That's literally the point of the fight. It requires forethought ahead of the fight. Before you enter the story, you need to think ahead past the fight with Balt to the fight with the Eater. I changed my Guardian spec from Firebrand to Dragonhunter and changed my utilities and elites to speed and CC-related stuff. Then I just circled Joko's cage. The fight was much easier the second time around. TL;DR this is NOT a melee fight. It's a ranged fight with a strong mix of speed and CC. All classes have these abilities. You will not be able to faceroll this boss, so don't try. How exactly are you supposed to "think ahead to the fight with the Eater" when you've never gotten there before? Psychic?Of course, once people have done it and posted how the fight is and what the best tactics are, you could prepare for it specifically, but if you're playing your story like a lot of people you have no idea what the fight will entail until you're there and see. Can't prepare for something when you don't know what is needed beforehand... Once you see his life drain for the first time you can adapt your strategy. Maybe if the boss is healing back to full you need to use your brain and find out why. It's not rocket scienceThe build makes a huge difference, and when you have NOT seen the battle/foe before, you can't have prepped a build suitable for it, so you can be stuck for a long time. The build I had, couldn't burst him like some suggest, and long enough range to stay well away on Necro, staff it would take an hour to bring him down, IF I never got caught ever by his heal, since one mistake and he erased what took so lng to do. I love the posts acting like I don't know how to play and or thinking I had to have failed to beat him just because I point out that when people said to THINK AHEAD to the battle, I say that you can't when you've never seen the fight. The majority of GW2 players never come near these or other forums, so they won't have ever read about the battle before doing the story the first time. Which means that a lot of people have and will encounter that fight with builds that make it way more difficult than it would be, or so slow that they don't even want to proceed... And if they die, having to go back so far and waste so much time to get to the eater again isn't enjoyable. Earlier, someone says combat doesn't have to be fun, well, that's moronic, the point of playing the game is to enjoy it, battles should be fun. Fun doesn't mean easy, but it means not slow, tedious, or frustrating. It's the basic storyline, not high end content. The fact that groups of less skilled players can't play together to get through it makes the situation worse., not only making your friends you play with mostly useless, but making it boring as all hell for them too.