Guild Wars 2

even if you do get gold time, the amount of loot dropped likely isnt enough to make up for the cost of starting it. In short, even with a perfectly coordinated raid, its probably better to go to orr.

In the meantime, please make the rune recipes from the last time available again. That’s the one thing I wanted to go back for, and you couldn’t even do that. Shameful.

I usually try to see things in a positive light, especially with new releases, but I’m rather baffled here. Right now I’m in an instance where we’re killing Boom Boom and we still have 5 bosses to go. I’ve watched the past 15 minutes go by with her health dropping about 20% total, between her healing and just have waaaay too much HP.

I don’t know what the intention is behind Boss Blitz, but it surely isn’t having fun. For now I’m autoattacking while playing on my phone.

Vael Victus.2654:

I usually try to see things in a positive light, especially with new releases, but I’m rather baffled here. Right now I’m in an instance where we’re killing Boom Boom and we still have 5 bosses to go. I’ve watched the past 15 minutes go by with her health dropping about 20% total, between her healing and just have waaaay too much HP.

I don’t know what the intention is behind Boss Blitz, but it surely isn’t having fun. For now I’m autoattacking while playing on my phone.

syupposedly you’re supposed to fight 3-6 bosses at once so they dont scale up too much via sending in 3-6 coordinated squads of heroes. In practice, good luck.

Donating coin does not activate the Blitz; it accelerates it. It will progress on its own.

The bosses also die very quickly if you aren’t in a map cap blob.

Nokaru.7831:

Donating coin does not activate the Blitz; it accelerates it. It will progress on its own.

and then once it activates it grinds to a halt for the next hour or so until it finally gets beaten

Bri.8354:

I was hoping ANet would learn from season 1 of the living story and improve

there’s the mistake. don’t ever assume anybody would learn whatsoever whenever. people are bound to repeat their mistakes over and over again. arenanet is no exception.

This is something I can never understand. Anet keeps saying they want people to move away from full zerk and all DPS traits, but then they keep making more and more stuff which just encourages people to stack DPS. It just makes no sense.

If you want people to diversify builds, make content that requires or encourages diverse builds, not content with arbitrary DPS-checks.

Ive lead 3 gold kill on Boomboom today all you need is condi and she melts and hit the turret when they spawn You only need 6 people to kill her anyway

You must be new here.
Because this isn’t new, but two events brought back from early last year.
And quite frankly, they’re pretty amazing.

Unloveableone.6082:

You must be new here.
Because this isn’t new, but two events brought back from early last year.
And quite frankly, they’re pretty amazing.

No, theyre half of what those events were, but nerfed into the ground lootwise and with a couple new events slapped onto the other one to make it look like they spent more than 5 minutes retuning it,.

Or you could complain about not being able to zerg faceroll for loot instead of enjoying it.
Whatever floats your boat.

Unloveableone.6082:

Or you could complain about not being able to zerg faceroll for loot instead of enjoying it.
Whatever floats your boat.

enjoying what exactly?

screaming at 50 other people when they refuse to group into anything except a zerg no matter how much you beg and plead?

Bri.8354:

I was hoping ANet would learn from season 1 of the living story and improve upon their game design. Instead it seems they threw together everything they could think of to make this the poorest designed content to date.

Access to the event is poorly restricted, requiring players to spend gold to activate it! Requiring players to spend a general currency to unlock an event of all things is one of the worst methods of restriction. Something far more appropriate would be an event players would need to complete to start it up or having to donate a resource obtain from killing monsters around the arena.

The bosses are damage sponges that repeat the same few actions over and over, providing no challenging mechanics or true risk. Of the few players that are downed they are easily brought back up by surrounding players, and those who die can just waypoint and be back in the fight in 10 seconds.

Rewards for participating are severely lacking. Monster drops are almost non-existent and the bosses don’t even drop a champion bag. Completion rewards are reduced the longer the players take to complete the content when the speed of completion should be enough of an incentive in itself. For bronze completion you’re looking at 2 champion bags and a green. Because of the gold cost of starting up the event you can lose money for taking part in this event.

Please stop nonsense like this.

Well said. I really hope that this is no indication of the next living story.

Honestly, it would have been better to just release the exact same content from last time. ANET, why would you dedicate people to this, and then roll out a product that was worse than the first time around? It literally makes no sense.

Xae Isareth.1364:

This is something I can never understand. Anet keeps saying they want people to move away from full zerk and all DPS traits, but then they keep making more and more stuff which just encourages people to stack DPS. It just makes no sense.

If you want people to diversify builds, make content that requires or encourages diverse builds, not content with arbitrary DPS-checks.

This bothers me as well, especially at Boss Blitz event in The Crown Pavilion. Adding Indomitable to bosses shutdowns a most of builds/skills thus making “your own variated builds” totally useless. But sure Bleeding, Poison & other Conditions are still passable, but then again it’s still limited.

So Zerks for everyone!

I actually think its is about as good as mari haha. Ppl just don’t learned how to play other way than deahless zerg .

First of all : if everyone in map donate 1s, you will still pretty mcuh activate it.
Then, the bosses mechanics :
Stampedes : Dudes, this is the most fun and perfect fight ever. Stampedes have been such a really smart design to make ppl don’t go afk attacking.
Ogre hawks : Another great design : Your group need to KNOW what they are doing. if they just autoattack headless, they will kill thenselves (So funny hahaha).
BoomBoom you need to take care of turrets, The destroyer you need to watch your step and be aware of the fir burrows, and even the Flame legion guy have a entire enviromental area. Pirate is the most casual one, buts its is still good for new players.

So, all bosses have his own and nice mechanics, and as if it was not enough, ppl need to learn how to organizate up to beat’em all together, so they don’t x’fer up their elite skills to each other.

Rewards? I really think the fun is very rewarding, but either way you still get a lot of goodies at gold reward. Well, I agree, they could be better, but this game never have been about rewards in hard contents at all.

PS: Zerkers are not the only and the best way to do it. Condis are awesome at boom boom, and tankers also very good at pirate.

problem is the fights are not that fun. Not rewarding and not fun is a bad combination for a game.

There isn’t that much strategy involved. You just pound them down, over at least a 15 minute time span, and stay alive doing it. It’s stupid if you don’t even get a reward for doing the work.

Good luck co-ordinating PUGs to split equally to 6 directions. Maybe, if you have a guild team with 6 commanders organizing the whole thing. But then the whole megaserver thing will ruin it.

All the skill and raid awareness on earth packed into your little frame can’t fix your teammates not killing the heal turret. My first boss blitz took 2 hours. That’s my last boss blitz. Might as well have not even brought it back, Anet.

Nanyetah Elohi.4852:

problem is the fights are not that fun. Not rewarding and not fun is a bad combination for a game.

There isn’t that much strategy involved. You just pound them down, over at least a 15 minute time span, and stay alive doing it. It’s stupid if you don’t even get a reward for doing the work.

To be honest, those bosses have some of them most well designed telegraphs in this game to date and some very very interesting mechanics. Look at Wiggins and Pyro, look at them! That’s clear and fair telegraphed mechanics which promote active movement.

Xae Isareth.1364:

To be honest, those bosses have some of them most well designed telegraphs in this game to date and some very very interesting mechanics. Look at Wiggins and Pyro, look at them! That’s clear and fair telegraphed mechanics which promote active movement.

I’d LOVE to look at them, but they were buried under 50+ people hitting them with spell effects.

You can say that “well, you shouldn’t be zerging” and you’re right, we shouldn’t. I was trying NOT to. I tried getting multiple commanders, tried convincing pugs to split, tried forming parties and slipping away so the 5 of us could attack one boss. But each shard I loaded into the vast majority just zerged.

I think everyone defending this content is imagining how it should ideally be played and saying ‘well, if it were played like that it would be good content’. Maybe, but in practice it isn’t played like that… and even if I WANTED to play it like that, which I do, I CANNOT do it of my own free choice. I somehow need to find a shard of 70-ish players who think like I do.

So in practice it is not fun.

Worse, not only is it not fun, it’s not rewarding. Even gold tier rewards are terrible. I’d love to see a graph of player participation numbers in the Pavilion over the few weeks of this patch, I suspect it will bottom out rapidly and stay there, as there’s absolutely no reason to do it, and it’s frustratingly designed.

Imagine the same bosses instanced, with say ten of your friends and a more forgiving timer. Can you make it around the Pavilion and kill them all in time? It’d be fun, interesting, challenging. Instead we have all the entertainment of shouting “USE THE BIRDSEED” while watching zergs die to retal, and “please split up, I’m begging you”.

Ah well. At least Labyrinthine Cliffs is fun <3

To go into better detail on my issues with the bosses, they aren’t designed for an open world situation, and this seems to be a recurring issue.

Much of the combat was designed and balanced around 5 players so the more players you throw in, the more it falls apart. The design of most monsters, including these, is also suited for that small number of players.

Instead of creating encounters and mechanics that would be suited for larger numbers of players, all we see being done is giving bosses things like more hp, damage, additional spawns, crowd control and other effect immunities, and timers before an automatic defeat.

As a result you have encounters that are best suited for a 5 man party and when thrown into the open world, degrade into a DPS race with a group that will never be wiped out or fail the fight thanks to the downed state and waypoints unless you add artificial defeat mechanics like timers.

I liked some of the new mechanics, but after a couple of bosses it just gets too chaotic. And even though I can respect an increase in personal challenge, when you couple it with a need for map-wide cooperation, the game just becomes a boring exercise in futility.

As an example, I enjoy the overhauled Golem Mark II event. In that case the increase in difficulty makes the event more personally engaging. Tequatl and this on the other hand, are just dispiriting. The likelihood of failure (or poor reward) as a result of things that are out of the individual players direct control, is just too high.

Alright Anet, time to blow up your mind. What if.. what if each boss location was an arena! Yes an arena!! and each arena could ONLY hold up to 25 people! OMG for real??
That would mean…that would mean no zergie fights!! PREPOSTEROUS!

Jokes aside, there are many ways to implement a “no zerg” and fun content. This patch was never meant to be fun, it’s just another gold sink. A bad designed one.

I am not sure what you get for silver/gold completion, as maps I have been on have only gotten CLOSE to silver. The problem is that people don’t split up evenly, don’t coordinate kills at the same time, and many times stack into very large groups as opposed to small 6-8 person groups.

It is fine if they want to make the content give best rewards when approached their way. However, there are a few MAJOR flaws that occur when things don’t go perfectly according to plan, and make the crown pavilion a major bummer. A few flaws in the current approach:
1. At the point that silver is lost, you are have no chance at ANY meaningful reward. You are best to either leave and try to get into another “instance” or just afk and let other groups finish.
2. In fact, afk-ing in the middle and letting smaller groups finish would actually help them go FASTER as the bosses scale REDICULOUSLY quick with number of players. I do not believe that they downscale either, so once a whole bunch of people join in – game over. This can lead to players getting MAD when other players join in, which is a behavior I thought Anet wanted to avoid.
3. At the point the blitz is failed, many may leave the instance. This leaves the few that are left to smack away at up-scaled sponges that take FOREVER to kill to reset, and will probably not have the resource to get a good 6-way split set up the next time. Even if the players don’t log off, they will figure that completing the blitz is a waste and just leech off the few who do want to do it that remain, leaving 1 group to go around killing sequentially.

These points combined, along with the learning curve or properly organizing, to make the event feel incredibly unrewarding. Its one thing to have “Great reward” for doing the event perfectly (gold), “good reward” for doing the event pretty well, and “decent reward” for doing it in an uninteded way. However, all that I have found is that if you get bronze, you just wasted about 40 minutes getting the same “reward” you could have gotten killing 4 random mobs. Worse, those 40 minutes felt really grindy b/c once there is a mistake in the approach, the entirety of the fight itself is just unfun.

BlackBeard.2873:

I am not sure what you get for silver/gold completion, as maps I have been on have only gotten CLOSE to silver.

Just to puncture your already-deflated bubble even further… silver/gold is just bronze with a couple of extra champ bags. Even gold is absolutely not worth it, especially if you yourself paid to start the event.

Its a dead place already… No one there only a couple ppl…

Problems I see:
- if map is almost full it’s super hard to split people into 6 groups;
- some bosses are easier with 5-man than 10-man group, on some you need certain professions to be effective. I.E doing destroyers without reflects is almost plain stupidity;
- paying for starting an event with almost no loot?! Why? It’ll be deserted in few days. People have to pay to get achievments. Give this new festive token that you get from meta as gold reward, since that’s the only way to get weapons (afaik).
- giving bosses additional skills after killing other bosses. It’s just ridiculous how much coordination it would take to kill all of them in the same time. Otherwise it’s getting really annoying, but doable.

Hyung.6140:

BlackBeard.2873:

I am not sure what you get for silver/gold completion, as maps I have been on have only gotten CLOSE to silver.

Just to puncture your already-deflated bubble even further… silver/gold is just bronze with a couple of extra champ bags. Even gold is absolutely not worth it, especially if you yourself paid to start the event.

Hahaha, yea I just found that out on reddit, and thanks for the heads up. Some of the fights are ok a couple times, but I probably won’t be back after I finish my meta – I prefer actual challenging and rewarding content – and this only feels artificially challenging and generally unrewarding. Damage sponges are so unfun to fight – I don’t want to take a minute just to kill a veteran, and 15 minutes for one champ just because more than the designed number of people showed up.

Ideal scaling would mean that having a larger group keeps the same TTK, or maybe slightly less, so that each additional is an actual addition to the group. With this scaling, every additional person past maybe 8 is a major decrease in group capability. If they had proper scaling as described – approaching the event with a proper split would still give the best rewards, but doing a poor split wouldn’t feel like a punishment. It just wouldn’t be efficient enough to get the max reward.

How exactly would you organize with that lovely chat filter still there and enabled by default? I dont get why that still hasnt been removed or atleast adjusted :/ I play with german players but use the english client, and by the logic of that filter, i cant have both at the same time. It makes organisation impossible because people simply cant hear you, and if they do, they probably ignore you anyways, but still.

So, got my first round of Boss Blitz and it was not fun.

- People were “farming” vets instead of helping with the bosses.
- Bosses were damage sponges, even if we were using the mechanics (true, we had a lot of stupid zergy people, but even then…)
- Mechanics range from hard to annoying (good mix overall, the Flame Shaman guy is the hardest as far as i see it)
- Even if going for bronze it just takes too much time, thanks to being damage sponges.
- Rewards are nearly nonexistent. 40 Minutes of painfully boring fights (as interesting the mechanics are, seing them for 15min is just jarring) and you only get 2 champ bags and a few festival tokens…
Thanks, but no thanks.
The only draw is the “easy” archievment points and i see this place abandoned after everyone has their 5 rounds of boss blitz finished…

Combining that with the way the chat is at the moment it is really weird to play.
I do not get reason why i should get invested into this type of gameplay.
The festival tokens? sure i want the slickpack.. but like that… shudder

Bring back instanced dungeon content with the LS, was wayy more fun doing aetherblade retreat or molten facility than all this open world boss zerg content.

Oh this was a terrific idea, first you feed zerg content to your player base for 18 months then you decide, we need to change it up people are earning 2 gold an hour oh my! So your plan, you lower the rewards, then change the content to an organized raid style without ever once considering you’ve made that nearly impossible by introducing a mega server where organization is nearly impossible…genius!

Even adding a small participant counter to each zone might help spread out the zerg. As others have stated sure with a full raid you can do well but when you join a server at random you are at mercy of the lemmings that follow the commander.

Vlad Morbius.1759:

Oh this was a terrific idea, first you feed zerg content to your player base for 18 months then you decide, we need to change it up people are earning 2 gold an hour oh my! So your plan, you lower the rewards, then change the content to an organized raid style without ever once considering you’ve made that nearly impossible by introducing a mega server where organization is nearly impossible…genius!

This is a valid concern, big guilds have been vocal about this as well. Its very hard to do a organized raid when the nature of the game is disorganization. Anet has yet to respond, I’m not sure if they are expecting a bunch of randoms to magically organize to defeat a boss. It will never happen, thats what raid instances are for.

Hyung.6140:

Xae Isareth.1364:

To be honest, those bosses have some of them most well designed telegraphs in this game to date and some very very interesting mechanics. Look at Wiggins and Pyro, look at them! That’s clear and fair telegraphed mechanics which promote active movement.

I’d LOVE to look at them, but they were buried under 50+ people hitting them with spell effects.

You can say that “well, you shouldn’t be zerging” and you’re right, we shouldn’t. I was trying NOT to. I tried getting multiple commanders, tried convincing pugs to split, tried forming parties and slipping away so the 5 of us could attack one boss. But each shard I loaded into the vast majority just zerged.

I think everyone defending this content is imagining how it should ideally be played and saying ‘well, if it were played like that it would be good content’. Maybe, but in practice it isn’t played like that… and even if I WANTED to play it like that, which I do, I CANNOT do it of my own free choice. I somehow need to find a shard of 70-ish players who think like I do.

So in practice it is not fun.

Worse, not only is it not fun, it’s not rewarding. Even gold tier rewards are terrible. I’d love to see a graph of player participation numbers in the Pavilion over the few weeks of this patch, I suspect it will bottom out rapidly and stay there, as there’s absolutely no reason to do it, and it’s frustratingly designed.

Imagine the same bosses instanced, with say ten of your friends and a more forgiving timer. Can you make it around the Pavilion and kill them all in time? It’d be fun, interesting, challenging. Instead we have all the entertainment of shouting “USE THE BIRDSEED” while watching zergs die to retal, and “please split up, I’m begging you”.

Ah well. At least Labyrinthine Cliffs is fun <3

What I’m defending isn’t open world raids. I hate them. I don’t ever do Teq or Wurm because it’s a lesson in frustration. If you want people to do something in a certain way and to be organised, you need the tools to exclude people who don’t want to be organised. Otherwise you just get frustration.

I was openly telling people who don’t listen to orders, who aren’t in Zerker, who runs whatever build they want to get out of the pavillion last night, and I feel justified, because simply that’s what Anet was asking people to do.

What I am defending is the mechanics themselves. I like them. I love them in fact. Clear telegraphs, fair mechanics thst cabt be just brute forced, engaging gameplay requiring active movement, stuff this game desperately lacks.

What I’m afraid of is Anet does a DE v2.0 and go ‘clearly people hate fights like that’, back to zerg zerg stack stack press 111111, or even worse, unclear and frustrating mechanics consisting purely of 1HKOs that’s basically equivalent to playing Russian roulette.

Xae Isareth.1364:

What I’m defending isn’t open world raids. I hate them. I don’t ever do Teq or Wurm because it’s a lesson in frustration. If you want people to do something in a certain way and to be organised, you need the tools to exclude people who don’t want to be organised. Otherwise you just get frustration.

I was openly telling people who don’t listen to orders, who aren’t in Zerker, who runs whatever build they want to get out of the pavillion last night, and I feel justified, because simply that’s what Anet was asking people to do.

What I am defending is the mechanics themselves. I like them. I love them in fact. Clear telegraphs, fair mechanics thst cabt be just brute forced, engaging gameplay requiring active movement, stuff this game desperately lacks.

What I’m afraid of is Anet does a DE v2.0 and go ‘clearly people hate fights like that’, back to zerg zerg stack stack press 111111, or even worse, unclear and frustrating mechanics consisting purely of 1HKOs that’s basically equivalent to playing Russian roulette.

I think we’re in agreement. I love the IDEA of the mechanics. If me and my friends were able to take on these bosses ourselves and challenge ourselves to beat them, then I’m sure we’d have a lot of fun.

In practice, however, it’s either an exercise in frustration trying to get people to split up (or even to explain to them what retaliation means -facepalm-) or a horrible boring zergfest that scales to astronomical levels.

Honestly, I don’t mind there being faceroll-easy zerg content in the game for people that want it.

But Pavilion in its current state doesn’t cater to either zerglings or people who want challenging group fights – both end up highly dissatisfied for different reasons. Truly the worst of all worlds.

And no-one gets any loot! \o/

^ I think we’re definitely in agreement then.

There’s a reason why open world raids aren’t a thing anymore. Blizzard wasn’t able to make it work, Trion didn’t make it work, Anet isn’t any different. It’s an impossible task, they just don’t work.

They only worked in the past because back then, it wasn’t about killing the boss, it was about who got the loot. Since this game ain’t about that, it’s not going to work. You just can’t expect Joe Bloggs who never played a MMO, who just plays game’s fit fun and uses skills that look cool to suddenly start optimising builds and follow commander’s orders.

The hardcore raiders get annoyed that there’s people who aren’t raiders trying to raid and screwing everything up for them, the non-raiders feel like idiots and get shouted at.

Put those bosses into dungeons, or even better, follow the same philosophy and change them even more to be raid worthy and put them in raids.

To be honest they created a catch 22, the zerg became a necessity because of the poor rewards. Now they’re trying to change the zerg mentality by making the loot a reward for coordinating and completing content but did so without enhancing the reward to warrant the effort.
They won’t ever change the zerg mentality until they change the rewards to make them truly worthwhile, which they can’t accomplish if they just kill the reward system altogether because that will kill the zerg but will also drive their other players away in the process.

I like the fights to a certain degree, but I have to agree on one thing: paying to get to do this is ridiculous! I mean, seriously!

At least they didn’t destroy Aspect Arena. That’s still one of the best mini games they have come out with.

I’ll likely just play that over the next month, and grab all the LS items I missed out on, cause it seems this crown pavilion thing is a bust.

The Boss Blitz would be fine (rewards aside) if it didn’t become more difficult with more people. A single player could defeat any of these bosses if there weren’t hordes of veterans that continue to spawn right next to some of them. Rather than the boss’s health increasing appropriately when enough people show up to kill the mobs and the boss, the bosses take 30 times longer to kill because their health scales unreasonably.

If they want to encourage small groups to kill the bosses, the veterans need to stay dead when killed until shortly after the boss dies, or at least have a much longer respawn timer. As it is currently, you kill one veteran and another instantly spawns in its place. Otherwise zergs of 25+ people are necessary.

I’m not sure. I get the impression they are trying to do with this what they do with the three headed wurm.

But the time limit is too restrictive, the scaling is too expansive, and the fact you have to pay for it is irritating, at the very least.

They need to either give more time, reduce the scaling, or a little of both. Or make the kitten thing free rather than charging.

Some of the battles I find interesting: the charr and the centaur both interest me some. I do find it exciting having to keep watch for the trampling centaurs. Wiggins and the ogre I also like. The destroyer is kinda dull, but not a big deal.

But boom boom whatever her name is, who just keeps healing ad infinitum… lord, she is so irritating. that healing turret makes her take forever to kill.

I’ve gotten gold on a server 5 times in a row. the inteded method is to have 6 commanders split up and kill them all at the same time. and you’re supposed to kill the healing turret. it’s does require too much coordination for randoms, but the server i got into had heaps of tts people

A Massive Headache.1879:

I’ve gotten gold on a server 5 times in a row. the inteded method is to have 6 commanders split up and kill them all at the same time. and you’re supposed to kill the healing turret. it’s does require too much coordination for randoms, but the server i got into had heaps of tts people

yeah but 90% of us aren’t on the server that the TTS group managed to lock donw for themselves.. so we get mindless “press 1 to win” pugs.. and we try to get 6 comms and split up and constantly explain each boss mechanic in map chat, and all that ever happens is the pugs go to the easiest boss and leave 3-4 comms out to dry.

wish Anet would let us pick which megaserver we could be in, or open one ourselves so we could actually make organized groups of 2-3 guilds working together.. because forcing us to do co-ordinated events with people who don’t care/listen is so godkitten ed frustrating

yeah, orswich, you’re right. but on paper, having a zerg of people split into 6 doesn’t sound like it should be that hard, yet it is.

Condition hate

Indomitable, ugh. Just Indomitable. Did the designers really feel that they needed to restrict conditions even more? Why not simply remove conditions completely while you’re at it? We’ll all go full DPS.

Rewards

-Are terrible. In the old Queens Pavilion you got massive rewards from every foe, and it was a giant loot fest. Now it’s a giant loot-less fest. Bosses are massive damage sponges, that take forever to kill, and if you take too long, they don’t drop ANY loot what so ever. Brilliant! So if a fight is taking a bit long, players will feel less and less encouraged to complete it as it progresses.

Tip to the designers: Do exactly the OPPOSITE of that!