Guild Wars 2

The title serves as a thesis to this little script. I really like the crown pavilion, I have no idea why there has been so much hate thrown at it. First off, the queens gauntlet is quite nice, the fights at least. They have such cool mechanics, mechanics that are actually fun!!! I redo the fights just or mechanics sometimes because they are good training and again fun to do. My only criticsm is the floor shouldnt be transparent because it can be distracting and makes red rings difficult to see, and the camera. I probably failed a lot more than I should on the last boss because of the camera.

But my main beef is on the first floor, lvl zerg imo. I dont mind zergs, but please, you’re only making this entire 6 section arena more of a farming stereotype when you put absolutely no mechanics in any of the bosses!!!! Its literally just zergs running around, standing in one place to hit a boss for 4 minutes. Its awful. Truly awful. A lot of fights in this game suffer from this same problem, which is the problem of no mechanics or skill needed. Designers, please, why didnt you put interesting mechanics like in the queens gauntlet, on any of the legendary bosses! For a legendary boss, 1 mechanic is far from enough, way far. Id say three is about par.

Perhaps something like an alternating massive ranged/melee type of mechanic. For the first thirty seconds of the fight, the boss does massive ranged damage, so you have to stack on her and melee. Then after the 30 seconds has elapsed, show some type of warning buff, perhaps hinted at by a certain dialogue that lasts 3-5 seconds. Then during that time the players must switched to range damage to attack her. After that, the cycle would only continue.

Mechanics are what make fights fun, and nearly all of those bosses are lacking mechanics. Im pretty sure Anet got lazy on this and just decided to give them all massive damage when dynamic scaling hit 20 or so people.

While I agree that the zerging gets old, the thing is… if a boss is zergable (Ie. an open world boss,) then you don’t have a lot of options. You have to deal with expected performance issues (hardware) and… performance issues (biological). Decreased framerates, increased lag, and just plain stupidity or ignorance on the part of half the zerg means you have to lower the bar for entry, because if a single failure leaves half the zerg on the ground, scaling means the remaining half has no chance.

to be frank, if there is a big zerg with oh so many AoEs around, I´m happy I see where the boss stands with my 10 fps max….would be nice if the had more mechanics (and champs overall…most of them have just big health pool and strong blows), but I wouldn´t survive a second since I couldn´t react to them maybe if the´d reduce the number of the players in one instance, maybe…

I like mindless zergs. Perhaps we should spawn more Overlords, though?

The boss with the “focus fire” ability destroyed my zerg. Everyone kept trying to range him, but about 10 of the 40 of us managed to get past the AoEs and killed him. Sounds like a good mechanic to me.

Its not so much the boss thats the problem, you can’t see anything that is going on in the fight at all due to spell effects and framerate. But they are working on one of those and the other isnt all that bad.

These are the most anti-zerg bosses yet. That Centaur AOE is a zerg killer, the flame legion guy and all those fire explosions, the pirate and that reflect.

I’ve seen zergs of 40-50 just get destroyed by those. The problem is rezzing. as long as 4 people survive they can rez the entire zerg in 20-30 seconds. even if 70/75 people die they will still destroy the boss since those 5 can get the zerg back up in <1 minute while maintaining aggro.

I don’t think begin able to Rez the mob should be considered a “problem”…..not unless your definition of a challenging encounter is everyone failing.

Folks, this is like the world bosses on steroids. It’s not designed to be tactically challenging mission, but a fun boss stomp for the masses…..play it as it’s intended and don’t try to make it out to be something it isn’t.

I’m all for challenging boss mechanincs… when and where they’re actually applicable. As it is right now, the best I can manage is use a wide AoE and watch the numbers that pop to get a general idea of where the enemies are, since I cannot see the boss, or the adds, or the other playes, or myself for that matter.

BTW, while we’re talking about boss mechanics, global invisibility is an interesting one :p

It’s essentially impossible to design interesting fights around the idea that an infinite number of players will be involved.

In order to design good fights you need to know exactly what can and will be brought to the table. These open world bosses will always be lackluster because there are no tight restrictions that can be placed on the number of players that can be involved so mechanics will always be generic and minimal.

Meh, too me the lack of any real way to control the fight (pull adds this way, boss that way, keep the back row clear) is what brings out the zerg. You rush in, spam your attacks against anything that moves, and eventually the area clears enough that you can focus on the boss (that is likely crammed into some corner by micro-pushes not blocked by Defiant).

Another thing is that the damage scaling for additional characters is wonky. 1 on 1 a veteran takes time. 2+ and vets simply melt.

Ok one thing I will agree with is the centaur boss does massive aoe damage that is somewhat counter zerg.

I agree with those above saying that this kind of fight simply isn’t going to be well designed. I think the combat system in the game doesn’t really allow for a good fight between a massive number of players and a single enemy (without being incredibly creative, and so far ArenaNet isn’t being good at it); we can’t even see what’s happening properly when you get close to the boss… And just attacking from range usually does the job, considering that even if a few dies it’s just the minority of a zerg.

IMO, ArenaNet should give up on this model, and try to think of something new. Maybe using multiple enemies that act as part of a team instead of a single powerful enemy, or an encounter in which players have to split in groups to do multiple tasks at the same time in order to defeat a foe.

Erasculio.2914:

IMO, ArenaNet should give up on this model, and try to think of something new. Maybe using multiple enemies that act as part of a team instead of a single powerful enemy, or an encounter in which players have to split in groups to do multiple tasks at the same time in order to defeat a foe.

Well, they have incentivised champions, and pointed out several times that events in Orr and Southsun scale by adding champions. That sort of thing could very well be where they’re headed… but we’re all in Divinity’s Reach killing single legendaries. Sort of bad planning.