Guild Wars 2

Hello,

So I decided to try to put into words what I think of the new bosses and the Pros and Cons of each. I’m going to try really hard to keep this as constructive as possible and I’d like responses to do the same (I’ve noticed some heated debates breaking out haha). I’m no way a specialist in this field and most forum goers aren’t. I could be absolutely wrong. I’m just presenting what I think for the consideration of people whose job it is to do this type of stuff. Thank you.

First the Pros.

1. Mechanics. So many fun mechanics of the bosses that really caused my experience to be a lot more enjoyable. The champion mechanics in marionette were new and very fun. I enjoyed those fights a lot.

2. Graphics and look. I really enjoyed the looks and the rework of a few of the zones

3. Rewards. Great reward system. On marionette especially. You did an amazing job with the reward system here with the cyphers. They were just the right amount that it didn’t feel grindy, they offered rewards at a very good RNG rate that rewarded dedication without making it feel like you were grinding. There was lore tied into the rewards which was amazing. Great job here. Unique looks on the wurm gear too.

Now the Cons. For this its going to be a bit of a paragraph because I feel like it isn’t something that can be easily expressed through number notation.

So when making large scale hard content (such as raids) it is important to look at something I call Player success rate vs Group success rate. What this means is how many players does it take to have one player be successful at something. So an example would be Queens Gauntlent (best piece of content you guys put out imho). It was 1:1. 1 player required for 1 player group to succeed. So now lets look at marionette as an example (more people I found have done her more than wurm). Say theres a 100 people in the zone, 25 per lane. It takes the success of all 100 people, so it is 100:100. Keep that in mind. Now lets look at player failure rate vs group failure rate, basically what a player failing does for the group as a whole. In marionette it can be as small as 2:100. That means if 2 people fail, it could mean that the 100 person group can fail. Reason this exist is because in lets say the platforms. 2 people of the same group die because they made a mistake. Now its 3 verse the champion and they get decimated. Now every person in the group can’t do anything to help that platform and they fail the event. So many games do this. They will make it so that events can fail if one player messes up. I’ve seen it in Raids and other large scale content. However, when you have ratios like this there is one major thing you need to account for, Player Control. If a player’s success rate is determined by another players skill level, even on a small scale, the player needs to have control over who he plays with. As the player count increases, the need for this increases. I believe this is where Anet has made a mistake with these bosses. They didn’t properly put in enough player control. I know many people here will disagree with me, and as I said in the first paragraph I may be wrong. If you make hard content, then you need to let us choose when and with whom we play with. It makes it harder for people to blame you (Anet) for bosses being hard and to blame other players. If you’re not careful with these type of world bosses, I can easily see a community like MOBAs forming around these world bosses. Many will say they haven’t seen this, but let me ask you; where will you be once this living story ends (this patch)? Those who continue to do this boss will get more and more strict on the subject of pugs in their groups. I’ve seen it happen a lot when I do tequatl. Another common thing for people to say is to get with a guild. The problem lies with how hard it is to get everyone in the same overflow. Say my 100 person guild has been waiting all week for friday so they have everyone on. We get ready to go kill wurm. If even one person can’t get into our group, its bad. If anyone finds themselves in the player that is missing position, they will be mad I promise you.

So my basic point is that if you decide to do open world bosses and make the harder to the point where an entire group’s successrate is being determined by the individual successrate of players, you must allow groups to choose who and when they play with.

Now the second big thing I’d like to talk about. Timers. I’ve said before on this forum and I’ll say it again. YOU MUST stay away from timers. They just aren’t good and promote waiting (which you don’t want players doing). Many will say well theres plenty of other stuff to do while you wait! This is true, but it doesn’t mean players will do this. This is an example of “You’re not playing our game right”. If you ever find yourself thinking this about your game, that means something is wrong with the game. Games are successful if players like it. If players are playing it wrong in your eyes and the outcome is resulting in a poor outlook, then something needs to change. I understand your need to prevent farming. That being said, putting 1 hour + cooldowns is not the way to do this. An example is queens gauntlent (again my favorite piece of content). There was no wait time. If I failed I could try again. I could learn quickly. The main thing that was keeping me from farming it was the tickets. not an hour spawn time, but tickets. Things that I was awarded with for doing actions, not waiting.
So basically if you need to find a way to prevent farming through bosses like this, do it by requiring an action to be done to participate. Not waiting. Pre events, tickets, whatever. Anything is better than waiting.

Now a bit of a suggestion tied to timers. You are slowly coming to amazing world bosses. Each one getting better and better. You’ve done an excellent job with involving the world with things like siege equipment (by far my favorite) and interactables. Now theres 2 more blocks you need to add to this formula. Enviroment and NPCs. These are two important things when it comes to world bosses and the open world. Involving these in boss fights will make it feel more like an open world and less like raid content in the open world. Lets do Wurm as an example. First NPCs. You can do this in a few ways.
So say you wanted to put ina timer of some sort to help prevent farming. Lets throw in some fun pre events! Say you wanted some help dishing out some solid dps against those wurm heads! Well if the players do a pre event over at Stormbluff Beacon, the Lionguard will send in ships to where the heads are located to help. The players can then talk to a NPC by a rowboat and they will ferry you to the ship and put you on board where you can drive cannons and shoot at the bosses. Want some bombs to use against the boss that pack an extra punch and require less to do their job?Well head on over to Moriatity’s hold and help the pirates with a few pre events. They will then let you borrow a few of their special bombs/gunpowder! Want to weaken those wurms and maybe take down their defense by 10%? Well head on over to Gran Barrier isle and help the Priory with some research and they’ll offer what they find to help defeat the boss! Those darn champions and spawns really being a thorn in your side? Well help the hylek over at laptl grounds and they’ll send in some warriors to help distract mobs (not just instantly die, they actually are good). Thats the NPC interaction you should be shooting for. You can also do pre events to “lure” the wurm out. These take a bit of time, have 5 mins in between spawns and can help alleviate quick farming. Doing pre events for an hour is a lot better than waiting! Throw those in there with the optional pre events and you got yourself amazing NPC and world boss interaction! The second thing is the environment. This one is a bit simplier in terms of how to describe it. It could be simple things like causing rocks to fall on a boss to do damage and stun it (by pass the anti CC boon). It could doing something with water or lava. Things like that. I think if you increase the NPC interaction, environment interaction, and do prevents rather than wait timers; you’d have yourself the perfect formula for World Bosses

I hope my feedback will prove useful, if you have any questions or perhaps like more of an explanation on something I described, please reply. I’ve been thinking about this stuff since I first did shatterer way back in the first months of release.