Guild Wars 2

I’m on Jade Quarry server, and we do Tequatl every reset, with a very high success rate. I had assumed it was the same on other servers as well. Lately, though, I’ve seen forum comments suggesting that there are really only a couple of servers that do regular Tequatl events, and that the dragon is ignored on almost every other server.

So, I’m wondering if ANet has plans to address this issue, or if the new Tequatl is here to stay.

There are lots of threads already about the Tequatl event in general. I’m more interested in a discussion about how to revitalize the event and bring it back into the mainstream event rotation for most servers.

It seems to me that the issue is not “difficulty” but “complexity”. The obstacle here is that the event requires a very high degree of knowledge, coordination, and pre-planning, all of which makes casual event groups unrealistic. If that is the case, then the best fix would be to simplify the event without reducing the difficulty.

Tequatl fight can be broken down into Offense Phases and Defense Phases. I like this feature a lot, because it gives a back-and-forth play to the battle that makes it feel more epic. We zerg Tequatl, Tequatl zergs us, until one of us prevails. I’d like to preserve that element of the event.

Here are a few suggestions to simplify the event so that it is more accessible to casual groups:

1. Fewer turrets. Increase the efficacy of turrets, but reduce the number to one set of three. This preserves the turret mechanic, but reduces the number of players dedicated to turret operation/defense.

2. Fewer Fingers of Tequatl. Another ancillary mechanic that draws players away from the main action is having to deal with all the finger spawns. Reduce the number of finger spawns, or weaken the fingers so that they require fewer dedicated players to manage.

3. Improve Battery/Laser survivability. On Defense phases, there are 4 points of defense, and they all are very fragile if not attended to quickly and effectively. Make them tougher to allow more room for error, and give player groups more time to respond when one is in danger.

4. Increase event timer. Increasing the amount of time we have to defeat Tequatl allows groups to better recover from mistakes and failures in previous phases. Right now, failure at a defense event can mean the whole event fails because we just don’t have much time to rally.

Did a JQ Teq run today (-3 hrs) from the reset for EU peeps on the NA server. (Approx 9pm UTC).

Many folks in the map had not killed Teq before (and still did not have the achievements from the meta).
I agree it is very complex to get sorted and we had a fantastic effort and JQ didn’t do too badly at all.

We had about 80 people+ into the map (not a hard-map cap):
*Teq was down to about 33% of health at the end
*Was organised 10 mins before he was about to appear.

A big thanks to everyone in JQ who turned up from lions arch, cursed shore and frost gorge.
[I promise to organise more of these!- we will get him killed at non-reset times also]

(Watch for more of these runs between for those EUs who cannot make the NA server reset on JQ. You will have to be in lions arch for those “ATTENTION: Jade Quarry messages – you know which commanders/guilds are organising them for you for the good of the JQ world with the big boss events on a regular basis at non-reset times: Karka, Balthazar and now Teq!”)

I do agree that many of these points in this thread would help revitalise Teq.
There are so many players who have now given up completely and have been turned off by how this world boss currently operates.

Now onto the constructive bits of how to fix this:

I really feel that Teq could do with some basic scaling items being fixed:
1) reduce chance of champions appearing at turrets if too many players stroll into the turret areas. This will encourage people to go up to the DPS kill zone to degen Teq.
<6 turrets are not so bad – but the scaling if many too many people are at the beach does not help>. I think we may still need 6 to keep scales down etc – without a major rework of the battle.

2) Definitely work on reduction of the number fingers/frequency appearing or poison dmg circles/length.
-> I never understood why a dragon has fingers appear randomly in the ground (do they somehow detach from his body?)
This seems to be a major killer with the poison condition which lasts a long time and cannot be easily removed.

3) Shockwaves – these seem so unrealistic. It’s a wave of water that can be jumped over not a tsunami – so why do two waves down players?
This really should be a knockdown yes – but enough dmg to kill players ?

• Players are not all going to run PVT builds just to survive Teq – this hurts casual players most who will not have more than 1 armor set. They are probably using rare armours (exotics if we are lucky).

4) Event timer – an additional 5-10 mins on the timer would rejuvenate this battle for sure and allow a non-hard map cap to complete it.
(15 mins seems unrealistic when claw of Jormag has a 30 min timer ??).
- completely agree on this point 100%.

5) Dead player scaling: dead players should not count as part of the scaled event.
-> this would help encourage people to go res using a waypoint without affecting the battle as much as it currently does. 20 people dead on the beach will get you champions to fight – once they WP out , no more champions. Not everyone has speedy reactions to go find a waypoint and res out.

6) Agro/finger reset between phases – these hang about between the phases and need to be killed. Loose foes can do major damage as the battery phases start if not delt with before the cannons appear. This makes the battery phase even more fragile than it needs to be.

The complex organisation of scale of this event is enough that most servers have completely given up on it (even at reset).
Many people were unaware that JQ did it at reset and asked do people still do that thing ?
(This is a common reaction I get from people who are not around at reset as it’s too late or early for them – think APAC/EU on NA servers).

It would be interesting to know the number of players who still do not have the full meta achievements or how many people actually do this out of the entire server population. The quality of kills seems to be going down even on some regular server groups (at reset) as time is progressing and people have got the drop they want (or meta) and are no longer doing the event.

I know this thread may irk people who are happy with the status-quo and want it to remain hard to ensure prices of the drops remain high and unobtainable for many. (It affects your potential profit – I know you won’t like it. You have had exclusivity of this event now for a while to have had the chance to profit from it in a big way).

The rewards are good enough for sure – 14K karma, 3 gold for 100% success each day/reset.

The depth of organisation is very complex with too high a failure ratio % as it currently stands.
Anything to make this more open for the community I feel would be a good thing.

This was a problem that was already predicted when the new Tequatl went live. Since then I have completed Tequatl a few times, and always got rubbish rewards in return. I can’t exactly say that it felt it was worth all the effort (at least not so far).

I wonder if this was the intention of the developers? Do they want this boss to be mostly ignored after the first couple of victories? Because right now it takes a lot of players and a moderate amount of coordination, which several servers no longer bother with.

I dont bother the dragons any more. Since a couple of months seems the devs are making the game a bit more booring. Only thing i still like is the mystic forge.

The living story is also booring and less fun then the before story’s..

For the record, I don’t think Tequatl is boring. I like what they’ve done with this battle. It’s way more exciting now, and you can actually fail the event. The problem is that it takes a lot of coordination, and usually you have a very subpar reward for all your efforts. The event doesn’t scale with smaller numbers of players.

For example, if I happen to be in Sparkfly Fen when Tequatl spawns, and I happen to organize the random players that are there, I will still fail the event regardless of my efforts. There could be a ton of random players in the zone, but unless I get them all on TS, and get the instance filled to the max, I haven’t got a chance for victory. And that is a bit of a harsh requirement for an event that gives pretty poor rewards, unless you are extremely lucky.

Tequatl is great, there is nothing to address. If they are not killing him on other servers, how is that Anets fault.??? I mean, you can guest to any server, so I have difficulty accept any argument that suggest “no one is doing it” .

coglin.1867:

Tequatl is great, there is nothing to address. If they are not killing him on other servers, how is that Anets fault.??? I mean, you can guest to any server, so I have difficulty accept any argument that suggest “no one is doing it” .

The math has been done that it’s about 3% of the population on a given day. Considering that a lot of the same ppl do it more than once per day that 3% drops to 2% or less. If you consider 2% a success, then yeah sure.

I do. It means they made something that is too difficult for all the care bears to kill. Successful indeed.

Got a link to your numbers? I think your being dishonest in your representation of the populations percentage. Prove it.

The encounter isn’t my problem, I love it and have been fortunate enough to have taken part in several successful kill attempts. However, what stopped me were two things:

1) amount of time investment – yeah raids in other MMO would be a 1-3 hour commitment but…

2) lack of guaranteed rewards – without the rewards to justify such a time commitment, I’m just playing a slot machine essentially.

In a comparison to other mobs in this game, how many of them offer you a guaranteed reward? What percentage of raid mobs in other MMOs offer you a guaranteed reward?

I am asking because it appears to me that this wouldn’t be something you would expect. Guaranteed rewards are not the norm, so I do not understand how you can dislike an encounter because it does not guarantee rewards.

I have never had to invest more then like 30 minutes. if you spending 1-3 hours, that is an issue with you as I see it, not the encounter.

Honestly though, this is what a lot of us asked for. Not everyone can completely enjoy it, as with every encounter, it will have it fans, and those who do not like it.

coglin.1867:

In a comparison to other mobs in this game, how many of them offer you a guaranteed reward? What percentage of raid mobs in other MMOs offer you a guaranteed reward?

I am asking because it appears to me that this wouldn’t be something you would expect. Guaranteed rewards are not the norm, so I do not understand how you can dislike an encounter because it does not guarantee rewards.

I have never had to invest more then like 30 minutes. if you spending 1-3 hours, that is an issue with you as I see it, not the encounter.

Honestly though, this is what a lot of us asked for. Not everyone can completely enjoy it, as with every encounter, it will have it fans, and those who do not like it.

1) Let me rephrase the “guaranteed reward” part, I should have instead said “imbalanced rewards vs. other PVE content.” I’m not keen on spending more than an hour plus to get blues and greens and one gold instead of doing multiple dungeons and earning around 8 gold not counting trash loot. That’s a poor decision when I’m trying to maximize my limited playtime.

2) And yes the encounter does take more than an hour. The encounter (fail or success) is short, true, around 15 mins. It’s the window leading up to it that’s killer. Therefore my analogy with other mmo raids can be accurate because the window CAN and OFTEN has made the overall Teq. experience be 2 hours and change… again for blues and greens.

So yes, my pov is coming from a rewards balance perspective. And I’m sure that this is one of the reasons some people have stopped doing Teq.

Fair enough. Let me ask you this. If you would have received one of the unique items available from only Tequatl, would you feel the same way about the encounter?

Honeslty, for me, the majority of the fun, is doing this encounter with friends and guilds, as is almost everything I do in GW2.

coglin.1867:

I do. It means they made something that is too difficult for all the care bears to kill. Successful indeed.

Got a link to your numbers? I think your being dishonest in your representation of the populations percentage. Prove it.

Done…next time do a lil research yourself b4 calling someone dishonest

http://gw2dragons.com/dragons/leaderboard

All you had to do is look at some of the other Teq threads to find the math posted.

There are currently two schools of thought:
I’m fine and happy – why:
<1> *I do this at server reset and que for up to an hour to get in. I can make this time." You are on Jade Quarry – so I’m pretty certain you are in this group.

The second group of people are the following:
<2> “We are not on the primary world that does this or cannot make the server reset”- there is a large amount of players actually in this bucket without any achievements.
These are players such as EU / SEA who you want to encourage onto a NA server to help keep your WvW going in what would otherwise be quiet times.

The same principle applies here for EU servers – I don’t know how frequently NA players in the EU (or oceanics) perform Teq at non-reset times and frequently.

To state your opinion – feel free to qualify which bucket you fall into:
<1> – I do it at reset and que – have fun. Good chance of success.
<2> – I can’t make reset have to guest to another world for a non-reset chance.
Also state which timezone you are in, and which world you are in, if you are happy or not.
<3> – I just don’t get the chance to do it, but would love to still if only it was at a reasonable hour for my timezone. State which timezone you are on and what server.

Essence Snow.3194:

coglin.1867:

I do. It means they made something that is too difficult for all the care bears to kill. Successful indeed.

Got a link to your numbers? I think your being dishonest in your representation of the populations percentage. Prove it.

Done…next time do a lil research yourself b4 calling someone dishonest

http://gw2dragons.com/dragons/leaderboard

All you had to do is look at some of the other Teq threads to find the math posted.

Wait, what? This post doesn’t even make sense. I called someone dishonest who was trying to speak for others. What does anything on dragonbrand have to do with representing the population as a whole?

Oh never mind, I see what is going on here. You are using some oddly small sample size to assume you can base that to make up numbers with no real facts. Now that is what I call dishonest.

Wow…. ok this will be my last reply since you don’t seem to get it.

That site tells us the number of times Teq has been killed on every server. Since we know when it was introduced we can deduct how many times Teq has spawned since being updated, then we multiply that by the number of servers. After that we take map population caps into consideration to find out the percentage of players involved. It doesn’t give you a small sample, it gives you the entirety…….lol. It’s really rather basic.

I supplied all the math..(if you were willing to do something for yourself and look) in other threads on the matter, but judging by you response it looks like you want others to do everything for you.

No actually it absolutely does not. I have killed Tequatl somewhere in the upper teen amout of times on organized overflows, somewhere around 19ish They are not tracked on the site you use. Lord knows how many other times overflow kills occur. We even have guilds on my server that advertise in LA about organized overflow kills.

If you need evidence, just go to you tube or twitch and do a search for “Tequatl overflow”

So clearly your leaving out an entire population of Tequatl killers. To throw your terms back at you, the entire hole in your math is pretty basic.

Entire population is not in overflows. That’s nice if some overflows killed Tequatl. Unfortunately GW2 API does not track overflow instances, so overflow won’t count.

Geekfox.4267:

Entire population is not in overflows. That’s nice if some overflows killed Tequatl. Unfortunately GW2 API does not track overflow instances, so overflow won’t count.

Exactly my point. Makes it hard to claim you can know exactly how many have killed him when you cannot even begin to know how many times he is actually killed.

Hum. I wonder if I can get my Zerg to a random server in liu of overflow… Eh, I’m more a temples commander and I’m not sure they’d follow for Teq… Not yet, at any rate.

Nothing wrong with overflow, but its hard to get into overflow if your server map isn’t full. We could use guesting to see that more of the servers get those overflows…even use them as a kind of named overflow…
//Portable Corpse

Don’t overflows take place on a particular unused server anyway? So some of those high Teq kill numbers are actually due to TTS guilds populating it and thus artificially inflating the scores?

At risk of derailing this thread further:
There is a risk every world boss will become this difficult – how then will people cope with a major reduction in killing world bosses?
It is something that ANET has stated may happen in the very near future – they have started with Teq first as what I see is an experiment.

I don’t want an answer to that scary thought in this thread

Feel free to start a new thread on how that would make you feel before they do it and reduce the Jormag timer down to 10 mins for example with no other mechanic changes as it stands (Prehaps you would have to decide is it Teq, Jormag, Grenth or opening Arah on a nightly reset with a full compliment of people!)
<End of side topic>

There are a large number of players who still have not completed Teq for many reasons (or even have a single achievement yet !).

I have fought Teq about 5 times and have TWO ascended weapon box drops !

Yes – that is right TWO (that’s RNG for you hey? – these odds should not be that high).
I do know what it feels like to get the reward, I also understand the frustrations felt by many of the players who either get disconnected (Main JQ) during the match up and would love another opportunity to get it killed after waiting for over an hour for the boss to spawn and wait another 23 hrs for the next opportunity.

I want to hear from more players that fall in buckets <2> and <3> as many of them don’t want to join a specific single guild to kill one dragon and they want to remain in the guilds which hold there friends and closest allies.

I want to help server worlds develop and be better at this as a whole- even if that means training, reaching out to people and slowly improving the odds of success for the greater good of the entire player base.

Other world bosses currently scale we’ll – this one is very difficult without a hard-map cap and disproportionate to the others.

I welcome more feedback from players that are unable to do this at the major server reset times.

Coglin : I don’t want to argue with you.

You must be one of these individuals who can make the server resets of JQ who stands a very good chance of winning. My bucket <1> – and I am very happy for you !
This is obvious from your posts.

I want this to be accessible to people who are not in TTS or people who cannot make the server resets.

There do seem to be plenty of worlds which don’t really stand much of a chance of winning. TTS is a NA only guild specifically formed to start killing that one dragon (and they certainly don’t cover all the timezones for various groups in NA) and they also have said it is difficult to get all the organisation planned out and done.
I don’t know which guilds were formed in the EU to kill this dragon (if any).

I don’t know if those overflow stats are included or not – I know from experience there are many standing around in Lions Arch who don’t even realise who or what Teq is !
I want to ensure that they have a chance of being able to experience this awesome content and enjoy an epic battle, participate and enjoy the encounter.

I’m very glad you are happy with the current status quo
– you fit the category 1: I do it at server reset and have fun.

I am more interested in the other category of players and there opinions right now.
This is not to dilute your opinion (we hear you loud and clearly), but I feel the rewards should be more accessible for the other category groups of players and make it more mainstream than it is. Even TTS has some major difficulties and problems organising these matches at non-server reset times (has been stated before in other threads).
——

Harder content?

Well, Balth right now is ‘harder content’ but unlike Teq, a Zerg can seemingly do nothing wrong, fail at no clear defense objective, lose no morale, and then find half of itself dead and the event failed, players asking ‘what happened?’. If there are cues, if the morale loss is gradual, if there are champion risen with giant zerg-piercing frickin laser beams attached to their heads, then the Zerg can see and respond to these challenges. As it is today, Balth presents a good level of difficulty but of an extremely poor type. (And if I am to put any weight to reports I’ve heard from NSP last night, it might be getting worse?)

Teq, however, gives you clear objectives, but I think suffers from some of the nicer features of dynamic scaling. If I stand at x,y, the event scales up at x,y, not the whole event, just where I am standing. This opens up some dynamics in a multi-section event like Teq, where players may just run through a defense point, bringing the aggro they drag, plus scaling it up for the point defense players, and creates scenarios where players call for ‘more needed at X’ when more really doesn’t help (yay, event just scaled up locally) you need smarter or savvier players.

That said, I’d welcome harder content across all levels (except fractals, which gets dang hard – killed myself with a barrage on 43 last night…). I’m not sure the community is ready for it… Unless the difficulty can be made to scale with the Zerg. 10 players at Teq? Keep at least one gun working and DPS the guy. 20? Keep a full set of 3 guns working and DPS him. 50+? Keep all guns working and start securing a perimeter. 100+? Full perimeter guard, added defend points, and keep the DPS on Teq. If nothing else, this would break up the Zerg, making things easier on low end client systems, and level the playing field for low pop servers, while keeping things a challenge for high pop servers.

All I can say is, if my server (Aurora Glade) want to kill Tequatl, we first have to organize everyone via our server’s forum. We have to all agree to meet in the same instance, on the same day, at the same hour. We then have to make sure everyone is on Team Speak, and has the right consumables and weapons, and that we have the whole instance filled with people. And if everyone follows the commanders correctly (which is a big IF) and doesn’t mess up the canons, then there STILL is a chance to fail the event due to lack of DPS. Despite everyone’s best efforts you can still fail this event if you happen to lack that extra bit of DPS, and for what? Poor rewards. That’s just way too high requirements for what is usually a big let down.

But I think it’s already indefensible that players need to organize so much to win this event. A random group of players in the zone should be able to do this. It shouldn’t be a DPS requirement. That’s just bad design.

Is Teq hard work? Yes
Does it take lots of organizing? Yes
Does it take dedication from the organizers to make it work? Yes
This is the point of Teq it is a dragon and supposed to be hard to do.
Do I want it easier? No
Dispite it not being done on most servers I still think it should stay mostly as it is.

I am one of the lucky ones that has a server that does Teq on reset. JQ does it every day at rest but I’m a EU player so I mostly don’t make that event. Its way too late for me. Would be interested to know what other server does daily Teq.
JQ also now has a EU daily being done for those that can’t make the reset. so hefe is a server that does a daily for both NA and EU times with continued success. There must be other servers out there.

I also feel that other world boses need to be a harder too as atm I feel sometimes like it repetitive. Im not a hardcore gamer but I want a challenge and I feel the deficulty that teq went up was amazing and I love it with all those people working together to get him downed. Now thats teamwork

should remove it, its dead content ignored most times on most servers…

Isis Gebnut.4609:

I also feel that other world boses need to be a harder too as atm I feel sometimes like it repetitive. Im not a hardcore gamer but I want a challenge and I feel the deficulty that teq went up was amazing and I love it with all those people working together to get him downed. Now thats teamwork

Please ANet look at the actual numbers and see that the majority of players DON’T want this and leave the other events alone.

I just ran my first Tequatl, by guesting to another server. We had very large fairly organized group, we failed I got 2 chests full of the same loot that drops in every 70-80 area in the game. I’m not saying that the drop rate for exotics isn’t much better for Teq but I don’t play GW2 just to chase exotic drops and even if I did, Teq is not the place for a good return on time invested as far as I can tell.

Here is what I liked about the new Tequatl:
1) The idea of coordinated action and the need to defend specific ancillary supports like the batteries. cool idea.

Here is what I didn’t like:
1) the number of people required to kill Tequatl and protect the objectives means that I spend 30 minutes as a huge cloud of name tags clicking “1”, it’s slightly better if I set my video card settings to “best performance” so some many of the players aren’t rendered. I guess it’s ok to fight next to green armymen, but it’s still a huge mess of rendering and name tags.
2) The same knife-edge game dynamics that ANET seems to live on. Either content is trivially easy, like leveling in the 1-15 zones or it’s Tequatl, very little in between, of course this is a slight exaggeration, but it does illustrate a problem in the devs approach to design. Same thing with the Event jumping puzzles….
3) It requires way too much coordination between large groups of people with no real way to communicate between everyone, the chat text is just not viable with all the “instakill” AOEs and other effects.
4) It’s boring. Personally I don’t like being a blob of nametags. I am not sure what to do about this, but I can’t imagine even the people who “like” Tequatl really like that dynamic….

I don’t have the achievement and won’t be running Tequatl again in it’s current state, if other events are made in this paradigm, I guess that will be more stuff I won’t run. There are other games.

Spoon