Guild Wars 2

I agree OP.. I think these world boss events should have a lot more teeth. I’d also like to see the dragon timers done away with outside the game (as helpful as they can be sometimes).

This is what I’d like to see:

- An in-game timer with it’s own spawn window so you can see at all times when one of the world bosses will spawn
- Some sort of a message flashes across your screen like “an large shadow has been cast over Splintered Coast” to signify that an event has started in that particular area
- Do away with the ability to loot these bosses daily and just have 1 weekly chest (across all bosses) that yields far far greater rewards (gold, exotics, rares, lodestones etc..). Nothing I hate more than waiting around on a single map waiting for a boss to spawn. Sure I don’t want to do that, but if I want the gold and chance at certain items I do.
- Make the world bosses tougher.. like far tougher. Scale up in damage, hp’s, special cued attacks etc.. Make it so they can be failed.

Hell maybe even make some for WvW that spawn, the more damage your server does, the greater the rewards. Wouldn’t that be a hoot, giant zerg vs zerg battle, and a dragon drops right in the middle of it lol.

This is like the best post since the game released. +1 for Shriketalon

This here is inspiration to my passion for gaming and the gaming industry! I really hope developers see this, it would be amazing to see future Guild Wars 2 events like this because this is honestly how I imagined dynamic bosses to be! Thank you Shriketalon!

I just wanted to say that the amount of effort you put in this post, and the quality of the ideas in there, are really worthy of all my praise. Excellent work! Since we know that the developers actively read topics, I am sure they will find quite a lot of interesting material in here!

thank you, thank you, thank you :-)

This is impressive how long did it take you to put all this together? Crystal Reid please make sure that everyone reads this if anything it should spark some ideas. I really hope the devs take a nice long look at this, hell even consider hiring/chatting with this person. Im not saying to do these exact encounters but this person is a genius and you could learn a lot from him/her. Looking forward to the changes anet has planned for the metas

This sounds amazing. You need a spot on the team.

The full mobility can be a problem, mostly due to the latency it would no doubt cause when skyscrapers with legs begin intelligently swathing through armies of players. So, I had the idea of placing a net of “nodes” around the combat area, which the boss can navigate around with pathing chosen by the boss’ AI (which takes in to account player vicinity, density, threat levels etc). The nodes would be distributed such that there’s no “safe” spots between them, meaning that you can’t just stand a distance away from a dangerous node and range the boss to death. So, rather than target individual players or groups of players, it would use the nodes around the area to determine the threat that each one poses, and then move to and/or attack that node’s area. If the nodes are properly distributed, you simply would not be able to stand still and have to keep watch for the boss’ movement at all times. This is just for the mobility aspect, however. Every other aspect of the fights that you mention would be on top of that. The fights would get CRAZY.

That mostly applies to dragon fights, not so much the others.

I think something like that would be much easier on the server and for the dev team to handle rather than a full, dynamic, mobile AI the size of a country.

I think a lot of what you put together is great and could really help the major events get better. I hope Anet considers and implements some of these ideas.

For some reason when I first read the blog and saw some trailers of the Shatterer battle during development, I pictured something like this below (and I wish there was a better video that showed the boss battles better but you’ll get the idea).

I have never actually played Shadow of the Colossus so I can’t say for sure how the feeling of the fights went but I have heard the game was pretty good. Granted it was single player so it may be difficult to implement some things for an MMO. But a few things I can see from the videos:

The bosses are epic in size and the camera and FoV helps this
The bosses are mobile and require movement while fighting
Because of the huge size of the bosses, they actually become part of the terrain and you climb on them to attack different parts or to avoid attacks

Seems like pretty good stuff for a game released in 2005.

If you want a great example of how worldboss events could be made better, spend some time in Rift.

Events there are not so focussed as in GW2, big events impact whole zone, with staged objectives. The “beat on boss” stage, is at the end, and not the whole summation of the experience.

Go look at the colossus event they added in Storm Legion, multi segment bosses, environmental weapons, multi-stage, and progresses through a zone, actually altering the scenery.

Thats the level I want GW2 world bosses to be. The dragons right now are just static, they sit there, and just face forward….shatterer could wipe the whole group just by learning a new move..“right turn!”.

Cameirus.8407:

If you want a great example of how worldboss events could be made better, spend some time in Rift.

I don’t think Anet looks at other games. I had hoped so but I can remember an older interview where they stated that they concentrate on GW2 and don’t look at other games. Which is a pity since a lot can be learned from new mmos, not only the holy old ones.

One of the best suggestion post so far

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Cameirus.8407:

If you want a great example of how worldboss events could be made better, spend some time in Rift.

I don’t think Anet looks at other games. I had hoped so but I can remember an older interview where they stated that they concentrate on GW2 and don’t look at other games. Which is a pity since a lot can be learned from new mmos, not only the holy old ones.

yep. I’m not saying copy another game, but an awful lot of the mistaktes GW2 made were easily predictable by people who have played games with similar mechanics, I’m sure that the devs have played these games, so it supprises me that issues anticipated even before the public betas were not pick up on, and in many cases remain unresolved now.

That post was awesome. Great job. You really put a lot of thought into it. Devs needa check up on this!

I see a Haunter, and i was like, :top:

In any case, lots of thought went into this and I can certainly agree.

Especially, you don’t only say “Devs, fix this!” but you actually provide solutions. I don’t want grindy mobs, but epic battles worthy of songs and prideful joys.

What also makes a good boss fight is a unique music during the battle.

The main problem with finals is that they interfere with the important things in life, such as forum threads on the internets. Anyway…

kittenune Fujibayashi.4813:

Most of this seems like a decent idea, but I’m not too sure about the weekly chest. It sounds to me like that’ll just end up with everyone zerging the bosses on Saturday and nobody doing them at all by the time Wednesday rolls around.

I understand the concern, but let me elaborate on that matter.

The main reason to shift to a weekly basis is to account for failure. If world bosses in the future do become difficult and people do die horribly in a screaming mess as they should, there is going to be trouble with a daily reward. If people only have one chance to kill the Claw of Jormag in a single evening and their server failures, the loss is going to seriously rustle their jimmies and make them rather spiteful towards one another. This will likely become toxic quite quickly, leading people to hate the clueless noobs foiling their farming when they cannot pull together.

Contrast that with a weekly attitude. If something terrible happens Wednesday evening against the Claw, it isn’t the end of the world. Try again Thursday or Friday before the Saturday reset. When people are less stressed about a single loss, they are far more likely to band together and focus on why they failed and how they can improve rather than devolving into ranting and blame. The more relaxed schedule will also allow guilds to schedule certain boss raid nights or for servers to organize training against some of the more fiendish creatures.

Weeklies may not seem as immediately rewarding, but they allow for more calm and relaxation to combine with extreme difficulty and frantic destruction for a better balanced boss beverage.

LokiAlpha.8164:

Well, let me just explain something, I’ve been playing since launch. I was actually level 80 within the first week of the game’s release. I fought a lot of bosses before people knew the mechanics, or had good gear. These world boss fights were epic, and amazing, and there were only a handful of people doing them at the time. We died. A lot. We struggled to down the boss in any reasonable time(45+ minute boss fights on Jormag). So, why is it, that all of a sudden the boss fights are boring?
…
…
In my opinion, ANet does not need to waste resources on a one-time bang of fun, and instead needs to continue to focus on 5-man content.

For starters, because balance changes have ensured that you are NOT fighting the same bosses as before. The Fire Elemental at launch held a double major in Flambe and Murder due to its knockdown+boil attacks and elemental spawns, but the nerfbat it took a few months later reduced it drastically. And secondly, boss fights because boring once people learned to glitch or zerg them to victory. Shatterer cannot fight people standing by his right shoulder. The Maw shaman is incapable of hurting a zerg using ranged attacks. The majority of the other bosses simply cannot kill players who know what they are doing.

But they could and they should. You are entitled to your opinion that they should be ignored because future bosses might be farmed, but I would remind you that the primary source of gold in this game comes from five man content being tilled regularly. Just as dungeons should be improved, so too should Anet find ways on making world bosses magnificent.

The two battlefields are sides of the same coin. For dungeons to be improved, they must be more difficult, engaging, and varied. For world bosses to be improved, the exact same thing must follow. There is no need to declare that one must be abandoned to focus on the other, for the entire game can flourish in all its aspects with enough tender love and care. Speaking of…

nethykins.7986:

3 – I’m aware than these changes will pretty much be out the the grasp of ANet’s limitations, more on tech limitations than effort and time required. I know you hinted at new things being added, but I’d really, really (can’t stress “Really” enough) like to hear your ideas on the dungeons as they stand now and what you would do to change them.

Hmm. A conundrum.

Please note, I am not an expert on dungeons, having not yet finished the last few parts of my Dungeon Master title (although after nine months, I finally managed to set foot in Crucible! Huzzah!). Ergo, please do not consider this an erudite opinion in any way. But judging from the content I have played and the various forums I have read, the following thoughts come to mind.

1) Fractals and Molten have demonstrated some improvement on the dungeon front, especially in regards to trash content versus steady progression. The best way to design fun encounters with normal enemies is to make each creature bring something unique to the table and allow different combinations to create different fights. The smarter the standard enemies become, the more tactics and control skills become vital for victory, and that’s a good thing. Give monsters a lot more small skills and a few big effects, combine them in interesting ways with enough incidents to be substantial without overstaying its welcome, and the normal fights will be keen and engaging.

2) To balance the need for challenge and accessibility, dungeons need more modes. Right now, explorable is supposed to be the elite content, yet it’s farmed in twelve minute speedruns for cash thousands of times per day. Add too much difficulty, however, and the farmers leave and the newbies complain. To meet different needs, the dungeons should expand outwards rather than try to suit everyone’s needs.

Personally, I’d go with something like this…

-Story Mode scales to the number of players participating, allowing solo or five man. Also, it should provide some tokens the first time the character completes it, just to ensure people actually care.

-Explorable Mode should be split into two forms: mission and free roaming. Mission should be as it is now, without the random bits. In contrast, Free Roam would provide open exploration of the entire dungeon, facing random encounters and many different bosses scattered throughout each area. Anet can choose which of these modes would be considered the reasonably difficult and which would be given mind-breaking hardcore status, and balance appropriately.

-Challenge Mode should reinvent the GW1 missions of old in a dungeon form. Each dungeon could be given several different challenges which rotate each week to provide a different overall objective. Some could be simple (speed run time, highest damage spike against end boss, highest number of foes killed in the least amount of time), while others could fit the dungeon’s individual character. Award prizes for the weekly winners of each server in terms of loot, and provide a unique title for the highest scores of all time that they must defend from challengers (if someone else beats the high score, the previous holder’s title is removed).

3) Defiant must die. Simply put, this condition it an abysmal way to make bosses more difficult. Not only does it allow players to grief one another (if someone specs for control they can foiled simply by someone else activating a CC skill at the wrong time), but it represents a refusal to let certain playstyles work rather than meeting players halfway and making bosses actually deal with CC in interesting ways. Molten Facility proved that boss fighting can and will improve in the coming days, and I look forward to additional improvements along those lines. But to actually make the support/control/damage concept worth two dubloons, the game needs to make bosses actually work with the skills and abilities players bring to the table, and Defiant simply does not do that.

There may be a way to use some of the current engineering and an existing creature’s odd mechanics to do just that, but it would take a little more analysis than I can do off the top of my head right now. Might make an interesting new project…

Shaeyl.7064:

Anet should hire Shriketalon.

Probably not a good idea, actually.

Every good thing in this world is about 5% good concept and 95% skillful implementation. Anyone can dream, but the ability to manifest that dream in this reality we all share varies greatly between craftsman. To be a worthwhile teammember, I would have to actually provide tangible talent capable of rendering a vision within the medium via technical or artistic ability. So unless Arenanet is in dire need of a geologist with a background in technical writing and geotechnical data analysis (…..unlikely), I doubt I would actually contribute much.

But I sincerely thank you for the compliment.