#explorable mode

BOSS ONE

The first boss is easy provided you can dodge or block. His description of "Devastating Smash" doesn't lie - it's as close as GW2 gets to an instagib. One hit will down you, another will kill you, and that really is that. Also remember that his smash isn't just an AoE around him, but is a singular target attack that will travel in a straight line from the direction he is facing.

Dodging is easy, and Guardians like myself who also have a great ability to block several hits in a row (natural aegis > virtue > Retreat is the minimum three blocks that all Guardians should run with in dungeons!) it makes this boss easy. I don't consider his partner - a "thief class" bow user - as a boss, because he's even easier. You can safely melee him with very little issue, only ever having to be aware of the spike traps that'll immobilise you temporarily and the fact he will evade out the way now and then.

BOSS TWO

Another pitifully easy boss, this is a ranged necromancer who can throw down a large variety of AoE. The AoE is easy enough to dodge provided you stand between them, but the fact that these are effectively signs he's put on the ground mean that eventually moving around will become hard - especially if he's trapped you between several varying marks.

He will manually destroy these marks after he's set them all down and they've been on the ground for about thirty seconds to a minute, and you don't have to worry too much about moving in the first place for this to be a problem. Generally stay at range, and you'll find this guy easy.

THUS ENDS THE SPEEDRUN

Unless you like a challenge, in which case, BOSS THREE is going to be right up your alley.

This boss is famous on the Forgotten path as being the hardest boss in that specific path. People who say this are not lying, either. While the previous two bosses have had no specific stages and haven't really had any real tactic into fighting them, the third boss is ridiculously hard, and takes a ridiculous amount of luck to try and get past. For the record, I'm going to give you what I remember of our team.

2 x Guardians (me and my friend Kaysira)

1 x Elementalist (who I believe was called Sheniqua? Apologies if I got your name wrong!)

1 x Necromancer (only remember your name began with W and you were a huge, huge Norn.)

1 x Ranger (I genuinely apologise that I don't remember your name. :< )

With that out the way, let's talk about the boss, and then about how we beat him.

This boss has three stages. The first and third stages are going to be the easy stages, but getting to that third stage... that's going to be the hard part.

Stage one will require you to stand on top of one another and kill grubs as this boss spawns them. If you're good and if you're fast, the boss won't eat any grubs, and this is going to make the second stage a lot easier on you and your party. Have somebody on the look out to call targets (the grubs) so you can kill them as fast as possible.

In our party, during this section of the fight, I actually went Greatsword and spammed Skill 1 until the boss spawned grubs. At this point I would slam down my Symbol of Wrath and then use Skill 3 - followed up by Skill 5 to pull in the Locust Swarms that this boss will also summon.

Stage one will end at roughly 75% health - and you'll know this stage is coming because the boss will become temporarily invincible. And when you see this? Run like your life depends on it, and split up from one another.

If you have any kind of skill that can revive a downed player (Guardians, you BETTER run Signet of Mercy or I am going to judge you very, very hard) then you run it, and you're probably going to use it. Surviving stage two with as many players as possible still in the arena is absolutely integral, because if you run away too far this boss will reset all it's health and if you all die, you have a long minute/two minute run back to get to him.

The trick is not to worry about going out of attack range. Yes, his health won't drop as fast, but you should stay alive much easier. The AoE that this boss drops isn't a singular AoE, but is instead multiple AoEs over a three second period (each lasting about two seconds each) that cover most of the arena. These things hit hard. Worse still, not all the AoEs are actually given circles, so you're going to take heavy damage even though you thought you dodged them all. You can dodge out of the AoE if you're quick enough, too, but it's often worth it to try run out of them and save your energy.

I had 22.5k hp with my sceptre. It makes me a force to be reckoned with and quite a tanky sort of Guardian. The AoE? 9k straight damage if it hit me. That's almost half of my health in only one hit, and the AoEs can easily overlap.

You pay attention to the floor, not the boss. The floor is your main concern.

The boss is also a bit of a concern during stage two, as he has a nasty habit of shadow walking. His shadow walk is slow and you will know it's coming because he will become transulecent - watch him during this time. No AoE will spawn while he is shadow walking, so you can focus briefly on him to see where he is walking. If you're a boss ninja like I was during our run, or provided you have a lot of blocks, you can dodge roll/block his shadow walk respectively. It takes a lot of skill to dodge out at the right time if he's right on top of you, though, and I'd recommend running if you see his green shadow trail come your way.

Also be aware his shadow walk can and will knock you down if it hits you, and that leaves you incredibly susceptible to a follow-up of AoE.

This is by far the worst and hardest stage of this boss. Anything less than 13k health is probably going to see you downed almost instantly if you get hit even once, and it's almost impossible to self-rally once you're down. Worse still, party members can't just stop and get you back on your feet, because this stage is all about the movement.

Hence, Guadians should use Signet of Mercy, and I'm sure Necros get a signet that allows them to resurrect somebody too. Yes, they have long cooldowns, but if you're in a good squad with good mobility (which is necessary for this both) then you should only have to pop your signet once.

Stage three will get wonderfully easier and will occur at about 50% health. The multiple ground AoE will no longer bother you, and the boss will no longer shadow walk, making the fight much easier. (Not as easy as stage one, of course, but dramatically easier than stage two.)

During this stage you need to be wary of three AoEs. The first AoE is a bubble AoE which you are recommended to simply stay in the centre of and pop a heal if necessary. You can, if you're fast enough, dodge out this bubble. The second AoE normally follows the first, and is a wider area AoE that deals some hefty damage if you stay in it for too long. Dodge out of it as soon as possible (and if you were bubbled previously, I recommend you run and keep moving the instant the bubble is gone.)

The third AoE is the widest AoE and deals more damage the longer you stay in it. It's easy to spot as the boss will levitate in the air during this AoE, and easy enough to get out of with some regen if you're low on health, or popping a heal and a speed boost. Blocks will not work for this AoE in particular.

Please take it from me, who had 22.5k HP during this boss and had the ability to block three times and who was dodge-rolling like an utter pro because I was so very focused: this fight is rock hard. It is really, really difficult and it does require your team to be working as together as possible while also making sure to work individually to stay alive. If you can, run with skills like Signet of Mercy so that you can get your downed party members up: you don't want them to die!

Death in stage two is going to be what wipes your party. The run back to this boss fight is long and it's very hit-and-miss as to whether you're going to get back on time before the boss resets. You probably won't. And I say this as somebody who ended up on her own at this boss in stage two, the sole focus of every single attack that he made, and desperately waiting for one of my party members to get back here and join me to take some of the heat off me (and to inevitably keep aggro when I ended up dead.)

The less of you there are in that arena, the more chance you have of dying yourself. Don't worry about the heavy cooldown for your signet, because that long cooldown is going to be so worth it if you keep one party member alive when they would have otherwise been killed. (Seriously, reviving people by hand takes longer and is far more dangerous!)

The aim of this boss in stage two is not to get him to 50% health as soon as possible. The aim is to not die for as long as possible.

It will make sense to anybody who has ever done it.

FINAL BOSS

The final boss is, quite frankly, piss poor in comparison to the boss we've just described. If you were hoping for a boss equally as engaging and as challenging, you really are going to be disappointed.

He's tough, but not that tough. He also has only two stages.

Stage one involves you helping a ritual (trying to free the will of an undead chicken) progress. This is done by balancing your team members and standing in two of the three points on the map. The Wraithlord will always consume one of those points and make the area toxic to stand in, so you cannot be in the same area as the Wraithlord! He will also spawn between five to six smaller wraiths to cause you general hassle.

We worked this stage out eventually by having one person kite as many of the wraiths around the centre as he could, and then having the other four party members stand in the two free respective capture points. Progress will be decently fast, although you will have to pop a heal every now and then and may possibly have to play a bit of "catch the aggro" with your kiter to try and make sure the number of mobs is even (or less than) the number of players in a circle.

Stage two is dramatically easier than stage one, believe it or not, and will see the Wraithlord come out to fight you properly. His attacks are basic; he'll spawn undead hands every now and then that will attack you if you get too close (and potentially knock you down, but I didn't test this.) He will also stack Corruption on you, but I don't know for the life of me what it does.

(And this is after I willingly threw myself into his attacks to see if the corruption debuff would ever reach a point where it actually did something. 27 stacks of corruption says no, it does nothing at all that I knew of. I didn't turn into a wraith, I didn't suddenly want to serve Zhaitan's corpse and I certainly didn't turn into a zombie.

Disappointed.)

THE END

You've done the Forgotten Path in explorable Arah!

The best, and also by far the hardest most rage-inducing boss of them all, is the third one. He's hard, and his loots are utterly rubbish for the amount of shit you have to do to survive him in the first place. (Not a single yellow or green. Only blues and the shards of Zhaitan.) But he's the most engaging boss of them all, and even though his loot is full of crap, it really does make you and your team feel like you've succeeded at something when you beat him. It's a lot of hard work, you're probably going to wipe, and you're all going to need to learn how best to deal with him in stage two, but I promise you that beating him is a reward in and of itself. You will feel good, you will feel like you have managed something super hard that other people haven't (which is true, because a lot of people simply ragequit at this boss after three/four wipes.)

For the record, the team I went with was a lovely team, I had a lot of fun even if I got a bit mad that people weren't instantly waypointing upon death (which is something you should get into the habit of doing. Seriously. I judge people who wait to be ressed from death.) I felt like a real ninja after the third boss was taken down because at one point I was there on my own for a minute and a half, kiting him around, dodging his AoEs and generally babbling down my mic to Kaysira, the other Guardian, about how he needed to hurry the fuck up.