Claiming Windswept Haven (TOO DIFFICULT)

THIS IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE!

Where do we begin?

We had a group of two Deadeyes, two Firebrands, one Mesmer, one Weaver, one Chornomancer, one Daredevil, and one Tempest, and we were STRUGGLING. Admittedly, the players with the PoF specs probably only had half of our specs completed but nine people doing this should've been more than enough! My other guild managed to claim the HoT guild hall with five people, and we didn't struggle as much as this.

First of all, the veterans guarding the champions during the first portion have way too much toughness. They don't do a lot of damage but they aren't easy to kill considering it takes a good bit of DPS to knock their HP bars down. Now normally this wouldn't be a big deal, but when you only have about four minutes to take down the champion, tough veterans getting in the way is extremely frustrating. Not to mention that they re-spawn after a few seconds and put up their shield on the champion again. Our party was capping the champs okay-ish (we only failed once or twice) but each time we barely managed to kill the defilers with twenty or less seconds to spare. On some occasions we barely killed the champion with less than five seconds to spare. Between the tough veterans, the supporting enemies fearing everyone often, and the AoE and knockbacking/downing, it honestly felt like we were just fighting to tread water.

(I will note that the "Kill the Defilers" event spawning were clustered close together, which was very nice. It was a lot easier to actually reach the enemies as compared to the HoT guild hall claiming where sometimes you'd have to sprint across the whole map through mordrem. But this doesn't excuse the difficulty!)

After we barely scraped by and killed all five of the champs (as well as the three dozen of veterans we had to slaughter to actually kill the champs) there was this insane final round. Not only did we have two legendary enemies to fight, but it also wasn't very clear on how to actually kill them. There was no indication that our party needed to stand by the floating orbs in order to survive the massive AoE attacks that the legendaries would spew. The first fight we wasted a huge chunk of our precious time running around like headless chickens. I kid you not. I was playing Deadeye, and I kept having to run around reviving everyone else because of how fast we were getting downed instead of actually playing the spec how it should be played. After squirming around and writhing in the midst of our AoE delirium, we somehow managed to kill the first legendary. With two minutes to spare to kill the second legendary enemy. I repeat. We have to kill not one, but two LEGENDARY ENEMIES within a time period of about ten minutes and it took us about six minutes to kill the first one! The screen was just filled with a chaotic mess of AoE's, flashes of red lights from attacks, arcs of ley-line magic flowing about everywhere. The NPC was no help. In fact I don't even remember if he said anything about the bosses and I'm pretty sure he either hung back or just died.

Not only is this annoying but it's extremely frustrating. I can't even imagine how any guild would be able to do this unless they have at least 50 people that absolutely know what they're doing. Forget it if you're a guild smaller than 20, it seems like there's no chance. I've heard that a lot of the bigger guilds were able to claim Windswept Haven but i'm sure that'd because they have participation and the numbers to just brute force their way through the events.

I think the biggest thing about this though, is that if you fail the final mission where you have to kill the two legendary enemies within the ridiculously short time-frame, you have to start all over from the beginning. Yes. You have to deal with the vets and the champs again. It took our party of nine players roughly forty minutes to just do the first part, and if you fail the second part, you have to do it all over again. We were left horribly distraught, and heartbroken. It was a huge mess.

I'm not even going to go into horrible detail about the failure that was my first attempt on the claiming but my guildies and I tried to three-man it and we weren't even able to kill one champion. I think we barely managed to knock down the champs to 68% before the time ran out.

There's no question in my mind.

This event needs to be nerf'd, or changed, or something! It's too difficult, it takes too long, it doesn't feel like it's balanced right, and most of all, it's extremely frustrating.

Please Anet. PLEASE. Do something about this! We love the new guild hall we just want to be able to claim it an enjoy it! All guilds do, even the smaller ones! But if nothing gets changed then none of the smaller guilds will ever be able to claim it without some serious help!

This was the exact attempt I was in. I just scrambled around and kept being downed vs those two legends without a clue as to what to do. I am essentially in a 3 person active of a 15 man guild that I personally own and I had to get the ragtag group of random guilds we were made up of for these attempts to help me try to take this. It was amazing we got as far as we got. There has to be some explanation on what to do on these legendary bosses. Before even getting my group together, it took me maybe 3-4 hours just to find my way there (I finally used a teleport to friend), and pleading endlessly and politely (even thinking of paying others) to get people to help me get this new hall. I already have Lost Precipice claimed, and even that was a nightmare two years ago to get enough people to attempt it, but it was no where near as hard!

Honestly, claiming precipice was a lot more difficult than claiming the haven. We did not have any issues with claiming at all.

The only downside was we had a couple that did not have mounts, but it was no issue at all. We were able to escort them to the entrance, throughout the claiming too, and they caught up no problem. We had a group of 5-7 people (most even using the new specs).

We claimed it with 5

How do you beat the legendaries then? What is the strategy?

How did y'all claim it? What did y'all do? We were really struggling, a lot.

UPDATE: Apparently if you do it with six people you only have to fight one legendary. We're going to try again but with less people.

We try with 45-50 ppl it was a nightmare but atlest the guild members had fun and experience the event... With 40+ ppl you had 6 Champion spawn locations to start with - all the be killed under 5 min and the elites were lvl 82 ( also they switch positions on respawn)... needles to say we didn't make it even close to the Legendary kills. We retry with 5 ppl it was walk in the park.... Only 1 grp spawn at the time (5 min timer) and the elites were lvl 80 and lvl 81 on 2nd and 3rd respawn. At the end only 1 Legendary to kill

@Yumiko Ishida.3769 said:How do you beat the legendaries then? What is the strategy?

If you had 2, we focused one at a time; they went down fairly quickly.

Guild Hall claim was indeed a nightmare. We had 25 people, 5 Champ Events, 5 people per event. We had to retry 3x before we figured it out finally. We also all had food/tools on.

We really had to make sure our dps in each party was spread evenly. 3 shield phases for the champs. Each phase, we called out our group number/symbol, champ's HP and what shield phase we were on so we knew if any group needed help. 33% dmg during each phase on average per group...if you weren't pulling 33% that meant you needed help. We would get every champ down to 10% then all kill at the same time. If you don't, more Veteran Canid's will spawn making the last champ alive harder to kill. For pretty much all 5 waves, we barely had 30 seconds left to kill final 10% on all champs.

With 25 people we got 3 legendaries. They were a joke compared to the champ event. They melted for us??? We again got them all down to 10% hp then zerged the next one, and the next, then split in eyeballed even groups of 3 and killed them all at the same time. Although, I don't think we had to do that but we were super afraid to lose 2hrs of progress, lol.

The waves wouldn't have been so hard if there was a little more wiggle room in time if your Guild Hall was scaled up, since you do have to kill them around the same time or there is no way to do it. Organizing that many people was hard enough, especially telling people to stop DPS, and having assigned people go float to help others. Lastly, my other complaint is the champs respawning for each wave in different areas based off of RNG. The times they didn't spawn close by, we really were pushing to get done in time. Bad RNG = we failed a wave or 2. Finished the fifth wave with half the crystal energy left (again, after two goobered attempts where we left the instance to restart). Phew...it was really rough but felt amazing to finally beat it at the end with a rag tag mix of different skill lvl PvXers.

We like a challenge but maybe balance it just a touch? It amazes me that 25 more people than we had...50 people total = only one more champ than 25 people total got! The scaling seems wack.

i scraped up a guide on reddit a bit ago and if you still haven't claimed your hall, it maybe of help. or you'll have a better preparation for it ^^the majority of us are pvp or wvw players so we adapt to things a bit quicker. i can imagine how frustrating it can be for others. we stopped at 3rd try and tried again the next day. lol.it scaled up pretty bad for us on our first attempt too. hopefully they fix the scaling since it's very punishing if your timer runs out. love how they do everything surrounding group events, group contents but add bad scaling to gh claiming. shrughttps://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/723wwo/lil_guide_for_claiming_windswept_haven_hall/

With four people - one champion per wave, one legendary. Doable. But we were struggling in attempts with two and three people, it was hard to finish the waves in a time limit.

We had about 35 players with 6 champs and 2 canids (protectors) spawning each time. Sometimes the canids ran off to the other group and had to be chased losing precious time! We couldn't do it with that many, and it was difficult to organize with that many players. One problem that occurs is when you kill a champ extra canids will spawn at all the other locations, so instead of two protectors you now have three. Players have to hold off killing their champs once below 33% until everyone catches up to prevent more canids from spawning in the remaining groups. Finally, we did what other suggested and found six good players and we didn't have the scaling issues. It was fairly easy in fact. In other words, your best bet is to not make it a guild event, and have as few guild members participate as possible. :/

It really needs to be scaled down. A simple solution is to give more time with larger groups. We weren't trying to complete a major victory event like defeat Balthazar; we just wanted to claim a guild hall. The event needs to accommodate the fact that every guild has squishy players and it shouldn't be expected for everyone to have the best builds to participate.

Gaiscioch tried it with nearly 100 people and failed 3 times. It scales up rather progressively. We couldn't even scratch off 60% of those champs before the timer ended. We then went in with 10 and completed the first 5 stages with ease and then brought everyone else in for the final boss fight. For the first 5 waves of champ killing you should really send in small numbers. Once you complete that phase then bring everyone else in. It's way easier.

Now this is really stupid. Why is the best solution to claim a guild hall TO DO IT WITH THE FEWEST PLAYERS MANAGEABLE?

Any group activity should overall be EASIER with more players not progressively more difficult to the point of burnout failure.

The scaling must be insanely overtuned. We went in with 4 people - all of us being pretty average players, and not even really expecting to take the hall; more to scout it out and get a feel for what claiming it would be like - and we claimed it on the first try.

As a minor aside, boon strip / boon corruption is your friend in there.

Claimed it with 6 people on release.This is our comp:2 Druids (healing)1 Soul Beast*1 Mirage2 Firebrandout of the 6, only 4 had considerable raid exp with wings 1-4

All of us were on discord.All of us had raptor mounts (t1)

All we did was prioritize the targets, and burned them down (pun not intended)We finished each group with about ~30 seconds left each

Maybe we got lucky?

We did it with 4 ppl. You just need to focus your attacks on the bosses and don't down

Guild hall claiming has always known to scale up and will get much tougher as it scales up. I guess this wasn't wide spread because there isn't a lot of guilds that claim with massive numbers. However, since it gets tougher as it scales up, it is also means that it is much easier with lesser people.

At a higher number, guilds have to coordinate and make sure all their squads have comparable DPS and burn the things at the same time. At lesser number, the things require way less coordination. It took my guild awhile while claiming the guild hall with 60+ people, we had to arrange the squads to make sure everyone has enough dps.

Previously, we did Glided Hollow with 90+ people, server crushed.

It seems from all these comments that the smaller groups have a much much easier time claiming Windswept Haven. Our large guild was very organized with group composition and voice chat, but still had great trouble killing everything within seconds of each other. I know this should be a bit of a challenge but claiming a guild hall should not be so difficult that it takes several hours for a large guild.

My guild also had issues claiming. We had a lot of people and the champs were tough, but we managed to kill three waves of champs. HOWEVER, we failed because quite a few times the champs failed to spawn the vet canids and so we automatically failed those waves. A big issue definitely was the canids wandering off to aggro on other close by champs and their assigned groups which wasted a lot of time. Also, often a spawn point or two would move all the way across the map, wasting a lot of time to find and move the groups to intercept the champs. There were some other issues, but those were the main ones.

We claimed windswept haven with 1 Power Reaper, 1 Staff full zerker tempest and 1 scepter/warhorn full zerker FA Tempest.Our strategy for the first phase (killing the random blobs of enemies) was to rush there with mounts, have our reaper pull aggro while we tempests do many damagus and throw our healing towards the reaper.As for the final boss, I honestly don't remember, he didn't seem to be any trouble at all. Just dodge the obvious attacks and do as much damage as possible.Most importantly, talk to each other, it's no problem if someone get's downed, just make sure you have someone who can pick him up.I don't know how the events scale with more players since we have always been a 3-man guild but I assume you'll just have to do more and pay more attention to splitting your groups. But from experience I can tell you that Windswept haven is really easy with 3 people :)

My guild did this first try (6-7 players, can’t remember how many anymore. 2 rangers (I was a condi soulbeast) a holomancer, a scourage, some guardian elite spec, a chrono, and can’t remember the last if we had one more)

Best advice is, bring lots of condi’s and condi cleanse. AoE’s are a massive help to kill adds without focusing on them (kill only vets, champs, and legendaries). Soulbeasts specifically bring bear stance, and dolyak stance. Bear for the ridiculous amount of condis and dolyak for fight with legendaries. They have like a 3-4 second knockdown/back and that is a long time to roleplay a carpet.

Finally, get a voice chat program like Discord (google it if you don’t know. It is free, reliable, and easy to use) to coordinate together and call out Canid spawns.

6 players was perfect for my guild hall. I was helped by 5 random players that wanted to see the new hall

My guild cliamed it with only 3 people and honestly found it very easy :sunglasses:

@Kodarashi.9543 said:My guild cliamed it with only 3 people and honestly found it very easy :sunglasses:

You may want to check the date on the last post. ;)