Guild Wars 2

Ok, so after spending the last 10 minutes watching my character auto-shoot his short-bow at a DE-boss I must ask….does anyone at ANet believe that giving a mob triple the sensible HP makes them somehow more challenging?

In general, it seems like ANet is trying to make up in HP, what DE bosses lack in actual mechanics. That, or there’s a bug somewhere and all DE bosses are spawning with the max. possible HP. So far this applies to all the DE bosses I’ve done in the 70-80 areas of Orr.

This applies to quite a number of dungeon mobs too, based on my limited experience.

I hate to say this but I wish ANet would have taken more cues from WoW when it comes to designing interesting and engaging fights.

In general though there seems to be a discrepancy between the HP of DE mobs.

-Once more than 10 players partake, trash mobs die almost instantly to the Zerg.
-Some bosses take a solid 10 minutes of non-stop beating, even with a group of 6-10 players.
-Occasionally some bosses drop really quickly under focus-fire.

I’m sure this will be ironed out eventually but I believe it deserves some attention.

Indeed, the real problem here is the lack of any depth in terms of engaging mechanics. The whole system is spank and spank (due to the lack of the trinity), with no brain activity required whatsoever.

Raging Bull

Indeed, the real problem here is the lack of any depth in terms of engaging mechanics. The whole system is spank and spank (due to the lack of the trinity), with no brain activity required whatsoever.

Well, it’s not quite that simple (a little bit of brain activity is required), but it’s pretty close.

Why I don’t understand is how this glaring design flaw made it all the way through (from design to release). Almost all of the dynamic events (the cornerstone of the PvE experience) are trivial. You try to stay out of the way; auto-attack while using your damage skills when the come off cooldown; and dodge/mitigate the enemies one “big damage” special. That, plus reviving the fallen, is literally what (almost) every PvE fight boils down to.

Ideas for DE Bosses:

• Stacking conditions based on proximity to DE Boss. Based on the boss, the condition might effect melee or ranged players more, and it’ll force the players to constantly move outside their comfort zone to shed the condition and force weapon swaps.
• ‘Enrage’/Fail timers. I think DE Bosses should feel more epic and should have a chance of losing, like when that alligator ate the fisherman. The battle was much more tense when you’re trying to jocky the health bar against the digestion bar. If the timer scales with the difficulty, that would be perfect. There needs to be more risk of failure, and that failure could result in everyone dying and the boss going on a rampage or some other equally bad state.
• Larger AOE. DE Bosses should have devastating AOE abilities that do massive damage to the bads who get caught in the red circle.
• DE Bosses need more CC conditions because it’s currently way too easy to evade and escape.
• Bosses should have more invulnerability periods where conditions need to be met (dispatching adds, firing world weapons, collecting materials to keep X alive, etc) before the ‘shield’ is dropped. If the boss regenerates health during this time, that’ll force the players to have some urgency in completing the task.

DE bosses were never meant to be anything other than “casual” content. So why not make them easy?

That said, another way to make DEs scale better might be with number of adds and with aoe damage. Single-target damage is tricky. You don’t want people being one-shot one after another. But personally, I wouldn’t mind if Anet added a few difficulty challenges like, adds have to be killed or they hurt people, adds don’t all group up nicely to be aoe’d down, things like portals or other objects have to be destroyed or boss is tougher/invulnerable/hurts more/etc., etc, etc.

I think they are aware of it cut them some slack the game just came out. They could add some new rare events and just making the events harder would require more of the players than just sitting there auto attacking. The events not scaling in difficulty is the real problem that lets everyone just sit there and blow the enemies away.

Its not related to lack of trinity. WoW could easily drop trinity and keep scripts as it is, and i’m sure Blizzard would drop tanks and healers if it weren’t such a drastic move.

Raid encounters for tanks have almost exclusively been tank swaps and picking up adds. High auto-attack damage and Tank swap mechanics are made specifically so that a raid needs multiple tanks, ergo if there is no tank, there is no need for such a mechanic.

No, the problem is that DE bosses and even a lot of dungeon bosses don’t have any script at all.

Servanin.5021:

Its not related to lack of trinity. WoW could easily drop trinity and keep scripts as it is, and i’m sure Blizzard would drop tanks and healers if it weren’t such a drastic move.

Raid encounters for tanks have almost exclusively been tank swaps and picking up adds. High auto-attack damage and Tank swap mechanics are made specifically so that a raid needs multiple tanks, ergo if there is no tank, there is no need for such a mechanic.

No, the problem is that DE bosses and even a lot of dungeon bosses don’t have any script at all.

The problem is that it’s boring and shallow as it is. How will they fix it – it’s up to them. Hopefully we’ll be pleasantly surprised.