I’m afraid the title might be misleading. I love the idea of these large scale battles. I mean, I did Tequatl when it was released. It was a lot of fun, but I haven’t gone back. Mainly because I can’t effectively know when it’s up without using a timer website (same thing that applies for other world boss encounters). And if you just go there without planning ahead you will probably be thrown on an overflow which will not finish the event. So what’s the point in adding more encounters like this without changing the current system? Did you think the trend of waiting around for bosses to spawn was alright so it might as well be enriched? In my opinion if this world bosses system is going to stick around there need to be some changes.
Respawn timer. Get rid of the two hour respawn timers. In fact, get rid of despawns all together. If a boss spawns, it doesn’t need to go away for two hours when you wipe. All this does is create artificial difficulty. Let it stay up until a competent group figures it out and kills it. When it’s killed, put a respawn timer on it. Perhaps in that case it might need to be more than two hours, otherwise the boss would almost always be up and it’d be trivial, like a lot of dynamic events.
Potential problem: How do you wipe if you can just run back from a waypoint?
- Have a mechanic that eventually kills players massively (could be time based). Could be a tidal wave for Tequatl or something like that nuke for the Marionette. Effectively, it would kill all players currently engaged in the fight and reset the boss’ health, rendering zerg kills impossible.
Event awareness. Improve event awareness, especially for the world bosses. I find it silly that there is an API that gives you access to the status of all events on all maps, so you can create a web tool that shows such things, but when you are ingame, and you actually need that information, you are extremely limited to a radius around your character in the map that you are in. I feel that if there is a kittening dragon minion or a huge worm spawned on a map, you need to know just by looking at the world map. Or there need to be people screaming about it in Lion’s Arch. One of the two.
Overflows. I remember reading shortly after launch that overflows were meant as a temporary solution to overpopulation during launch and not as a permanent phenomenon. However, the way newer content is designed creates an overflow problem that it does not seem address. Actually, I’m not sure overflows would still be a problem if the previous suggestions were applied. Would the overflow you’re moved to also have the world boss spawned? If so, even if you were moved to an overflow at anytime other than a patch release, you’d still have a better chance of beating the boss (or at least making some progress) and probably an overall better experience, if you didn’t have only one try.
I might be missing something here but I really don’t think the way these encounters are implemented is the best way for this game. And seeing two more released with the same problems that I identify in the Tequatl fight makes me think ANet doesn’t see anything wrong with it. The new fights look very fun, but they do have these problems, or features, or whatever you want to call them. I’m curious to find out what others think about this.