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How to do boneskinner?


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@Vinceman.4572 said:

@"Seraph.5831" said:It's the last day of Boneskinner Week this month and I've come looking for solutions. I read through all the posts to date and appreciate the comments - even the ones that strayed from the main topic - it sounds like people needed to vent and it's apparent the strikes need more work if they are to meet the stated intention.

I've participated in Bjora Strike Missions every night, most of them successful, including the Boneskinner. What I'm seeing now is everything mentioned above, and in a negative way.

Yes, leaders can choose their 10 team members, but now some are becoming more particular, including telling people to leave if they don't like their choice of weapon. Other groups have commanders with no raid experience and cannot help team members with adequate strategies or advice on which character to bring to the mission.

People want to learn. They are willing to switch characters if it will help the team and learn how to better use their skills if they are told how and not scolded or put down. Simple commands like "/gg" are new to them, but they're learning.

The tips above on how to defeat the Boneskinner work. I've reiterated them to commanders many times, but a team of 10 inexperienced players rarely succeeds.

Instead of offering a place where people can learn from each other, Anet has created an environment where the division between the two groups becomes more evident and sometimes negative. To meet the goal of encouraging more players to try raids and work in groups, Anet needs to develop an environment more conducive to people helping each other and a safe place for inexperienced players to learn. I'm in the middle of the experience spectrum and want to see something positive come from all this so we can get back to having fun killing stuff.

But tell me, what is the solution Arenanet can implement here? I would say: It is not possible. We are seeing different kind of people here and you won't bring them together because their play style differ so heavily from each other that mixing them is one of the worst ideas possible. The players that want to progress already do so by themselves: They ask in map chat about more useful builds, have guilds & communities in which they find answers and/or most likely know about web sites from Snowcrows, LN & Metabattle. It's not like you have players out there knowing explicitly nothing about the game. Those just do not want to play like this. They don't want to "struggle" with gearing their char properly. They don't want to learn mechanics of encounters. They want to get into a boss fight, beat it and feel they contributed to it even though their performance was terrible. Let them play like this a.k.a. give them easy modes or for my sake strikes. Let all strikes be hilariously easy but develop harder content for the niche as well. Since Arenanet tries to cover that they have no plan to develop more challenging raids they put things like Boneskinner in that again a majority of players is not able to beat but on the other hand is too boring for the more casual crowd. On top the rewards are skritt at best so they obviously are a failure from the start.Cater to your subsets of customers and you'll be fine. They don't do that so the complaints will stay.

Strikes are intended to prepare players for raids. Making strikes brain dead content where everyone gets their participation prize with low effort is not the way to go.

The primary reason players fail at boneskinner is because they do not pay attention and stand in the red aoes. This is a player skill issue and not an issue with the strike.

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@"Ayrilana.1396" said:Strikes are intended to prepare players for raids. Making strikes brain dead content where everyone gets their participation prize with low effort is not the way to go.

The primary reason players fail at boneskinner is because they do not pay attention and stand in the red aoes. This is a player skill issue and not an issue with the strike.

The way strikes are implemented won't lead to prepare players for raids. Actually, a proper grouping tool/tutorial with step-by-step explanation how to "get to together" would prepare them better than strikes ever could.Strikes are just bosses with 0 explanation and the one day a player faces Icebrood construct most likely won't fail and "win" and the other day he/she will face the Kodans or worse directly Boneskinner and fail. Even if they win at Boneskinner they usually have no clue why and that the squad consisted of 4 healers for example. There's 0 indication what's needed or how things are working. So, with that logic, dungeons, later on fractals are preparing in the same way for raids as strikes are doing. In fact fractals are doing better overall because they have at least 4, if not 5, different difficulty levels with T1-4 + CMs.But it remains true: In all of those contents players don't know anything about dps, buffing a.k.a. having support classes (and healing) when they are starting.

Strikes are just a cheap implementation of saying: "Nah, we won't be able or we don't implement dungeons, fractals & raids any longer, so we ship out a new thing called strike make them either doable for anyone (Icebrood Construct) or not (Boneskinner) but we won't hand out any advice or tutorial for beginner becoming better at the game. At the same time we save dev resources with not implementing challenging content and leave that community behind."

I mean you can do that but don't expect players of both sites to be very satisfied. Nobody can tell me that strikes are a model of success. Especially when Anet's strenght comes to the surface at being horrible putting up a proper reward balance.

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@Linken.6345 said:

@"DRfear.5234" said:just 2 man it like this, easy

That was before they updated the boneskinner. They tried it again after and couldn’t do it.

Was it buffed twice?since he specificly say at start that this is after the buff.

I didn’t realize that he had tried again later and succeeded. I remember that he tried after the update and they couldn’t do it.

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@Vinceman.4572 said:

@"Ayrilana.1396" said:Strikes are intended to prepare players for raids. Making strikes brain dead content where everyone gets their participation prize with low effort is not the way to go.

The primary reason players fail at boneskinner is because they do not pay attention and stand in the red aoes. This is a player skill issue and not an issue with the strike.

The way strikes are implemented won't lead to prepare players for raids. Actually, a proper grouping tool/tutorial with step-by-step explanation how to "get to together" would prepare them better than strikes ever could.

It would help with the formation of groups but won’t help with the actual raid encounters. It also won’t help with the majority of players who join existing groups. Besides, the Snow Crows website already provides a great explanation about this.

Strikes have mechanics that are similar to what you see in raids. Players learn these mechanics and then apply that knowledge towards overcoming the mechanic that’s similar in raids. Unfortunately Anet made the strikes way too forgiving so mechanics can be skipped.

Strikes are just bosses with 0 explanation and the one day a player faces Icebrood construct most likely won't fail and "win" and the other day he/she will face the Kodans or worse directly Boneskinner and fail. Even if they win at Boneskinner they usually have no clue why and that the squad consisted of 4 healers for example. There's 0 indication what's needed or how things are working. So, with that logic, dungeons, later on fractals are preparing in the same way for raids as strikes are doing. In fact fractals are doing better overall because they have at least 4, if not 5, different difficulty levels with T1-4 + CMs.But it remains true: In all of those contents players don't know anything about dps, buffing a.k.a. having support classes (and healing) when they are starting.

Everything in this game doesn’t have an explanation on how to beat it. This is something that players learned how to do. Fractals don’t give any explanation but the difference being that they are less forgiving that strikes.

This is also the perfect time for players to learn more about DPS, support, and so on. There doesn’t need to be separate training provided by Anet for this.

Strikes are just a cheap implementation of saying: "Nah, we won't be able or we don't implement dungeons, fractals & raids any longer, so we ship out a new thing called strike make them either doable for anyone (Icebrood Construct) or not (Boneskinner) but we won't hand out any advice or tutorial for beginner becoming better at the game. At the same time we save dev resources with not implementing challenging content and leave that community behind."

That’s an assumption that there won’t be any more fractals or raids. Whether or not there’s any truth to that is irrelevant as strikes were not intended to be their replacement.

I mean you can do that but don't expect players of both sites to be very satisfied. Nobody can tell me that strikes are a model of success. Especially when Anet's strenght comes to the surface at being horrible putting up a proper reward balance.

Rewards could certainly be improved with the Bjora strikes to include some worthwhile RNG drop but the primary focus should still remain to teach players various new habits that they’d encounter in raids. The only way to do this is to force players to perform those mechanics rather than ignore them.

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@"Ayrilana.1396" said:It would help with the formation of groups but won’t help with the actual raid encounters. It also won’t help with the majority of players who join existing groups. Besides, the Snow Crows website already provides a great explanation about this.

Strikes have mechanics that are similar to what you see in raids. Players learn these mechanics and then apply that knowledge towards overcoming the mechanic that’s similar in raids. Unfortunately Anet made the strikes way too forgiving so mechanics can be skipped.

I just stated the fact that the only additional value strikes brought in was the formation of a 10 person squad or its semi-automatic formation via public. Everything else has been there before: Be it dungeons with very few indicators & tells or fractals that have raid-like mechanics for years. T1 fractals also are easy grouping easy kill content. In no way strikes were needed extra.

Everything in this game doesn’t have an explanation on how to beat it. This is something that players learned how to do. Fractals don’t give any explanation but the difference being that they are less forgiving that strikes.

That's wrong. T1 fractals are very forgiving and but also have different difficulties within their tier. Again, strikes didn't bring in new value regarding the things you mentioned except the 10 player variant. If we don't need to teach players how to learn their classes, buffing/healing others there's no need for strikes in the first place because everything else is here - since years.

This is also the perfect time for players to learn more about DPS, support, and so on. There doesn’t need to be separate training provided by Anet for this.

You don't need those in strikes, you don't need those in fractals. Except for boneskinner but here the antagonist is higher tier fractals. So again, I don't see the necessity for strikes at all.

That’s an assumption that there won’t be any more fractals or raids. Whether or not there’s any truth to that is irrelevant as strikes were not intended to be their replacement.

Well, to this point of time "nothing is off the table". We all heard this a thousand times now but it won't help at all. It's more than one year now that we got a new fractal and in addition the last two (Siren's Reef + Deepstone) were fractals accompanied with very low enthusiasm by the core fractal player base. Even Twilight Oasis led to player efflux than influx.I still hold my guess that they replaced new raids & fractals with strikes because they are much cheaper: Only one little room with 1 encounter (2 in case of Kodans) with no serious scripts in case of tubing (bosses in a row, enemies in between etc.). It's obvious that this was their main intention and not the argument of bringing players together and scaling down the gap between hardcore and casual crowd. This argument is a simple excuse to veil that serious content isn't produced any longer - at least for a serious long-enough time span. Therefore, yes, strikes are a sort of replacement and a dirty one because with fracs & raids they cover two things and not just one.

Rewards could certainly be improved with the Bjora strikes to include some worthwhile RNG drop but the primary focus should still remain to teach players various new habits that they’d encounter in raids. The only way to do this is to force players to perform those mechanics rather than ignore them.

"could certainly be improved" is such an understatement what is again something I expected from your side. I mean you are totally fine and satisfied with the game. Good! But even you should have noticed that this is not the case for everyone here.

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@Vinceman.4572 said:

@"Ayrilana.1396" said:It would help with the formation of groups but won’t help with the actual raid encounters. It also won’t help with the majority of players who join existing groups. Besides, the Snow Crows website already provides a great explanation about this.

Strikes have mechanics that are similar to what you see in raids. Players learn these mechanics and then apply that knowledge towards overcoming the mechanic that’s similar in raids. Unfortunately Anet made the strikes way too forgiving so mechanics can be skipped.

I just stated the fact that the only additional value strikes brought in was the formation of a 10 person squad or its semi-automatic formation via public. Everything else has been there before: Be it dungeons with very few indicators & tells or fractals that have raid-like mechanics for years. T1 fractals also are easy grouping easy kill content. In no way strikes were needed extra.

Whether mechanics exist in other content is irrelevant to the reason why Anet added strike missions. If you believe that strikes were in no way needed, why do you even care so much? Additional means to train for raids were consistently brought up by players who wanted an easy mode for raids. If I were to go back to those threads, which side of the argument would I find you on? In any case, Anet felt there was a needed for content that bridged the gap to raids so they added strikes.

Everything in this game doesn’t have an explanation on how to beat it. This is something that players learned how to do. Fractals don’t give any explanation but the difference being that they are less forgiving that strikes.

That's wrong. T1 fractals are very forgiving and but also have different difficulties within their tier. Again, strikes didn't bring in new value regarding the things you mentioned except the 10 player variant. If we don't need to teach players how to learn their classes, buffing/healing others there's no need for strikes in the first place because everything else is here - since years.

Playing a class efficiently, as well as playing as a group, isn't unique to raids. It's something players should have been doing along. The difficulty in raids is the mechanics which was what strikes were created to help with. I'm going to make a guess that you don't raid?

This is also the perfect time for players to learn more about DPS, support, and so on. There doesn’t need to be separate training provided by Anet for this.

You don't need those in strikes, you don't need those in fractals. Except for boneskinner but here the antagonist is higher tier fractals. So again, I don't see the necessity for strikes at all.

Players don't need those yet but there's no reason that they cannot use strikes to improve. Strikes will also get progressively more difficult so eventually this will be important.

That’s an assumption that there won’t be any more fractals or raids. Whether or not there’s any truth to that is irrelevant as strikes were not intended to be their replacement.

Well, to this point of time "nothing is off the table". We all heard this a thousand times now but it won't help at all. It's more than one year now that we got a new fractal and in addition the last two (Siren's Reef + Deepstone) were fractals accompanied with very low enthusiasm by the core fractal player base. Even Twilight Oasis led to player efflux than influx.I still hold my guess that they replaced new raids & fractals with strikes because they are much cheaper: Only one little room with 1 encounter (2 in case of Kodans) with no serious scripts in case of tubing (bosses in a row, enemies in between etc.). It's obvious that this was their main intention and not the argument of bringing players together and scaling down the gap between hardcore and casual crowd. This argument is a simple excuse to veil that serious content isn't produced any longer - at least for a serious long-enough time span. Therefore, yes, strikes are a sort of replacement and a dirty one because with fracs & raids they cover two things and not just one.

That's an assumption of yours based on little facts. You don't know whether Anet is working on another fractal and raid. They typically don't reveal that information until it's practicality ready. So no, it's not "obvious".

Rewards could certainly be improved with the Bjora strikes to include some worthwhile RNG drop but the primary focus should still remain to teach players various new habits that they’d encounter in raids. The only way to do this is to force players to perform those mechanics rather than ignore them.

"could certainly be improved" is such an understatement what is again something I expected from your side. I mean you are totally fine and satisfied with the game. Good! But even you should have noticed that this is not the case for everyone here.

I don't believe that Anet intended strikes to be another full-fledged game mode. Based on the rewards so far, this seems to be the case. Anet could certainly add some RNG rewards for those players that need a carrot to chase or need to get their next dopamine fix. Their primary intention with strikes still remains to be what they've already stated.

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Thanks for the comments. Had a great time today teaching new people how to do the Voice and Claw strike - took a couple of tries, but got it and they had fun.

My comment above is about Boneskinner, not about all three missions, because that was the title of the discussion. The other 2 missions encourage new people to try something different. And I'm not seeing people turned away for anything but Boneskinner. I'll probably advise new groups which are repeatedly getting their asses kicked by BS to wait until one of the other strike missions comes into rotation.

I appreciated one of the previous comments a few weeks ago that it seems there are three different levels of difficulty. That helps explain it to new folks.

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@"Ayrilana.1396" said:Whether mechanics exist in other content is irrelevant to the reason why Anet added strike missions. If you believe that strikes were in no way needed, why do you even care so much? Additional means to train for raids were consistently brought up by players who wanted an easy mode for raids. If I were to go back to those threads, which side of the argument would I find you on? In any case, Anet felt there was a needed for content that bridged the gap to raids so they added strikes.

I care much because "my content" isn't in development since 1 year now for fractals respectively 7 months if we talk about raids. And both latest releases were disappointing. I don't see the additional value that strikes brought in because there isn't any. Strikes serve in no way better for training raids than fractals or raiding easier bosses itself.

Playing a class efficiently, as well as playing as a group, isn't unique to raids. It's something players should have been doing along. The difficulty in raids is the mechanics which was what strikes were created to help with. I'm going to make a guess that you don't raid?

Well, it's more the question of you have never been into fractals, I guess? I repeat myself: Strikes don't have anything more or special compared to fractals. The only difference is 5 vs. 10 players which isn't a plausible argument for making strikes.

Players don't need those yet but there's no reason that they cannot use strikes to improve. Strikes will also get progressively more difficult so eventually this will be important.

Thanks, you agree, players need to improve if they want to raid and that's what fractals can do. Even much better than strikes because there's a tiered level system where players can visually see that there are difficulty differences. For strikes they can't in the slightest. A new player will stagger into boneskinner and not realizing what's going on. T1 fractals are doing this much better!

That's an assumption of yours based on little facts. You don't know whether Anet is working on another fractal and raid. They typically don't reveal that information until it's practicality ready. So no, it's not "obvious".

You can't prove me wrong neither. Interestingly both parts - fractals & raids - haven't seen any content updates since above mentioned time frames. I wouldn't say anything if at least one of them would have gotten a new level/wing. But both aren't even mentioned in their very dilettantisch and amateurish road map. We all know they are horrible in communicating but they could just have told to the audience that the next thing for instanced content is either a raid or a fractal. Since they refuse to do that but talking about reworking the WvW mount shows enough for me personally that instanced content is only directed at strikes at the moment. The reasons for that were explained by me in a previous post above.

I don't believe that Anet intended strikes to be another full-fledged game mode. Based on the rewards so far, this seems to be the case. Anet could certainly add some RNG rewards for those players that need a carrot to chase or need to get their next dopamine fix. Their primary intention with strikes still remains to be what they've already stated.

Thanks for underlining again that 2 full-fledged game modes are decomposing but we have strikes with bad rewards. All hail to them even if they aren't another full-fledged game mode.You know what, Ayrilana? Sometimes I'd like to throw the party you do.

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I love boneskinner, though I find it a bit sad that the mechanic is so unwieldy that its easier to just bring 2-4 healers and ignore the mechanic.

Theres one important thing: everyone has to STACK - and MOVE - tightly. People start dieing when they move off the stack, or stand in the red circles. To keep the red circles contained in a small area you need to stack tightly. And in that regard I think the boneskinner strike is quite nicely done on difficulty. You have to watch your surrounding and stack properly.. two quite important skills to learn for any instanced pve content. Or if you want to do the mechanic with your raidsquad, you have to watch for the "tell" when to move out behind the torches to re-light them. While this isnt a raidmechanic per se, its a coordinated mechanic.On the other hand, the learning curve isnt too steep. After a few tries everyone that can read squad-chat and is willing to learn can do the stacking part. It takes a few tries more to get outside to the torches on time, but so far Ive only ever had 1 raidsquad bother with the mechanic anyway.

Ive solohealed the boneskinner squad, but that was with raid players. If both healers know what they are doing, you can get away with 2. Otherwise you need more.

http://img.pichoster.eu/a1b95855boneskinner_healstats_tempest.png

This was with 2 healers (herald and tempest) on the day after boneskinner got "challenging" with a pug squad. The herald had close to 10k healing. So in a "normal" squad you need roughly 20-25k healing output.Healscourge on magi tops healtempest btw, I can get ~15k barrier+healing combined.

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  • 2 weeks later...

@Eramonster.2718 said:

@Ayrilana.1396 said:They increased (or fixed) the tick damage from not having torches lit so keeping them lit is now required.

If that's true, it's a very bad change. Players were struggling with lit the torches strategy before, what's the odds of doing it now with the damage amplified :warning:. Heals won't reach them.

Technically one person with sustain, and can properly dodge the radial attack, can keep them lit until 50%. I did it without issue in a solo instance when doing the torch achievement.

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Technically one person with sustain, and can properly dodge the radial attack, can keep them lit until 50%. I did it without issue in a solo instance when doing the torch achievement.Yes you can enter instance and grind 30 torches one by one lighting them without problems since you dont stand in aura and dpt with one unlit torch is low, but it is not the issue. Before 27jan patch damage done by tormenting aura was significantly lower than now. You could just ignore torches and outheal it. But you can't do it now. It is ok that Anet wants squads to follow mechanics and lit torches but there is something wrong with ticking damage. It is way too high to sustain at 75% where all torches are extinguished by boss's wave thus spreading 25 stacks of torment per second doing ~11k dps which is more or less oneshot for glass cannons. So even while standing near torches at this moment and instantly lighting them, there are casualties.

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Yeah this seems to be pretty impossible right now. At 75% when all torches get extinguished, the dmg-ticks are so high that you cant survive for 1 second without healers nearby. That is a problem since the cast for relighting a torch takes like 2 seconds. Also keep in mind that the boneskinner pulls everyone to the center when he puts out the torches. So fastest you could do is blink/shadowstep to a torch and press F instantly, but even then you will go down during the cast and thus not actually light it.

@Ayrilana.1396 said:Technically one person with sustain, and can properly dodge the radial attack, can keep them lit until 50%. I did it without issue in a solo instance when doing the torch achievement.

Show me please how you can keep them lit solo after 75%.

Edit: You might probably be able to light them if the whole group moves to the same torch after 75%, so healers can keep hp up while someone lights it. Havent tested it though, just an idea that just came to my mind.

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Anet: Increases damagePlayers: Stack more Health and Toughness

Basically just fill your squad with scourges in full Trailblazers. Even with me playing completely like shit and in a pug group the encounter is super chill. On the 2nd attempt with the same group I also got the "Hold onto the Light" achievement. Just use spectral grasp instead of blood is power. Once the boneskinner blows out all the torches it a guaranteed achievement because the wisps won't have any torches to put out.
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@Zhaid Zhem.6508 said:Players : ignore mechanics, outheal the dmgAnet : kill everybody before mechanics

Pretty much this. I tried keeping the torches lit and pretty much died when i did before posting this. It also seemed like the bar, when not broken, would expand the aoe area (and you aren't given much of a window to break it). And requiring a particular gear set, with no natural way to gather it before the encounter from that kind of content, is poor, disconnected design.

All in alll the community resorted to hard counters because executing the mechanics was ridiculously difficult.

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@"Xanthia.7209" said:Anet: Increases damagePlayers: Stack more Health and Toughness

Basically just fill your squad with scourges in full Trailblazers. Even with me playing completely like kitten and in a pug group the encounter is super chill. On the 2nd attempt with the same group I also got the "Hold onto the Light" achievement. Just use spectral grasp instead of blood is power. Once the boneskinner blows out all the torches it a guaranteed achievement because the wisps won't have any torches to put out.

Exactly the scenario I'm trying to avoid, resorting to stacking scourge barrier/healers (trailblazer requirement). Also, didn't last long enough to see if the torch pedestals can still be permanently destroyed.

With the current mechanics, players are bound to take damage even if the mechanics are done. Tweaking the damage won't help, either a killzone or survivable with healers. Not sure what can be done about this to make players do torches. (Eg. Maybe make the Aberrations invul and give player(s) who did torches a temporary buff which allows them to kill minnions. Some melee abberations to avoid stacking reflect :wink:)

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