Guild Wars 2

Miflett.3472:

I don’t have any doubts that I can’t complete it, it’s just that I’m scratching my head as to why I’m not finding it nearly as fun as some of you, as I too like real challenging content.

I loved it, because it was more about finding how to do it… finding out how everything spawns and how to turn that into your favor (for instance, I’ve sometimes let the orbs drag me away from the boss to give me extra time if they were in a safe zone).

Once you get the hang of the mechanics in it I just find it really fun to screw around with it to find better / safer ways of beating it.

Kronus.6048:

Have fun doing liandri with your rare gear. Oh and lol,another warr ‘’omg everything is too easy!!!’’ post

Liadri doesn’t have that much HP, so damage isn’t needed that much.
She doesn’t deal too much damage if you have some toughness. Problem solved.

And, on top of that, I’ve beaten Liadri on every class that I like to play.
Which are: Mesmer, Guardian, Necro, Warrior.

So yeah, you’re just proving my point of people going ‘’wahh, wahh’’.

Paulytnz.7619:

Fight our mentors? Naw, Trehearne is what I’m smelling here since everyone always calls for his blood! Ummm, errrrr or would that be sap? O.O

Real spoiler: You think you’re fighting a Watchknight disguised as trahearne, but after the fight it appears it was really him. This gets revealed at the end of this LS content, which will lead into another festival starting the 3rd of Septeber.

Talk to the NPC’s that give you the buffs, they sell them

No, you get credit for each unique balloon tower.

Only Orr and Southsun don’t have them.
Each explorable zone has 2 balloons.
So that’d give you 44 balloons in total.

I think it’s just a random chance from any champion loot bag, but don’t quote me on that

Magxene.2579:

I agree with you OP, the difficulty of the gauntlets is ridiculous and unfair. The thing I’ve always loved about playing Guild Wars 2 is that you can fight in dungeons/against champions/world bosses etc with just skill alone. You can be level 80 with just level 50 gear having no problem fighting against the things I have listed previously because it takes skill, you need to be accurate with your dodges, know how the boss fights,etc. But the new gauntlet does a poor job exemplifying that. Sure, it takes some skill to face these new foes but not only do you need to worry about your skill you have to make sure you have the proper gear/weapons/traits. And if that wasn’t enough you have to be mindful of the time limit when facing the bosses. The gauntlet is a poor to design to show off skill in this game. Very disappointed in this rushed update.

There’s been a lot of people asking for harder, more challenging content. Obviously this does not cater everyone.
Aside from that, the whole gauntlet has it’s own seperate achievements, so that you can complete the regular living story just fine.

If you wouldn’t need proper gear, then it’d be too easy, or it would create loopholes to bash through the content.

I’ve personally never hit the time limit while fighting every boss. And that’s without being spec’d for damage. I’ve also beaten several bosses with just green gear, on time… like how I used my warrior for the meatless murder achievement, because he has the perfect toolset for it without having perfect gear even. If anything, it’s forcing you to deal with situations. It’s taking you out of your comfort zone, which is a good thing.

I’m sure you can do all of the achievements with just rare gear even, although it’d be harder, it’d still be doable. So there you have your choise.

I would love it if people could make a clear distinction between the fights and the arena mechanics. The camera is indeed not optimal, but it’s no excuse to why you can’t manage something. I’ve played the biggest character in the game during these fights, and I can deal with it just fine.

The bugs are indeed awful, but they don’t happen often enough for you to not be able to complete anything. And hey, what’d you know… they already fixed a couple of them.

Seriously, most of the negative feedback just sounds like ‘’wahh, wahh, I can’t beat it because camera sucks’’. I would love it if the comments were more constructive, rather than rambling on about the known issues. Heck, perhaps even come up with something inginuitive to prevent this in the future.

Mortifer.2946:

achievement for mesmers only… gg

Mesmer: Reflect / Evade / Stun
Ranger: Blind / Evade
Warrior: Block / Endure pain
Guardian: Block / Reflect / Invulnerability
Thief: Blind / Block Projectiles / Stun
Ele: Invulnerability / Blind / Block
Eng: Blind / Block / Invulnerability
Necro: Blind / Fear / Interrupts

And I’m sure I missed a dozen more options for every class how to deal with the boss.
I’m 100% every class can do the 5 gambits on him. Ofcourse, some will have an easier skillset to deal with him cause the classes are so diverse.

So my advise: play more than 1 profession if you want the ‘’easy route’’.

Fiontar.4695:

When you have to perfectly follow a virtual script to defeat an encounter, well, that kind of game play exists for games that fill that niche, but it’s horrendous MMO content design.

I can imagine certain motivations for this, but none of them include “for the good of GW2”.

You don’t have to perfectly follow it.
There’s dozens of screw ups you can still easily overcome with dodging, or simply bypass with skills (such as shield stance / mist form / renewed focus).

Now if the darkness was unblockable and would hit you through invulnerability and evade… that’d mean you’d have to follow a script perfectly.

Luckily, every class has acces to ranged AoE damage.

Stability also works.

They spawn at exactly the same time, every time. So that should give you some indication of when to have your skills up to deal with it.

There’s plenty of ways to deal with it.

It just forces you to deal with it. One way is to rally off them, but like you said that doesn’t really work 100%.

I used stability for it. You can also just be very aware of your surroundings, or be on teamspeak with a friend to call them out for you. Just use AoE to kill them.

They have like 6 different spawn places, and keep spawning every 45 seconds or so.

It really is doable, and I don’t see a big issue with it.

Well, I think a lot of the frustration comes from it being actually challenging content… and then the arena just isn’t the ideal situation where you’d do these challenges.

People often rage when they can’t do something… and now there’s actually things that shouldn’t be there to make it even harder.

You get a heap of achievement points… that’s quite a big reward to me.

Lord Erik.6903:

Awesome! Congrats! It’s a bummer I can’t watch your technique up close to watch your micromanagement though.

Thanks man. Yeah, I wish I could share it

But, you can see that I try to cleanse my conditions off as soon as possible, and try to stay near the center while running to the orbs

Sadly I couldn’t record myself, but a friend of mine recorded me doing the 8 orb achievement.

Now I’ve already posted a small guide on how to do it, but I keep seeing posts of people saying it’s impossible on a guardian.

So, here’s the proof

Are you sure you’re not using ‘’Superior Rune of the Soldier’’?

Hickeroar.9734:

That seems….a little nuts. You basically invalidate control-based builds because they do exactly what they were designed to do.

It’s only immobilise.

Cripple / fear / chill /etc. still work on every boss just fine.

aspirine.6852:

eekzie.5640:

aspirine.6852:

Seriously this is such a small thing, cant you just either give everyone their 1 point or change the daily untill this is fixed? Dont give me that it wont be fixed today..

Lol. They gave you extra dailies already since the event.

So there’s now 13 dailies instead of 11. And another monthly to give you 10 extra points.

I seriously don’t get your strain of thoughts.

I dont care if you get it or not. It’s not a very large bug, it cannot be. So to say that it wont be fixed is just not ok. I am also fine if they remove it from the daily this day without compensation. Right now it’s just confusing.

They will fix it, just not today.

Meh, I switched to my warrior for this. I couldn’t get it on my guardian

I picked up a green sword/shield… fear me + endure pain + stomp.
Sword to cripple them both, and if he throws food nearby just fear them or knock them back. Killed them without any problem :O

The fight and mechanics are absolutely fine.
I would be really disappointed if they changed it.
Although I would love to see the arena more polished for a cleaner fight.

Also, I melee’d her. So yeah, saying that ‘’non ranged classes’’ can’t do it is nonsense.
It requires proper timing and knowing when to disengage. But, I can kill her using only melee weapons on my guardian. And no, I don’t use zerker gear.

Try it with only 1 gambit on, that worked for me

aspirine.6852:

Seriously this is such a small thing, cant you just either give everyone their 1 point or change the daily untill this is fixed? Dont give me that it wont be fixed today..

Lol. They gave you extra dailies already since the event.

So there’s now 13 dailies instead of 11. And another monthly to give you 10 extra points.

I seriously don’t get your strain of thoughts.

Trina.9625:

Would also be nice if they could offer challenge without having to rely almost solely on one-shot kills. Kind of hard to get better at something when there’s no skill involved, just reflex timing.

I’d like to compare it to Mario. You could fall down, and be completely annihilated.
Same goes here. There’s plenty of ways to deal with it, so that’s not my biggest concern.

What I would like to see is more pressure fights that last longer and can tip over in your favor (or turn into a complete failure). Cause there’s not too many of them yet

It would be nice to have as a rotation base. Although for people who have it completed it really does become obsolete.

Quick Mouse.7635:

You can disable the light flashes by setting post-processing to “none”
Thanks dulfy.net!

Yeah I did that too (after having it completed the first time) to get the final achievement.
I’ll edit it in

Haha, that’d be awesome. Although there’s no water to land in (yet)

Akamon… I guess the hardest part here was to keep your cool.
I kept hovering around the vortexes in the second part as they spawned (from safe zone to safe zone). This way you’d be guaranteed a crystal or two

Then, if the area wasnt safe I used my shield knockback and my greatsword to pull the enemies away.
Hardest part is to keep track of everything. Where the darkness will land, when the pulling orbs will spawn. And the stacks on her disappear after a little, so you have to keep track of how many times you’ve hit her manually (considering you might miss in the speedy action as well).

Just keep cleansing your conditions off and save your dodges as much as possible.
And I can’t give it enough emphasis, stay near center of the circle!

Fimbulvetr Wraith.2379:

It’s kind of special when the main gimmick to increase difficulty in a boss fight is abusing an already hopeless camera system.

It more highlights how bad the camera is than anything else, something that is more than sufficiently pointed out simply by the railings on the floating walkway around the arena. Unless one is trying to look down at a fairly steep angle the camera goes mad getting caught on the railings.

I never had camera issues on my norn or human or asura. Could any of you perhaps provide a picture of these screw ups? Maybe I’m just used to switching my camera fast that I didn’t notice it

Ok, so I’m not saying you are wrong. I’ll just give you some tips how to deal with it.

1. Keep track of where the red circles will spawn. They have a pattern that doesnt change. Knowing where they will spawn on top of sort of seeing them was enough for me to do it without failing.

2. This is just tactics. You have plenty time to lure enemies onto them and then the rest away. And on top of that there’s a dozen mechanics that make it even easier, like knockback or shield stance.

3. Gotta go with the toughness there to neglect most of the damage if you can’t succeed. I used knights gear and completed it with plenty time left. Perhaps use a mango pie to keep some HP regen. If you want to, you can dodge every single auto attack to last to the second phase.

4. They spawn at certain pre-determined places. They have like 6 or so options of where they can spawn. And they always spawn at the same moment. So it’s sort of random, but still fairly predictable. As far as the ranged attacks, that is indeed super annoying so I would advise using aoe attacks for it.

5. Once you get to learn how to do everything as fast as possible, you should have plenty of time. I think I had a good minute left when I did the 8 orb achievement. And like I said, I didn’t have full damage spec.

What issue you haven’t really adressed here, in my opinion, is that in the second phase you can’t really melee her. So some classes that are weak with range have a real disadvantage. For instance, a necro is very short range which isn’t optimal.
Aside from that having a lot of condition removal really is helpful if you’re trying to get close to her.

Go to your options.
Graphic Options.
Put ‘’Post-Processing" option to ’’None’’.

This should solve your nightmares

Ha, I’m just super happy right now. Just completed the 8 balls achievement on her with this exact same strategy It’s really doable as long as you don’t panic and keep cleansing those conditions off you when you have to.

Invisible walls would be a lovely replacement for the dome

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

Ah, sorry, I have no idea who the OP is referring to, I was answering the post right above mine.

Haha, it’s funny cause that guy was referring to the Gauntlet bosses. These do not have Defiance. And normally immbolize doesn’t count as CC and still works (just like underwater currents work while defiance is active)

You can ask around, I’ve found all of the bosses multiple times while doing my 30 balloons.

Sweaty, try finding an overflow that doesn’t have that many people in it is all I can give for advice when your hardware can’t handle it

I’m thinking there’s a difference between getting loot from the monster (lets say you need to deal 3% damage) and getting gold for the event (1% damage). Those numbers I just made up but it does seem the case.

DonRobeez.3560:

What’s wrong with the blinding light?

Hurts my eyes. I’d rather have a black screen than to stare in that brightness.

Martin Kerstein.3071:

Please read my correction above, I wrote something incorrectly which I have fixed.

Thanks for the replies… My mind was boggled about that. Works like a charm

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

(…)

If I could have 1 thing, it’d be more content updates like Sorrow’s Furnace in guild wars 1. Even though it was a reasonably small instance, it had a lot of different pathes and mechanics that were really good and fun.

And… please… missions like in GW1 as well. Those are, in my opinion, the best story telling mechanism there is.

That would just make me so happy <3

This would really give me a sense of a living world. I don’t want to be in a world where everything is different all the time. That’s nice every once a while, but I want the world to evolve. I really don’t feel like any of the Living Story has had an impact on the game.

Yeah love it when that happens… especially when you have a dozen gambits for an achievement and you can just say bye bye to your tickets.

I wished the domes would be a little bigger, and for the glass to be absolutely clear.
With a surface that’d show the AoE circles in a better manner.
That way it’d be better to observe as well.

I hated it on my Norn charactar. My asura and human didn’t really have any issues.

Key aspect here for me was to use Mango Pies to give me the extra health regen to survive the auto attacks.

The second phase you just really have to pay attention to when you have to dodge.
Try to cripple / chill her as much as possible and stay near the center so you get to preserve your dodges. Use your dagger to get rid of your own conditions, or use your heal. Just range her and stay patient.

I also used rabids with 30/30/10/0/0

A thousand times yes, and the fellblade could be a lot more black as well

Eat all of his meat, and keep a stunbreaker for the 4th one.
Once you start stacking those you’ll deal a lot more damage and it should be fairly doable

Strategy

• First Part

I firstly walk to the right side. The darkness won’t spawn here for a long time, giving me plenty of space to dodge auto attacks from the boss.
Make your way to the first vortex and keep track of the darkness. The first vision should be in it pretty fast. Throw it asap.
Same thing goes for the second one. You should have plenty of room to pick the crystal up to throw it at the boss.
Now the third one made me pick up my shield. There will most likely be 3 or 4 visions now. Just try to lure one of them into the vortex. Then use your shield to knock the other visions away giving you enough time to hit the third crystal.

• Second Part

The first darkness hourglass will spawn horizontally. So you should be safe at the top or bottem. Try and stay to the center of the dome as much as possible, so you don’t have to walk as much. If you ever run out of time, use your leap to make way. Try to reserve your dodges as much as possible. Try and lure the boss into the safezone. After the darkness collapses, run up to the middle edge of the next safe zone. Fight her there.

So, what I did to fight her was throw down wall of reflection and Symbol of Wrath. I kept going at her till the darkness collapsed. After that just run away. If you’re crippled use Stand your Ground and just walk away. Speedboost isn’t really needed if you’re standing near the middle of the dome! That’s what made it so much easier for me.
I kept ‘’Save Yourselves’’ as a back up. I didn’t actually use it, but I planned on using it incase I got dragged into an orb and had to stun break + dodge. The vigor would give you enough endurance to get back in track.
So, just keep running in circles and only fight when it’s save to fight. Make sure to have your retaliation up and only fight her when she’s using her whip. Only do that when you have condition removals available! Try and save your dodges for her leap so you don’t have to deal with that.

I guess that pretty much sums all of my tactics up. And after I twinkled around with this setup I actually managed to do it on the first try (After failing many times with different traits and utility skills). I guess 2 key aspects for me werestanding near the middle in the second phase, and having more condition removal + stability from the last trait line.

Mostly, just stay calm and try to do it as methodically as possible. The only thing that can cause you bad luck are the lightning flashes, but you can either save your dodges for it (and use ‘’Save Yourselves’’) or your Renewed Focus. Considering I was in the save zone at all times, I could just stand still and wait for it to pass by.

So, any questions?

Alright, so first off I’ll quickly give a little explanation of the two stages, followed by a walk through to give you an idea of what I did.
After reading it, if you’ve any questions feel free to post them here or PM me if you don’t think other people would have the same question.

The boss itself

• First Stage
  The first stage is pretty straight forward. Here are the numerous aspects:

- Liadri has basic projectile attacks. There’s a decent delay on her pathing, so if you keep switching where you go you can just force her to miss you.
- There’s the one hit kill darkness, that occurs in 4 different places. It spawns Bottem, Top, Left, Right. It will always maintain that order, so keep track of it so you dont have to waste your dodges.
- Visions of Morality will walk towards you, but are very slow. You need to direct them into the lightning vortexes. Always keep an eye on your back to see if one spawned on top of you, there’s one lightning swirl near the edge of the dome that tends to spawn one on top of it. Once a vision (or multiple) walk into it, a crystal will spawn that you can use to burst her invulnerability, you need to do this 3 times.
- An Orb will spawn which will pull you all the way over to it. Knocking you down. You can kill it with 1 hit (and you can also rally off it).
- Obnoxious Lightning flashes on your screen
Disable them by Options – Graphic – Post-Processing: None

• Second Stage
  The second stage is the tricky part of this duel.

- Liadri switches to Swirling attacks and Whipping attacks.
- Visions of Morality will not function differently.
- The darkness will change mechanics. It spawns as an hourglass, one horizontal and one vertical. It keeps flipping between those.
- Orb keeps spawning randomly.

Gear and Traits

• Gear
  So I’ll start off with my gear. It was pretty straight forward. I didn’t come close to dieing at all, and the damage needed isn’t too significant. (Although you want to be efficient at the first stage to make sure you have plenty of time)
  I just ran with full knights gear + trinkets.
  Pvt Greatsword & knights Scepter/Shield.
  I used 6x Superior Runes of the Soldier (condition removal + survivability).

• Traits
  Now I had to switch my traits for this. I couldn’t manage it with my original setup.
  I switched to 0/0/10/30/30.
  Now I’ll highlight why I picked it.
  10 in Valor for 5% toughness into precision.
  30 in Honor is mostly because it gives significant skill recharge. 20% shouts & 20% 2h weapons. I also used Pure of Voice.
  30 in Virtues, retaliation lasts 25% longer. Virtue of Resolve removes 3 conditions. Virtue of Courage crants you 3 seconds of stability, now this one I mostly used to kill the Orbs that spawn. I popped my virtue as soon as I saw it and hasted my way over there.

Just did it on my necro, single target dps while dodging a lot and poison to prevent healing

I’d rather say the opposite… never have I been so reluctant to not vote. Both were terrible choises and gave little to no incentive to vote for them.

I feel like this post I made way back sums up a lot of how people feel.
It’s just so evident all of the people who are now mad are mad because they strongly opposed Ellen Kiel.

I don’t get how Anet didn’t see this coming. It was such a poor choice that players had to make and both outcomes would’ve made people mad.

I can see all the people who voted for Ellen getting really upset over the discount on black lion keys if Evon won.

All in all, I guess I’m disappointed it didn’t end in a draw.