healthy challenge. This one felt like being tortured in the fires of Hell. Nowhere else have I seen PUGs fall apart so much as on her.

Second problem. It’s not obvious how to beat her. So an average team thinks: Well, I suppose we gotta lure all 5 sparks to the statue thingy. Well, WRONG. You don’t lure all 5. Are you out of your mind? Of course not!! Because if you do she’ll keep stealthing and regenning back at 50%. So an average fight goes like this:
Hit her to 50%HP.
She stealths.
Team lures sparks.
Boss returns at 60-90%HP.
Hit her to 50%HP.
And that goes on in a loop. Till the end of times.
So the only way to actually beat that is to first lure 4 sparks and let her regen back. Then the next time she stealths you lure 1, and she’s back again. That’s the only way I’ve found that works for getting her below 50% consistently.
So the average team never figures that out on themselves. Ok so after the 50% barrier, you hit the same thing at 25%. No matter how you do your spark runs, she’ll regen back at 25%. And if you let her back at above 50%, you’ll have to start all over again (for extra fun).
So the only way I found to get past this is to lure her outside the cave (thanks for the forum people for the tip), have 3 people DPS the hell out of her. Have 1 ranged guy throw tears at stoned DPS and run 3 sparks. Have 1 guy sit in the back waiting for spark spawns. Because if you keep her in that cave, everyone gets aggro on those sparks and it’s just one big mess that doesn’t get you anywhere ever.
So only using this method grinding the HP off her bar, running sparks, repeat, repeat and repeat until she finally dies and stops healing.

Like what the kitten is going on here?
How did this pass quality tests? Play tests? Are you kitten me?
Not to mention we have to prepare to have fun. Yes, that’s right. One does not simply kill a Simin. You first have to gather a bunch of tears in one spot, so you don’t actually run out of them during the fight. ArenaNet themselves have stated they don’t want people to prepare to have fun, but to just have fun from the start. What happened to your philosophy on this fight? Why do we have to grind tear spawns to get a chance of beating her?

(continued)

By now you should know what boss I’m talking about.
Yes, it’s the boss that should not be named… But I will do anyway: Simin
Simin the unkillable. Destroyer of planets. Breaker of PUGs. God of gods. The impossible.

Yes, I have actually killed her (have Dungeon Master title). I’m not coming here to ask for help. I’m here to report broken content that is in need of a fix ASAP.
But first a little history on my experience with this hellish boss. (skip for the point of the post)

So, last week as I was getting close to finishing my Dungeon Master title, and successfully running Arah groups, I thought I’d give path 4 a try. Thinking it might take an hour or 2 or 3, like the other paths, with the hardest boss there being Giganticus Lupicus. Relatively smooth sailing through all the pre-GL bosses for a group consisting of people new to path 4. Well, even GL wasn’t much of a problem even. Grenth was a piece of cake. But then… the nightmare begun.
So we were up at Dwayna, thinking it would be another joke boss just like any of the others before her. Well, we got our butts kicked for several hours straight, and getting nowhere close to beating her. So after already spending 3 hours in the dungeon before even getting there, another few hours were spent killing the unkillable. Eventually the group fell apart as it was like 2AM already.

So after a bad first experience I seeked revenge. I made another group the next day. We got through the dungeon much faster this time. Up until Dwayna again… Another night of getting our butts kicked without getting anywhere. Again, the group fell apart and gave up at 4AM or so.

A few days later I felt like getting stomped into the ground (aka running Arah path 4) again. Made another group and set off earlier this time. Doing pretty well…. until Dwayna. Man, we thought we’d have the DPS this time. I read forum posts, watched videos, studied tactics for this fight. We had Warriors and Guardians with greatswords and berserker gear. Hell, we even had one guy with the legendary sword Twilight. We thought we’d be able to take this motherkitten down for once and for all. But of course she had to kick us around again. Our group broke apart several times, but I had 1 guy sticking with the party this time, and he recruited new guys several times. Over the course of hours we’ve gone through multiple groups. Explaining strategies. Thinking of new things to do.
And at last we finally got it down. After a fight that went on for so long she finally got killed. But man, it wasn’t easy. It was tougher than 10 Giganticus’s combined. Even the Elder Dragons themselves must’ve feared this thing. I thought I was already asleep and dreaming when I saw her falling to the ground. Wondering if this was reality. But yes, it was. It’s possible to kill her. But only after the toughest fight you’ll ever see in this game (PvE).

(continued)

rhodoc.2381:

Somehow both path 2 and 4 leaded to this boss which we couldnt kill. Also he resets mid fight.

All Arah paths lead to this fight.
Although on path 1 he’s hardest because of a missing(?) waypoint.

Sina.9208:

Imo killing this is only possible via extreme luck, sometimes the boss glitches and you can attack him through the healing phase, unfortunately we could down him when we had this bug. (we didn’t attempt to glitch it purposefully) I saw kill videos, and I’m inclined to think they were just lucky, or this is only got broken recently ..

I don’t know, but it seemed to come down to luck. Almost every time she’d go into stealth at 50%, except for a few times when we didn’t really do anything different than all the other times. But then you get stuck on her going into stealth at 25% all the time. So I’m guessing you need luck to get past that bit as well.

It’s important to have your team break the crystals, tell them if you have to.

Attempted this boss twice in different PUGs, never got her below 25% after hours of trying. I don’t know.=s

Kurp.3207:

This must be a bug in the current version. I’ve seen videos of her getting killed, but the fight doesn’t currently work like it used to. The bug seems to be that she pops her heal state at 50% every single time.

Yeah, this is another thing I noticed. Some videos that show her getting killed don’t have her heal back constantly at 50% or 25% health.

I’ve been playing balanced build, and love it. Can do everything with it without crippling myself much.

Malkavian.3751:

In terms of storyline, is there a particular order that I should do the SM of dungeons? For example, is it ordered by level of the dungeon? Or, is everything separate and I can do it in any order?

Thanks

You can play them in any order you like. It doesn’t matter.

Same thing on Gandara server.

TheVirtualFrog.8714:

This a great guide, thank you. Now I can finally replace every single battle situation theme with the Yakety Sax. Much more fitting!

Great idea.8D

Joxy.6879:

He doesnt one shot unless you are running with 13k HP which means, either you’re in full glass cannon build and maybe you should think about getting some vitality gear so he doesn’t one shot you or you’re just undergeared and you’re trying to do the last instance in the game undergeared.

The first time I did him undergeared at 11.5K HP and even then I didn’t get 1-shot by him. He hits 10K or so I think.

Most of the dungeons have at least one easy/do-able path, but it really depends on your PUG. A bad PUG can make even the easiest paths a hell, while a good PUG can get through pretty much anything the game can throw at you.

Mine is a combination of all kinds of stuff.
The top is from Sorrow’s Embrace dungeon set. The legs from a regular karma vendor. Boots and legs crafted. Shoulders are tier 3 cultural. Headpiece is from character creation. Weapon is from Ebon Vanguard.

Preventing vote-kicking is pretty difficult. You can set up all sorts of rules, but then it’d get easy for people to abuse those rules that prevent vote kicking to grief a whole party.

AC is one of the easier dungeons. You probably just had a bad team.

Today I tried boss (path 2) with the Elementalist trait Renewing Stamina (vigor buff on critical hit). Could use more dodges than I really needed, making it very easy. Brought teleport to get out of the crystals, although this wasn’t really needed, cause my PUG was pretty good at taking care of everything.
I remember doing this boss a few weeks ago without the vigor buff, and it was definitely harder to manage my dodges.

Lol, I had the exact same experience. I started out as Elementalist, and loved the action-y combat, and having to be careful with how many mobs I fight at once, strafe around, dodge etc.
Then started a Guardian and faceroll’d everything in my path without any problems. No strafing, no dodging, not knowing my skills. I just hit attack and stuff dies.xD

Kill Simin solo.

/thread

It’s a good boss, because it does more than 1 thing unlike other bosses in the game, and it requires you to know how to dodge and use defensive skills well. This boss is one of the main reasons I like to do Arah.

It’s an instrumental version of Fear Not This Night.

Well the point of this thread is to have ArenaNet read it. If we need to keep resetting a boss just to get a chance to beat it, or getting lucky with spark luring, it needs to get fixed.

Vlad Morbius.1759:

I am bitterly disappointed to see this staff, as a Necromancer it is just downright silly looking and unless there are changes made I won’t be caught dead using it. I’m now totally unmotivated to put the effort into getting this legendary and completely bummed out that Anet chose this path of one type fits all professions!

As an Elementalist I hate the staff too. Although if I played any other staff wielding class I’d still hate it, because it just doesn’t go with any of the classes. Just like the legendary shortbow and a few of the other legendaries, it looks like it belongs in a cartoon for 3 year olds.

At least the greatswords look awesome. Sunrise is made for Guardians. Twilight for Warriors. That’s how every legendary weapon should be like. I want the “omgomomgomgomg i want this thing!!!!11!” reaction for every legendary, not just the 2 greatswords.

I play mostly for fun, although progression can be part of the part. But to me progression is more of a secondary kind of fun, like a nice extra on top of the main part what’s fun for me.
I love to do dungeons, because they’re the high-end PvE content, and challenge my character in a way the open world PvE can’t offer me. It’s also nice to team up with people and have some teamwork going on. That’s what enjoyable to me. The tokens and silver at the end is just a nice extra on top of that.

I have several classes I love to play, and a few I don’t care so much for.
If you don’t like any of them, game might not be for you.=s I don’t see how you can’t like any of them, though. They all play pretty different.

Mostly dual daggers.
I use staff in some of the dungeons or when I’m with a bad PUG. Also use staff in huge zerg events cause I get a headache being in the middle of that many particle effects.

If you can it helps to bring a teleport skill to get out of the crystals.

I’ll also join any Arah group, but preferably path 1 or 4, as these are two I haven’t done before, and I’d like to see the end for both paths. I’m on Gandara server too, but the gate is bugged (permanently locked).

It’s bugged on Gandara and Gates of Madness too.

I had something similar happen to me.
I was LFG’ing for a dungeon group, however after a few messages I got suppressed. A while later I tried again, still suppressed. I tried different ways of saying it, still suppressed. I tried to join a conversation in /map chat, still suppressed. Luckily it was gone the next morning, but it’s a serious issue.

Also we need a LFG tool if we get muted for that…
And no, I wasn’t spamming the message. Was saying it every few minutes or so.

Playing Guardian and Elementalist mains. I don’t think it has anything to do with my personality…

TheDemonEmperor.6825:

It just Skin customize any way…Not legendary epic stuff.

Indeed, so what’s the problem? It’s not like you -need- the Arah set anyway. It won’t give you any advantages.
Some people have more stuffs going on in their real lifes, therefore less time to play and might not be able to do every single thing a game has to offer. While other people have less stuffs going on in their life, therefore are able to put more time into a game they like. There’s nothing unfair about. You miss out on one thing, but realise you have other things in place of that.

Our team attempted the same strategy yesterday, but she wouldn’t go below 25%. Every time at 25% she’d stealth (kind of like how she does at 50%), and no matter how fast we ran the sparks, she’d stealth again at 25%. After a bad spark run she went back to above 50% and we had to break the 50% barrier again, but she wouldn’t go below that until we got lucky with a fast spark run again ages later. But then we were stuck on the 25% like before. It’s like an endless circle.

Tried the outdoors strategy, and never really got her lower than 30% or so, then people started dying or we got sparks that wouldn’t go. Then she would get back to +50% again, and go into endless loops of healing back up to 60-80%, back to 50% and stealth again, and repeat. Tried indoors and got her to 25% a few times, but same stuff happens.
After a few hours people only wanted to try pure DPS, and we got not below 50%.
This boss is seriously tougher than fighting 10 Giganticus simultaneously.

Jibbie.7215:

Hey everyone,

I was just curious if I should farm a full set of exotic Karma gear before attempting Arah and other dungeons on explorer mode, or if a full set of level 80 greens (masterwork) was enough.

Thanks,

Greens is good enough to do dungeons with.=p