Guild Wars 2

Several World Events were changed in the last update, and not one of them for the better other than Teq. I get the idea about increasing difficulty, but not one of them actually seems any more difficult than before, except maybe Claw, but I’ve never seen it come within 10 minutes of failure. What did change is that they became seriously tedious.

The Maw, as the easiest example, used to be very simple. You run a chain of events, you fight the Shaman, he dies in about thirty to sixty seconds, you move on to the next event. Now, obviously this was being trivialized, and perhaps you wanted it to be more difficult. Fair enough. But it’s not more difficult, it’s still just “zerg-and-spank,” except that instead of being done in under a minute, it takes closer to five to wear him down. It’s about as interesting as watching paint dry to just stand there spamming attacks until he falls over.

Same with Shatterer. He now takes about 2-3 times as long to drop, for the same rewards, and with absolutely no change in difficulty. Again, it’s just tedious. And of course there are the ones that have always been a bit tedious, like the Priestess of Lyssa when there are a lot of people around and she takes about twenty minutes to fall over.

Too many World Events well wear-out their welcome. They have mechanics that are fun for a little bit at a time, but then they just take five to ten times that long to die, so most of the fight is more annoying than entertaining, just busywork. You decided to change the bosses by making them MORE tedious, rather than less, but increasing the time they take to drop, without in any way increasing the fun players would have while doing so. Poor form guys.

I’m not going to go into each boss and suggest ways to improve them, I think that timer assign the changes you made to Tequatl show that you should be capable of figuring that out on your own. What I will do is make two firm recommendations about all world bosses.

1. Figure out a decent time to kill for each boss, and make it work. The current times are not the right times, just a hint. With the current mechanics, spending any more than two minutes on the Maw Shaman is just cruel. With the current mechanics, the old Shatterer was just right. If and when you change their mechanics drastically, you can increase their duration.

A basic rule of thumb should be that once a player has seen a given move and adapted to it, you probably shouldn’t repeat those moves too often. Even Claw’s cycle is a bit bloated, it takes the player repeating the same actions too many times before each phase advances. If Claw were left exactly as is, but it took half the time to drop his wall and half as many golem hits to drop him, it would be a lot more fun.

2. When you scale, do not increase the duration. The Priestess of Lyssa with only 5-10 people only ends up taking maybe five minutes (once you gain access to her directly). Fighting her with 20-30 people? it’s not only a chaotic mess, but it takes about twenty minutes instead. Why? It might be a mistake, and she’s just being scaled up the same as any other boss, but given her turtling behaviors this makes her much more survivable than most bosses, but you should know that and account for it.

Every bosses’s scaling mechanic should be hand tuned to make it so that TTK goes down the more people are added. It shouldn’t plummet, like if it takes five people a minute to kill then it shouldn’t take ten players thirty seconds or anything crazy like that, but it should fall slowly, like 10% per ten players added (diminishing returns, of course), and should NEVER actually rise. This balancing should also be done using fairly average stats, not based on an assumption that every participant will have the very best possible gear and high damage load-out.

TL;DR Boss battles should only last as long as they are fun. The more fun you make them, the longer they can last, but for most of the existing ones they shouldn’t last more than five minutes, and many of them currently last longer than they should.

Ohoni.6057:

Several World Events were changed in the last update, and not one of them for the better other than Teq. I get the idea about increasing difficulty, but not one of them actually seems any more difficult than before, except maybe Claw, but I’ve never seen it come within 10 minutes of failure. What did change is that they became seriously tedious.

Play later at night or on servers with lower population and you will see that claw fails, or people just stand around and don’t even start fighting, because they think its not worth the time because it will fail.
Also the constant fear spam from Jormag now is just so plain annoying.

Shatterer i had once 23 seconds left, and that just because some people were ported to LA to get more players.

But i agree that it all gets just more tedious now, and i think maybe only the timer on Behemoth is ok. A littler longer than before, so people have still a chance to get him if they are late, but still not just a bag of hitpoints like Jungle Worm now is.

Also .. Saturday at 10.00 in the morning on Vaabi there was not even ONE person fighting the last Crystal before Jormag, while at the same time on Elona Reach he was killed in 12 Minutes.

Play later at night or on servers with lower population and you will see that claw fails, or people just stand around and don’t even start fighting, because they think its not worth the time because it will fail.

It depends on the server, but doesn’t change my point, if Claw EVER takes longer than thirty minutes to put down then they’ve done something wrong. The timers add a possibility of failure, but in no way make the encounters more interesting. I would prefer to see all timers removed from these fights, even Tequatl’s, they do not improve them at all, they only have the potential to make them more frustrating.

The claw feels easier with the changes. Phase 1 is about the same. Phase 2 feels faster.

As for the other ones that take longer now. Their effort to reward ratio was skewed towards the reward side. ANet’s options would have been to either lower the reward or increase the difficulty. I am not a fan of the changes but their effort to reward ratio is closer to the others now.

The fire elemental is the only one that seems to have gone overboard.

They don’t take any more effort than they used to, they just take more pointless tedium. More minutes of sitting there spamming attack. There’s no benefit to that unless their goal is to waste as much of our time as possible.

Jungle Worm is the most unfun now, takes nearly as long kittenterer (why is that name censored ? I mean the other “easy” dragon) but in the end gives only 3-5 Dragonite. Frozen Maw takes nearly as long but at least the Shaman can drop an extra champion bag. Behemoth is still quick and i would say he is now perfect, not too long but if you are late you still have time to get him.

Jormag on a Server like Desolation now goes in 12-15 minutes, however the scaling makes him unbeatable now later at night on servers with low population.