Welcome to my guide for the Guild Wars 2 raid boss, 
Cardinal Adina (Earth djinn), one of the first encounters in The Key of Ahdashim (Wing 7). This is a detailed guide on the mechanics of the fight including various strategies that cater to everyone from beginners to experienced raiders. If you’re brand new to raiding, I recommend reading my Path to Endgame guides first.
Cardinal Adina has short, distinct phases. She is not a difficult boss, but she does require some coordination and divvying out roles before starting.
Power DPS is better for the short phases and handling the adds in the intermediate phases quickly. Builds with strong ranged weapons and skills are particularly good.
You can use two 
Boon Thieves because Cardinal Adina's stolen skill is 
Detonate Plasma, which provides five players with every boon except for 
Alacrity.
Boon Strip: Useful but unnecessary, boon removal will take some pressure off of your tank and can be particularly useful in the last phase.
Projectile Mitigation: While not technically required, some form of mitigation is often used for the intermediate phases. Adina is on a platform of hexes over quicksand, standing in the middle of five rock pillars. Entering this ring of pillars will begin the fight.
If a player falls in the quicksand, they will be launched back up on a 
Sand Geyser. Every bounce inflicts moderate damage, 
Bleeding (5 stacks), and 
Radiant Blindness, a 10-second debuff that causes all outgoing attacks to miss. This gives your screen a cracked, sandy appearance, and the effect cannot be removed; players must wait for it to run out.
The rock pillars are a recurring mechanic throughout the fight. They come in three different states.
Adina a stack of 
Pillar Pandemonium, a buff that increases her outgoing damage and reduces her incoming damage by 20% per stack. These need to be attacked twice to be destroyed. Adina a stack of Pillar Pandemonium. These need to be attacked once to be destroyed.Two players should stand behind each pillar before the fight begins. Someone can start the fight by running in the ring of pillars (and then immediately back behind their pillar), or by hitting Adina with a ranged attack.
She will begin by releasing a shockwave, doing moderate damage to anyone struck. This wave can be jumped or 
Blocked, but the easiest way to avoid it is by being on a mount when the fight starts. Your mount will take the damage instead of you. She will then empower all the pillars, giving herself 10 stacks of Pillar Pandemonium, and throw boulders at every player. I’ll explain this mechanic in more detail later, but for now, all pillars will be destroyed as long as you have two behind each.
After this attack, everyone can move in. Adina will aggro on your tank, the player with the highest 
Toughness. She will never move from the center, but the tank should choose a direction to face her and stick with it throughout the fight so everyone else knows where to stack.
Adina repeats the same attack pattern during the main phases. Her auto-attack, 
Stone Fist, does little damage and can easily be out-healed, but as she can’t turn during it, the tank can also sidestep. She gains two stacks of 
Might with every auto-attack, so this is primarily where Boon Strip can come in handy.
She will use three auto-attacks and then target the tank with 
Perilous Pulse. This is a long, thin orange cone that tracks the tank’s movement. She will release a tremor three seconds later that does moderate damage and 
Knocks Back anyone in the cone. The tank should Block this or at least negate the Knockback using 
Stability.
She will also use 
Tectonic Upheaval at the same time as Perilous Pulse.
Tells: On-screen message: “You have been targeted with Tectonic Upheaval!”
The five farthest players from Adina, aside from the tank, will receive a small orange PBAoE. After five seconds, the AoE will ‘drop’ wherever the player was standing at the time. Two seconds after that, a pillar will spawn on the AoE’s hex. Anyone standing on the AoE when the pillar spawns will be instantly 
Defeated. The pillars also emit small shockwaves that 
Cripple and 
Immobilize. The shockwaves can be jumped, but it’s generally easier to run out of range of the newly-spawned pillars.
If two AoEs are placed overlapping, only one will spawn. You shouldn’t do this if you have all 10 players alive, but if one or more players die or you’re attempting to low-man the fight, you can use this trick to spawn fewer pillars or destroy existing damaged pillars.
Following Perilous Pulse, Adina will use five auto-attacks and then use Stalagmites. She will conjure stalagmites in a rough cone shape on each hex where the tank is standing. This is indicated by small orange expanding AoEs. If stepped on, the stalagmites will detonate, inflicting heavy damage, 
Weakness, and Bleeding (5 stacks) to players on that tile and anyone within a small radius. More importantly, they will destroy the hex underneath. The only way to negate the damage is with 
Invulnerability. The tank can sidestep when they see the AoEs.
The tank should not face Adina toward a spawned pillar or else no one will be able to reach it during the upcoming attack. Players should also do their due diligence during Tectonic Upheaval and not place a pillar directly behind the tank, as this increases the chances stalagmites will surround it if the tank does not notice.
Fifteen seconds after the Tectonic Upheaval mechanic (eight seconds after they drop), Adina will roar and begin charging Diamond Palisade. A glowing eye will appear over her head. Three seconds later, a few things will happen:
Adina will immediately follow this up with 
Boulder Barrage, so players should stop attacking, turn away, and get behind a pillar when they see the eye icon.
An expanding orange AoE will start to fill the platform. Four seconds later, when it reaches the edges of the arena, Adina will spin, throwing boulders at every living player. Any player struck will go down and be inflicted with Radiant Blindness and Bleeding (3 stacks).
Each boulder that hits a pillar will damage it. Thus:
After Boulder Barrage, any unprotected players should be revived as soon as possible so they can return to the stack.
She will then repeat her attack pattern as follows:
3x Stone Fist → Perilous Pulse + Tectonic Upheaval → 5x Stone Fist → Stalagmites → Diamond Palisade → Boulder Barrage
Five players should always be assigned to bait pillars. This will ensure no one is taken by surprise and fails to move away. The pillar baiters should be the healer(s) and any boon support or DPS players with ranged skills so they can continue attacking as they back away. Avoid assigning any full melee builds to this role unless absolutely necessary.
An easy way to ensure the same five people get the mechanic every time is to have anyone not baiting stand within the grassy hexes surrounding Adina. The baiters can stand on the ring of rocky hexes just outside this area, meaning they will always be farthest away.
There are a couple of strategies you can use for placement. The commander can place five squad markers around the arena, roughly corresponding to the locations of the initial pillars. The baiters should always take their AoE close to one of these markers, and the other five players can return to the marker they started for each Boulder Barrage.
You can also use a buddy system, putting object markers on the five baiters and assigning or letting the other players choose who they’ll partner with at the beginning of the fight. The baiters can place their pillars wherever is convenient, although putting them in the same area each time is desired. The other players can follow their buddy to the correct pillar during Diamond Palisade.
Stray empowered or damaged pillars can be destroyed in a few ways. The tank can face Adina toward a pillar the next time she uses Perilous Pulse; this will destroy any within the cone. The tank should notify the stack if they plan to do this so everyone can rotate to still be behind her. Alternatively, someone can place their next Tectonic Upheaval AoE on the existing pillar, and the spawning one will destroy it.
If only one player dies, squads will usually still split and place pillars as usual. You can combine two pillars so she doesn’t keep a stack of Pillar Pandemonium, but one player will always receive Radiant Blindness and go down to Boulder Barrage. If two players die, you should definitely have two baiters place their pillars in the same location.
If your squad has extremely high DPS, you won’t have to worry about where you place the pillars or how many you have overlapping, since you will phase her before she uses Diamond Palisade. Do not count on this unless you know your squad is capable of meeting the check.
When Adina reaches 75% health, she will go Invulnerable and destroy stalagmites and any remaining pillars. Two red arrow tells will form a straight line from north to south. Shortly after, she will channel 
Quantum Quake along these arrows, beams of rock and sand that slowly rotate 360° counterclockwise, similar to Sabetha’s Firestorm. The beams start slightly offset from the arrows, but when they meet, they become ‘active’ and will instantly kill anyone they touch.
When Quantum Quake has finished, Adina will 
Terraform the arena. She will get a medium orange AoE under her and mark many hexes in the arena with small orange circles. She will lift up the grassy hexes beneath her, forming a raised platform of pillars. Like the pillars formed from Tectonic Upheaval, these will kill anyone in the AoE and release a larger shockwave that destroys the marked hexes as it billows out. It also does moderate damage to players but can be jumped or 
Dodged.
A giant stone hand will spawn in the sand on the northwest and northeast sides of the new platform configuration. The one in the northwest is a Hand of Erosion. Every 15 seconds, it applies one stack of 
Eroding Curse to all players, increasing the damage they take by 15%. The effect wears off after one minute, so it will persist into the next damage phase.
The one in the northeast is a Hand of Eruption. It uses 
Stone Claw, which throws stone projectiles at players that Knockback players 200 units and inflict Weakness and Bleeding (5 stacks). is a good countermeasure since a 
Revenant can maintain it for a long duration and move it with the squad, but other skills such as a 
Necromancer's , 
Mesmer's , Thief's , or 
Druid's can be equally effective. You can also use Stability to negate the Knockback (keeping in mind players will still take damage and conditions).
You can either split or stay together to kill the hands. If you’re staying together, I recommend destroying the Hand of Erosion first to minimize the number of stacks people gain. If you’re splitting, make sure the players on the Hand of Eruption have some way to deal with the projectiles so they don’t take unnecessary damage and their allies on the other hand don’t get knocked into the quicksand.
When both hands are dead, Adina will Terraform the arena again, this time into a rough four-pointed star shape, and another main phase will begin.
This phase starts when Adina reaches 50% health. It is almost the same as Phase 2, except two additional hands will spawn: one in the southwest and southeast.
You can stay together or split as before. If you’re staying together, make sure you know which side you’re starting on. If you’re using to deal with the projectiles, it might not last through the phase. To ensure the longest uptime possible, your Revenant can swap to when the phase begins and let their energy cap out as they run from the wall.
If you’re splitting, again, ensure the players on both Hands of Eruption can deal with the projectiles.
When all four hands are dead, Adina will Terraform the arena again, this time into a small circle with two outer rings and ‘bridges’ in each cardinal direction connecting them. Another main phase will begin.
This phase starts when Adina reaches 25% health. It is identical to Phase 4, except there will be two gaps in the lines of hexes extending north to south. Players should be prepared to jump twice and potentially Dodge as they get to the other side to avoid Stone Claw.
When all four hands are dead, Adina will Terraform the arena again, this time into a rough spiral shape, and another main phase will begin.
This phase is the same as the other main phases, with one addition. At 20% health, a Hand of Erosion will spawn in the northwest, and at 10%, one will spawn in the southeast. They stack Eroding Curse like the ones during the intermediate phases. They can be killed, but players usually ignore them in favor of burning Adina down quickly. If you have a couple of dead players, consider killing at least one since Adina's Might and the incoming damage increase will steadily increase the pressure put on your tank.
If you don’t kill Adina within 8 minutes, she becomes 
Enraged and does 200% more damage.
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© 2023 Phoenix Uprising.
All rights reserved.