Dagger/Dagger Insane Crowd Control (Daze, Stun, Immo's, Chills etc.) Builds?
in Elementalist
Posted by: omgwtflolbbl.7142
The problem is that people aren’t understanding how you’re getting dazed so much. AFAIK, the only daze skill that Elementalists have via their main weapons is with a Focus offhand (2 second daze on 25 second CD Comet, Ice #5). If they use the earth shield conjure, then they can get a 2 second daze on a 12 second cooldown, but with conjures, you lose the weapon if you drop it (meaning you’re locked out of Comet unless you drop it, which in turn means you’re either limited to one more shield or you can’t access the shield daze until you can summon another one). You said it was a D/D Elementalist, which rules out Focus/Comet daze. At most, the Elementalist was running around smacking you with the earth shield conjure, but honestly I found that kinda doubtful.
This boss is pretty boring once you figure it out but using a safe spot? You’re doing it wrong.
3 people using lasers, but EVERYONE jumps down after you’ve activated the lasers. Everyone gets at least 6-8 seconds of dps. Use burst damage skills for your utility slots, elite etc.
When the shield is about to go back up, just jump on the bottom red platform, then jump to the stairs which lead back up. Rinse, repeat.
You only need 3 people up top when activating the lasers. There’s no reason not to have 2 people in the safe spots at the bottom at all times. You can have the others rotate up and down between laser fires, but there’s no reason for all 5 to go up and down together. It’s just extra work for no gain at all for the 2 not running the lasers.
It’s not a question of whether they’re doable, but if they’re at the right difficulty level. Being story mode, the developers meant for these to be comparatively easy for all. They don’t have token rewards and there’s no real reason to rerun them, and the main reasons people are meant to run them are either to unlock explorable mode or see the story. I believe the developers said that story mode was supposed to be easily enough doable with any Pug while explorable was the real challenge. In contrast, I think a few of the story modes are just as hard, if not harder than their corresponding explorables. That shouldn’t be the case.
Whether you think dungeons need to be harder or not is irrelevant. We’re talking about story mode here – explorables can be made more difficult for all I care.
I hate evolved destroyer more than any other boss. He poses no difficulty at all and is simply a test of patience. I have used both methods (staying at the bottom as well as firin the laser and jumping down/up), and honestly it’s just tedious. It’s not difficult in the slightest, and you could probably write a bot to run through this encounter. It would feel a whole lot more interesting if the shield stayed down longer when successfully disabled, and the boss himself was given more moves to attack players when they actually get down there. Seriously, 2 easily dodged dragons teeth and a fire shield, that’s really all this boss does?
It should feel like I’m jumping down into a pit with a dangerous and threatening monster, not a punching bag. The evolved destroyer’s sandbag nature just makes this whole encounter feel boring IMO. Coupled with the fact that he just derps there while you slowly take down his precious shield is just ugh. I feel no threat whatsoever from this boss encounter. Not just because I’ve done it a lot and am used to it, but because he seriously just doesn’t do anything notable or threatening. The champion abomination is more threatening than this guy.
(edited by omgwtflolbbl.7142)
Yes, cross server works. However, you cannot play across the water (ex. If you’re on NA server and I’m on EU server, we can’t dungeon run together unless one o us switches over).
My biggest problem for this dungeon and any others, is that they take way too long to get through. Maybe it was just my groups but in my opinion a 5-man dungeon should take 1-2 hours tops, 2 hours being if your group is struggling. I ran the 2nd path last night and we were in there for 4 hours as we came upon the last round of Alpha
Umm, if it took you 4 hours to get through the Teleporter path, you and your group seriously need to step back and look at what you’re doing wrong. I regularly lead CoE first timers on runs that take less than an hour, as long as they listen a little. There’s a group that can run the Submarine path in well under 20 minutes. I’d understand it a little bit more if it was the Front Door path, because Alpha is a bit more annoying and impatient groups can easily make taking down the Evolved Destroyer take much, much longer than need be, but either way a 4 hour long CoE run is at the fault of the players.
I do think the fact that the paths are so similar and the fact that you have to fight Alpha 3 times each path does make it feel really tedious, but it’s really not all that long of a dungeon.
I don’t really care one way or another about people skipping mobs. If my pug wants to skip, I’ll skip, if they want to kill them all, I’m good with that, too. The major problem with trash mobs is that there isn’t all that much incentive to fight them if it isn’t necessary to. Sure, you can say that they have a chance to drop good loot, but honestly it’s the same loot as you can find anywhere else and more plentifully, like with some mindless half afk zerging in Orr. If the developers want to stop people from skipping, they need to either make it mandatory to fight them (like wih gated areas or whatever) or actually make them appealing to fight. Again, though, I honestly don’t really care how they go about it.
Bosses, however, do need some significant revisions. I should not be afking in the middle of a boss fight while not really even worrying about dying. A big health pool does not make a boss fight. I’m okay wih it if the first big boss fight or so of an explorable mode is fairly simple and easy to overcome with minimal thinking and brute force, but final bosses should all feel like thy pose major threat and require some good thinking and strategy to overcome. You pointed out vallog, which I agree with you on: he sucks. Who seriously thought he was anything close to sufficient as a final boss of a dungeon?
Oh look out, he’s casting a fireball that does really crappy damage.
Oh look out, he’s casting a projectile reflecting spell.
Oh look out, he’s casting a Pbaoe that does crappy damage and knocks you back.
I’m pretty sure the only reason people ever get downed during this fight is because they’re ranged and fell asleep while attacking the guy, resulting in them accidentally killing themselves while they dozed off and stopped paying attention.
I thought TA was one of the easier dungeons. The only thing I can’t stand about it is firing at a blossom and seeing “Obstructed” a million times.
Not too bad. Every so often you get people that are just really annoying, but for the most part people are willing to listen, especially if they happen to be dying a lot and notice you aren’t (and you’re ressing them).
To be honest, though, I haven’t really done any organized runs, so it’s not like I have anything to compare my PuG groups to. Though I did have a really awesome CoE PuG group a few days ago where we knocked out two paths in about 25-30 minutes each, which was nice. No explaining necessary, just smooth runs and lots of random chatter.
Venn Diagrams of Death… I rather like that lmao.
Here’s Alpha, really simplified.
If he’s using Dragon’s Tooth and you’re far enough away for one to appear, just walk out. This should never be a problem as long as you’re up. Don’t waste endurance.
For the line of spikes, watch who he was facing towards during his previous casting animation of whatever attack he threw out. He’ll generally throw the line of spikes at that same person. Judge whether or not you’re going to be in the way of that; if so, roll. if you need to. If you have to eat an attack, it should probably be this one as everyone can usually absorb at least 2-3 hits of this (though beware, one cast can hit you twice depending on where you are).
For the circles of earth spikes and singular ice spikes, coordinate with your group to either keep a good distance or to stack on top of each other. If you see no mist forming in the air over you, stay still; you won’t be hit inside the smaller circle. If you do see mist forming in the air, walk out of the inner circle, because an ice spike is coming. If there happens to be a lot of overlap, just dodge roll for the evade.
If you have a blink (ex. Lightning Step, Steal), just blink out. Invulnerabilities are good for buying time, too.
Something more and more people are picking up on now is that if you’re right on top of him with your teammates, you’re pretty much safe. His line of spikes does not start out from his center; this means even if he’s targeting you with it, if you’re close enough, you can just walk into him and the attack’s starting point will be behind you (and you should have time, because he stop walking for a moment before casting it). If everyone is stacked up on top of him, then everyone’s safe zones are overlapping and there’s no need to dodge. And since he doesn’t drop a Dragon’s Tooth on anyone who is in melee range, there’s no danger from that (though you do need some okay regen to counteract the PBAoE burn he inflicts – with a healing shouts condition clearing Warrior build, I can pretty much negate this for my whole team). Just watch out for any ice spikes that you may need to use endurance or whatever on. It used to be pretty rare for me to see any PuGers meleeing him, but people are learning how he works, thankfully.
I basically just two manned the last fight of Subject Alpha with a Guardian who was running the front door path for the first time, but listened to my instructions. And I’m in glass cannon armor, aside from my Soldier’s runes (full berserker exotic armor and accessories), so it’s not like I was just sitting there tanking hits with my defence. It just takes a little know how and attention.
Though I agree that having to fight him 3 times every path is pretty tedious.
I’ll join you if you happen to run CoE around the time you posted.
People sitting for 20 minutes in CoE path 1 waiting for all the trash to despawn.
Do/did people really do this?! Seriously P1 takes like 15 to 20 minutes tops for my group to finish and we kill everything.
I’d REALLY like to see this. 3 minutes on each alpha fight, perfect laser run, all 5 security locks at the same time, and Bjarl the Rampager never having Scales of Jormag, ever.
No really…I want a video…I’ll wait.
I’ll fraps our next run, it certainly wasn’t significantly longer than 20.
Whoo! If you pull this off, I’ll be in awe. Best of luck.
~16 minutes total. We did pretty poorly on laser and Jormag charged the NPC once or twice, it was our first attempt at a pseudo-speed run tho, hopefully next time will be much better.
I lol’d at the laser trap. I also can’t stand it when someone gives me swiftness while doing that part. Makes it easier to mess up.
It has happened to me as a Warrior as well.
I mean, I never die from the laser trap! L2P!
Honest question: do you all stay in the zone X dungeon is in and spam LFG in chat or do you go to LA or other cities and ask there?
Im currently on an AC kick so ill spawn in to Ashford and post LFG in chat. If noone answers or i dont see anyone else then I hit up LA and ask there and I ALWAYS find a group.
And if you dont wanna do that then post in the forums that you wanna run X dungeon X amount of times on X path. Dungeons are cross server so if you get replies than there you go.
Complaining you cant ever find a group is hardly an argument for a dungeon finder.
That being said, i do agree than a system of some sort would be nice for in-game approaches to making a group.
But again, there are alternatives.
If I wanted to run AC all day, I could. If I wanted to run CoF all day, I could. That’s because they’re very pug friendly, their weapons/armor are super popular, they’re very pug friendly, and well, they’re very very easy comparatively (not saying that dungeons are that hard, but relative to the other dungeons they’re about as derpmode as you can get and very short). Thus, people are always running those. Even the worst of pugs will succeed in those dungeons, and they’re very safe bets (not to mention AC makes you an actually decent amount of gold, which provides even more incentive for people to run that dungeon).
On the other hand, I want to run CoE. In the time it takes me to get a CoE group going from scratch, I’ll often see at least 2-3 CoF groups form up and go, and that’s assuming I even get my CoE group completed and going. 2 days ago I spent over an hour trying to get a CoE group together before I gave up and just went off to zerg in Orr. An hour wasted of spamming Lion’s Arch and Mount Maelstrom. I rarely ever put together full groups of people who are all experienced with the dungeon; I usually get at least one first timer, if not multiple. CoE also just isn’t enjoyable to a lot of people; many in my guild just don’t want to run it with me, because they hate it. Even when I guide people through pretty much perfect runs, they don’t want to run it again because they just didn’t like it. And god forbid if they DID have trouble with Alpha, or someone was impatient with with Evolved Destroyer making it take an even needlessly longer time than normal, because they’ll often tell me thanks for the run, but I never want to run this dungeon again.
At this point, forming dungeon parties is far more difficult than the actual dungeons themselves for me. I don’t necessarily want a fully automated system, but at least let me search for a party without having to dedicate time to getting message suppressed and warping around between Lion’s Arch and whatever map the dungeon is in.
Warriors should have no problem defending with melee AoE. As a warrior with a hammer, I can almost solo defend the console. Thief short bow is also quite nice. Engineer grenade spam or even bomb spam works pretty well, too.
For the next part (with the trapped inquest), you can choose to let the inquest die by overloading the shield, which will also kill all the silver mobs. On the other hand, you can choose to save him, which keeps the shield available to overload when alpha appears. You can then trigger the shield overload to knock out a good 50% or so of his health, which makes the fight absolutely trivial. If you want to do that, I’d recommend kiting the mobs back into the previous room. Meleeing multiple at once is quite a pain because many of those mobs feature knock backs and knock downs.
There are a LOT of bosses with no real interesting mechanics or threat to them.
I don’t remember which boss it was, but 2 days ago while running CM, I literally pressed 1, got up, went to make a quick jelly sandwich, ate it, cleaned up, and came back just a bit before the boss died.
…that should never be possible. For trash mobs while in a group, maybe, but a boss fight?
Having a “tank” for CoE in particular doesn’t make any sense. The main boss, Subject Alpha, targets everyone in range with every single attack (other than crystal, which if you consider Warrior a tank, is actually quite bad to get trapped in as one because you don’t have a blink). There’s no purpose to having a “tank” for that fight. I’d rather bring my Thief if it was a high enough level than my Warrior into CoE to fight Alpha. Evolved Husk would not benefit at all from having a tank for obvious reasons, same with Evolved Destroyer. Considering that Bjarl spends most of his time either spamming AoE crystals everywhere or laying on the floor, having a tank for him is pretty pointless, too. The Mark T tunnel visions one person, and anyone can survive just fine as his target of choice – no tank useful there, either.
None of the mobs pose a big enough threat to need a “tank” either. The only real danger from the Ice Elementals is that V shaped blast they do, and even with my Warrior I often just switch to my rifle against the wolves so that I don’t have to watch for that dumb PBAoE they do. Some big meaty guy up front just to make things easier to AoE might be nice, but you really don’t need that.
At the start, only the small bomb golems will spawn. After successfully using the console, 3 large golems will spawn while the small golems continue to spawn. If you kill those 3 golems, then nothing but small golems will spawn until the next time you successfully use the console again, at which point 3 more large golems will spawn. This continues on and on, though no large golems will spawn after successfully using the console the 5th time.
If you choose to have multiple people using the console at the same time (ex. two pressing at once, 3 defending), then you will successfully get 2 activations put towards the event, (and also spawn 6 large golems). You don’t have to do one at a time if you don’t want to.
If you’re having trouble clearing the large golems inside the room, run back outside. It makes it a lot more manageable to focus golems when they’re all coming from one direction, rather than random bomb golems coming from all sides. It’s a fairly easy event, just takes some patience.
Though, I do want to try and find a way to get all 5 activations at once, lol.
So I tried the other day to find a group for CM at level 57. Had no luck and the only real response was that you really need to wait till you are level 80 to do dungeons. I guess I just really don’t understand the scaling system in any way. So think I’m just going to give up and perhaps at 80 they will be a bit more doable.
Eh, more important than levels is experience. I took my level 52 Thief in CM explorable for back to back runs the other day and they went quite smoothly. I may not have done as much damage or been quite as strong as opposed to if I had ran it with my level 80 Warrior, but I still contributed quite a bit. I played more on the defensive end putting up lots of blinding fields, pulling with wire, and granting AoE stealth and regen.
Only bads have trouble with this…
here’s a tip: turn your camera sideways.
I look straight down, lol.
I don’t really care for a fully automated dungeon finder. Anet has already said they don’t want a fully automated dungeon party system, and that’s fine with me. But at the very least, let me look for a dungeon party in a way that doesn’t force me to either waste time in a map I’ve already completed spamming /map message or sit in Lion’s Arch… spamming /map messages. And then getting message suppressed (yes, I know zoning fixes it, but it’s stupid regardless). Do this with an actually useful LFG list, or a LFG chat, or whatever. But the current system is…, well, nobody actually uses the system implemented for this because it’s useless, which is kind of sad.
You only have to do roughly 25%-30% of her health. It’s quite easy to hit that point as long as your group focuses her.
You guys probably probably misread whatever guide you were looking at. You don’t get her down to 30% health left, you deal around 30% of her health. Big difference. Then she’ll say something about how you’re a rude and terrible jerk and leave the the ghost for dead. By not focusing her when she came down you made the fight much harder than it needed to be.
Depends on your server and when you can play too, though. I’m only available to play at really odd hours for now, and it’s extremely difficult for me to get a group running with the current system, despite having joined a dedicated PvE dungeon guild. I spent a full hour and a half yesterday just looking to run CoE explorable. The end result? I gave up and ran CM instead, even though I really don’t need to run CM, and zerged in Orr for an hour. No CoE runs. I still need ~1650 tokens from CoE to get what I want, and the hardest part about getting tokens by far for me is just finding groups that are running it. At this point I don’t even care if the group is terrible, I just want to be able to run the freaking thing.
I’d rather see Anet bring in more puzzle/timing/jumping elements into dungeons. I run my Warrior through this dungeon, so I don’t use any blink mechanics to get myself through it.
Rather than just try to bulldoze through whatever is giving you problems, just relax and watch how it works instead. If I can learn to do this on EU servers, where I sometimes lag so badly that I actually have to time my jumps so that I am visually INSIDE the outer moving waves of lasers on my end, I hope you can do it on a normal connection.
It’s just dividing by 1+Arcane bonus.
This is basically faster rate of change, like if your water faucet put out 100% more water it would fill a bucket in half the time, not instantly.
That’s what I have in the later part of my first post. I don’t have any trouble understanding how the math works, I was just confused as to if they were doing it this way and why. It’s counter-intuitive IMO to have your 20% recharge traits actually reduce recharge times by 20%, then have this use a different calculation. I would understand using this kind of calculation more if we had some kind of visible metered system other than just time (ex. some other resource like energy/stamina).
I tested the Engineer and the Guardian out in the mists. Apparently this is how it functions for their F key skills, too.
If you can edit the video and add in information on his cone attack, it’d be nice.
Unfortunately for me, I don’t have the hardware to support decent video recording right now, so I couldn’t do so.
If it’s working as intended, that’s pretty dumb. I can’t think of any other cooldown mechanics that work like this in the game. It’s also quite misleading. A lot of people I talked to yesterday thought the base attunement recharge time was 20 seconds because of this when it’s actually 15.
This actually makes a pretty big difference and it doesn’t make any sense that this single recharge/cooldown mechanic follows a different formula than every single other thing in the game. I’d really like some official confirmation that this is either bugged or working as intended.
(edited by omgwtflolbbl.7142)
Can anyone confirm how this works? I would think that this is a pretty big deal, given that, you know, this is sort of a core mechanic for the Elementalist and a lot of stuff revolves around switching back and forth constantly.
I went off and tried it on a golem dummy. Even with an extra 20% Condition Duration (20 into Fire tree) for 18 second stacks of Vulnerability, you top out at 20 stacks of Vulnerability, and even then it only lasts for maybe 2 seconds before you drop back down to 16 stacks. With the 20% cooldown reduction for water skills trait it’ll stay at 20 longer than it’ll stay at 16, but yeah. And of course, doing this means your own personal damage is nonexistent, so you’re basically hoping that the extra 20% damage each of your teammates is doing makes up for the fact that you’re not doing any real damage yourself.
On the other hand, I could simply go Engineer, and keep up like 12+ stacks of Vulnerability while simultaneously dealing really high AoE damage and inflicting chill/bleed/blind.
Hrm, so for his AoE vomit, if you can be hit while standing in front of the circle, does that mean that every one of those is actually a projectile and thus can be reflected?
I don’t know if I’m missing something terribly obvious here, but…
I made myself an Elementalist and went off to the Mists to see if I could make the Elementalist work in a way I’d find enjoyable. All it did was make me even more confused.
Attunement recharge with 0 points into the Arcana tree gives 0 increased attunement recharge rate (thank you, Captain Obvious!), and leaves you with a recharge of about 15 seconds on an attunement when you swap.
Each point into the Arcana tree gives +2% recharge rate. At 60% cooldown reduction (30 points into the tree), that means attunements should have a recharge time of 15*.4 = 6 seconds, right?
So why does it take 9 seconds to recharge an attunement with 30 points into the Arcana tree? Is this intentional? Heck, to think of it another way, every 5 points into the tree should take off another ~1.5 seconds from the recharge time (10% of ~15 second base recharge time for the math impaired). Instead, you only get 1 second off.
The only thing I can think of is that it literally means the rate of recharge is sped up by 60%. Meaning, if at 100% recharge rate (0 points into Arcana) you are recharging at a rate of… 1 second “worth” per 1 second, then at 160% recharge rate (30 points into Arcana), you are now recharging 1.6 seconds “worth” per 1 second. In other words, it takes 9.375 seconds with 30 Arcana to recharge the same “amount” as it takes 0 Arcana to in 15 seconds.
If so, this is just kitten backwards. That’d make it inconsistent with the way virtually everything else is done and needlessly complicated.
Someone please tell me that I derped hard somewhere and missed something really obvious.
I’ve only gotten the opportunity to run this dungeon once, and the group I ran it with wanted to do the whole lead him to waypoint thing. As a result, I didn’t really get to see many mechanics of the fight very well before it devolved into a zerg fest, so I went off and watched a video of someone clearing it. It’s left me with a few questions that I’d appreciate if someone could answer them. I don’t think I’ll be running Arah very often (mainly because there’s nothing from that dungeon I actually want, except maybe the Longbow if it didn’t freakin clip straight through my butt), but I’m still curious about a few mechanics.
1) Giganticus Lupicus’s single target attack (the single wavy green bolt aimed at one person). Is there a way to dodge it consistently without burning endurance? The videos I’ve seen usually either burn endurance to avoid it or just eat the thing, lol. This thing was probably the most annoying thing to me about this fight, weirdly enough. Does constant strafing dodge it (like how you can just strafe left and right against archer enemies to bug their aim)?
2) Giganticus Lupicus’s AoE bolt spewing of doom. This might sound kind of funny, but are the AoE ground indicators accurate? Obviously, not standing inside the circles is the smart thing to do, but I felt like sometimes I got tagged while I was clearly out of the indicators. I’m not sure if it’s because the indicators are inaccurate, or if I just simply got tagged with a single target bolt after he was done with his vomit storm. In the video I’m watching, there are many times where the bolts are clearly landing off center or even outside of the ground indicator, and it seems like the player is getting hit when she should be safe as well.
3) Giganticus Lupicus’s weird little poison bubble dome. Is it worth it to bring a stun breaker against it that doesn’t grant stability or teleport you out of it? I was relying on Shake It Off going into the fight, which immediately stun breaks but doesn’t actually move you anywhere. When I got caught in the bubble, I’d use Shake It Off and get up, but get knocked back down again before I could get out. Should I have just replaced Shake It Off with Balanced Stance? Is it even worth bringing Shake It Off into this fight? Furthermore, will you be continually knocked down as long as you’re in the bubble, or does that only happen when you try to run through the edge?
Your message was suppressed due to excessive messaging.
Thanks, Anet! I guess I’ll just not run dungeons then.
That said, leave the zone and return and you should be okay for a while again.
Shatterstone, switch to lighting while casting, lightning 2 and 3. Or switch to earth and use earth 2 second effect if you have the shield already on you. Or arcane skills. But this skill default vun last 15sec and can be cast strait after its finished, 15sec/2 ~ 7time in 15 seconds, 7 × 4 = 28 with a cap of 25 so you can spam this whilst the other 4 guys in your group lay down 25% more damage.
Is that really worth it, though? It’s not like the Elementalist is the only one who can apply or maintain high stacks of Vulnerability, and you would be sacrificing a lot of damage to do that – keeping that up full time would be like telling your teammates to do your damage for you while you don’t bring much else to the fight, which kind of makes the whole thing moot while also making it harder for you bring other utility to the fight while you keep spamming it. Any time you switch out to another element you’re also going to be dropping stacks.
Something I observed during my last teleporter run is that when it comes to the ice blast, he picked only one target to cast it on for pretty much the entirety of the fight. As long as that person was in range, he would cast the ice blast under that person, with the usual rings for everyone else. If that person died and was running back, he’d then pick a different target to use it on until that first person got back. Sort of similar to the earlier golem boss with the 4 turrets in the same dungeon. I’ll try to test it more when I can, to see if this is actually how it does work or if it’s path specific. If that is how it works, then it means you don’t even have to pay attention to whether you’ve got an ice blast or a ring of earth coming up once you figure out who he picked out.
I’ll add in the bit about the ice spike animation when I get the chance. Thanks for the tips!
Usually he’ll cast it at whoever he was looking at while casting the previous spell (which depends on the path you were taking, of course). So if you’re doing the Submarine path and he turns to face you whenever he casts Dragon’s Tooth, you can be pretty sure he’ll be tossing that row of spikes at you. He also sometimes turns halfway through while tracking his target before casting, I think it’s just kind of buggy. Unfortunately, I can’t help you with the actual timing of the dodge; I’m in NA playing on EU servers, so my dodge timing is probably way off. I usually dodge extremely early before he even actually casts the thing and I get the evade message, but I feel like that’s probably not the normal timing lol.
At least it’s not as confusing as what the Warrior does.
Rifle #1) Bleeding Shot – Fire a shot that bleeds your target.
Fires while looking down the sights.
Rifle #3) Volley – Fire a volley of shots at your foe.
Fires while looking down the sights – if anything should be hip fired, this should be.
Rifle #4) Brutal Shot – Shoot your foe and make them vulnerable.
Fires while looking down the sights.
Rifle #5) Rifle Butt (melee attack)
And then we have…
Rifle #2) Aimed Shot – Fire a precise shot that cripples your foes.
Fired from the hip.
Wait, what?
Number 3 is a pretty big deal for me actually. If you could transmute across different armor types, I’d have probably gone ahead and actually started working towards making myself the Kudzu for my Warrior coupled with some TA armor for the whole nature theme (that, and I rolled a pink/green setup for the longest time anyways). But since it doesn’t really fit that well with most heavy armor, I ended deciding against it.
One more thing… don’t spend your adrenaline on rifle burst skill… ever… it sucks badly.
Eh, it has its places. For example, in CoE exp, against the mark T, I can use it to heavily chunk 2 of the turrets and the boss all at the same time. Though yeah, Longbow burst is just really good, unless you’re up against targets who are immune to burning lol.
Can someone please teach me how are we supposed to fight him in that tiny room of front door? The last battle.
You simply do not have any space to dodge the earth spike and his aoe covers the whole room. I can do him just fine in the other paths, dying only 2~1 times, but i died dozens of time in that part
What other people said. Think of your dodge roll not as something that simply moves you somewhere, but as something that temporarily turns you invulnerable. It doesn’t matter if you’re rolling into a Dragon’s Tooth, or a giant Earth Spike, or whatever – if you’re currently rolling, you will evade it, even if you’re smack dab in the middle of the hitbox. It may not make sense in your brain, but that’s how it works. You’ll have to learn the timings depending on your lag (my timings are probably quite off from the norm given my connection and the fact that I play overseas), but once you do, as long as you have endurance, you should never take a hit against Subject Alpha assuming you’re not trapped in a crystal with no way out.
Of course, maintaining that kind of endurance is kind of hard, so the next step is to figure out what you simply don’t need to use endurance to avoid.
Subject Alpha’s line of Earth Spikes is only cast in one direction. He also turns towards whatever direction he’s casting it beforehand (and usually he tosses it out at the same person he was facing when he casted his previous attack – in the case of the FD path, that’d most likely be a ring of Earth Spikes). This will let you know whether or not you will need to burn endurance avoiding this attack. Otherwise, you can just continue on with your day like nothing happened. I covered that above.
After he casts that, up next will almost always be a ring of Earth Spikes centered around every player, with the occasional Ice Blast thrown in. You may or may not have to burn endurance to dodge this as well. This is dependent on the positioning of your teammates. If they’re all buddied up with you (causing your safe zones to overlap), or giving you quite a lot of space (so that there’s no significant overlap at all), you most likely don’t even need to move to avoid this. If you’re running around mindlessly and spaced out ala my “standard PuG” picture, then yes, you may need to burn endurance on a dodge if you don’t start running for a safe spot fast enough.
Beating Alpha smoothly is a combination of good positioning and good endurance management. As long as you pay attention to those two things, you can dance around him naked if you really wanted to. The more chaotic your party is, the crappier and more annoying fighting him will be. That’s an obvious, generic thing, but Subject Alpha’s mechanics make it doubly so. One of the smoothest Alpha fights I’ve had was in a 4 man (total) PuG that kept their cool.
You know, I wrote a guide on how to deal with Subject Alpha, outlining pretty much all his mechanics and a lot of tricks, in this very section. Two hours later, you created a topic asking about how his mechanics work.
Does not compute.
Eh, when you come across one of those, you have a couple of options. Rifle Butt will go through, being a melee attack obviously. A well aimed Longbow F1 and #3 will hit, too. But yeah, when you come up against something that reflects projectiles, you feel kind of dumb lol. Usually I just holster my weapon until the effect in question wears off.
Personally I went 30/30/0/10/0. I used my Longbow to AoE farm a lot. Generally I tagged everything nearby with autos (using my Longbow if I needed Adrenaline, Rifle otherwise), gathered them all up, rolled through them twice to evade most attacks, tossed Longbow F1 down for the field and endurance gain along with #3 for the might, then #4 for the AoE blind to buy me some time to line up a good #5 immobilize on whatever was left. #2 and a switch to Rifle would usually let me clean up whatever was left, if there was anything.
Problem with Rifle in PvE imo is that it’s just slower overall. It’s safe as heck and you can pretty much make sure you never die (between #2 cripple, Bolas, Rifle Butt, and reduced cooldowns, pretty much nothing in PvE will ever reach you), but for the most part you will be doing single target damage, maybe hitting 2-3 max on a very large mob (and for reduced damage). You can’t burn down large groups of mobs. I like lining up the shots though, so I use it a lot anyways.
But all in all, if you really want to make it work, you can. I used Rifle/Longbow all the way from 1-80, and actually followed the exact same train of thought you did in picking that route (tried Ranger first, didn’t like it, tried ranged Thief, didn’t like it, tried Warrior). Admittedly, in dungeons, I tend to swap out one or the other for a Hammer, just so that I have a lot more CC to add to the group. But for general world PvE, it will do just fine, though you might get some funny stares.
All in all, there’s really only 4 real dangers:
1) Your teammates – the more people that understand how this fight works, the less this will matter, obviously.
2) Crystals – if people learn to focus fire these, these shouldn’t be a problem. Depending on your class, they may not even be an issue
3) Endurance – if you can spec for some endurance regen (vigor or whatever), this generally shouldn’t matter either, especially in paths 1+2.
4) Misread ice blast mixups – sometimes you expect a ring of Earth Spikes and you instead find yourself a new butt plug made of ice. If you keep moving left/right repeatedly, generally you can spot when the circles are not perfectly concentric, but it doesn’t always work out. This is probably honestly the most tricky thing about Alpha. I’d actually like to just test it, to see what other differences there are, but since I only pug, I can’t unfortunately. On downed players, I think he sometimes casts both simultaneously, but again, I’m not quite sure on this.
Also consider your ressing options. Fast, ranged resses are pretty nice for this fight (ex. Warbanner), as depending on Alpha’s rotation it can be very hard to ress someone with eating damage of your own. You can change the skills on your utilities/elites, it’s true!
And then there’s the REAL issue with Alpha… the fact that he has a stupidly large HP bar and you have to fight him 3 times per path. But that’s a different discussion…
Now that you have all this information on hand, you can make up your own strategies for not sucking at fighting Subject Alpha!
On a final note, a lot of this is from this perspective of a ranged player. I usually roll with a Rifle/Longbow Warrior, which is a really weird and honestly pretty inefficient combo, but I do it because I like the ranged playstyle. I love to kite and I love to pew pew, though not the pewpewpewpew of SB rangers (and which is why I’m not a ranger). That said, you can absolutely melee Alpha (I occasional swap the Longbow for a Hammer) and do fine. In fact, if your party is on the same page, some melee parties can make some Alpha fights absolutely trivial, hint hint. Naturally not a single pug has ever listened to my advice on Alpha, but despite that and the fact that I run dungeons in Magic Find gear (raises flame shield), I can still manage melee on Alpha fairly well. Anyone who actually is used to running lots of melee can make it work here just fine. Also, burst builds are generally nicer for this fight for crystal shattering. Which, of course, my build absolutely sucks at.
(edited by omgwtflolbbl.7142)
Now, for the 3 versions of Subject Alpha (I may mix things up between paths, this is off the top of my head and honestly I just pretend all the Alphas are the same at this point):
Submarine Path
On this path, Alpha does not use the ring of Earth Spikes. He only casts Dragon’s Tooth and the line of spikes (the first and second attacks listed above). He will constantly alternate between these two, going DT>Spikes>DT>Spikes>etc., with the occasional heal/summon/crystal in between. If Alpha pauses for a few seconds without doing anything, he’ll sometimes cast the same thing twice in a row, but that usually doesn’t happen (this is common to all paths, and sometimes kinda buggy). If you’re in a full ranged party, and Alpha is currently targeting you, then generally you will be following a pretty simple pattern – run out of Dragon’s Tooth, roll evade out of Spikes, run out of Dragon’s Tooth, etc. If he is NOT targeting you or someone close to you (doesn’t face your direction when casting Dragon’s Tooth), then you can pretty much just stand still and do nothing while he casts the line of spikes.
Teleporter Path
On this path, Alpha does not attack with lines of Earth Spikes. He only casts Dragon’s Tooth and the ring of Earth Spikes (attacks 1+3), with the occasional ice blast (attack 4). This is IMO the easiest version of Alpha. Your general pattern will be to walk out of Dragon’s Tooth AoE, then stand still as Earth Spikes go up around you, and repeat. The random risen thralls are more dangerous than Alpha in the first fight. Just watch out for the occasional ice blast switch up (I’m actually not even sure if he uses it in the first fight). More importantly, oddly enough, watch out for your teammates.
Now, this will probably be the first time you deal with the rings of Earth Spikes, and this’ll probably make everyone go crazy and run around. For a ranged party, the key is to keep your distance from each other. By running around close to each other, Dragon’s Tooth becomes kind of hard to avoid simply because you now have to avoid several instead of one, but more importantly, your rings start to overlap and your safe zones get negated by the damage zones of others. In fight number 1 along this path with a ranged weapon, if you take out the adds, you can literally clear this encounter solo moving like 5 steps every Dragon’s Tooth, and then just standing there pressing 1 with a ranged weapon until the next Dragon’s Tooth. By running around haphazardly, you’re actually making the encounter FAR more annoying and tiresome than it needs to be, both for yourself and your team. If you play smart, though, and have a little bit of extra endurance regen, you should be able to keep up enough to dodge every single time he plops out rings of Earth Spikes, just in case your team decides they like making your life difficult.
Front Door Path, the manly man path
In this path, Alpha is both hardest and easiest, oddly enough. I say easiest because there’s an actual waypoint that you can use to quickly get to the last Alpha encounter, which means that those that like to waypoint zerg actually can now, which is a lot of pugs. Alpha gives up his Dragon’s Tooth spell here in favor of the other two. This means the dangers presented by your teammates that I outlined in the above path are now made far worse, because now you may have to be burning endurance on back to back rolls, which means your teammates have a much higher chance of eventually getting you killed along this path if Alpha decides he really likes to aggro you. Not to mention the camera control in this area just sucks.
Subject Alpha is a little bit different in every path, but in total, Alpha has 5 basic abilities that you actually care about. I’ll list each of these and explain how to deal with them individually, before talking about each paths’ version as a whole. If you’re still confused after reading, check the links for some pretty AutoCAD (lol) pictures!
1) Alpha casts Dragon’s Tooth on everything in range. This is the same as the Elementalist’s #2 fire Scepter. While he casts this, he also lets out a PBAoE that inflicts a burning condition. You generally should never dodge roll this attack, as it’s a waste of endurance. You can simply walk out of it, often even if walking backwards most of the way. Also of interest is the fact that if you are close enough to him, he will not cast Dragon’s Tooth on you. Taking advantage of this can make this fight trivial, hint hint. Essentially, Dragon’s Tooth is free time if you’re up.
http://imageshack.us/a/img20/8502/subjectalphadragontooth.png
2) Alpha casts a line of Earth Spikes, with the first being quite small. As the attack gets further away from him, the Earth Spikes get progressively bigger, essentially becoming a cone AoE in the direction of his target. Unless you are strafing very close to him where the width of the cone is at its smallest or you can walk through/behind him as he casts it, you will usually have to dodge in order to avoid this attack. They don’t do all that much damage compared to some of the other spells, so eating one or two between heals is okay. Be aware that you can be hit by two of these in one attack, though, as the spikes overlap slightly.
Note that the hitbox for this attack does not start from Alpha’s center, hint hint. Use this in combination with the above for the easiest runs ever.
http://imageshack.us/a/img834/8829/subjectalphalineofearth.png
3) Alpha casts a ring of Earth Spikes around everyone in the room. Note: it’s a ring of spikes. The AoE indicator on the ground looks like two concentric circles, one about double the radius of the other. The inner circle is a safe zone. The area between the two circles is the actual damage zone. This means that against this attack, you can actually just stand still and complete avoid it. In fact, you can be downed or stuck in a crystal, and this will sometimes miss you. Alternatively, you can run out (forwards/sideways, not back), or time your dodges. If you roll, however, I’d recommend you dodge towards the outside of your circle for reasons listed next.
http://imageshack.us/a/img853/4518/subjectalpharingofearth.png
4) Alpha casts a delayed AoE ice blast at a target location. This is one of his trickier moves. The ground indicator is very similar to the ring of Earth Spikes, in that it’s one circle inscribed inside another. He also casts this at the same time he casts rings. However, if you are moving around and this spell is cast on you, the inner circle is NOT (usually) concentric with the outer circle. Look at the diagrams below if you need more clarification. In addition, any incoming ice blast has a blue mist over it, whereas rings of Earth Spikes will only have a frozen patch of ground (thanks to the sexiness that are Spreadsheets, and Shiri as well). This is IMO his most dangerous attack, as it is easy to confuse with his ring attack, deals very high damage upfront, and applies 6 stacks of bleeding.
http://imageshack.us/a/img824/5204/subjectalphaiceblast.png
5) Alpha jumps up and down, encasing a single target in a purple crystal. This happens pretty fast, and although it can be dodged, it’s pretty hard and requires quite a bit of luck to do so (you’ll know because the crystal will still go up, but you won’t be trapped obviously). This is often what actually makes Alpha difficult, depending on whether your team deals with the crystals or not. Note that you can blink out of crystals, and use invulnerability moves while still inside (Eles, Thiefs, and Mesmers deal great with crystals solo). Stunbreakers don’t seem to work on them, however. They also seem to break after a certain period of time automatically. As a Warrior, I can’t escape from one (afaik), but I can use Endure Pain while inside a crystal. This attack is common to all paths of Alpha for each second and third encounter.
Alpha can also regenerate a bit of health and summon risen thralls and tendrils. Use the tendrils to rally yourself if you do go down. You can also stun Alpha by killing his Alpha Essences when he tries to heal, and even chain this to stun him for the entirety of the fight. Alpha will also occasionally take a nap, AKA bug the crap out and pet a kitten for 10 minutes, which is fine with me but probably not intended.
(edited by omgwtflolbbl.7142)
I was looking forward to the CoE videos in the video guide sticky, because a lot of people I’ve pugged with have trouble there. In particular, I was hoping that they’d show how to deal with Subject Alpha. I have about 2000 more CoE tokens to grind up for my Warrior (probably gonna need another 1200 or so when I get my Thief to 80), and I would highly appreciate it if people were somewhat less terrified and terrible when it comes to him in my pugs and stopped dying 10 seconds after getting in range of him, especially with the waypoint placements of paths 1 and 2. Unfortunately, the only videos up of CoE right now kind of show the group failing pretty hard at Alpha, so I’m just gonna write my own little guide here and hope that someone will be willing to learn from it or contribute. Subject Alpha is just absolute terror to most people from what I’ve experienced.
http://imageshack.us/a/img822/7145/subjectalphastandardpug.png
I’m not going to give you exact group strategies or whatever (DO THAT YOURSELF), but I will hopefully be able to make you less terrified of the second ugliest thing you’ve ever seen. Also note that these are all my own observations and I’m a mostly solo/duo player – I ONLY pug, and pretty much only play this game with one other person, who doesn’t run any dungeons. So I won’t claim to have the entire thing analyzed (in fact there’s some stuff I am unclear on myself and would like to test, and with red circles everywhere it’s pretty messy). This is also all off the top of my head, so… hopefully I’ve got a great memory lol. If you see something off or flat out wrong, just tell me and I’ll check it when I can.
I’m sorry, but the CoE videos up are kind of… disappointing, as a “guide”. The group that ran them basically waypoint zerged a lot, and failed to understand at all how Subject Alpha works (which is probably the biggest issue for most people when it comes to CoE), and if you’re waypoint zerging the first encounter with Alpha like they were in video three, that’s not really showing anyone anything. The end of their path 2 run was literally one person firing on a bugged out Alpha for like 20-30 minutes because it looks like they didn’t want to risk unbugging him. I appreciate that they were willing to upload their runs, but to call them guides is… eh. I’m not expecting super perfect runs here, but something we’re labeling as a “guide” should not feature excessive waypoint zerging.
Like others CoE’s laser trap. I have about 2000 more tokens to collect on my Warrior alone before I’m done with getting what I want from there, and the laser trap is the one thing I really look forward to consistently when running that thing. I’d love an extended laser trap lol.
This might sound counter-intuitive, but I think it is very important to consider not to display class and level info in a future, upgraded LFG system. It leads to homogenization of group compositions and favours certain, as more useful perceived classes/specs and fully levelled characters. While in theory this is already the case, in practice it is not feasible and common practice for a leader to just invite every “attractive” character and kick unappealing characters. In a list-based menu where the leader alone has authority to throw together their group, the currently existing element of randomness, the “impromptu” nature of Pugs could be lost.
That’d be fine, as long as you’re unable to put yourself under the list as looking for a group for a particular dungeon if you aren’t high enough to run it. Right now, someone could put themselves on the LFG list and you’d have no idea if they’re even capable of running the dungeon, or if they just want to run through the map objectives with a party, or what. Of course, nobody puts themself on the LFG list to begin with right now, but yeah.