First instance looks nice, boss fight is horrible

[Ourasa.7306]

> @"yoni.7015" said:

> The boss fight is quiet easy, I didn’t have any problems with a public group.

 

Damn son, you lucky then. In my instance, nobody knew to CC the boss by getting in the tank and harpooning it. Everyone was just too focused on killing whatever is on their sights.

[Khisanth.2948]

> @"Rukia.4802" said:

> My first run went fine, I had players that know how to tie their own shoes in the morning. But my 2nd run.. I don't know how many times I said in chat how to CC boss and even explained there was a timer when he vents, multiple times. Everyone refused to listen so it took ages to kill it. Honestly I wanted it to fail, there is no excuse for letting that fight eventually succeed despite horrible performance from the players. If it failed then maybe they will do the mechanics next time.

 

Sounds like the typical experience for an open world boss

[Jilora.9524]

Just explain that right after the bomb icon gets put on you theres a 15 second vent countdown is when you should get in the tank before it starts moving and you all safe for those 10 seconds and once the tank goes back to start you all harpoon and unload everything. We 2 burned it my last one with a full group. Usually it's 3 or 4 and can be forever if no1 listens/learns

[Blocki.4931]

Tip for people playing that first instance/soloing it:

Look at the boss healthbar and watch for the vent timer. You can basically afk and kill an enemy every 20 seconds if you like, focus the portals and kill a couple more enemies to get ammo. The second you hear or read the word vent in a text bubble you run to the tank, press 3 3 3 3 3 3 and then hold down 1. Rinse, repeat.

[Woop S.7851]

Kudos to the tank mechanics not seen since GW1 [Fort Aspenwood](https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Fort_Aspenwood), the boss at the end indeed needed team work (portal bombers, bunker heal, running scrap metal, ammo etc.), perhaps a pop-up window with clear instructions with brief pointers would help new players :) aside from that, well done event mechanics!

[Khisanth.2948]

> @"Blocki.4931" said:

> Tip for people playing that first instance/soloing it:

> Look at the boss healthbar and watch for the vent timer. You can basically afk and kill an enemy every 20 seconds if you like, focus the portals and kill a couple more enemies to get ammo. The second you hear or read the word vent in a text bubble you run to the tank, press 3 3 3 3 3 3 and then hold down 1. Rinse, repeat.

 

You can just hold down 3 as well.

[Jimbru.6014]

I ran a public group tonight. All went well until we got to the Ancient Forgeman. That was when we suddenly noticed that we didn't have a full group. I think we had only five people for most of the boss fight, maybe six. There was so much going on with portals and tank repairs and the constant way too fast AOE that we hardly had time to attack the boss. I died so many times that I lost count. I don't know how long it actually took us to finally kill him, but it was definitely longer than the rest of the instance all together; it felt like at least an hour. Even allowing for the fact that we weren't a full group, this fight definitely needs adjusted. Too much stuff happening too fast -- which could be said about this game's entire combat system, really.

[Ayrilana.1396]

They could have been in the tank which is why you didn’t see them.

[sevenDEADLY.5281]

> @"Jimbru.6014" said:

> I ran a public group tonight. All went well until we got to the Ancient Forgeman. That was when we suddenly noticed that we didn't have a full group. I think we had only five people for most of the boss fight, maybe six. There was so much going on with portals and tank repairs and the constant way too fast AOE that we hardly had time to attack the boss. I died so many times that I lost count. I don't know how long it actually took us to finally kill him, but it was definitely longer than the rest of the instance all together; it felt like at least an hour. Even allowing for the fact that we weren't a full group, this fight definitely needs adjusted. Too much stuff happening too fast -- which could be said about this game's entire combat system, really.

 

Whether you had 5 or a full group doesn't matter, the instance can be soloed. The boss can be done in under 10 minutes. Just because your group didn't listen to anything the game told them and failed to do any of the mechanics as they are meant to be done doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the encounter. The problem lies elsewhere.

[Cyninja.2954]

First run for me was right after the patch hit with a full public group.

 

It was rather easy to tell that 2-3 players were paying attention, the rest was just attack anything in sight.

 

Went okay until the boss, where we proceeded to fight it for ages. I started telling people in say chat to "enter the tank and use skill 3". Some caught on eventually, but since the instance was scaled to 9-10 players, the breakbar was always close to getting broken, but never fully. I then started to politely whisper players who were still not getting it (and I do mean politely, I basically wrote: can you please get in the tank and help with the breakbar on next phase?). I also started to call the breakbar phase early (basically once the 15 second timer started).

 

Took 2 more unsuccessful breakbars and the boss being down to already 30% life before we finally managed to get almost everyone into the tank and successfully cc the boss.

 

During the non breakbar phases I was occupied with healing the tank and getting up the blast walls (which was impossible without help if the 2 runes are on opposite sides). Successfully completed the mission twice with public squads, and 5 times total so far. I'm not quite sure what happens if the tank dies tbh, haven't seen that happen myself yet.

 

**TL;DR**:

Many players are not good or actively paying attention to what the top-right event window tells them or even noticing it at all. For most it simply a:"rush to nearest enemy and hit it" assuming they are helping in a meaningful way. The best approach here is to help out as best one can, taking on duties like healing the tank if needed. As with all new content, I do expect the failure rate to increase with time once less dedicated players join in. The strike mission is not hard, but if no one does mechanics or pays attention, it will fail. Not a huge issue for invested players since the mission can be soloed rather easily, and scales very well with more people for smaller squads.

[Rukia.4802]

This fight gets worse every day its out, people just ignore mechanics completely, we managed to get a single harpoon breakbar today and the rest was just spamming range on the boss or dying to hilariously ez mechanics. I never want another public fight like this again unless you can implement proper punishment for ignoring mechanics. Just make it fail and restart the fight would be much better and teach people better than giving a gold medal for pressing 1 on the boss for 30 minutes or even worse ignoring boss completely and just killing trash mobs the entire time.

 

Funny I have my bad pug strikes but at least people seem to learn mechanics in there after a few restarts, here I see no improvement, maybe in another week people can learn a couple simple mechanics. GW2 must be the first blind-friendly MMO because no one reads my chat when I explain, its just pure silence like playing with horrible AI lol.

[ParanoidKami.2867]

I went with some randoms and didn't have any issues. If you see people ignoring mechanics just tell them because they probably don't know.

[Astralporing.1957]

> @"Cyninja.2954" said:

> I'm not quite sure what happens if the tank dies tbh, haven't seen that happen myself yet.

It doesn't. It just kicks everyone out and can;t be entered if on low health, It will heal up a bit after a while, and can still be repaired however (although if you're at this point, you have probably problem with portals already - if too many of mobs are spawned, tank HPs go down _very_ fast, and you won't be able to keep up with repairs).

 

> @"sevenDEADLY.5281" said:

> > @"Jimbru.6014" said:

> > I ran a public group tonight. All went well until we got to the Ancient Forgeman. That was when we suddenly noticed that we didn't have a full group. I think we had only five people for most of the boss fight, maybe six. There was so much going on with portals and tank repairs and the constant way too fast AOE that we hardly had time to attack the boss. I died so many times that I lost count. I don't know how long it actually took us to finally kill him, but it was definitely longer than the rest of the instance all together; it felt like at least an hour. Even allowing for the fact that we weren't a full group, this fight definitely needs adjusted. Too much stuff happening too fast -- which could be said about this game's entire combat system, really.

>

> Whether you had 5 or a full group doesn't matter, the instance can be soloed.

Only when you start instance solo. If you start instance with a full group, and get to the boss with 6 (like i did), then the instance remains scaled for 10. And if some people go afk or leave at this point (which, again, happened to me), then you're out of luck. It's impossible to fail the instance, at least, but it still took the remaining 2 active players and me around half an hour to kill the boss on the first try. Yes, we knew what to do - it didn't help.

 

Edit: from i can see, players going somehow missing during the instance, and you getting to the boss with only half a squad seems to be common in public groups for some reason. Not sure why.

 

It's probably best to simply ignore that it is supposed to be a group content, and just go in solo right away. Not sure if that's the result Anet intended, though.

[Westenev.5289]

My group struggled with the tank grapple cc, so the boss fight took forever. I hear holding the grapple button results in more cc, but the tooltip icon change make me intuitively spam press the button since that is usually how multi stage skills work in this game...

[Jilora.9524]

I've done it 13 times now on 2 accounts and all were fast except 1 took a while but if you tell them when to get in tank and harpoon you have a better shot and most complaining above you can tell also don't know mechanics yet and are the guys I have to tell when to get into tank and hope they listen

[kharmin.7683]

> @"VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.3618" said:

> the boss fight was fine. Two people were smart enough to stand on the plates and the others were hard hitting enough to take down the mobs. Could have gone better, but still was reasonable smooth - and the tank never suffered real damage.

>

Ran this the first time last night (public) and had this same experience.

 

 

[hlaraujo.3210]

I had no problem doing it in the first go with a public group. But I guess that's it, if you don't have a group of people you know to keep trying it and are left to public groups and people don't care about mechanics and do not bother to read, its not a bad game mechanics and encounter desing, its a bad habit of the players. I actually really liked the level of difficulty they toned the entire mission, it was not just a zerk group that goes by killing everything ezpz and it was not impossible if your group knew the basics. Besides, that's part of every game, failing and trying again until you get it done.

[Ayrilana.1396]

I had a group that refused to break the defiance bar so after like five failures, I just took the WP to the start and watched something on Netflix. I’ll put in the same amount of effort as I would have with competent players but anything beyond that is a no.

[Elden Arnaas.4870]

re: I had a group that refused to break the defiance bar so after like five failures, I just took the WP to the start and watched something on Netflix. I’ll put in the same amount of effort as I would have with competent players but anything beyond that is a no. - You should have just left the instance.

[Ayrilana.1396]

> @"Elden Arnaas.4870" said:

> re: I had a group that refused to break the defiance bar so after like five failures, I just took the WP to the start and watched something on Netflix. I’ll put in the same amount of effort as I would have with competent players but anything beyond that is a no. - You should have just left the instance.

 

And have to spend another 25ish min getting to the boss to just get another group that can’t break the bar? No thanks. I’ll pull my weight as I would a competent group but I’m not going to put more effort/time than that. I’m not going to spend 30+ min on the boss killing enemies/portals over and over.

[Elden Arnaas.4870]

So you'd call this new method of story-gating a success, then?

[NeyteriKiyeri.4207]

I have done it a sveral times, First time took ages because we needed to learn how to play it. the last time i played. the boss went down fast. I think most of us knew to use the tank. Ppl need to learn how to play this. it it will be fine.

 

I did only publiv map.

[Shena Fu.5792]

Instructions in-game are grade F. Doesn't tell you that players are supposed to drive the tank, and players alternating. Scant instructions on how to use the tank. They don't tell you how to refill tank ammo. What to do with Dark munitions.

 

Harpoon only takes the defiance down to 10-15%. So on its own seems useless.

 

Also the keybinds are broken for skill #2 and 3. Have to use the mouse to click the skills. But #2 is AOE, so just end up blowing at the tank.

[Hannelore.8153]

One thing to beware of is the scaling works just like all other scaling in the game, its not linear with the number of players but goes up in coarse increments, which for example why taking Guild Halls is more optimal with 5-7 players instead of 10.

 

They just handle the scaling really poorly and its easy for it to become overscaled with the wrong player count because you have enough players to push it up to the next scaling step but not enough players to actually handle the increase in difficulty. They've needed to revise it since many years but still haven't touched the code roughly since the game's release and probably aren't going to.

 

Its become more apparent in these public Strike Missions than anywhere else.

[Ayrilana.1396]

> @"Shena Fu.5792" said:

> Instructions in-game are grade F. Doesn't tell you that players are supposed to drive the tank, and players alternating. Scant instructions on how to use the tank. They don't tell you how to refill tank ammo. What to do with Dark munitions.

>

> Harpoon only takes the defiance down to 10-15%. So on its own seems useless.

>

> Also the keybinds are broken for skill #2 and 3. Have to use the mouse to click the skills. But #2 is AOE, so just end up blowing at the tank.

 

It's explained in the prep events, You're also told what to do in the strike. There's also a thing called taking initiative.