Commanding

• This is going to be a guide on how to command raids in Guild Wars 2 and everything I think you might want to know. I’ve been raiding for nearly 4 years in this game, commanding for around 3, and training new raiders for around 2, so I’m in a pretty good position to give some advice based on my experience.
• Quick disclaimer: A lot of these are going to be opinion-based. I’m sure there are some commanders just like me who are reading this, already have an idea of how things work, and might do things differently from me. And that’s okay. I’m not here to teach you all the most optimal ways of raiding as I’m sure you all can imagine. I’m just here to show you all what I know works based on experience.

• Leading
  • General tips on how to lead people
  • Tips for commanding over Discord
  • Teaching people
  • Commanding in Guild Wars 2
• Squad Setup
  • Squad UI
  • Subgroup composition
• Add-ons
• Bosses
  • Wing 1
    • Vale Guardian
    • Spirit Run
    • Gorseval
    • Sabetha
  • Wing 2
    • Slothasor
    • Trio
    • Matthias
  • Wing 3
    • Escort
    • Keep Construct
    • Twisted Castle
    • Xera
  • Wing 4
    • Cairn
    • Mursaat Overseer
    • Samarog
    • Deimos
  • Wing 5
    • Soulless Horror
    • River of Souls
    • Statues:
    • Dhuum:
  • Wing 6
    • Conjured Amalgamate
    • Largos Twins
    • Qadim
  • Wing 7
    • Gate
    • Cardinal Adina
    • Cardinal Sabir
    • Qadim the Peerless
• Conclusion

Leading

General tips on how to lead people

• There is no expectation for you to know everything. I feel like a part of the reason that people are hesitant to try out commanding people or leading in general is that they place an expectation on themselves to be a perfect leader, to have all the answers, and to know exactly what to do. This is rarely the case in any kind of leader position, and I can say with certainty that it isn’t the case for Guild Wars 2 raid commanders. You’re there to unify people, get everyone on the same page, and guide people, but if you don’t know whether Dragonhunter takes Scepter or Sword on Adina or the exact attack pattern of Largos or any of that stuff, don’t stress.
• It’s really important that you give off the impression that people are in an environment where it’s okay to make mistakes and that nobody is going to blame them or point fingers at them. One great way of doing that is by calling yourself out when you make mistakes. Own up to them. Remind people that they’re in a training run and they’re in the right place to screw up and make mistakes. Another way to make people feel alright to make mistakes is by adjusting your phrasing whenever you need to call people out. For example, if your tank moved the boss to a wrong place, instead of saying “Tank, you moved the boss wrongly there”, you can say “Tank, the boss was moved wrongly there”. Using the passive voice kind of helps people feel like they aren’t getting told off or blamed. Finally, feel free to add in some humour here and there to break the ice a bit. As long as you don’t overdo it, self-deprecating humour, as in making fun of yourself, is a great way to make people feel more at ease.
• This is something that comes with experience, but when you’re calling shots in a real-time environment like raids, it means very little for you to call things after they’ve happened. I see this often among commanders where something happens in a raid and then they will announce it after it’s happened. For example calling out a Deimos black like 2 seconds after the orange circle spawns. It doesn’t help very much. The most helpful calls are when you know roughly when it’s going to happen and call it out. Of course, that means knowing attack patterns and timers by heart and honestly don’t stress if you can’t do that at the start. It’s just something to try to get used to.
• Be calm and patient. You will need the patience of a saint sometimes. And sometimes you will get players that are hard to deal with, like not listening to your advice or actively and consciously not wanting to do what you’re telling them to do. Thankfully, in training guilds like RTI and Crossroads, that probably almost never happens, but if you’re pugging, it’s a possibility. In the end, you sometimes have to put your foot down on things, and that’s something that’s pretty hard to do.
• Take notes. Open up a text editor, write down some general points in bullet form, and dump it on your phone, second monitor, or just a window on top of your game while you’re explaining things. Your run will go so much better and you’ll feel so much less nervous about it if you’re prepared and have some notes. I’ve done this thing for years and I still glance at my notes while explaining things just so I can structure stuff better.
• Also, use positive reinforcement. Tell people when they’re doing a good job. Try and notice it, call it out, tell people “yeah, that’s how it’s done”. If you see the Druid go up to a bunch of Samarog spears and cast Entangle? Call it out, tell them good job. If someone asks you a question that makes sense? Tell them that was a good question. This is the real trick and one of the big takeaways of this whole commander training thing I’m doing. People will respond really well to being told what they’re doing right and praised for it.

Tips for commanding over Discord

• Speak clearly. Learn to project your voice and talk slowly, like I’m doing right now. This was especially hard for me at the start because I had a habit of talking very quickly and my words ended up tripping over themselves a lot, but I made a conscious effort to slow down and I got better. Especially if you’re commanding in a language that isn’t your native language, practise reading out loud. Just go to Wikipedia, hit the “random article” button and read away.
• Leading from the previous point, make sure that your voice is clear over Discord. There isn’t much you can do about a bad microphone, but make sure that your volume at least is loud enough for people to hear you. To do this:
  • I’ll assume everyone reading this is on Windows 10. I won’t be able to help you on earlier versions of Windows or on another operating system, but on an English Windows 10 at least, if you want to increase your volume:
    • Go to your taskbar at the bottom and right-click on the volume icon.
    • Click Open Sound settings.
    • Then, at the top right, choose Sound Control panel.
    • Go to the Recording tab, right-click on your microphone, and hit Properties.
    • Navigate to the Levels tab and over there you’ll see a slider with your microphone’s level, and you might even see a slider called Boost as well.
    • You can increase these sliders for your voice to be louder.
    • Go into voice chat with another person on Discord who has your volume set to 100 and ask them to help you balance out your volume to a level that’s appropriate.
  • Also, in Discord, choose the gear icon next to your name at the bottom, navigate to Voice & Video, and check a couple of things:
    • First off I’d recommend that you’re on Voice Activity and not Push to Talk. There’s nothing more aggravating than pressing a button every time you need to talk if you’re the one calling the shots.
    • Under Automatically determine input sensitivity., make sure that’s turned off and speak into your microphone. You want to make sure the bar fills up to the green part for the most part while you’re talking but when you’re typing it isn’t loud enough to go into the green part. Try and get this right. If the input sensitivity is too far to the left, every little bump, click, or button press will be heard by people, and if it’s too far to the right, then you’ll cut off a lot while talking and you don’t want that. Again, go into voice chat with someone and have them help you with this.
    • Scroll down and under the Advanced tab, you can check all of the settings under Voice Processing and Quality of Service.
• When you say something important, like a trait name for example, or specific timers for a boss, or Sabetha cannon order, or whatever, don’t just say it vocally. Type it out. Voice is genuinely quite hard to understand over Discord sometimes, especially when there’s background noise, shoddy Internet connections, or whatever, and sometimes people just don’t hear what you said and need it to be written out.
• If someone has a lot of noise coming from their microphone or when you speak, you hear your voice echoing through their microphone, please do yourself a favour and ask them to mute. There is nothing more difficult than talking while hearing one guy typing away on his mechanical keyboard, another guy munching on a cookie, and another guy’s microphone repeating everything you say half a second after you said it. In fact, in general, if you need to make this kind of request, make it. If you want someone to stop interrupting you, say so. If you want someone to speak a bit more slowly so you can understand them, ask. As long as you’re polite and respectful, the vast majority of people will listen.

Teaching people

• So a huge part of leading raids is the training aspect. In training guilds, we raid a lot with people that have never killed a certain boss before. Some might’ve not seen any videos or even read any guides, so being able to explain things clearly is important.
• The biggest tip I have to mention here is not to overload people with information. I am doing this to you guys right now because I have no other option, but in a raid, you don’t have to explain everything there is about a fight to jump in, especially if the fight is a complicated one. You can try and delegate certain things to being explained during the fight instead of in your initial explanation of the fight. Like, Kernan has a three-part cone attack on Sabetha but people don’t need to know that in the pre-fight explanation. Just explain that Sabetha sometimes goes away and we need to fight a henchman while kicking heavy bombs off, and then in the fight, when you get to each henchman, briefly tell the group what to watch out for. Or for Deimos, just explain how the pre-event and the demon realm works for the start, and then after the group has seen and interacted with those mechanics, explain the boss.
• Talk about big picture things first before details. For example, on Dhuum, say that to win, we need to kill the boss while keeping all 7 reapers alive. That’s a big picture thing. You’re talking about the win condition of the fight. And don’t talk about super minor details until people have seen the mechanic you’re talking about first. For example, on Keep Construct, don’t tell people that during the phase where you pick up white and red orbs, you should stay in the middle to get healed and don’t stray too far from the group. That kind of detail doesn’t mean much to people until they’ve actually seen the mechanic, so give people specific tips like that after they’ve experienced what’s going on.
• Use any kind of visual guides to help people understand what you’re saying. Everyone’s a visual learner at heart. If you can use squad markers or other players or the environment or moving your own character as any kind of visual guide for people to help while you’re explaining, then use them.

Commanding in Guild Wars 2

• So, if you want to command raids in this game, one thing you’ll almost definitely need is a commander tag. This is 300 gold and you get it from any commander NPC in major cities. It’s expensive and obviously not strictly necessary, but it gives you some really invaluable tools for raids. Ready checks, squad markers, and even just having a dorito icon above your head for people to follow are all really helpful.
• Also, play a class that you know really well, have played it for a long time, and isn’t mentally stimulating. I find that Chrono or Alacrigade or most healers are pretty relaxed once you get used to them, while DPS tends to have stricter rotations to follow and more buttons to press, but go with whatever you think you’re comfortable with. Let me just say it from now though. Your rotation is going down the drain if you’re doing any kind of verbose shotcalling, especially if you’re new to it. It’s not going to happen. I’m sorry to say.
• Couple of important options you’ll want turned on as a commander in-game:
  • Show All Player Names
  • Show Skill Recharge
  • Show Target Health Percent
  • Thick Party Health Bars
  • Thick Squad Health Bars
  • Always Show Party Health Bars
  • Always Show Squad Health Bars
  • Lock Ground Target at Maximum Skill Range
• In Control Options, make sure that the following options are bound to comfortable keys and that you know where they are:
  • Call Target
  • Everything in Squad

Squad Setup

Squad UI

• The squad UI has been around in this form basically ever since Heart of Thorns released, and knowing how to use it properly is a very good idea for any commander. It’s not terribly complex so I won’t go over it too much but here are the basics.
• You start a squad by pressing the Create Squad button after clicking on the arrow at the top left. Over there, first thing you’ll want to do if you’re commanding raids is to hit Raid Mode. You might also want Private Squad if you don’t want people outside your squad seeing your commander tag.
• You can initiate ready checks over here, which is what you should get into the habit of doing when you’re commander. It’s easy to forget and then wonder “why isn’t the commander putting up a ready che- oh”, so that’s definitely something to get used to.
• Over here, you can edit your squad message. This is where things like links to your Discord voice chat go, since people can open it and actually copy-and-paste links in there. I would always recommend, after clicking on squad message, to press Enter once and create a new line. This makes it easier for people to read the message and copy any kind of links in there.
  • I’d also recommend using this place to put any kind of information that might need to be checked multiple times throughout the run or memorised. Things like Dhuum soul split timers, where people go at Qadim or Qadim 2, Sabetha cannon order, and so on.
• You can click on the Broadcast to Squad box if you ever need to write a message down that shows up right in front of people’s screens, like food reminder or whatever.
• Then, in the squad itself, you have a bunch of boxes that indicate people’s health, class, name, and if they’re downed or defeated or whatever. This is something I personally keep an eye on all the time. I can easily call a res when I see someone down, and when I see someone low I’ll know that they need a heal, and so on.
• Now a bit about squad markers:
  • Alt + 1-8 will place a ground marker. You can mouse over an existing marker and press the same number again to remove it.
  • Alt + 9 will remove all ground markers.
  • Alt + Shift + 1-8 will place a target marker. This will attach on your current target and will follow them around.
  • Alt + Shift + 9 will remove all target markers.
• Back to the squad UI at the top left, you can right-click on any one to give them the tag or assign them as lieutenant, which means they can move people around from one subgroup to another as well, place markers, and broadcast to squad.
• You can also Alt + Left Click on the minimap to place waypoints. There are different kinds of waypoints you can place, alongside your personal waypoint which is the white one.
• Perhaps the most important thing I’ll mention here is that you can drop people’s boxes to move them from one subgroup to another, and this part is actually what confuses the most people… who goes in what subgroup and why. That’s coming up in the next section.

Subgroup composition

• First I’ll talk a bit about how the subgroups work in Guild Wars 2, or rather, how boon, buff, and heal priority work. Let’s picture that we’re in a raid squad right now and I’m on support Chrono.
  • If I go and cast a well on some person, it’ll give them a boon because they’re standing in it. That’s great.
  • But if I mouse over my well ability in my skill bar, I’ll notice that it has Number of Targets: 5 written in it. What does this mean?
  • Well, it means that when my well pops and gives everyone standing in it a boon, it actually only does so for 5 people tops. So if 6 people are standing in there, then what happens? One person isn’t going to get that boon. But who?
  • This works on a priority system. So firstly, at the top of the priority list is me. I’m the one that dropped that well, so I’m getting the boon whether there’s just me in there or 20 people in there.
  • Next on the priority list is everyone in my subgroup. So if we have two subgroups, then anyone in the subgroup I’m in will get the boon over people not in my subgroup.
  • Next up is people in my squad. So if we decide to go touring open world and I cast the well on the ground, someone in my squad will have priority for this well over someone not in my squad.
  • Next on the priority is players outside of our squad.
  • Finally, at the bottom of this list is player minions, pets, clones, allied NPCs, and so on.
  • Now, what if we’re all in the same subgroup and I place a well on all of us? We all have the same priority, and my well will only give boons to 5 people, so how does that work? Well that’s very simple. It prioritises by proximity. So if all 10 of us stand in this well, then the 5 people that will get it are myself (I will always get the boon since I cast the well), and the 4 closest people to me.
  • This is not just how boons work, but buffs in general and heals. The only exception with heals is that, unlike boons, heals will overflow to the other subgroups. If I’m a Druid and I cast a Celestial Avatar skill 4 on people around me, it will first heal up my subgroup, but if my subgroup is full on health, it will overflow and start healing the other subgroup instead. This is a huge deal since it’s what allows squads to run a single healer.
• Armed with all this knowledge, we can now figure out how we’re going to set up our squad composition. First off, a couple of golden rules.
  • You will almost always have 2 subgroups, subgroup 1 and subgroup 2. This is because most abilities in the game have a target cap that is divisible by 5. So either 5 targets or 10 targets. This means having two subgroups of 5 people generally makes the most sense. There are certainly exceptions to this rule, and if you look on Snow Crows you’ll find all sorts of funky compositions that aren’t necessarily two subgroups of 5, but those are generally advanced and not something that the vast majority of the playerbase needs to understand.
  • You will also want to make sure that, if you have two healers, both healers are in different subgroups. This just makes sense, right? You don’t want all the heals to be prioritised on one subgroup when you can split them up.
• Now I’ll talk a bit about boon distribution:
  • In each subgroup, you’ll want a permanent source of:
    • Alacrity.
    • Quickness.
    • 25 might.
    • Fury.
  • Those are the four super important boons that everyone will need to have. Understanding the different classes and how they work will help you determine whether or not each subgroup has those boons:
    • A Chrono gives permanent quickness and alacrity to the subgroup it’s in and some quickness and alacrity to the other subgroup. If the Chrono is taking pack runes, which it should, then it’ll also give very decent uptime of fury and swiftness to its subgroup
    • A Druid gives permanent 25 might to everyone, permanent fury, regeneration, and swiftness to its subgroup, and high uptimes of regeneration, fury, protection, and vigor to all ten people if it wants to.
    • A Quickbrand gives permanent quickness to its subgroup and only its subgroup. It also gives some might and permanent fury to its subgroup.
    • An alacrity Renegade gives permanent alacrity to everyone, decent might to just its subgroup, and permanent protection to just its subgroup.
    • A boon Thief, on only certain bosses (i.e. Matthias, Keep Construct, Mursaat Overseer, Broken King, Kenut, and Adina), will give permanent of every boon in the game except alacrity to all ten people, regardless of which subgroup it’s in.
  • With all that in mind, you’ll find that we have three main comps that we’ll find in pugs, training groups, and honestly most groups outside of really high end speedclear groups:
    • Double Chrono. This will have a Chrono in each subgroup giving alacrity and quickness to their subgroup and a sharing some boon uptime across to the other subgroup. One of the Chronos will tank and the other, called the “off-Chrono”, will not. You’ll also have a Druid in one subgroup to give 25 might and all sorts of other boons to everyone, and in many groups you’ll also have a second healer as well. This can be any healer - Tempest, Scourge, Firebrand, Renegade, Scrapper, a second Druid, maybe even heal shout Warrior. So your subgroups will simply be one Chrono in each subgroup, one subgroup having a Druid, and the other having the second healer if there is one.
    • Fire brigade. There are different variants of this, but the best variant that has the most room for mistakes is the one with a Chronotank and Druid in one subgroup, and a Firebrand and Renegade in the other. Since the alacrity Renegade gives permanent alacrity to everyone in the squad already, the Chrono has no pressure to give alacrity to people, so they can drop the alacrity well (Well of Recall) and instead take Mimic, which they can use to double up on either their quickness well or the Signet of Inspiration. The Druid is still there to heal and give 25 might to everyone, and optionally, either the Quickbrand or Renegade can run a healer variant (although I’d recommend the Renegade going healer).
    • Boon Thief. This is a bit niche and only really helpful on a couple of bosses, since it depends solely on whether or not the boon Thief gets Detonate Plasma as a steal skill from the boss, and not all bosses give that. The only bosses I’d recommend taking boon Thief on for most groups is Matthias, Mursaat Overseer, and Adina, where the boon Thief can tank. Remember that boon Thief gives every boon to everyone except alacrity all on its own, so all you need alongside a boon Thief is an alacrity Renegade, one that usually goes healer. For most groups I would recommend also taking an extra healer just to smooth things out though. It generally doesn’t matter so much how you set up the subgroups for the boon Thief, but usually you put the supports in their own separate subgroups so they don’t get priority on 5-man buffs like Empower Allies and Assassin’s Presence. Also, since we’re not running a Druid in this comp, many groups will also take a Soulbeast that trades one or two of its utilities for Frost and/or Sun Spirit.
  • There are other variants, like running fire brigade with no Chrono, taking two condi Renegades with alacrity trait instead of one alacrity Renegade, taking no dedicated quickness source and just having all Guardians take the “Feel My Wrath!” quickness shout, and so on, but this will be a very long guide if I have to talk about all the different kinds of compositions we can use, and the three I mentioned really are the most important ones to know.
• Now for some specific tips:
  • You’ll generally have a Druid in one subgroup and often times a different kind of healer or no healer at all in the other subgroup. The subgroup with the Druid will get Spotter, which is a 5-man permanent buff that increases their critical chance a bit. Not all classes need Spotter, and only power classes really care about it, so condi classes do not need it. Also, classes get buffed and nerfed, so who needs and doesn’t need Spotter changes over time, but on Snow Crows if you go to the class builds they will usually mention if Spotter is needed or not.
    • As of the time of me giving you guys this guide, the power DPS builds that would like Spotter are:
      • Weaver & Tempest.
      • Chrono.
      • Rifle Deadeye.
      • Berserker.
    • Soulbeast is a bit of a weird one in that it needs Spotter but, if it’s on power, it will also give out Spotter as well (as of a recent patch around the time I’m writing this).
    • Daredevil and Reaper also would like Spotter, but it’s not as much of a big deal if they don’t have it compared to most of the classes I just mentioned.
    • Finally, the builds that don’t really care about spotter are:
      • Any condi build.
      • Dragonhunter.
      • Renegade & Herald.
      • Holosmith.
    • In the current meta, what you usually find is that, after we make sure each subgroup has quickness, alacrity, fury, and 25 might, all Guardians are dumped into one subgroup, which they like since it means they share retaliation uptime which is important for their traits. Then in the other subgroup, you’ll have a Chrono, Druid, and any classes that would like to have spotter.
  • The Druid also needs to make informed decisions on what spirits to take. This is not really your responsibility as a commander to know as much as it’s the responsibility of the Druid, but it’s good to know this stuff.
    • First off, remember that spirits are 10-man, which means that if you take more than one Druid, they shouldn’t double up on spirits generally, since they don’t stack together. If you do take two Druids and they have free slots though, they can double up on their Stone Spirit, since even though the passive effect won’t stack, the active cast of pressing the spirit’s skill will stack and lead to more protection uptime, which is very nice.
    • Anyway, Stone Spirit is almost always taken in 99% of groups. It gives a lot of protection to everyone, and unless you have a source of protection in both subgroups (which is usually going to be a boon Thief).
    • Frost Spirit is taken when there’s any number of power classes in the squad.
    • Sun Spirit is taken when there’s any number of condi classes in the squad.
    • Storm Spirit is taken if vulnerability on the boss is an issue. Now this is a bit advanced, but basically, various classes contribute towards vulnerability uptime. Mainly, Guardians, Holosmiths, Daredevils, Tempests, Soulbeasts, and Necromancers are the heavy hitters when it comes to giving out vulnerability, while condi Mirages, condi Renegades, Warriors, Weavers… they don’t tend to give as much. If you notice vulnerability go down, which is definitely going to happen in compositions where you run a lot of condi Mirages like on Cairn or Largos, then you will want the Druid to take Storm Spirit. It’s an often overlooked issue but if vulnerability goes below like 21 or 22 average, storm spirit is going to be a bigger DPS boost than any other spirit.
    • Water Spirit is taken if the other subgroup doesn’t have a source of regeneration. Healers that give regeneration to their subgroup are Tempest, heal boon Thief, Herald, Druid, Firebrand, and Scrapper, while Scourges, Renegades, or no healer at all in the other subgroup means that the Druid will want water spirit.
    • Nature Spirit is always taken unless you need the skill Entangle for immobilises for whatever reason, such as on Vale Guardian, Gorseval, Escort, Samarog, and Deimos, OR unless you need Glyph of the Stars for a select few bosses where it makes sense.
  • Finally, there are a few other considerations when setting up a subgroup:
    • Assassin’s Presence is a 5-man ferocity buff that comes from an alacrity Renegade, so you’ll want to dump your power classes with them.
    • Empower Allies is sometimes taken by a Warrior if their entire subgroup is full power, so you might want to segregate the condi DPS from the power DPS for this reason also.
    • Scourges give barrier and you might want them in separate subgroups so they don’t overwrite each other’s barrier.
    • If you have one healer, you might want to put the high-priority people like the tank in the same subgroup so they get heal priority.
  • Of course, none of the above tips take priority over making sure both subgroups have the right boons and so on, but they’re small considerations you can make too.
• I know that’s a lot of information and I feel like many people reading up to this point might feel a little overwhelmed by it all and think “wow I’m never going to remember any of this”. All I’ll say is, don’t worry about it. I knew none of it when I started commanding, but you learn over time and gain an intuition on this stuff, and honestly a lot of it is not super important for you to know. Like, if you forget to put all Dragonhunters in one subgroup so they share retaliation, then yeah it’ll be a DPS loss, but it isn’t the end of the world. You’ll also have 9 other people in the squad with you and people will either be knowledgeable enough to ask you to move them to certain subgroups for certain reasons or not knowledgeable enough to care, so don’t put any pressure on yourself to get the subgroups exactly right at the start.

Add-ons

• My plan for the rest of this guide is to go through every boss in all seven wings and talk a bit about how to prepare for them, marker placement, what specific roles in the fight do, what compositions you might want to take, and so on. But before that, I quickly wanted to mention some add-ons you can download to make your life a million times easier while commanding.
• For starters, ArcDPS is… I’m going to say a must. It isn’t just there to check people’s DPS, but you can also check boon uptimes, mechanics, and so on.
• Most importantly, ArcDPS allows you to upload logs. So for those who don’t know, if you hit Alt + Shift + T, you can choose “Parse encounters to EVTC” (and you can choose to compress them too for significantly reduced filesizes). This dumps an EVTC file to C:\Users\<user>\Documents\Guild Wars 2\Add-Ons\arcdps\arcdps.cbtlogs. Then, you can go onto the site http://dps.report/ and upload these EVTC files to get some insanely detailed and helpful data on your runs. You can see people’s DPS across different phases and in graphs, you can see boon uptimes in specific phases of the fight, you can see how many times people got hit by a certain attack or how much damage they took, and so on and so forth. You even have a combat replay animation that shows you how the fight played out. This is really valuable for any raider but raid commanders especially.
• There are two plugins you can get for ArcDPS, and that’s the Boon Table and the Mechanics Log. The boon table just turns ArcDPS’s boon table into something a lot more readable. The mechanics logs allows you to open a window at any point in the fight and see who failed or received a mechanic. So if you’re on Deimos and you have no idea who triggered that black? You can open up the mechanics table and flame the- sorry, constructively point it out to them.
• Another add-on I would recommend is YoloMouse. This turns your mouse cursor into whatever you want it to be. While you’re shotcalling and teaching, the last thing you want is to lose where your cursor is, and Guild Wars 2’s cursor is extremely hard to see in all the visual clutter, so I’d recommend giving YoloMouse a shot.
• Finally, the last tool I’d recommend is GW2 TacO. This is in fact not a delicious Mexican dish, but it stands for Guild Wars 2 Tactical Overlay. It’s an interface that overlays on top of your game and can do a million different things to make your gameplay smoother or easier. One of the things it can do is overlay on your screen things like Sabetha cannon timers, making it much easier for you to call them out for your squad. Keep in mind that this won’t help you improve your shotcalling and is a bit of a crutch, so I wouldn’t recommend relying on it, but if you’re really nervous about commanding and want something to make your life a bit easier, then TacO is your friend.

Bosses

• Right, now I’ll be going through all the bosses with you guys and identifying some things you might need to prepare or organise for each boss.

Wing 1

Vale Guardian

• So, the good thing about Vale Guardian is that it has literally the best pre-event in the game for preparing you for the actual fight. Almost every mechanic is explained in the pre-event, so use this pre-event to teach people about the different Guardians, seekers, green circles, blues, boon-stripping blue Guardian, and so on.
• Make sure you have at least two or three condi DPS classes in your squad for red Guardian. If you have a condi quickbrand or condi banner Warrior, they both count. Make it clear that during the split phases, they will be going to red. You’ll also want to assign someone to pull green Guardian to blue and make sure that you have at least one Chrono on blue at all times to boonstrip.
• Decide whether or not you want to skip greens. I’m going to say that in general, go with what pugs usually do, and pugs usually skip greens, so you should skip them too. Advise your Chronotank to try their best to time their signet distorts with the greens so that they don’t die to the explosions. Also, if you skip greens, a heal Scourge is ridiculously good for this fight, since they can pull people that get ported and barrier before each green explosion.
• Important roles:
  • Your Chronotank will be doing a lot of the heavy lifting in this fight. Make sure they have enough toughness to tank and survive the damage. The usual strategy for tanking is either to keep the boss in the middle, which I wouldn’t recommend, or to move it to the edge, in which case we want to move the boss between the blue and red slices along the edge of the arena. We’ll do this for the first two phases, and for the last phase, we’ll start between the blue and green slice, and rotate to stay on the safe slice until the boss is dead.
  • Your Druid will need to handle seekers. Their elite skill Entangle is immensely important for this. On top of that, they can go into Celestial Avatar and use skill 5 to also immobilise the seekers, and they can take Glyph of the Tides to push seekers out if they get close.
• Markers:
  • Markers aren’t a big deal in this fight, but you can place an arrow on green slice, heart on red slice, and square on blue slice for clarity’s sake.

Spirit Run

• Spirit Run needs very little explanation, you can probably just jump right in. You may want to prepare the Chronos by telling them to take Blink, Mimic, and Portal and ask them to alternate doing portals using adrenal mushrooms, but otherwise jump in and explain the point capturing mechanic and you’re good to go.
• For the next area, you will basically want to kill all the mobs here. The brazier spawns to the side and anyone who’s a support can pick it up. If they don’t weapon swap or go down for the rest of Spirit Run then they can deposit it in a handle at the end which spawns an extra chest and is needed for a legendary collection achievement.
• The spirit run itself can be done with or without portals. My recommendation for training runs is not using portals. I usually tell everyone to run through the capture circles and supports to stay behind in the capture circles to capture them.
• Important roles:
  • The Chronos will optionally be portalling.
  • Someone may take the brazier.
• Markers:
  • Markers aren’t necessary for this encounter. You may want to mark the Adrenal Mushrooms for the Chronos.

Gorseval

• Gorseval is actually a fairly non-trivial boss to command, not because it’s a hard boss but because the way you will do the encounter changes a lot based on people’s DPS. You can do fast CC or slow CC, and updrafts or no updrafts, and you can decide to mix it up, such as fast fast slow CC or updraft updraft no updraft. This all depends on the squad’s DPS, but usually the first line of defence to bad squad DPS is to make CC slower. The slower the CC is, the more time you guys buy for yourselves. The second line of defence is adding updrafts into the equation. If you can skip a World Eater attack with updrafts, you’ve bought yourself a lot more time. Updrafts usually complicate the fight a little more, so I wouldn’t recommend it, but sometimes it is your only option.
• Another consideration is that the slower your DPS is, and especially if you prolong things by taking updrafts, you will have more orbs to deal with. In fast DPS groups, you can almost ignore orbs, maybe just kill a few that are getting really big. In good but not amazing DPS groups, you can just clear orbs during the split phases at 66% and 33%. In slow DPS groups, you will have to ask people with ranged DPS like condi BS, Dragonhunter with scepter, and so on to drop some AoEs on orbs now and again.
• Finally, during the CC, make sure everyone stacks on your tag, including the tank. The black goop that Gorseval spawns on the grounds can be very deadly, and especially if you’re doing slow CC, you’ll want to stick together for the whole thing. If you want to know the movements to avoid ALL black goop during CC, the pattern is:
  • Stay, stay, out, out, in, stay.
  • Stay, out, stay, out, out, in.
  • Out, out, in, stay, stay, stay.
• Important roles:
  • One of the Chronos will tank. Just make sure he always faces the boss away from the group.
  • The Druid will probably want entangle for the spirits in the 66% and 33% split phases. Healers in general are important for the CC phase to save their big heals so that people don’t kill themselves.
• Markers:
  • I would recommend a marker on each spirit spawn point in the split phase, with the arrow one at north west on the minimap.

Sabetha

• Again, make use of the pre-event for Sabetha. In this pre-event, you can learn how the sapper bombs work, and it’s by far the most important mechanic in the fight. Don’t forget to call it out when people get it and then make sure people are all ready on the jump pad so you can show everyone how it works.
• The hardest part of Sabetha is obviously calling out the cannons.
  • Make sure you assign a cannon 1, cannon 2, and backup cannon player. In trainings I’d recommend those being either the BS or DPS.
  • The cannon pattern is: SOUTH -> WEST -> NORTH -> EAST, SOUTH -> NORTH -> WEST -> EAST, REPEAT.
  • The cannons spawn every 30 seconds on :00 and :30 on the timer. They will show up on the minimap as red crossed swords.
  • The sapper bombs spawn 5 seconds later, at :55 and :25. Whoever gets it will have a few seconds to throw it onto the correct jump pad where there’s someone waiting.
  • The person waiting at the jump pad should only go there are the very last second so the flak doesn’t hit them.
  • If the first attempt at throwing the sapper bomb fails, the person who was supposed to do the cannon will need to back off and the backup cannon will need to take over for any backup sapper bombs that might spawn. This is important, because if let’s say cannon 1 was on circle waiting for his bomb, it never came, so he stayed there and waited for his backup, then when it’s his turn again on his next cannon, he wouldn’t be able to take it, because he still has the debuff from using the jump pad so late. So always have your designated cannon person go back and send a backup.
• Remember that if you struggle with calling out the cannons, you can always use TacO to help you out here, although I’d recommend just calling them out for yourself and trying to keep track of them on your own to see how well you do.
• Important roles:
  • You will want a kiter. Your two options here are either having a ranged DPS with good sustain like Scourge go out and kite for you, or you can have a ranged healer like Druid do it. Remember that whatever you choose, on the stack you still need to have good boon coverage. An experienced Druid can kite at range while still dipping into the group as often as they can to give might, but an inexperienced one won’t do that.
• Markers:
  • Sabetha is one of the few bosses where the markers are pretty much standard in most groups. You’ll want arrow on south, circle on west, heart on north, and square on east.

Wing 2

Slothasor

• This is a very hard boss for training groups. One big issue is the tantrum attack he does, so that’s the one where he slams his arms on the ground and circles spawn underneath you that knock you down. For these, the best way to handle them is to stand still for the first two circles, and then dodge away when you see the second circle down in a direction that’s safe. Shakes are also often an issue. Having some kind of reliable condi cleanse like a Daredevil with F2, a Soulbeast with Bear Stance, a heal Scourge with Plague Signet, a Druid with Healing Spring… that’s all very helpful. Of course, double dodging when the shakes happen is also an excellent idea.
• Eating patterns will vary wildly in groups, and it will also vary with whether you eat along the wall or keep Slothasor in the middle. The vast majority of groups don’t do this “eat along the wall” strategy anymore, so I’ll mainly explain the “mid strat”, or at least how I do it. Over here, you’ll have the four mushrooms that people are going to eat, and a corresponding mushroom in the middle that they’ll be designated to eat. The idea will be to eat a path from the place where they turned into a slubling all the way back to their designated middle mushroom. Usually, eating 3 to 4 mushrooms is enough, and it’s always a good idea to eat a mushroom towards the next glowing mushroom to help the next person that needs to turn into a slubling. Then, whoever is fixated has to keep Slothasor in the middle and on safe ground as much as they can.
• Important roles:
  • There are no important roles for this fight.
• Markers:
  • For markers you could have arrow, circle, heart, and square on the glowing mushrooms in the corners and star, spiral, triangle, and cross on the middle mushrooms to be eaten.

Trio

• This one is pretty trivial up until Narella where there may be some issues. You can limit your explanation of this fight to just the fact that there are three mini bosses, and each one has an environmental weakness. Berg, who spawns at 6:50, is weak to beehives, so you can place beehives around his spawn point. Zane, who spawns at 4:50, is weak to wargs, so you can open these before he spawns and make sure you’re standing on him when he spawns. Narella, who spawns at 2:50, is weak to oil kegs, so you can place the kegs on the ledge next to her.
• Urge your Chronos to take focus for pulls, if any Necromancers are around, ask them to take Spectral Grasp, if Soulbeasts are around, ask them to merge with pink Moa, etc.
• One other thing that’s definitely worth mentioning is that environmental items can be picked up by interacting with them, dropped by weapon swapping, and used with skill 1.
• You’ll also need to describe how to start the fight: one group goes top, one group goes bottom, and everyone stacks at the entrance to line-of-sight all the snipers.
• Important roles:
  • Someone should be assigned to handle saboteurs. Usually the BS would be pretty good for this. They spawn at irregular intervals throughout the fight and there’ll be a message on the screen and an icon on the minimap. They should wait for the saboteur to reach the cage and gain a CC bar, and then use any kind of CC they have to break it. It’s not a large CC bar.
  • Someone else should be assigned for mortars. Usually, a Chrono with Gravity Well is good for this. This mechanic happens at 5:23, 4:23, 3:23, and 2:23. One or multiple bandit bombardiers will go up to a position, stop, gain a CC bar, and then start setting up a mortar. All bombardiers will have to be CC’d in time or else they might be able to finish setting up their mortar, which will shoot a bunch of AoEs at us and the cage. The first three mortar spawns are on the jump pad that we took to get up to the stronghold. The last mortar spawns at 2:23 are on the bridges, but they aren’t important to deal with because by this time, Narella should be dead or close to dead.
  • Halfway through the fight, snipers spawn on the top bridge and it’s nice to have someone assigned to kill them. I believe they spawn at around 4:00 - 3:50 on the timer.
  • Finally, you’ll want a thrower that can stand where the oil kegs are placed, pick them up, and throw them at the boss with intervals of around 10 seconds. We can then detonate the oil with fire fields or by using sapper bombs.
• Markers:
  • If you want, you can place markers on the three boss spawns and perhaps a fourth marker on the place where people should put oil kegs.

Matthias

• By far the most important thing to explain here is that there is a difference between the two different kind of random mechanics you can get: corruption and well of the profane. Corruption gives you an orange circle around you and has to go into a clear fountain. Well of the profane goes to any wall which isn’t a fountain and is simply placed on the ground manually with a special action key. The corruption doesn’t have a special action key, which makes it easy to tell the difference.
• On this boss you might want to consider taking a boon Thief comp. This means a boon Thief, an alacrity Renegade, a healer, a BS, and six DPS.
• Finally, make sure you don’t have any rampant reflects that might ruin the shards of rage attack that the boss does. Shattering blow on Warrior, staff Daredevil’s auto-attack chain, and especially Medic’s Feedback on Mesmers are all important to watch out for.
• Note that if people don’t have the Forsaken Thicket Waters mastery, then they’ll get stunned when they run into a fountain to cleanse their corruption.
• Important roles:
  • You’ll need to assign people to main and backup reflect. This role is almost exclusively done by a Mesmer, usually a condi Mirage, with Feedback, but a Guardian with F3 tome and Wall of Reflection works too. Wait till the boss spawns the dome around him and turns, and the instant he starts shooting, the reflect can go down.
• Markers:
  • You can optionally place arrow, circle, heart, and square on the fountains to make it easier to call out which fountains are safe.

Wing 3

Escort

• There are multiple ways of doing Escort. You could send 4 people up to the towers to capture them together and have the Chrono port them up and down, or you could have everyone go up to insta-cap the tower with a portal and then immediately port back down when it’s capped, or you could even have the Chrono try to solo towers on their own with focus pull and greatsword push. Either way, especially if the Chrono will be mostly on their own doing towers, they’ll want to go as tanky as they can. They should look up a video on how to do the cave at the start but it’s generally very straightforward.
• Like at Trio, make sure that classes are taking pulls for this encounter.
• Important roles:
  • Make sure you assign a back warg. Usually a condi class or the BS will do this but literally any DPS that is able to apply soft CC on the warg and kill moving targets effectively can do it. They will just camp at the tent at the start and kill every warg that spawns until the group reaches the end.
  • You’ll need a tower Chrono as we’ve covered.
  • Finally, you’ll need a babysitter, usually a healer,
• Markers:
  • No need for markers for Escort.

Keep Construct

• Keep Construct is a boss that’s a lot more complex to explain than it is to actually do, so don’t get too hung up on explaining how it works.
• The most important factor here is DPS because it dictates how many orbs you’re going to do. You can usually get a feel for how many orbs you’ll need to do after a few attempts, but 3-3-4 orbs are a good starting point.
• Urge your Chronos to take focus so they can help with pulling the orb.
• Important roles:
  • One of your Chronos will tank. There’s nothing particularly difficult about this. Just keep the boss facing away from the group and move him to the glowing statue straight away.
  • Someone will need to push. Any class can do this, but Druids are usually recommended because their staff auto-attacks are pretty suitable for the job. When the orb spawns in the middle, they’ll just spam auto-attacks on it to push it from one rift to another. Make sure their pet is on passive or at least not attacking the orb, since some pets might CC it. They can cancel their auto-attacks by dodging, stowing their weapon, or pressing Escape.
• Markers:
  • If you want, you can place markers on the green circle spawn points but it’s not a big deal if you don’t, as long as there are two people per circle.

Twisted Castle

• Twisted Castle will be very difficult to explain over a written guide. What I usually do to teach this encounter is to quickly explain the overarching mechanics: what are we doing here, how the haunted statues work, how the madness stacks work, how the fountains work, how the gates and buttons work, and so on. Then, I jump in and we stick together for the whole thing, showing people every different button that needs to be pressed. If we wipe, which is likely, then I will start assigning people to split up from the group to press specific buttons.
• Here is a guide on Twisted Castle for those who don’t know how to do it.
• Important roles:
  • You will need someone to split up from the group and do the fountain button and the button next to the line of statues.
  • You’ll also need a Chrono to take portal to port people onto the archway.
• Markers:
  • What I like to do while going through Twisted Castle is marking all the buttons we need to press with markers to make it crystal clear for people.

Xera

• Xera is a pretty hard boss to command because there are large chunks of the fight where people are not going to be next to you and you won’t be able to call out for them or help them out. I would start by focusing on the minigames at the start of the fight, explaining how those work, and assigning ranged DPS or supports to stand on the buttons for the second minigame. You don’t have to explain the whole fight to people at the start, just focus on the minigames is what I would say, and when people are comfortable with them or you guys actually made it to the fight in an attempt, then talk about the fight.
• For the actual fight, the most important things to cover are that people are not to stand in front of the boss, shard clearing, how to time the special action key, and the fact that people will be repeating the minigames at 40% and 20% of the boss’s health. For the special action key, usually counting five seconds in your head and casting it on the group is good timing, but you can also time it by looking at the massive Xera marionettes around the arena… when they lift their arms up, you immediately drop the dome.
• Another hard thing for trainees to manage in this fight is the derangement stacks. Basically, you get these stacks by standing in anything red or pink or bloodstone-related. Most of the stacks come from either getting hit too much during the gliding phase or getting hit by red orbs from the laser.
• Finally, for the gliding phase, make sure people are deploying their glider properly. There’s a temptation from many people to double tap space bar to deploy the glider, which is not the right way to do it. Make people hold their space bar down, and that will deploy the glider at the earliest convenience.
• Important roles:
  • The tank, usually a Chrono, will have a very important job here. They need to follow three golden rules:
    • Never leave the boss in the middle when a red laser spawns.
    • Never tank the boss to a spot where the bad half spawns, as in the big pink semicircle that you don’t want to stand in.
    • Never face the boss towards the group while she’s doing her blurred frenzy attack.
  • If both healers get ported during any of the minigames at 40% or 20% of the boss’s health, one of them should take the portal back.
• Markers:
  • There’s no standard way of doing this, but I usually place the arrow marker around the side of the circle where we enter, and then circle to the left, heart at the far back, and square to the right.

Wing 4

Cairn

• This one’s easy to command but hard to do for a few training groups, especially those with low DPS. Apart from explaining the green circles mechanic and that you have to match or exceed the number of players to the number of orbs above the circle, there really isn’t much to talk about here.
• One way to make things easier for people is to assign specific players to kite the red agony circles. These spawn on the person furthest away from the boss at 7:37 to start off and then every 20 seconds after that. You could assign four people to cycle through them, usually supports.
• Don’t forget to make sure people aren’t casting reflects, like Mesmer’s Medic’s Feedback trait. Projectile destruction, on the other hand, like Druid Staff 5, is really good.
• Also, a common mistake that people make here is to stand too far out with the agony. Everyone can stay at melee range on the boss, as long as people don’t stack on the group.
• Important roles:
  • Apart from maybe assigning people to kite agony, there are no important roles.
• Markers:
  • I usually place arrow marker where everyone should stand and circle, heart, and square markers around the boss’s left, right, and back.

Mursaat Overseer

• Mursaat is probably the easiest actual raid boss in the game, but don’t underestimate him still. There are things that can go wrong. I would recommend running a Scourge with epidemic here to help with clearing the scouts, because you do not under any circumstance want more than two soldiers active at any one time. Most of the damage pressure of this fight comes when there are soldiers up, and if a soldier dies, it explodes, so people need to time a dodge.
• You can also consider running a boon Thief comp for this boss.
• Important roles:
  • Claim will need to tank the boss and claim tiles. They get a short-cooldown special action key that they can aim at any tile to claim it and make it safe. They should focus on keeping the four tiles in the middle safe and, if a scout or a soldier is about to walk over a tile, waiting until they touch the tile before claiming it.
  • Dispel gets a long-cooldown special action key that they can use to remove the yellow shields from scouts or soldiers and make them vulnerable to damage. They need to actually target the scout or soldier and then press the special action key, and I’ve been told that if Mursaat is in the way, it might body-block the dispel projectile too, although I can’t confirm this, so just to be safe make sure that whoever’s on Dispel duty has a clear shot.
  • Protect gets a very long-cooldown special action key that places a dome underneath them which makes people invulnerable to all damage, including spikes from the tiles. If DPS is low, it’s good to save this protect dome for a particularly nasty set of spikes that comes towards the end of the fight, where all tiles are dangerous except the corners. Otherwise, they can save this and use it if there are two or more soldiers up at one point.
• Markers:
  • You can maybe place markers on each of the four columns of the chessboard to make it easier to coordinate.

Samarog

• I consider Samarog something of a gold standard when it comes to raid bosses to learn raids on. I actually think it is literally one of the best bosses for that. All the attacks are extremely well-telegraphed and clear, it emphasises good positioning (always stand in Samarog’s butt), CC is important, and all the mechanics can happen to basically everyone so it isn’t the case of having a couple of people carrying the raid for everyone else.
• By far the most important thing to get right here is CC. This is one of those bosses where not running a good comp that has decent CC can ruin you. As a commander, if you’re multi-class and have an idea of what CC each class in your squad can do and what simple trait or utility swaps they can make to get more CC, then you’ll be able to help out a lot in this department, but generally, the heavy-hitters as far as CC go are Warrior swapping to maces and using Head Butt, Revenant Staff 5, Guardian’s Bane Signet, Ranger CC pets, Engineer’s Big ol’ Bomb and rifle 4, Thief’s Basilisk Venom and F2 bomb, Chrono’s F3 / Gravity Well, Elementalist’s dagger air 5, and Necromancer’s Flesh Golem.
• Important roles:
  • Make sure the Druid is able to handle Rigom by taking Entangle and either a longbow or Glyph of the Tides.
• Markers:
  • Markers aren’t needed for this boss, but you may want to place a marker for where to stand during the split phases.

Deimos

• Deimos is one of the hardest bosses for training groups, or raid groups in general. Prepare to become very acquainted with this boss if your group is inexperienced, and gather as much patience as you can.
• There are a million different ways to do Deimos but I find that the best approach to take in trainings is melee strat, keeping the boss on one semicircle of the arena while the hand kiter is on the other side, and making use of the ward. Will you get the boss down more quickly in ranged strat? Probably. But if you want to teach people to actually interact with the fight, then ranged strat really isn’t in your best interest.
• There’s also the question of whether or not to sacrifice the person at the last 25% of the boss’s health. This is basically the strategy of leaving whichever unlucky player got targeted with the green circle at 25% alone to die in the demon realm while everyone else phases the boss to 10% as quickly as possible. I wouldn’t recommend doing this in a training run, just because that kind of strategy is somewhat DPS-reliant, but it’s not a horrible idea if you want to give it a try.
• Focus on explaining the start of the fight and try and coordinate killing all four statues at the same time. You’ll probably want to send all players that can do any kind of DPS up with the green circle while supports stay behind and kill or immobilise the prides.
• The blacks are going to be your main issue in the fight. They spawn at 60% of the boss’s health and every 15 seconds after that. It’s the tank’s job to make sure that the boss isn’t standing on any blacks ever and the black kiter’s job to make sure that blacks don’t spawn in bad places, namely in the middle where people might want to go in the ward.
• Important roles:
  • You’ll have a Chronotank that does a lot of the hard work in this fight. I won’t go into too much detail on what they should be doing, but I will say that one thing a lot of Chronotanks do wrong is that they make things infinitely harder than they need to be. They get hung up on making sure they time a block for the ward attack for example… They don’t need to. Just run into the ward as a tank. Unless someone’s in there already with a green circle, nobody will care; you have enough time to run back out and get into position again. Also, many times tanks get knocked off the edge because they mistimed a dodge or block. Again, they don’t need to stand between the boss and the edge. When the boss does the smash attack, the chronotank can just stand behind the boss and then dodge back into position. Easy.
  • You’ll have a black kiter. This isn’t a super important role if you’re doing melee strat but it’s nice to have someone whose job it is to make sure blacks don’t spawn in bad places such as inside the ward or on the group as they kill one of the evil versions of Saul. This black kiter should either coordinate with the Chronotank to have them give aegis to survive the ward attack or else they should take their own blocks. Remember that only blocks work, not dodges or invulnerability.
  • You’ll have a hand kiter. A lot of different classes and builds are good for this. My personal favourite is Herald hand kiter, but obviously Soulbeast is also very popular, and I’ve seen some great things from Spellbreaker, Tempest, and even Scourge hand kiter. One good piece of advice for them is not to be too hung up on stacking five hands at a time if they’re new to the role. They should focus on surviving and on timing their block with the ward attack.
  • Finally, you’ll want a Druid to make sure the prides get immobilised. They do this with Entangle and with the Jacaranda pet. You don’t have to focus all your damage on prides when they spawn, which is past 40% of the boss’s health, as long as they remain immobilised and that they’re killed when the Druid has run out of immobilise. This Druid might also want to stay behind during the last 25% green circle to make sure no prides go into friendly Saul while everyone is gone.
• Markers:
  • For markers, I tend to put down three markers on one semicircle of the arena to kind of mark where the tank needs to tank the boss around.

Wing 5

Soulless Horror

• Soulless Horror is a fight that you can spend 3 hours wiping on with a training group or get down in a few attempts. It’s very reliant on RNG and you can be really screwed by bad walls.
• The most important things for you to explain to people is to not die, not CC the golem, not stand in front of the boss, and move with the group.
• Don’t forget that at 90%, 66%, and 33% of the boss’s health, the arena gets smaller. If people are standing at the edge due to a bad wall or whatever, they absolutely have to not stay too far out or they will die.
• Important roles:
  • Tanks will usually be two Chronos. These need to make sure that they swap aggro with their special action key when their stacks of Necrosis wears off on their buff bar. Remember that the longer you tank for, the more stacks you get, so if as a tank you’re hitting 4 stacks or more, it means the other tank isn’t swapping early enough. Also, tanks should make sure that the boss never turns to the group and that she remains tanked not too far from the middle but not too close - the large circle marked around the centre of the arena is usually a good guideline for where the boss should be standing.
  • Someone will need to push the golems when they spawn. This is almost always going to be a Druid, but I’ve heard of some pretty amazing pushing happening from heal Scrappers too. It’s a little hard to say when the golems spawn since it depends partially on DPS, but after the first one spawns, they spawn every twenty seconds or so. If your Druid is pushing, make sure they take Glyph of the Tides, longbow, and that they go to their traits to make some swaps. In the Druid trait line, they need to swap Celestial Shadow to Verdant Etching. Then, they need to swap the Skirmishing trait line to Marksmanship 3-3-3, namely for the longbow trait that allows their arrows to pierce. The good thing about Glyph of the Tides is that, as long as your alacrity uptime is decent, its cooldown aligns pretty much perfectly with the golem spawns.
  • Finally, you’ll need a Scourge for Epidemic. Hopefully you’re running a mostly or fully condi-based squad composition, or else the Epidemics won’t be strong enough. Basically, the Scourge should cast their Epidemic while having Soulless Horror targeted when they see the golem spawn. Awareness here helps though - if they notice the Druid out of position, downed, or whatever, it’s a good idea to delay the Epidemic until it’s a good time.
• Markers
  • Markers aren’t a huge deal here, but I usually put down four markers around the circle in the middle for coordination purposes.

River of Souls

• River’s a very trivial encounter if you do the usual strategy of sending most people ahead and keeping one or two players behind to babysit Desmina. Make sure you run as many healers as you can, and these should be heavy-duty healers that are great at healing over time; I’m talking about classes like Tempest, Herald, Renegade, Firebrand, and Scrapper. You literally only need two or three DPS classes here if that.
• Important roles:
  • Behind, you’ll assign people to babysit Desmina. You want at least two things covered: good healing and aegis. You can provide both with a Firebrand, but usually my recommendation will be to err on the safe side and send at least two people with Desmina. I would usually take a Scrapper healer for superspeed and either a Firebrand or a Chrono for aegis.
• Markers:
  • You won’t need any markers for this.

Statues:

• You can do the statues in any order you want.
• For Broken King, make sure you don’t over-DPS or under-DPS. Usually if every player nails around 10k DPS on average, then they’re in a good spot. Also, urge people to play it safe here. Tell them to run their open world builds or go on tanky classes or classes that can sustain a lot like Reaper or Daredevil/Deadeye with the Invigorating Precision trait. Running utilities that can save themselves or allies like resurrection utilities or mobility skills are always very helpful too. Finally, if you have any Dragonhunters, do not allow them to go inside the hitbox at the start or they will die.
• For Eater of Souls, you’ll find that the hardest part is explaining how it works. So few people truly understand how this boss works and will do things that don’t make sense, like get the boss to 0% health when he isn’t under a lit-up platform or isn’t ready to kill, or going to kill a spider when you have enough orbs in the sky. You’ll also want to decide how many people to send on the green circle. I find that sending 2 on the first and 2 on the second is the way to go for trainings, but you can go for the “0-5” strategy, which is where you skip the first and send five people on the second, with one of them purposefully getting eaten by the boss to skip the CC. This only works if you can get the boss to release orbs twice before the second green circle pops, so you do need to move quickly and have good DPS.
• Finally, for the Eyes of Darkness, there are again two strategies; portal strategy, or split strategy. I’m personally in favour of the split strategy; I think it’s faster and more robust to mistakes, but if you know how to do the portal strategy and how to explain it to your Chrono, then go for it. Make sure that the Druids take the Marksmanship trait Moment of Clarity and that they’re the ones detonating the orbs so that the eye is stunned. Also, make sure nobody uses daze abilities while the eye is stunned or else the stun will get interrupted.
• Important roles:
  • You’ll have a tank for Broken King and Eater of Souls. On Broken King, they just need to face the boss away from the group. They don’t even need to stand at melee range. On Eater of Souls, they need to move the boss onto the lit-up platform. They can take as tanky gear as they want.
  • You will want two throwers on the Eyes of Darkness, at least if you do the split strategy. These can be any class. They should share the orb in the middle and alternate using it, make sure they throw as quickly as they can, and not let light thieves take the orbs.
• Markers:
  • Sometimes I like placing markers in real-time during Broken King to indicate where I want people to take green circles.
  • On Eater of Souls, you can place markers on the platforms to coordinate where the boss should go to.
  • On Eyes of Darkness, You can make someone lieutenant so that both of you can place target markers on the eyes in case they ever teleport.

Dhuum:

• Dhuum is going to be the hardest boss in the game to get a kill on if you’re commanding a training group. Hands down. I have taken up to four or five nights to get a Dhuum kill before.
• One of the main pieces of advice I can give you as a commander is: make sure everyone who is doing greens has practice on them and knows what to do. People who can’t do greens will destroy a training run, and you can’t have nine others unable to progress because one person can’t figure out greens unfortunately. There is a way to learn how to do greens in your own time solo, which involves using a class that can apply invisibility to the reapers to keep them alive.
• You will also want to make sure people let afflictions expire instead of exploding them early unless they have good reasons to, and also try and make sure people stand in the correct location right before the boss does a lesser deathmark (the attack where he dips into the ground). The group can manipulate where that attack lands, so if everyone stands in a location where the AoE will be easy to avoid, then you’ll have a much easier time.
• Finally, the last 10% is important to get right. It’s your job as a commander to put a ready check up when you’ve picked up five orbs in the last 10%. Remind people to ready up if they’re fully dead, and urge people to ready up when they’ve picked up five orbs. The most important thing that should happen before going out to the markers, though, is that three boons are out: swiftness, quickness, and protection. The swiftness comes namely from Druids casting warhorn 5, the protection also comes from Druids casting Stone Spirit, and the quickness comes from Chronos casting Time Warp and Signet of Inspiration. These boons help a lot. Without them, people should identify what blocks, mobility skills, and heals they have so that they can survive long enough to channel their marker.
• Important roles:
  • Like I said, an important role is greens. Usually, you’ll have your BS do green 1, your kiter do green 2 (with a backup for their first green at 9:00), and your off-Chrono do green 3. There are tables, guides, and automated voice alerts for the timings of the greens all over the internet. Make sure that they always pick up the big orb, which will always spawn at the same time and place relative to where they took the green circle, which is right to the left of them if they’re facing the middle.
  • You will have a tank that starts tanking the boss to the left of the throne at the start and then moves the boss to a new location after each lesser deathmark. It’s paramount that the tank never faces the boss on the group, because that will oneshot them. Another difficult manoeuvre for them to do is facing the boss away from the group while keeping him in the middle after the first soul split. That will take some timing and practice.
  • You’ll have a kiter. For this, usually you’ll have a Druid, but literally any ranged healer class can do just fine. Their job is to pick up messengers the instant they spawn and to make sure star reaper remains healthy and healed up. In the pre-event, they’ll be picking up tons of messengers, but after the pre-event, they can stay with the group for the entire time, except for specific occasions when a golem will spawn. The first one spawns during the first soul split at around 6:25. After that, they spawn every minute, give or take. You might skip a spawn if whoever is doing greens is able to pick up a medium orb.
  • Finally, you’ll have a boon-strip DPS class. This is usually a condi Renegade, but power Chrono and condi Scourge are all perfectly viable too. The job of this class is to strip any and all boons the boss gets after each soul split and if anyone happens to get hit by the lesser deathmark.
• Markers:
  • The markers are standard for this fight. You have arrow on the reaper to the left of the throne and then rotate clockwise with all the other markers until you reach triangle. Remember to assign people to their markers for the last 10%, and ask them to place a personal waypoint on the minimap with Alt + Left Click to mark their designated marker so they don’t have to remember it.

Wing 6

Conjured Amalgamate

• This boss, like many others, can be done in a lot of different ways, but because its mechanics are generally so forgiving, you don’t need to stress yourself out on the specifics of what you’ll be doing. Focus your explanation on how swords and shields work and what to do when an arm is destroyed and you have an orbs phase.
• Make sure people are on their power classes and that the sword pulls happen properly. Your chronos will take focus and pull the swords only after the arm starts being lifted up. Make sure that people keep an eye on any swords that are still alive and that they immediately cleave them down before shields come in.
• Important roles:
  • Your most important roles here are going to be your swords and shields. You will assign four people total: sword 1, sword 2, shield 1, and shield 2. This is because there are fifteen orbs total for swords and the same for shields, but one person can only carry ten at a time. Therefore, you’ll have sword 1 take 10 sword orbs and sword 2 take the remaining 5 sword orbs. Same with shields 1 and 2. There are other ways of distributing who takes 10 orbs and who takes 5, but for a training I recommend just keeping it simple. The swords will always spawn somewhere to the left of the boss while the shield orbs will always spawn somewhere to the right. Usually I’ll assign supports on swords and shields and maybe the BS, and make sure that if you assign a Druid to do it, put them on sword 2 or shield 2 rather than sword 1 or shield 1 so you can give them time to stack might on the group. Also, make sure that whoever is gathering orbs has swiftness on themselves or they will have a hard time.
• Markers:
  • I like putting triangle around where the swords spawn and heart around where the shields spawn.

Largos Twins

• Largos is very easy to explain but very, very hard to execute. Go over the main structure of the fight; say that you’ll start by getting Nikare to 50%, and then you’ll get Kenut to 50%, and then you’ll split up and get them both to 25% and then 0%. There is a portal strategy for this fight but, considering most pugs don’t do this and considering that it means you have to fight an entire 25% of one of the boss’s health bars while they’re enraged, I wouldn’t recommend it. Don’t forget to also explain how the Waterlogged stacks work and that if people stay in any kind of water for too long at any one stretch of time, they will die.
• This is one of the fights where being able to call out what’s going to happen in advance helps a lot. Watching a video to memorise the bosses’ attack patterns is helpful, although I can give you a general idea over here:
  • Just like our skills, enemy skills such as Nikare’s dashes or Kenut’s shockwave all have cooldowns. If Nikare has just dashed on you for example, then he won’t dash on you again for a while and you can feel secure in that fact.
  • Nikare tends to pair his bubble attack with the dashes, especially on the first platform. The second and last time we fight him, they’re a bit harder to predict, but do expect dashes around the time you land on a platform.
  • Nikare’s first dash is always aimed at the person furthest way. His second dash is aimed in the opposite direction, generally towards the tank. Finally, the last dash is aimed also towards the tank.
  • Kenut will alternate between doing a shockwave and doing her boon steal attack. How many auto-attacks she does between each attack depends on how much time she spends moving and is generally quite hard to predict. I won’t go into too much detail on her attack pattern unless anyone here wants me to but I do invite people to watch a few videos if they want to see if they can notice how it works.
  • Kenut’s boon steal attack will always happen on the person furthest away, and it should be kited.
• You will almost definitely want to run a double Chrono comp here with two Druids if you’re doing the split strategy instead of using portals, so that both sides get good quickness, alacrity, might, fury, and spirits.
• Keep an eye on boon uptimes. If you’re having a bad time with people going down often, it might just be because supports aren’t sharing enough protection or regeneration. Protection comes from Chronos casting shield 4.
• Finally, you’ll want to
• Important roles:
  • Your tanks will be the Chronos and them running tanky gear is definitely a good idea. The way the tank should be handling Nikare is to make the third dash always in the same direction as the second. I can’t stress how important this is, since it makes Nikare so, so much easier. They do this by standing in front of where Nikare is facing when he finishes the second dash. Usually, backing off in the opposite direction to where Nikare dashed the first time round will be good enough. The worst thing you can do as a tank is have the first dash be one way, the second dash be the opposite direction, and the third dash also in the opposite direction. For Kenut, the tank should keep the boss facing a consistent and predictable direction. In general, tanks should also make sure the boss is always standing right in the middle (unless there are bad tidal pools or for some other good reason).
  • Your healers have an insanely important job here. The damage pressure in the fight is among the highest from any fight in the game. If they are crap at dodging, get knocked down often, etc, then they will ruin it for everyone else. If your healers are confident and experienced, you’ll notice just how much easier this fight will be. Also, as you’ll be taking two Druids, make sure they’re taking the right utilities. They’ll both want Healing Spring and then every spirit that begins with the letter “s”: Stone Spirit, Storm Spirit, Sun Spirit, and Spirit of Nature.
  • One of your healers will be kiting for Kenut so the boon steal attack isn’t aimed on the group. Make sure they’re not standing far away from the group at all times - you only need to move out specifically to kite the attack, not camp outside at all times. Instruct them to get a feel for when they should be outside. If Kenut does get boons, Chronos with sword, Scourges, and Renegades can boon strip.
• Markers:
  • I sometimes place a marker on the south side of every Nikare platform to make sure people drop tidal pools around that marker. It’s also quite standard to put arrow on the left side of Kenut’s first platform and circle on the right side, so you can indicate which group goes in the direction of arrow to fight Nikare and which group goes in the direction of circle to fight Kenut.

Qadim

• This is a very complex fight that isn’t extremely difficult to execute but is hard to explain and has a lot of moving parts. You will struggle a lot if you don’t have an experienced kiter, a decent tank, and one or two good people in the lamp. It’s a very intimidating fight to command since there’s just so much going on and so many viable ways to pull it off.
• Your first decision is whether to skip the stability pyre or not.
  • If you skip the stability pyre, the boss will have stability during his defiance bar (unless your DPS is ridiculously good and you phase the boss before he needs CC). This makes it almost impossible to CC his defiance bar, unless you take a Spellbreaker with the elite skill Winds of Disenchantment.
  • This skill spawns a dome around the Spellbreaker that refuses to allow any enemies inside it to get boons for its duration. The Spellbreaker that’s casting it can move and jump, but he can’t dodge or use any skills. They should cast it half a second before they anticipate that the CC is going to happen, which is generally shortly after the second shockwave.
• Your second decision is assigning people to pyres.
  • If you skip stability pyre, you can usually do something like put group 1 on the protection pyre and group 2 on the retaliation pyre.
  • If you don’t skip the stability pyre, you can have two DPS (counting BS too) on the stability pyre, and then a Chrono and two DPS on each of the other two pyres. Where the healers go is arbitrary and they can choose whichever pyre they want.
  • The most important things are that the kiter is on the protection pyre and that the protection and retaliation pyre each have a Chrono or some kind of boon strip.
  • Remind people that the pyres at 66% are shifted one platform anti-clockwise.
• Your third decision is whether to pull the magmas in or out.
  • Your Chronos will both want to take focus here, and you have two strategies to deal with the magmas that are protecting the lava elementals.
  • The magmas can either be pulled in, which means that right after Qadim lands his shockwave, a Chrono will place a focus pull precisely in the middle underneath the boss and pull the magmas in. Then, in this precise moment, everyone unloads all the cleave and AoE they have and kill the magmas, and then they move around the boss and cleave any remaining elementals before they go in. For the second phase from 66% -> 33% of the boss’s health, you’ll need one Chrono to pull two of the magmas and then the other to pull the remaining magma.
  • The other strategy is to pull the magmas out. For this, you will assign three separate people to go to each magma and pull them out of the group of lava elementals. What I usually do is assign one of the healers (like a Druid with Iboga pull) to the magma to the left of stability pyre as you leave it or clockwise if you want to look at it that way. Then, since I already have one Chrono on protection pyre and one Chrono on retaliation pyre, I will just tell them to go clockwise to their pyre (or to the left of them as they’re leaving it) and pull the magma elemental they’ll find there out of the group of lava elementals.
  • Then, when the lava elementals reach the group, everyone will cleave them down before they touch the boss.
• Your fourth decision is who handles the lamp.
  • If you have someone who is confident in soloing the lamp, which is very possible for many classes, especially Daredevil or Reaper, then go right ahead and assign them to that. Otherwise, if people are new to the lamp or not confident with soloing it, send two DPS players into it.
  • If people aren’t sure where to go inside the lamp, there are guide videos and images on the internet that are very easy to find.
  • You’ll want to send more than just one or two people for the final lamp, though. For that, I usually send all of my DPS.
• Your fifth decision is whether to kite with one or two players.
  • My strong recommendation is to have someone learn solo kiting, which is almost always done on Thief, and go with that. For trainees, rifle Deadeye solo kiting with the Mug trait is the way to go, because it’s literally just a matter of dodging a single ability and otherwise just standing in the same place the entire time. You can also try Daredevil, although that requires you to understand Qadim’s attack pattern a little better and move more, so it is harder.
  • If you have nobody that has the right build to solo kite, then you may be forced to have one of your healers babysit the kiter.
• Your final decision is whether or not to take portals.
  • If both Chronos take portals, they’ll be dropping Well of Recall and Well of Action, which means they should take Portal, Mimic, and Signet of Inspiration, with the Seize the Moment trait for extra quickness. The alacrity will be awful if you don’t take an alacrity Renegade or at least a condi Renegade with the alacrity trait Righteous Rebel. You could also have a Thief player or two take a instead to teleport people from the pyre guardian to the boss.
  • Portals are useful to skip the travel time from the pyre guardian to the boss, which is not only faster but also safer. You can also completely skip the jumping puzzle with portals. I won’t go into details on where to place the portals here but looking up speedclears or videos should help. However, you need to have the right classes to do portals, and you shouldn’t compromise on having good boons just for the sake of taking portals. For most trainings, I’ll say that I actually don’t bother with portals, but if the circumstances allow, go for it.
• Important roles:
  • You will need a designated tank for the majority of the boss who stands as close to each mini-boss as possible to take aggro. This is a fairly difficult but very very predictable role and you can literally avoid all the damage as the tank if you move correctly and time your blocks and dodges correctly. You’ll need a second tank for the matriarch wyvern. Usually I assign both Chronos to tank and make sure it’s clear who goes to patriarch and who goes to matriarch. Remember that patriarch dies first, so everyone who isn’t in the lamp, kiting, or on matriarch should be focusing on killing patriarch and CCing it if need be. The matriarch tank has to make sure that their wyvern is never facing the group since the wing flap ability will knock them off.
  • You will also need a designated kiter. As we covered, this’ll be either a Thief on their own or any kind of kiter with a healer to babysit for them.
  • You will need people assigned for the lamp. As we covered, this’ll be a Thief, possibly on their own, or two DPS for the first two lamps, and then every DPS who isn’t the banner Warrior and isn’t kiting on the last lamp.
  • You will need someone assigned to break the lamp. In trainings that’ll usually be a BS, but literally anyone can do it.
• Markers:
  • On Qadim, I actually place markers everywhere. I place a marker on where to stand for the final lamp at 33%, a marker on each pyre guardian platform, and a marker on every platform that isn’t adjacent to a pyre guardian. I would recommend dropping some markers down on at least the pyre guardians you guys will be killing just to make it clear where to go.

Wing 7

Gate

• Gate is the pre-event to the entire wing and it’s very trivial. Just kill everything that has a red nameplate and capture the circles. When you get to the door and need to protect Glenna, kill all of the three branded djinn to finish the encounter.
• Important roles:
  • You will want two people protecting Glenna near the door once you’ve captured all the circles. One will be a healer, another will be a DPS.
• Markers:
  • No markers needed.

Cardinal Adina

• Adina is probably the hardest boss in the wing, but with decent DPS and proper pillar placement, it’s not terribly difficult.
• Make sure to very clearly explain how the pillars work and assign people to pillars. DPS players that are able to swap to ranged DPS temporarily, such as Dragonhunters, are good to place on pillar duty. You can also place all support players except the tank on pillar duty too. Make sure that everyone knows whom their assigned pillar buddy is as well. The people assigned to pillars have to stand at max melee range and the people not assigned to pillars have to be right inside the hitbox. Also, make sure none of the pillars are placed in front of the boss. If Adina manages to auto-attack a pillar, she will damage it, and cracked pillars give her the buff that makes her deal more damage and take less damage.
• The main source of surprise damage in this fight comes from the retaliation she gets when she does the eye attack that everyone has to look away from. Urge people to either stop attacking or pop their heal skills at this point or they will kill themselves. Alternatively, you could have someone boon strip the retaliation right when it spawns. Chronos are good for this, but personally I do it on boon Thief taking sword/dagger on my off-hand weapon set and simply double tapping skill 3 right when the retaliation appears.
• For the hands, always kill the curse hands first and then the projectile hands. You will want someone to reflect, absorb, or use stability for the projectiles that are thrown at people. Firebrands with their tome skills or Renegades with Ventari are great for this. Druid can also do this with staff 5 and, if all else fails, you can ask your Dragonhunters to coordinate using Wall of Reflection. Make sure also that at the 50% and 25% phase, you start killing the curse hand on south side first and then rotate to clockwise to kill the other hands.
• You can consider taking a boon Thief comp for Adina, with the Thief tanking. It actually works very very well for this boss because it gives you everything you need - you can have a heal Renegade with the Ventari tablet for the projectiles, a boon Thief to strip the boons and give everyone almost every boon in the game, and really high DPS since you’re not forced to take so many support classes.
• Important roles:
  • You’ll need a tank that keeps the boss facing a consistent direction, usually south side. The boss’s attacks are pretty painful but they’re also quite easy to block or dodge, as long as you dodge on the spot. Make sure that this person moves away from the mines behind them before the boss either spawns new mines or phases at 75%, 50%, or 25% so that the mines don’t kill them when they explode.
• Markers:
  • I use five ground markers - arrow, circle, heart, square, and star - to direct people to the general locations for their pillars, and I use five corresponding target markers on the people who are supposed to kite the pillars.

Cardinal Sabir

• Sabir is a very easy boss that shouldn’t take a terribly long time as long as people deal decent DPS and react quickly enough to the mechanics.
• One of your important jobs as a commander is to coordinate the timing of the special action key during the special CC bar that needs everyone to cast it at the same time. You can look at the squad UI to see who has the special action key and who doesn’t since those with the special action key charged up have a yellow border around their name. When around 6 or 7 people have it, you can either spam an ability in chat or, if you’re on voice chat, initiate a countdown.
• If you’re able to learn or get used to Sabir’s attack pattern and warn people in advance when shockwaves or domes are about to happen, it will help a lot.
• Important roles:
  • You will need someone to handle the wisps later on in the fight. These spawn at 40% of the boss’s health on platforms that fly up around the main platform, and you should have preferably one person, preferably on power DPS, to go to these wisps when they spawn, CC them with the special action key (which they can use to get on the wisp platform to begin with), and then kill them quickly. This becomes pretty much a full-time job for the last 40% of the boss’s health and the person assigned to it needs to be very careful not to die. Usually, the BS goes on power and is assigned to do this.
• Markers:
  • No markers are needed for this fight.

Qadim the Peerless

• This is not the hardest boss in the wing, but it’s certainly the most complicated.
• A cause for wipes in this fight is people not standing in the right positions when the knockbacks happen. The golden rule to survive in this fight is to never place yourself in a location between a knockback and lava. Always stand in places where, even if you do get knocked back, it isn’t a big deal.
• Make sure people understand what to do if they get the lightning or arrow mechanic. Lightning comes in three circles and if they get it, their monitor’s edges will start glowing yellow. They’ll move to a direction where there are no pylon kiters, usually south, and only come back to the group after the third circle is down. The arrow mechanic makes the boss shoot three very painful projectiles at a single person. That person should stand somewhere such that the boss faces away from other people and not panic jump. Just wait until the boss lands his arm on the ground and then jump right when you see him about to do that animation.
• Towards the end of the fight, the boss will start getting boons. These boons need to be stripped, especially the retaliation. The main people responsible for this will be the Chronos with sword auto-attacks, but Renegades and Scourges can help a bunch with this too.
• Finally, at 20% of the boss’s health, he will have eaten all three pylons and everyone will have their special action key forcefully toggled on. Someone might end up becoming the tank when they really shouldn’t be. You can notice who the tank is because they’ll have a purple fixation icon above their head. You should make sure this is your designated tank, and to make sure this happens, make sure they are the first ones to enter or be in Qadim’s aggro range before anyone else does.
• Important roles:
  • You’ll want a tank who faces the boss away from the group, away from any pylons, and away from any orb spawn locations. This person needs to tank all of Qadim’s auto-attacks, trying their best to time their dodges and blocks with each flurry of attacks, and they must have their special action key turned on so they can get the aggro.
  • You’ll need someone to deal with the anomalies, or as they’re called in the fight, Entropic Distortions. This person will go to an anomaly when it spawns, wait till it’s standing on any lava if there is one in the anomaly’s path, and then CC the anomalies and make sure they die. Usually, a BS will do this, but if you have something like a heal Scourge then they are really good for this role too. Make sure that the person doing the CC doesn’t accidentally jump into the lava while CCing or they will die.
  • You’ll finally want three pylon kiters. For this, my recommendation is rifle Deadeye. They can do really really good damage while also having a very easy time picking up their orbs. If you have rifle Deadeyes, make sure they take the trait Silent Scope in the Deadeye trait line instead of Premeditation, make sure they take Shadow Step as one of their utilities (probably instead of Shadow Gust), and make sure that they take Invigorating Precision in the Critical Strikes trait line. Scourges are fine for kiting too, in which case make sure they take Flesh Golem to help with CC and Parasitic Contagion in the Curses trait line to keep themselves alive.
• Markers:
  • Perhaps the most intimidating of things to figure out as a commander is where to place markers for lavas during the 80% and 60% phases. There are actually many ways of doing this, but the most common way is to place a target marker on each pylon, and then to the left of the pylon or clockwise, place the exact same marker but as a ground marker on the orb spawn location. Then, make people split on the pylons evenly at the start for CC; you’ll have three on two pylons and four on one pylon. At 80%, people will place their lava between their designated pylon’s target marker and its equal ground marker. At 60%, people will place their lava between their designated pylon’s target marker and its unequal ground marker.

Conclusion

• We’ve covered a lot of ground in this training run. Anyone here who didn’t take notes probably forgot the vast majority of the different things I said, which is why I’m also recording this and will post it online on my YouTube channel or something with proper timestamps and everything. That way, you can always refer back to everything that’s said when or if you ever start commanding yourselves.
• If anyone is truly interested in commanding and especially training new people, just join the RTI guild from our website and start joining or organising runs. If the runs you command go well and you want to do this on the regular, then we might opt to give you a dedicated “commander” role and you can properly get into training new raiders on a regular basis. It’s very satisfying and rewarding work, and it’s also very important work. I can’t stress how vital it is to have new blood in the raiding community to keep the community and the game mode alive, and that’s going to be so much easier if you have dedicated people commanding, teaching, and welcoming new players to the game mode.
• Anyway, thanks to all the people who came and sat through all of this. If anyone has any questions, go right ahead and say something! It doesn’t even have to be now; feel free to contact me on Discord at any time and I’ll try my best to respond to any specific questions you have. Thanks once again!