Guild Wars 2

First thing: more in depth encounter mechanics, more complexity. Like, a LOT more.

Second: more difficult. Really challenging. And I don’t mean “boost the HP, boost the damage dealt on Dragon’s behalf, trusty deckhand. -Aye aye, skipper!”

Third: REMOVE THE AUTO-AIM from the cannons! I hate artificial crutches this game uses to make it easier for the player. Make it similar to mortars. Player needs to aim by himself and be accurate.

Fourth: Boost the rewards once the dragon is dead.

No need to thank me ANet, I accept both dollars and euros. Contact me for my foreign account and bank details. :P

Zii The Mad.2563:

Many many people moaned duing the BWE’s: “The game is too hard, the game is too hard. We will never develop any personal skill, so please make it easier”. Now it is easy, very easy, and we are all left with an empty feeling inside.

Yes – But, I think that mostly applies to general PvE content (and solo play) and they should roll that back to the kind of level they had in BWE1.

OTOH I don’t see how they can make those large zerged boss fights interesting for variable numbers of players . If I’m playing ranged the boss really has to one shot me to take me out of the fight (as some do), otherwise I’m just going to run out of range and heal. Even if it does one shot me I can revive at the nearest way point and run back in half a minute or less.

So how exactly do you make an open world boss fight more interesting/challenging with a zerg of 40 on balance average players attacking it? Individual skill hardly makes a difference at that scale so you can either balance it so that an average collection of players win or they lose.

the first time it took us 15min to kill the boss. i had 30fps during the fight
but the second time i took part at this event i had only 5fps.. (hw: i7 3770k & gtx680)

it was not possibile for me to use any of my skills properly because it felt like 5min to actually activate one skill… (funny thing – got gold though…^^)
all in all it took only 3min to kill the shatterer

IMO its just the zerg that gets waaay to big….

altough im all for hard bosses i dont think that it would be such a good idea to give this boss more hp and dmg
imagine beeing part of a zerg of 200 people (just a random #) trying to deal dmg and dodge attacks with only 5fps…

Zii The Mad.2563:

Many many people moaned duing the BWE’s: “The game is too hard, the game is too hard. We will never develop any personal skill, so please make it easier”. Now it is easy, very easy, and we are all left with an empty feeling inside.

Sadly. It also doesn’t bode well for the future if things continue to be toned down to appeal to the vocal portions of the community who demand that everything is accessible. I enjoy a challenge and I’ve found a fair few already in this game, though dynamic events become very predictable and many are quite similar. It’s the mechanics that make a ‘boss’ intriguing, so we need to see more focus put on them rather than allowing people to just stand around and attack something for ten minutes whilst dodging now and then.

The big boss fights just feel like giant loot pinatas to me. A lot of the other aspects of the fights arnt even factors if enough people show up and when that happens you can pretty much just afk spam to get a gold.. Support roles are not even acknowledged.

I love how all thesekitten are trying to discredit you by saying “the shatterer isn’t an elder dragon”. Completely irrelevant.

Agree with you 100%, the fight was a total disappointment. After fighting him once and seeing how easy he is, I fought him a second time. I just walked into range, pressed “1”, and left my computer to go watch tv. Came back 5 minutes later to a chest of loot, full health bar, and gold participation.

Could be fixed easily by making it so his aoe attacks are actually threatening. All he really does to kill anyone is the breath attack which moves painfully slow, has a small radius, and does very little damage anyway. The crystal phase isn’t all that special – everyone focuses down the crystals like they should and it’s all good. I haven’t seen what happens if you fail to destroy the crystals.

Would also be pretty interesting if he turned people into “shattered” enemies, but that would pit players against one another so Anet would never do that. Too bad, it would be super kitten.

Also – why the kitten don’t any of these dragons just stomp on people? They just kinda sit there and wait to die while they use worthless abilities every 5-10 seconds. It’s so lame.

Martiger.8920:

The Shatterer is one of the best looking fights ever seen! But so easy I’m so disappointed with him after seen him for years on Youtube and then finally fight him but he was almost dead before it started Ppl ignore tactics and only nuke him down instant. Tequatl have the same problem. Sometimes a little random mob at the same level as you are harder -.- Let us fail to kill him sometimes? The more epic it is to take him down. Give them a hearty buff and a random spawn timer instead of 3 hours. It will take away the camping and also the spam “Timer on dragon? Please!” Ofc I love the game anyway

How on Earth is that the best fight ever seen? I think exactly the opposite, it’s one of the worst ever. PLUS it’s too easy.

And enough with “oh but I love the game”, you don’t need an excuse to criticize something that is beyond awful. I, for an example, see the potential in GW2, but it has to be REALIZED in practice otherwise it’s no use.

roqoco.4053:

Zii The Mad.2563:

Many many people moaned duing the BWE’s: “The game is too hard, the game is too hard. We will never develop any personal skill, so please make it easier”. Now it is easy, very easy, and we are all left with an empty feeling inside.

Yes – But, I think that mostly applies to general PvE content (and solo play) and they should roll that back to the kind of level they had in BWE1.

OTOH I don’t see how they can make those large zerged boss fights interesting for variable numbers of players . If I’m playing ranged the boss really has to one shot me to take me out of the fight (as some do), otherwise I’m just going to run out of range and heal. Even if it does one shot me I can revive at the nearest way point and run back in half a minute or less.

So how exactly do you make an open world boss fight more interesting/challenging with a zerg of 40 on balance average players attacking it? Individual skill hardly makes a difference at that scale so you can either balance it so that an average collection of players win or they lose.

How do you make fights more interesting for large groups of people? Simple: MORE MECHANICS! ^^

Of the top of my head:

• More boss abilities: Examples: Encage players in ice that slowly suffocates them unless helped out. Isolate players in difficult situations. Dungeons and Dragons online has a lot of interesting mechanics in boss fights, like isolating the player and forcing him to fight his own mirror image. Take notes from other games that have good boss fights.
• Bosses with the retaliation boon: Would force players to actually be awake during fights, instead of DPS’ing and then going afk. Now there is a thought.
• Bosses should have a failure scenario: The boss is trying to achieve something. If the boss achieves it, you fail. Atm. you can’t lose. If every player logged out of the boss fight and came back 1 hour later, the boss would still be there… screaming (mostly talking about the dragons here).
• Different AI: Instead of applying the same chaotic AI to every mob (that switches targets like the wind), how about a specific AI for certain mobs. Like maybe a berserker that sticks to one target when aggroed, is immune to CC and won’t stop until the target is completely dead (or it is). DEAD, not downed.

It’s like not a lot of thought has been put into designing the various events, which is really weird considering how long the game has been in development. DPS’ing away and always winning is not an indication of a great combat system.

Ps. Dying is fun. It makes actually beating the event that much more rewarding when it finally happens.

All of this:

roqoco.4053:

How do you make fights more interesting for large groups of people? Simple: MORE MECHANICS! ^^

Of the top of my head:

• More boss abilities: Examples: Encage players in ice that slowly suffocates them unless helped out. Isolate players in difficult situations. Dungeons and Dragons online has a lot of interesting mechanics in boss fights, like isolating the player and forcing him to fight his own mirror image. Take notes from other games that have good boss fights.
• Bosses with the retaliation boon: Would force players to actually be awake during fights, instead of DPS’ing and then going afk. Now there is a thought.
• Bosses should have a failure scenario: The boss is trying to achieve something. If the boss achieves it, you fail. Atm. you can’t lose. If every player logged out of the boss fight and came back 1 hour later, the boss would still be there… screaming (mostly talking about the dragons here).
• Different AI: Instead of applying the same chaotic AI to every mob (that switches targets like the wind), how about a specific AI for certain mobs. Like maybe a berserker that sticks to one target when aggroed, is immune to CC and won’t stop until the target is completely dead (or it is). DEAD, not downed.

It’s like not a lot of thought has been put into designing the various events, which is really weird considering how long the game has been in development. DPS’ing away and always winning is not an indication of a great combat system.

Ps. Dying is fun. It makes actually beating the event that much more rewarding when it finally happens.

Like a lot of people have said- DPS’ing a dragon foot and evading the occasional foot stomp is sort of “yawn”
Dragon’s mythically speaking are epic creatures, and usually intelligent…… so why do they fight fairly stupid? I have yet to see someone get “bitten”… better yet SWALLOWED and you have to fight your way out from inside while taking dAMAGE FROM STOMACH ACID (ASSUMING YOU WERE NOT BITTEN IN HALF?)… Excuse the random caps lock….
How about we all attack a foot until it falls over then have to go for the head and only head damage actually counts to killing it?
Maybe have them MOVE and not stay in one place (or predictably fly away and come back)

Cause and Effect mechanics maybe requiring some teamwork? Only 3 NPC turrents can take down the dragon but they have to be defended from minions while the dragon has to fended off from a power supply for example…. something creative?

Someone said random timers, but I think that is a bad idea…since an Epic fight needs at least decent #’s….. and there is no server wide chat to call out a random Epic spawn so it will be a fail event or guilds will have campers and use guild chat to rotate events… either way it makes it hard for semi-casual or small guild players… why deny a solo player the ability to chack an approximate spawn time and then try to attend a FUN COMPLICATED event

Diversity in event mechanics would be nice.. not like other MMO’s where it is ok..at 75% he will do x…they at 50 he does y… then at 20% and below he will spam x and y….

A “Whoa… never saw him do THAT before” moment is a good thing… not a nuke type wipe people thing…but something… tail swipe… bite… maybe rage instead of fear where you damage you fellow players for 10 secs?? people would have to stop mindless DPS and be care ful what and how they attack.. no AoE only direct targeting etc…

I have no “answers” but I think this thread has some great suggestions

I’d like to add my voice here, hoping that perhaps the Shatterer will live up to its image one day after some update or other.
It is indeed a magnificently executed storyline, as someone wrote above, from noticing the shadow first when you arrive in the region up to finally fighting the dragon itself.
and the visuals are so gorgeous!
but the fight itself! the excitement only comes during the first time, not knowing what to expect, but then it turns out: there’s no danger whatsoever. It is indeed a let down. There could be so many things the dragon could do to make the fight more interesting that it hurts even more that it doesn’t. something that affects an area, or all attackers would work effectively even against large number of people, but there are many good suggestions above.
Anyways, love the game nevertheless.

The Mega Destroyer is the funnest world boss.

Whoever designed him should rework the shatterer, claw, and tequatl. And should be in charge of future world bosses.

Only thing disappointing about the mega destroyer is that it uses a really commonly used destroyer model. Couldn’t we have gotten a model like the Great Destroyer? All the other dragons get an infinity champion supply, why can’t Primordius?

I dislike shatterer, but I liked the battle against tequatl.

tequatl has much more layers to the combat wherekittenterer feels like a mindless button smashing event.

haven’t done claw yet.

In terms of encounter design, on a scale of 1 to 10, I’d mark the dragon fights as follows.

The Shatterer – 3 out of 10 – Pretty animations, visually impressive but no threat whatsoever to players.

Tequatl the Sunless – 5 out of 10 – There are quite a few mechanics here but none of them seem to have a major impact on the fight. It’s like ANet wanted to make the fight seem complex without actually being challenging.

Claw of Jormag – 7 out of 10 – Now we’re getting there. Jormag is a clear step up from the other dragon fights. Especially when fighting him with less than 40 people it can actually be quite…challenging. There’s a lot of stuff going on although it’s not always clear how they affect each other.

Overall however the Dragon encounters all share the same problem in that they don’t scale well with player numbers.

The fights can seem pretty epic with up to 30 players….but after that they just turn into mindless zerg-fests followed by loot-pinatas. I also feel that the Dragon encounters shouldn’t simply be put on a timer and repeated every 3 hours but rather be a reward for completing all the DE in certain zone.

Jaxichael.2590:

The Shatterer, as others have stated, is not an elder dragon – AND on top of that, one of the first REAL threat bosses you see in the game. It makes sense that it would be doable. If you’ve fought the Claw of Jormag yet, you’ll see how interactive boss fights can be.

Hogwash.

Honestly, I’m more than a little tired of the tutorial-style excuse. We had this tutorial back at level 1, with a “epic” bosses that can die in under 10 seconds. Then I ran into another “epic” boss at level 15. Same problem. Rinse repeat. The Shatterer is a level 40 encounter. These “epic” bosses (from the tutorial onward) are just way too easy to put down and the working solution with all of them seems to be pump out damage, damage, and more damage, and top it off with a touch of damage.

When I first did the Claw of Jormag event (first time I did a dragon event), we had maybe 3 or 4 people. Took about 4 hours, and was frustrating as hell. I’d say 15 or so makes it fun. Of course, on my server, there is rarely more than 20 there. In fact, at The Shatterer event, I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than 7 or so.

I have done couple of these fights on Ruins of Surmia (medium pop, fairly low medium these days I’d guess) and Ring of Fire (high pop). It’s very different and scaling doesn’t compensate. Since most people here seem to be complaining about how the events go with high population, I’ll describe my experience on Surmia.

The Shatterer is one of my favorite events. I just like the location, visuals, animations, siege tools and adds. Surmians would turn up for the event but the zerg just wasn’t overly big. Due to lower dps on the dragon and crystals, we’d have several crystal phases before event was over. Someone didn’t even know what their point is: They heal Shatterer while they’re up. If you don’t have enough people to kill them fast, they might undo most of the damage you had done until that point. The collateral aoe damage flying around was also far less, leaving more adds alive and having them sometimes reach the siege weapons. This would peel further dps off the dragon. Overall not a very difficult fight but you felt like you had done something.

Claw of Jormag was even somewhat challenging and frustrating on Surmia. 1st phase would have him fly up multiple times due to lower total dps and again dealing with the adds is a major distraction for a lower amount of people. Once the charrzookas weren’t even available (bug or related to other events?) and people had to go closer into aoe damage auras to shoot at the barrier. 2nd phase was quite deadly. While on high pop server dragon would be down to 25% (half of 2nd phase done) before the strong veterans and champions even spawned, on Surmia most of the phase was done slowly while under constant fire of those adds (which on both servers are too tough to be worth killing still) which would not only down (and even finish) players but kill the golems that needed to be escorted through in high numbers to progress anywhere. Golems would also be dying to the ice pillars while with higher population middle area stayed mostly clear. Champion adds would sometimes be loose on the worst spots in the middle of golem routes.

The scaling for population really needs to be a lot more sensitive or these can never be really balanced to be fun for all. Remember that very quiet off-peak hours have some small groups doing the events as well. Although I’ve heard those people admit it wasn’t really worth the extensive time invested generally – so clearly the dragon hp is very high for them still.

The group event dragons suck. lol The other dragons sucked too. They’re all just so weak and boring, all you do is keep shooting at it in safe spots, dodge an AoE here and there, revive a person here and there…. Claw of Jormag was more involving, had more steps but still in general was boring i stood there with auto attack going and just watched the screen half the time in my little safe zone.

Another thread is talking about the Fire Elemental in Metrica… There is also Lyssa and Balthazar priest/priestesses which were huge challenges even to a large amount of people. The dragons need to be on that kind of scale where everyone dies super easy, and need to be on their best performance to stay alive.

I mean the look of them, the NPCs shooting it down, calling out warnings etc is fine.. .but the danger of them not so. Being able to just slice at its foot is also stupid, won’t it just crush you if it moves its feet? lol maybe give its feet alone some power, like more knock backs and damage with every move.

If possible, dragons should also have AI to actually respond to people, like people crowding at its feet, it can literally just crush them. It should also aim better at actual people. Give the higher end dragons like Claw of Jormag and Tequatl more advanced AI

I agree thes epic dragon fights r so badly thought out.... you wait fior four hours tob get to play in one and it lasts less than 5 mins...... whos idea of fun was that???

The lag in these events turns the fight into:

1) Show up
2) Press 1 maybe 2
3) Stay out of the Red Circles
4) Collect loot and hope the RNG likes you.

I made a thread about all the dragon fights needing a revamp here – https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/events/Dragon-Fights-Need-Changing

Raging Bull.5048:

How on Earth is that the best fight ever seen? I think exactly the opposite, it’s one of the worst ever. PLUS it’s too easy.

And enough with “oh but I love the game”, you don’t need an excuse to criticize something that is beyond awful. I, for an example, see the potential in GW2, but it has to be REALIZED in practice otherwise it’s no use.

I logged on just to say this:

How exactly is The Shatterer so bad aesthetic-wise in your eyes?

Why are you acting as if this game is the equivalent to Superman 64?

Why am I suddenly reminded of SoMuchMass?

He’s easy because hes in a relatively low level zone. Doubt they want random lvl 40-50’s in there running into a dragon and getting smashed instantly. Jormag is in an 80 zone, and his fight is pretty interesting, and people get downed constantly. Are the basically impossible fights to lose? sure i guess, but so are most events that have a ton of people at them. I bet if only ~5-10 people showed up (like some Orr temple bosses during night hours), it would be possible to lose, but dragons are really popular so there’s always at least a decent sized crowd.

Regarding the more random timing of when he can spawn, I get the feeling that all that would do is get guilds to send people into the zone every 10 minutes to check up on him, or at least always have a member ‘stationed’ there.

I’d always assumed that The Shatterer’s fight was sort of an introduction to later Lieutenants, sort of like to get people to dip their toes in the water, so to speak. However, I think of all the lieutenants, The Claw of Jormag is the most challenging (although not really HARD but you have to be on your toes for it).

The Shatterer was extremely fun while levelling my ranger. Henge bled a LOT of population when the WvW guilds quit, and their “followers” fled to other servers.

That’s because the first time I faced him, There were a grand total of 5 players there, and we could not keep up with the trash spawns. We called in a little guild backup, and ended up with 11 people there. We actually got to see all of his mechanics, rather than just having things melt the instant they appear.

With the small number of people, the crystalization mechanic he has also came into play, and it made it much more important to free people before they “shatter” and do 95% of your health in damage.

The second time was with around 18 people, and while his mechanics still came into play, they didn’t play as big a part as with the smaller fight. This one also showed the typical Shatterer player behaviour…3 people doing the pre-quests, 15 people idling by the dragon spawn point.

There are Meta events in almost every area. Most of them spawn chest with drops equal to the dragons. It’s just a size thing. Many of those smaller events are sparse making them out to be much larger challenges.