Let's Discuss — Spirit Vale | Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 has some seriously underrated instanced content. Due to the casual nature of the game (and some other issues I discussed in this article), a significant portion of the playerbase never even touch its raids, which is a serious shame, because they're a ton of fun. GW2's action combat makes for encounters that are fast-paced and fluid, and it has some of the most creative fights I've seen in the MMO space, especially in how GW2 incorporates players' kits into the fights.

I've decided to start a series of analyses/discussions on the raids—the lore and story of the fights, their mechanics and general fight design, the strategies players use to deal with these fights and how they've changed over time... pretty much everything. I'll do an article for each raid wing, and as a fun bonus I'll rate each encounter while also maintaining a running tier list of them all. Who knows, if people enjoy these, perhaps I'll do the strikes and fractals, too!

Into the Spirit Vale

The Spirit Vale, commonly referred to as "wing 1", is the first raid instance that GW2 ever released. It's actually one third of a larger raid known as the Forsaken Thicket, which contains the first three raid wings. That's actually where the term "raid wing" came from in the context of GW2—the first three instances are each individual "wings" of one larger raid. 

Of course, that concept of multiple different raids being strung together into one big raid didn't really work out. With each wing being a separate instance, they never really felt like one big multi-part entity, just different raids that happened to have a continuous story throughout them. The community adopted the term "raid wing" to refer to all of the raid instances moving forward, despite the fact that none of them after the Forsaken Thicket were ever organized as full multi-wing "raids" again.

A notable aspect of the HoT raids is that their story is actually a part of the game's main storyline. The PoF raid wings are isolated side stories, while wing 8 and the strikes are all recreations of events from the main story; wings 1-4 and the dungeons (okay and Forging Steel) are the only cases where you actually need to play instanced content for a full understanding of the main storyline. The Forsaken Thicket bridges the story between Heart of Thorns and LW3, properly introducing the White Mantle and their plot to revive Lazarus.

It's worth remembering that, despite their prominent presence today, there wasn't much about the White Mantle in the game's early days. For players who didn't already know them from GW1, their only real encounters with the Mantle would be from a handful of human personal story missions that they may or may not have chosen. There are some subtle hints that some Krytan bandit gangs may be associated with the WM, but the Spirit Vale is where this plot twist is properly revealed.

The story of this first raid wing follows a band of elite mercenaries led by the Commander*. After a squad of Pact soldiers goes missing in the jungle, captured by the bandit leader Sabetha, we're sent in to retrieve them. To reach the bandits, we'll first have to fight our way through the ghosts that populate the thicket, and in the process we'll begin to unravel a deeper conspiracy at play...

One final tidbit before we start actually talking about the fights. You may have noticed the asterisk on the mention of the Commander there. That's because the story was originally pretty open-ended as to whether or not the Commander was actually present for the events of the raids. Things were left just vague enough that the raids could feasibly have been completed by just some random band of particularly competent randos without the Commander's help. Thanks to SotO, this is no longer the case; some details there confirm that the Commander was canonically involved in the events of wing 4, and some of Glenna's dialogue (and our general relationship with her) ensures that being present for one wing means we had to canonically be there in every wing.

Vale Guardian

The first encounter of Spirit Vale, and the very first raid boss in the game. How does it hold up? Pretty dang well, actually.

Tutorialization 

VG starts with a pre-event that's an excellent example of a form of tutorialization called priming, which is essentially where you teach players a new mechanic by introducing it to them in a low-stakes environment, often one where they're forced to engage with it in order to proceed. In this case, it's the three colored guardians that you must defeat in order to reach the main boss. Each guardian uses one of VG's main mechanics, providing an opportunity to learn them one at a time, and two of them also have unique mechanics that serve to teach an important lesson to new players.

The unique mechanics in question are how the red guardian is almost completely immune to strike damage, thus requiring you to bring condi builds to kill it, and how the blue guardian is impervious to damage until you use a boonstrip on it. These serve to immediately teach players that raids in GW2 will often require them to bring specific builds and effects, and that they won't just be able to coast on a single multi-purpose build they brought from the open world.

Lore

We actually know surprisingly little about the Vale Guardian. It's a being made of some sort of magical energy, and it shares many similarities to the Unbound Guardian fought at the end of the Bloodstone Maw meta-event, but that's about where our concrete knowledge ends. It doesn't appear to be a ley-line anomaly, as it has a different style of model, though it does seem to have a deeper connection to the three pylons, which either powered or created it. 

The origin of the pylons themselves is unknown, but one journal entry located in the area nearby states they were 'imbued with energy' by a 'windstorm'. It's heavily implied that this storm is actually the shockwave of magic that was released upon Mordremoth's death—this will be a running theme throughout the raid, in fact.

The Fight

VG is split into three phases, divided by two split phases where you must fight the three colored guardians again. The fight is a relatively simple "ramp", where new aspects are gradually added as the fight progresses. In the first phase, players must deal with the three main mechanics they were introduced to in the pre-event—green AoEs which several people must stack in, or else the entire squad takes heavy damage; blue AoEs which spawn under players' feet and will teleport them randomly unless avoided; and moving red AoEs that spawns at predefined locations and continuously pursue players.

As mentioned earlier, VG works great as a tutorial for raiding as a whole, as it introduces players to the importance of bringing builds and utility effects tailored to the encounters. In addition to the condi damage and boonrips they'll need to get past the colored guardians, the fight also features a toughness tank, who controls the boss's positioning, and benefits greatly from CC effects like pushes and immobilizes to keep Seekers (red AoEs) off the group. As the fight enters its second phase, the boss begins periodically gaining a CC bar, introducing yet another important mechanic.

An interesting strategy most raiders will know for VG is that you can entirely ignore the green stack AoEs. Failing them deals damage to players equal to exactly 80% of their HP, meaning it can never kill you if you're properly dealing with the other mechanics and quickly recover the group with burst healing. While this is most certainly not the only example of a raid mechanic which gets ignored in favor of just outhealing it, it's the most memorable to me, perhaps because of how consistently close it cuts it.

The split phase is also handled very well, in my opinion. Many fights have you split up to kill multiple adds—this trope is so common that it's half the reason we call them "split phases". VG's stands out as especially interesting thanks to the fact that the three adds it spawns are all mechanically different, and two of them require specific utilities to handle. You need to put actual thought into which members of the squad go where during this phase, which I think makes it much more interesting than similar splits in e.g Gorseval.

I already mentioned the Magic Storm attack, which must be cancelled by CCing the boss. The other addition to the fight in the second phase is the Unstable Pylon mechanic, where one third of the arena will be covered in a very dangerous AoE. Which 'slice' is targeted rotates over time, forcing players to move around while still dealing with the other mechanics. I think this adds greatly to VG's quality as a tutorial for raiding, as it's a perfect way to prepare new tanks for the task of boss positioning. It's easy to think that, if the danger area is rotating, you should run away from; however, players are rewarded if they instead think outside the box and avoid the mechanic with minimal movement by instead staying by an edge and entering the previously dangerous slice as the effect moves. Studious tanks may also notice that the green always appears in the same slice that VG is currently standing in, giving them more to think about if their group isn't just ignoring those.

The third and final phase doesn't add any new mechanics, but what's already present gets amplified. Unstable Pylon now targets 2/3rds of the arena at a time, forcing even the cleverest groups to move around, though you're still rewarded for quick thinking and mathematical understanding if you choose to remain near the middle as you move. Additionally, a greater number of blue and red AoEs appear, adding even more pressure.

Overall, VG is a real standout encounter and a great showing for the game's very first raid boss. It does a great job of teaching players many of the general ideas they'll need to understand to continue raiding, as well as introducing some GW2-specific concepts like defiance bars and green AoEs. It's visually appealing and easy to follow even as a viewer, and the fight has very little of what I'll call "burn time". This is portions of a fight where you're not under any pressure from any mechanics and can just stand still at the boss and do your damage rotation—effectively downtime. In my eyes, a good fight should have some burn time to let players breathe, but too much is almost always the sign of a bad fight. In VG's case, it strikes a good balance.

My one big gripe about VG is this: when the fight specifically has three color-coded mechanics, and those mechanics match the colors of the three color-coded minibosses... why the hell do the blue and green bosses use each other's attacks!? It's annoyed me forever, and now that I've pointed it out, it'll annoy you, too.

Verdict: 9/10

Spirit Woods

More commonly called "Spirit Run" after its most interesting and memorable section, SW is the second encounter of Spirit Vale and the game's first "event encounter"—one where the goal is something other than just killing a boss. The woods are split into four distinct segments: a room where you take capture points, a room where you kill a few enemies, the titular spirit run, and a puzzle where you must find and simultaneously press a bunch of buttons.

The Lore

The woods in Spirit Vale are haunted by various human ghosts, primarily the victims of the White Mantle who were sacrificed in their profane rituals. They were awakened by the death of Mordremoth, similar to the Vale Guardian, and are in a crazed, confused state of mind when we arrive. They falsely believe the Commander and co. to be their torturers.

Also located in this area is the River of Spirits, which is a pretty cool bit of set dressing that most of us haven't really thought of the implications of, probably including ANet. Like, that river is clearly made of the same stuff the ghosts are, right? Is that just liquid congealed soul? Why is that different from what happened to... well, we'll get to them later.

The Encounter

Spirit Woods starts off with its worst part: the capture event. You are trapped in an arena with infinitely respawning ghosts. Periodically, a capture point called a "rift" will appear; stand in the area to claim it. If you take too long, the rift will explode and kill everyone, resetting the encounter. Most raiders dread Spirit Woods and have been skipping it since the game gave us the ability to do so, and this section is entirely to blame. It takes upwards of six minutes to complete, there's very little you can do to make it go faster, and it's just... the same thing, the entire time. Stand in circle, wait, stand in circle, wait.

When you finally get past the rifts, the next room is simple; just kill seven of the ghosts (not counting the champion in the middle) and you're done. Groups usually take advantage of classic dungeon strats here, standing behind a pillar to force most of the enemies to come to you.

Next up is the actually interesting part of this encounter, the spirit run. You must traverse a long, winding corridor while being attacked by ghosts and chased by a wall of congealed, angry spirits. Along the way you'll need to destroy several spectral walls and capture a few more rifts. Since these tasks usually need to be completed at the same time, there's a bit of actual strategy in deciding who should stay behind in rifts and who should run ahead to kill the walls. You also need to avoid enemy AoEs and jump at a couple points, giving this section a decently fast pace and hectic feeling.

Last is the button puzzle in the cemetery. There are five buttons hidden across this explorable area, some of which take a good bit of searching to locate and some of which require you to complete a short jumping puzzle. Touching one button causes additional enemies to spawn in the area, and the group must split up to press them all simultaneously, so you often need to coordinate everyone to press the buttons at the same time lest someone get jumped by too many ghosts.

Spirit Woods is an... interesting case. Most of it is inoffensive, and the spirit run part is genuinely fun, but the first section with the rift capturing is just abysmal. It's boring and repetitive and accounts for half of the encounter's runtime, and there's pretty much no reason for it to work that way. The rifts don't get harder as the section goes on, it's just monotony for the sake of it. The encounter as a whole would be much better if the first section ended after a much smaller number of rifts, but as-is, it drags the rest of the encounter down with it and makes it a total slogfest.

Verdict: 4/10

Gorseval the Multifarious

Lore

Gorseval is, once again, the result of the magic released from Mordremoth's death. The shockwave released the souls of those sacrificed to a bloodstone, but twisted them together into a monstrous amalgamation. Another example of the same thing happening can be seen with Lextalion in the Bava Nisos meta-event; if you've beaten Gorseval before, the Commander will even comment on the similarity.

The Fight

Gorseval is another fight that utilizes a toughness tank, but unlike VG there's actually very little going on in the main phase at first. One of Gorseval's auto-attacks will knock back players, but this can be negated with good positioning and stability, meaning most of this first phase is pure burn time.

The most important part of each main phase is Ghastly Rampage, a skill Gorseval will use exactly once per phase. This attack creates rings of blue goop across the entire arena which do heavy damage to players; it only stops when Gorseval uses all four possible patterns of goop or when its defiance bar is broken. Exactly 25 seconds after Ghastly Rampage ends, Gorseval will use another attack, World Eater, which will instantly kill anyone it hits after it stops channeling.

While VG featured a mechanic that can be ignored with good healing, Gorseval shows us one that can be ignored with good DPS. Veteran players almost never even see World Eater, as it can be skipped or canceled if you simply do enough damage to get Gorseval to the next split phase (66 or 33% HP). For new groups, it can be beneficial to go out of your way to CC slowly during Ghastly Rampage, thus giving you more time to dish out damage before the clock starts ticking. Groups very rarely do the intended mechanic, which is to destroy one of the walls around the edge of the arena and glide into an updraft where World Eater can't reach you.

The two split phases are simple. Four Charged Souls will spawn around the arena and begin slowly walking towards Gorseval; if any of them reach it, the boss will instantly use an unavoidable World Eater and kill everyone. Groups generally split in half and use CC effects like slow, chill, and immobilize to stall the adds.

This phase provides us an interesting example of a widespread misconception. The Charged Souls are immune to "hard CC" effects like push, pull, knockback, or stun. For a long time, many players falsely believed that using these effects would actually cause the spirits to move more quickly. I have no clue where this idea started, but it's very funny to look back on.

Gorseval is a ramp boss just like VG, meaning it gets harder as the fight goes on. After each split phase, one new mechanic is added. The first new mechanic is Spectral Darkness. AoEs will spawn near the edge of the arena and continuously expand; anyone who touches them becomes cursed and has their damage neutered. To cure yourself, you must kill the Spectral Darknesses and collect the yellow orbs that they drop. In phase 3, Gorseval starts using Ghastly Prison, an attack which spawns a small AoE under each player's feet. Anyone hit by one of these will be briefly trapped in an egg, which can be broken by using the skill that replaces your bar or by having other players hit your egg.

Overall, Gorseval is a pretty simple fight, and it's made much simpler by the ease with which you can outDPS its main mechanic. It consists of a lot of burn time, especially for experienced groups. Spectral Darkness spawns near the edge, World Eater can be skipped, and Ghastly Rampage can be outhealed, meaning for veteran players the only times you ever have to move are during the split phases and to avoid getting egged, the former of which only happens twice and the latter you're only likely to see 1-2 times in the final phase. The fight is meant to be easy, since it's part of the first wing, but I feel that its mechanics are too easy to trivialize, resulting in it being a bit uninteresting at high levels of play.

Verdict: 6/10

Sabetha the Saboteur

After an entire wing of dealing with various ghosts and spirits, Spirit Vale ends with a showdown against the bandits that kidnapped the soldiers you're searching for, led by Sabetha. She's the first actual character we face off against, and this actually sets a trend of wings consisting largely of various monsters but always ending with a character that actually talks to us.

Lore

Sabetha's importance in the grand scheme of things is a bit nebulous. It's through her that we get the proper reveal of the plot twist that many of Kryta's bandits are actually working for the White Mantle, and it's clear Sabetha and her men work closely with Matthias and Xera to send them worthy sacrifices. She's in on the plan to resurrect Lazarus, and she and her men also seem to have some insight on the various anomalies encountered in the Vale, including the guardians and Gorseval.

It's implied that Sabetha herself might actually be in control of the Vale Guardian in some way, and the Commander also suspects her of "binding the spirits" of some of the ghosts encountered in the Spirit Woods.

Tutorialization

Similar to Vale Guardian before, Sabetha also features a good example of priming. To reach her, you must complete a pre-event where you kill bandits while approaching her arena. In one section, you can only progress by using a Sapper Bomb on a launchpad, a mechanic that will be important against Sabetha as well. 

The Fight

Sabetha is a big step up in complexity and difficulty compared to the rest of wing 1, fitting for the final boss of the wing. This is the first fight to require special roles beyond standard tanks or just bringing an extra utility skill, and it requires multiple—someone needs to act as the flak kite, baiting an attack which constantly fires long-lasting AoEs towards the furthest player from Sabetha, and others will need to handle the fight's primary mechanic, cannons.

The main gimmick of Sabetha's fight is that it takes place on a rickety platform with its own healthbar. Certian mechanics will damage the platform—namely cannons and Heavy Bombs—meaning you'll be on a dynamic timer based on how well you're handling the mechanics. There are four cannons on platforms around the arena, and one will periodically activate and start firing AoEs at the platform, making its side dangerous to stand in and gradually destroying the platform. To deal with cannons, a player must get hit with a Sapper Bomb while standing on the nearby launchpad; unless someone is baiting the bombs (a high-end tactic), it can be applied to anyone, meaning the whole group needs to be paying attention and ready to use the bomb to get someone to the next cannon. This makes Sabetha the first fight with a significant focus on personal responsibility, strictly requiring every single squad member to understand the mechanics and pull their weight.

I criticized Gorseval for its World Eater attack being too easy to outDPS; in contrast, I think Sabetha is a great example of a good implementation of a mechanic that can be skipped with DPS. If your group does enough damage, you're rewarded with the ability to skip some of the cannons for additional uptime, which in turn increases your damage even more. Many veteran groups will pick just a single cannon to deal with, and the best groups can get away with killing none at all. This works because the DPS requirements to accomplish these skips are much higher than Gorseval's, and because choosing to skip cannons comes with an inherent downside—unlike World Eater, which is simply skipped without fanfare, not doing cannons means the platform dies faster (thus making any other mistakes much more punishing) and that the cannons themselves will be applying damage pressure to the squad. There's a risk/reward dynamic in which strategy you choose to employ, meaning the mechanic isn't just completely trivialized by good DPS.

As for other mechanics, Sabetha has a good handful. I already mentioned flak, which is something the kiter will have to deal with throughout the entire fight. There are also occasional time bombs, player-attached AoEs which do heavy damage and must be taken away from the group. Heavy Bombs will periodically spawn, and must be interacted with quickly or else they'll explode and take out 20% of the platform's HP. Finally, Sabetha will occasionally use her iconic flame wall, which spins in a circle and instantly kills anyone that gets hit.

One great part of Sabetha's boss design is that all of her mechanics are targeted based on learnable criteria. The time bombs target the closest players, the flak targets the furthest player, Sapper Bombs are applied to whoever's closest to the Bandit Sapper adds when they spawn (which is itself a consistent pattern), and the flame wall targets a random person. You can optimize the fight a lot by having specific players deal with specific mechanics, or by stacking the group in a specific spot to bait the flame wall into starting at that point. You're always in control of the fight, and that makes it very satisfying.

In addition to all of that, the fight has three split phases. Each one summons a bandit champion with a different, simple mechanic. Kernan fires a combo of increasingly large AoE cones, Knuckles must be CC'd before he attempts to throw players off the platform, and Karde summons flame turrets in random positions that fire projectiles in all directions. None of these are particularly difficult, but they serve to break up the fight. Sabetha will return before each add is fully killed, and will often use her flame wall immediately, which can lead to some hectic situations as well. In the final phase, debris will start falling onto the platform and creating more AoEs for additional damage pressure, but that's the only change as things progress.

Overall, Sabetha is a really well-designed fight. The way cannons and the platform work are ingenious and very unique, and the rest of the mechanics are fun to play around. There is a lot of burn time for most of the squad, since her mechanics are spaced out and most only target one or two players at a time, but that's counteracted by the need for everyone to pay attention to Heavy Bombs, Sapper Bombs, and timed bombs (lots of bombs). It's definitely one of my favorites.

Verdict: 10/10

Tier List

I'll take this opportunity to explain how I'm going to handle the running tier list throughout this series. I've been scoring each encounter, and those scores will equate to tiers on the list. The categories are as follows:

• S: 10/10
• A: 8-9
• B: 6-7
• C: 5
• D: 3-4
• F: 1-2 (I don't think anything will end up here)

The encounters within each tier will also be ordered. Items to the left are considered "higher" than items to their right, what I believe is the standard for tier lists. If for whatever reason I decide to rescore or just move around a previous encounter, I'll also mention that in this section of the first article after the change, along with my reasoning for why.

Now then, the first installment of the tier list! It's pretty small now with just these four encounters, but it'll fill up quickly, I assure you.

Conclusion

I was actually struggling at first to figure out what I was going to write for this week's article. Committing to one a week has been pretty good for my productivity, and hopefully it will convince AdSense to finally let me monetize the blog, but in the process I quickly ran through all of the ideas I'd already had sitting around. Most of my non-review articles have focused on really big-picture topics or huge side projects, and I kinda ran out of huge things to do that wouldn't require a monumental effort and/or more than a week to complete. At some point, I think I sorta forgot that I can just... talk about my favorite game. That was the original reason I made this blog, after all.

It was a slight departure from a lot of my usual GW2 content, but I hope this article was enjoyable to read, for veteran raiders and casual players alike. If you've never raided before but are feeling interested after reading this, I recommend checking out this article from a couple weeks ago for tips on dealing with the in-game LFG and the raiding community at large. Aside from that, I look forward to talking about Salvation Pass next week!