<spoilers> Is the LW 4 Ep 2 boss bugged or just poor design?

[Polarfairy.8046]

It was okay, there was too much aoe imo and I found it difficult to dodge around on my condi reaper so i "died" maybe... 6-7 times but you get right back up so that wasn't too bad. It was mainly just long and tedious. I don't see myself doing the 3min achieve alone as my build is condi damage over time and not burst dps, it's an old old raid build from wing one but I don't have the time or gold to change it. So, i'm done with the story, I'll skip the achieves and just wait for chapter 3.

[Silverwing.8750]

A lot of interesting responses.

Maybe, in the future ArenaNet could add a choice of difficulty levels to the start of the story instance.

e.g. easy, normal, hard, nightmare ;-)

In easier modes the boss would have less health/damage and fewer abilities, so be quick to kill. Hard/nightmare would have no auto resurrect, more boss health etc.

People who just want to experience the story or reach the new map quickly, could choose easy, and those who want a hard fight could choose hard or nightmare (with an achievement for completing nightmare)?

[thesilverdragoon.3078]

When the boss runs out of shield stacks, keep using that ley energy item because it inflicts 25 stacks of vulnerability. After figuring that out, his health bar plummeted until he was dead.

[Vayne.8563]

Did it with my wife. Didn't take us long to figure out what to do. Had very little problem with the boss. The real issue people are having is that what you have to do isn't spelled out explicitly and you have to figure it out while fighting, which not everyone is good at. But it's honestly not that hard a fight.

[Sarrs.4831]

Definitely not too hard. I think the only LS boss I've seen which was genuinely too hard was Caudecus.

 

Nothing wrong with a story step asking you to take 2-3 attempts on a boss to get a grip on its mechanics.

[Griever.8150]

Destroyed it on my Zerker P/P Deadeye, its not bugged, just requires a bit of strategy. I liked it personally.

[Manasa Devi.7958]

> @"Drarnor Kunoram.5180" said:

> > @"Daroon.1736" said:

> > The lack of in game information to try and help you work out the mechanics is even worse than usual in this fight.

>

> It's not in the fight, it's in the enemies you had to kill on your way to the boss. Every so often, you would have to pick up ley energy and use your special action key to hit a shielded golem on your way over, then kill the ejected core. The only difference is in the number of times you had to do it on the boss.

 

I don't remember killing any ejected cores. I guess I never noticed them because they got obscured by the never-ending onrush of the little cube things. It also can't have helped that I was bored at that stage and just wanted to get it over with.

[mochriademia.5713]

It was easy to figure out, I had no problem staying on my feet and I would have enjoyed soloing it, but it was definitely bugged for me. Finally managed to get through it after about an hour, but the core wouldn’t pop out after using the ley energy (fully stacked) 90% of the time, so I just kept taking out golems and collecting ley energy to use over and over again with 0 effect. And the shields were still showing 75% damage protection when there was only one shield left. Some of the little golems were getting stuck outside of the dome, too. Like I said, I finally managed to get through it, but I’m pretty certain it wasn’t working as intended for me. I’m not one to get easily frustrated with a boss fight—I enjoy using the different mechanics and figuring out the rhythm. The ley energy stack also got weird (like someone else mentioned) so the stack stopped getting depleted and was stuck at 3. No need to nerf, just make sure it works properly for everyone.

[ReaverKane.7598]

> @"Silverwing.8750" said:

> Fighting the LW 4 Ep 2 Mark II Beta Exterminator Golem is just annoying and not fun. The golem totally ignores all my clones, targeting me constantly, this removes one of the mesmer's main defences in PVE, i.e. deception. Is this a bug or just bad design?

 

There's a mechanic to it... It's not self evident, but you can do it **much faster** if you read the bosse's description.

[Daroon.1736]

> @"mochriademia.5713" said:

> It was easy to figure out, I had no problem staying on my feet and I would have enjoyed soloing it, but it was definitely bugged for me. Finally managed to get through it after about an hour, but the core wouldn’t pop out after using the ley energy (fully stacked) 90% of the time, so I just kept taking out golems and collecting ley energy to use over and over again with 0 effect. And the shields were still showing 75% damage protection when there was only one shield left. Some of the little golems were getting stuck outside of the dome, too. Like I said, I finally managed to get through it, but I’m pretty certain it wasn’t working as intended for me. I’m not one to get easily frustrated with a boss fight—I enjoy using the different mechanics and figuring out the rhythm. The ley energy stack also got weird (like someone else mentioned) so the stack stopped getting depleted and was stuck at 3. No need to nerf, just make sure it works properly for everyone.

 

Just replayed it and it does indeed appear to be bugged. Boss goes down to 25% pretty easily using the mechanics, but then he doesn't regain his shield buff, so the ley energy just stacks vulnerability, the power core you are supposed to attack never appears and the only way to defeat him is to burn his HP down, which takes a long time and is the cause of all the frustration. Needs fixing!

[Healix.5819]

> @"Daroon.1736" said:

> Boss goes down to 25% pretty easily using the mechanics, but then he doesn't regain his shield buff, so the ley energy just stacks vulnerability, the power core you are supposed to attack never appears and the only way to defeat him is to burn his HP down, which takes a long time and is the cause of all the frustration. Needs fixing!

 

The boss basically switches to attack mode for the final phase and drops the shield mechanic. At the same time, the NPCs will grant you power, increasing your damage by 100%. Unlike in prior phases, the boss is no longer anti-melee, so just attack it; being closer is easier. After taking it down a bit, its core will finally pop out, which you can instantly kill and destroy the boss.

[brenda.9723]

Yes the boss is bugged, the ley-line energy did not work most of the time.

(it takes a very long time to kill this thing without that mechanic :scream: )

But they tried to make it epic, and I liked the camera zoomed-out.

The boss is not that bad, it just takes really really long.

[Daroon.1736]

> @"Healix.5819" said:

> > @"Daroon.1736" said:

> > Boss goes down to 25% pretty easily using the mechanics, but then he doesn't regain his shield buff, so the ley energy just stacks vulnerability, the power core you are supposed to attack never appears and the only way to defeat him is to burn his HP down, which takes a long time and is the cause of all the frustration. Needs fixing!

>

> The boss basically switches to attack mode for the final phase and drops the shield mechanic. At the same time, the NPCs will grant you power, increasing your damage by 100%. Unlike in prior phases, the boss is no longer anti-melee, so just attack it; being closer is easier. After taking it down a bit, its core will finally pop out, which you can instantly kill and destroy the boss.

 

I will replay later and take a look, but last play through, no core ever popped, I had over 30 ley energy laying around from dead bots and; as others have stated, several things spawned outside the arena area, so were completely inaccessible even with ranged attacks.

[Atelia.4852]

> @"Nayaru.4716" said:

> 4) Incoming damage is perhaps a little too high for a solo run through especially when the power core is out and the main boss seems disabled - something took me from full health to downed during this phase and I don't know what - forgiving of course playing a glass cannon character and maybe I'm just bad. It was nice not to have to go through the whole downed state and possible retry, though.

I definitely felt that, too. I don't know how much of it was "good" challenge- the not-too-easy but not-too-hard kind- but it was really hard playing on a staff weaver with the high-damage fields everywhere. If I was caught in one, I was down to ~25% health, and I would almost definitely be caught in one (or more) if I started a long cast. And yeah, it might be my fault for soloing it with a glass cannon, or maybe my gear's not ideal for soloing story instances, or maybe I'm just not good at playing my class "right", but I always feel like story instances are really unfriendly to soloing with an elementalist.

(the auto-res was a really nice addition, though. I liked that with Balthazar and this because it made me feel a little less bad about dying all the time. I just wish it wasn't necessary, I guess.)

 

However, one thing I did notice that's really nice about this episode is that, because it goes instance-to-instance, you *can* quit after one part of the story. So if you're feeling too burnt out after the Inquest bases, you can just relog and come back later. You have to restart the instance you were in, and you won't have the new area yet, but you don't have to go through every instance again. I'm not sure how it is with restarting and retrying instances for achievements, though.

[Ayrilana.1396]

> @"Daroon.1736" said:

> > @"Healix.5819" said:

> > > @"Daroon.1736" said:

> > > Boss goes down to 25% pretty easily using the mechanics, but then he doesn't regain his shield buff, so the ley energy just stacks vulnerability, the power core you are supposed to attack never appears and the only way to defeat him is to burn his HP down, which takes a long time and is the cause of all the frustration. Needs fixing!

> >

> > The boss basically switches to attack mode for the final phase and drops the shield mechanic. At the same time, the NPCs will grant you power, increasing your damage by 100%. Unlike in prior phases, the boss is no longer anti-melee, so just attack it; being closer is easier. After taking it down a bit, its core will finally pop out, which you can instantly kill and destroy the boss.

>

> I will replay later and take a look, but last play through, no core ever popped, I had over 30 ley energy laying around from dead bots and; as others have stated, several things spawned outside the arena area, so were completely inaccessible even with ranged attacks.

 

The core came out for like the last 5% although that could just be random.

[VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.]

the boss in the charr camp was slightly annoying, but not a problem. Easy to figure the mechanic out.

[Overlord RainyDay.2084]

The boss wasn't hard, just really tedious. The mechanics weren't hard to figure out, but it wasn't exactly completely clear either. On the way to the boss, the little encounters teaches you "if the enemy puts up a barrier, you need ley magic to pull out the core". Then the boss, doesn't use a barrier, he just takes very low damage if you're not attacking the core. Took me a minute to figure out that the drones were power golems instead of assault golems and I needed to be fighting them instead of kiting them and focusing the boss. Then, the power golems despawn after a while and they really spread out, so I often found myself with 3 stacks of energy just waiting around for the boss to spawn more adds. Like others said the AoE was a little hard to manage. The circles for the bouncing projectiles don't give you enough warning to actually get out save for a perfectly-timed dodge, and he shoots them so quickly, that you can't dodge them all. If he had a tell or pattern that would let me know where he was going to launch them, I never knew because I was too busy focusing on the little golems to watch the boss's animations.

 

It feels like they must playtest the LW content with full parties. Trying to solo a lot of these is a real chore. If you're not full glass-cannon, it's real tough to meet the DPS needed to take down bosses in a reasonable amount of time, but if you do, the high-damage nigh-unavoidable AOE will nearly one-shot you. All in all, the fight took me about 20 minutes. I could probably get it down to about half that now that I know all the mechanics. With friends, I could probably get the achievement, but since I'd have to get through the whole 20-minute lead-in first to even have a chance at trying again, I think I'll be waiting a while.

[Lilyanna.9361]

> @"DeadTreeJig.6714" said:

> > @"Doctor Hide.6345" said:

> > Are people seriously complaining about the golem fight? It's easy as pie to figure out if you know anything about mechanics in any MMO. Not to mention they told us how when we had to use the energy blast on the pathway up to there, so it shouldn't be much of a surprise when we have to use the same mechanics the game showed us previous on the fight. The Taimi fight from the previous episode was a lot hard than this.

>

> At least the the Scruffy 2.0 fight was fun.

 

That was horrid.

I was blinded ninety percent of the time, with flames being randomly spewed all over the place and blinding my screen.

 

No that was not fun.

This fight was cleaner, straight to the point, and didn't require you doing unnecessary crap to start dpsing the boss itself.

 

SMH, I guess people just enjoy more flash than clean mechanics these days.

[Ayrilana.1396]

> @"Overlord RainyDay.2084" said:

> The boss wasn't hard, just really tedious. The mechanics weren't hard to figure out, but it wasn't exactly completely clear either. On the way to the boss, the little encounters teaches you "if the enemy puts up a barrier, you need ley magic to pull out the core". Then the boss, doesn't use a barrier, he just takes very low damage if you're not attacking the core. Took me a minute to figure out that the drones were power golems instead of assault golems and I needed to be fighting them instead of kiting them and focusing the boss. Then, the power golems despawn after a while and they really spread out, so I often found myself with 3 stacks of energy just waiting around for the boss to spawn more adds. Like others said the AoE was a little hard to manage. The circles for the bouncing projectiles don't give you enough warning to actually get out save for a perfectly-timed dodge, and he shoots them so quickly, that you can't dodge them all. If he had a tell or pattern that would let me know where he was going to launch them, I never knew because I was too busy focusing on the little golems to watch the boss's animations.

>

> It feels like they must playtest the LW content with full parties. Trying to solo a lot of these is a real chore. If you're not full glass-cannon, it's real tough to meet the DPS needed to take down bosses in a reasonable amount of time, but if you do, the high-damage nigh-unavoidable AOE will nearly one-shot you. All in all, the fight took me about 20 minutes. I could probably get it down to about half that now that I know all the mechanics. With friends, I could probably get the achievement, but since I'd have to get through the whole 20-minute lead-in first to even have a chance at trying again, I think I'll be waiting a while.

 

The boss had a buff icon with the tooltip indicating the mechanic. There was even a number of stacks shown to indicating how many more you had to use on it.

[Overlord RainyDay.2084]

> @"Ayrilana.1396" said:

> The boss had a buff icon with the tooltip indicating the mechanic. There was even a number of stacks shown to indicating how many more you had to use on it.

 

It didn't take me long to figure out, I just think it would have been smarter design to have you deal zero damage instead of just an extremely low amount. In most parts of GW2 zero damage is almost universally a sign that there's some special mechanic that you need to be using. While low damage could mean anything from "you're woefully under-geared" to "wait for an NPC to come along and hand out buffs/debuffs to make this doable".

[Amaya Bloodstorm.9174]

What is the point of gearing up, choosing elite specializations, setting skills and attributes to maximize fight efficiency based on your play style just to be forced to throw it out the window and rely on a tedious boss-specific mechanic to fight? Devs have put SO much effort into allowing player to customize their characters, and then reduce every boss fight to kite, dodge, execute forced mechanic. It sucks.

[Zalani.9827]

One of those times I'm glad I main a ranger since it made it soo much easier to just let the pet chase the core/adds around while I bowed it.

[Ayrilana.1396]

> @"Amaya Bloodstorm.9174" said:

> What is the point of gearing up, choosing elite specializations, setting skills and attributes to maximize fight efficiency based on your play style just to be forced to throw it out the window and rely on a tedious boss-specific mechanic to fight? Devs have put SO much effort into allowing player to customize their characters, and then reduce every boss fight to kite, dodge, execute forced mechanic. It sucks.

 

What’s the point of boss encounters if you can just burn them down and ignore mechanics because of gearing up, choosing elite specializations, setting skills and attributes to maximize fight efficiency based on their play style?

[Mahou.3924]

> @"XxsdgxX.8109" said:

> Lol as usual with **every single patch** that isnt doable by just auto-attacking

>

> Smoked every encounter with my Power Herald... as usual. FeelsGoodMan

> So better hurry up and play it all already if you want to experience a decent difficulty, before they nerf it to the ground... **as usual.**

 

One of the least helpful posts in this thread... as usual. FeelsBadMan

[DeadTreeJig.6714]

> @"Lilyanna.9361" said:

> > @"DeadTreeJig.6714" said:

> > > @"Doctor Hide.6345" said:

> > > Are people seriously complaining about the golem fight? It's easy as pie to figure out if you know anything about mechanics in any MMO. Not to mention they told us how when we had to use the energy blast on the pathway up to there, so it shouldn't be much of a surprise when we have to use the same mechanics the game showed us previous on the fight. The Taimi fight from the previous episode was a lot hard than this.

> >

> > At least the the Scruffy 2.0 fight was fun.

>

> That was horrid.

> I was blinded ninety percent of the time, with flames being randomly spewed all over the place and blinding my screen.

>

> No that was not fun.

> This fight was cleaner, straight to the point, and didn't require you doing unnecessary crap to start dpsing the boss itself.

>

> SMH, I guess people just enjoy more flash than clean mechanics these days.

 

The Scruffy fight required active participation, with this new fight I just kited and pew, pew. But i guess some folks like tedium more than a challenge these day. :)