Guild Wars 2

… I’ll be the first to say it. These new bosses, while ambitious, are far too complex for the way they’ve been presented.

I can dig that complexity of having to do specific steps to take down a boss, but this is when you have 5 – 10 people. Hell, in a dungeon, a boss with a tower defence stage followed by a mini-boss that allows you to break off part of the main boss is really cool.

You can’t make that work with 20+ people, people who are strangers, whose only form of communication are the chat log.

Honestly, if you’re making a boss with 20 – potentailly hundreds of people, any idea of cooperation outside of spamming attacks and heals is the most you can expect.

Think of it this way: get 25 people in a room you don’t know, and ask them to perform a task cooperativly. Now, a simple task, like everyone just bash a box open, should be easy enough. But anything more than that will be tricky to do, hard to coordinate, and highly depends on the luck of having people who will be able to do said task.

That’s also not to speak of the lag people are sure to experience with this many people in one fight.

Now, I can dig that, perhaps, if you get a guild with a good number of people altogether, they’ll do a good job with these bosses. But this seems like an affront to the freedom of being a part of dynamic events in the world.

At this point, the Wurm is basically unplayable, since the idea of having to specifically do something to kill said Wurm is supremely difficult to impart to 20+ strangers. And even as informed players learn the trick, inevitably such large groups of players will include beginners, or people just not familiar with the encounter.

These bosses seem either better suited to a raid-style instance for large parties and guilds, or something to be nerfed and made far simpler. I can complain about individual people’s skills, but if you have mass of people, there’s only so much cooperation you can expect.

Right now it’s just frustrating and feels like a dice roll for whether we can get enough cooperation out of strangers.