IMHO there are 3/4 major flaws on this fight:
- The camera. It’s awful and I’m pretty sure that everybody agrees on this.
- The floor textures, which make unnecessarily harder to spot red circles.
- The FPS loss (really annoying if you have a kittenty PC and already run with lower settings for everything) caused for sharing the area with some zerg events.
- The pulling orbs, not because the orbs themselves, but cause the already stated camera issue. There are sound clues afaik, but if we could cover better the area with the camera, they would be much more manageable.
I do not think 1HKO attacks are bad at all.
Yes, they kill both zeker and tanky builds, but there’s also a regular damage source form the boss attacks.
If people running full mitigation specs think that this damage is negligible, congrats to them, their build is doing exactly what it was designed for and now they can just focus on 1HKO sources.
Having done this with on a character with less than 2k armor, I have experienced how my health goes from 18k to about 2-3k in about 2-3 sec after being charged. On phase 1 I had to use all my healing skills on recharge even if I was sidestepping some projectiles; I even had to respec my traits in order to take “Backpack Regenerator”.
For the 8 orbs achievement, however, I have used my guardian specced for about 3k armor and plenty of protection sources and I have been able not only to endure Liadri’s charges much more easily but also to whirling wrath on her face in the meantime. I pretty much doubt I could have completed this achievement on my engineer without an almost full regear.
Getting rid of 1HKO abilities is more an issue than a solution.
One of the beautys (the main one IMHO) of GW2 combat system is that’s reactive. People should spot enemy attacks and react to them, trying to use the most powerful mitigations (like evades) against the most dangerous ones (like oneshots).
That being said, letting people to solve fights just relying on defensive passive stats would be a great mistake.
I’m not going to deny that Liadri may have too many one shot sources, up to a point where you may need to use a lot of defensive tools for them (even if in theory the fight could be won without needing to evade a single AoE).
The issue with zeker burst builds (usually warriors) finishing fights in few seconds is a completely different kind of monster.
They finish the fights so fast that they can avoid most of the damage covered by long CDs or just never experience stamina starvation, trivializing fights that otherwise could have been a real pain in the kitten . In order to “solve” this problem (we can’t forget that the main purpose of a burst is to finish the fight fast enough to avoid attrition issues) this fights just need to be a bit longer, enough for requiring a second burst and force players to experience a bit of pressure and test skill beyond an initial combo.
This can be achieved by many ways, like the so popular HP increase :P
Removing 1HKO wouldn’t make fights more challenging for burst builds, since they would still melt the enemy in seconds.; it just would make them easier for sustained ones, which may be fair on comparision, but is a step on the wrong direction.
Combats need to be balanced around so called balanced builds (knight gear, mix of soldier/cleric with zerker, balanced trait allocation, …) that must experience one shot moves (that need to be avoided) and pressure (regular damage, conditions, …).
The benefit of a defensive build is on sustaining the pressure much more easily so they can focus on 1HKO attacks. The counterpart is that the fight will be longer, so the amount of oneshots moves will be higher and there’s a higher risk on failing by chance.
The benefit of an offensive build is just the opposite: the fight will be shorter, but the pressure a lot higher, so the player should show great finesse in order to avoid almost everything (or just everything) for its duration.