Is this how boss battles are supposed to work?

Last night, some guildmates and I when to hunt the fire chicken. As an archer my job was to do as much damage as possible whIle not getting eaten by the chicken. Eventually, we formalized the strategy, we all stand in a tight cluster with the tanks on the edge facing the Phoenix and done.

I spent the entire session (around 8 cycles worth) stacking tiles like I was playing a puzzle game. I couldn't see the chicken, I couldn't see much of my party. I ended up dead twice but I never saw anything hit me, my character never reacted to an attack, I just saw the screen go red, I popped as many countermeasures as I could and then a teammate was peeling me off the ground.

I couldn't tell if I was doing damage, the only bit I could see is that if I landed a fully stack blinding shot, I think the enemy's health bar fell a bit faster. I know I landed the killing blow at least once, so I couldn't have been missing everything, though my window was too clogged with Teammate heals you for 4, over and over.
Is this what MMO boss battles are, tile stacking minigames?

 

Don't wait to be half dead to buff, buff before you begin and keep the buffs up. If you practice keeping your buffs up, it will just become natural and you will just know when to recast them. The phoenix has a fire dot aura, but as an archer you can stay out of range of it, as well douse will clear it and keep the damage low. If you let a tank hit it for 30 seconds before you begin to attack, they will have built up enough agro it should not turn on you. If the tank uses swords, keeping 3 rends going on the mob will help a lot in holding the agro. As you practice stacking and keeping them in the same spots, you can tell when it pops it ready for stacking peripherally. Most skills are not really worth stacking anyways, but rapid fire is one that is good to stack.

 

My experiences with bosses has involved requiring me to run after people because they are taking damage and they think the best course of action is to run away from the healer. Depending on what you play your challenges vary. Also a more refined group is going to have a simpler battle. My decks do almost zero stacking and I fare just fine.

 

In my experience, boss enemies will simply crit me for 200+ every few seconds until I die. No healer I've seen can handle that dps. I get no feedback typically, if the boss hits me for one less than half my health, I can't tell without glancing up to my health bar. As an archer, for an boss that allows positioning, I'm supposed to position myself opposite the other high damage archers to maximize crits, unfortunately I'm sure that drives the healers crazy.

 

True but if you as an archer are being hit you aren't working with a good tank.

I use my aoe heals to heal those who are not the tank, since they need less healing. But if someone is running out of range I have to weigh the tanks life vs yours and you're gonna die.

 

The bad part is that I find archers are the best tanks.

 

I don't have problems with the ones that hold still. If you can't hold still you shouldn't be tanking.

 

I crunch the chat logs after boss hunting sessions and the archers always seem to take the most damage, even when a dedicated melee tank was present. Archers simply do too much damage, often in burst, which draws aggro and since bosses have effectively limitless range archers tend to get hit. I just wish bosses had less than a 75% crit chance against me.

 

Unless we use an archer in heavy armor with lots of defense as a tank, I die as an archer dps. If we use a melee tank I have, I can only charge attack slowly. Otherwise I steal aggro due to burst damage.

 

Every game I have played, when I grouped for boss fights, as an archer, the tank, who had a really good taunt type skill was always able to keep the mob on him, no matter how hard I or anyone else hit, he kept the agro, made it so much easier for a healer ..... then of course we had a good mage, that had a skill that kept the argo's stunned until they were hit .... LOTR's had it right ..... I grouped a lot in that game because it was FUN, we all had a vital role to play..... not so much here

 

you can also zoom out and fight in a 3rd party like view and you can then see all that is going on around you, but some players want to look thru their own eyes (1st person) and other like myself look down from behind and above so I can see all going on in front AND all around me ?

Also there is seeing names and not and a lot of other information can be left on or off the screen?

while fighting the single target like pehonix 1st person is ok but in a cluster - Undead in Rise (many targets) first person is insane to me.

 

The issue with this is that the archers are doing a bad job of dpsing.
A key part of their job is to NOT take agroe. If you steal agroe because you are far superior to your tank you deserve to die because part of being a skilled player is to be able to adapt to your tank and healer. If you can't do that and you constantly pull agroe then you are just a bad dps.

Until there is a proper system for tanking (which really there is not) you have to be able to throttle yourself in a group.

 

Hard to do that when aggro control skills are flaky. I have a log where I pop escape the moment before getting killed, output "No target".

 

I have to throttle myself to a couple charged attacks every 30 seconds with non archer or DPS tanks. The problem is not being "far superior to your tank" or being bad DPS, the problem is that tanks do not have the tools to hold aggro and DPS do not have the tools to control aggro.

A DPS can allow the tank to build aggro for 30 seconds before attacking and throttle attacks and still pull aggro by a unlucky chain of crits. The tank has no way of getting that aggro back, the DPS has no way of telling that he/she is about to take the aggro, and the DPS has no way of dropping aggro. Playing super passive as a DPS isnt fun.

 

I'd love to see a video of this.

 

Nope, best tanks use shields, and archers cannot use shields. I also think sword is what you want for a tank as once you get 3 stacks of rend going, it builds a lot of agro.

If you are having trouble pulling the agro, try waiting before you start to dps to let the tank build up more agro. It seems if another person has been hitting the mob for a time, I cannot pull it off. It is like agro is a numbers game that keeps building up, let someone build up the agro number so yours cannot catch up.

 

Escape is bugged and does not reduce threat for me. So that may be part of your issue.

Well if a tank doesn't have the tools for mass agroe, they aren't going to be able to handle a high power archer on full throttle.
Not saying it's fun, but until the group mechanics are fixed (and they need bug reported actively to fix this) that's the safest way to do it.

 

Someone would need dev tools, it's all a technicolor blur from 3rd person view.

 

Isn't that the point?