Guild Wars 2

Does any one of you fellow gamers and MMO veterans feel that the epic encounters are not quiet epic?

I would take dragon events as an example. The dragon events are timed, and the battles are big, it requires lots of people to beat them, but generally these events do not feel epic.

The dragons them selves are way to easy i believe, not only they are too easy, but they also have a bad loot pool.

With that i would like to ask ANET to enhance these epic battles.

Here is my Idea on Claw of Jormag:

The idea is to keep the event rare/scarce.

1. Keep it timed, with spawn window, but also when event starts make the event area be a “dome” which no one can enter except those who were there to wait for the even in the beginning.
2. Scale event difficulty based on minimum amount of players starting with 10 (if less than 10 people in the dome the encounter is undoable). if 10 people in the dome, event becomes doable, for each additional player event scales just enough to still be doable but hard and not easy.
3. To wrap up the first two points – those who miss the beginning of the event will have to wait until the next event starts. If even wont get minimal amount of players, dragon breathes frost, instantly killing the players and flies off, event resets.
4. With increased, scarcity/rarity of the event and scaled difficulty we can now implement a carrot. Enhance the loot pool, add stat free cosmetic on rare drop (like wings for example) and add tickets that will drop from encounter (once player does enough events to get enough tickets, he/she can exchange them for ascended gear). Any other ideas on adding carrot will work as well.

So now we have Epic encounter that is truly epic, epicly hard, epicly looty and overall worth encountering.

The problem here is that you enforce “waiting to have fun.” Instead of playing the game, you have to stand around in the dome so you are there at whatever random time in a 30-60 minute window things get started. That was one of the huge complaints about Tequatl.

I’ve seen suggestions that loot should be enhanced for those that do the long event chains leading to the spawn. That would help it feel more epic than standing around waiting for the dragon bus. So would revamping the fights to be more like Tequatl (which I found to be epic and fun, as I am on a highly populated and PvE motivated server). Just adding an artificial barrier to participating would merely turn it into a more tedious effort than it already is.

Awful idea. Nothing “epic” on that.

I agree some what with what you said. Artificial barrier might not be the best Idea, but the loot pool has to be enhanced, this is just irritating to do Claw of Jormag 10 times a week and not get a single worthy item. People just cash crap in and nothing happens, there faster ways to farm gold than do dragons that end up not dropping any thing worthy.

to justify the enhanced loot pool, ANET needs to balance it with difficulty and make sure the encounter is not zergable.

As for artificial barrier, there is one already, if you join the fight mid event you end up not getting any loot.

What i mean is, these events are cool, but they are not rewarding enough. I have 3 characters full of sexy exotics, and i got it all without doing a single dragon event. I tried dragon event few times but it doesn’t boasts interest to keep doing it. there no drops, that would be interesting to get, no skins, gold you get from cashing in is too small to wait for timing events.

Well, Daimasei that’s the best i came up with. You have a better idea to make the timed dragon events feel more epic? the way it is right now is just go do it once to check it out and forget.

It’s like Zhaitan fight, when it’s just came out every one said the fight was disappointing, not challenging, not rewarding.

I don’t agree with your formula of limiting players + better loot = epic encounters. I do agree however, that there is a real lack of epic PvE battles. For a game that is action-oriented, bosses and enemies are surprisingly static; how cool would it be to see the dragons rampaging around the battle area instead of sitting on the spot?

agree, my idea is definitely not the best, but there is a lack of epic battles.

Asmodeius.2751:

1. Keep it timed, with spawn window, but also when event starts make the event area be a “dome” which no one can enter except those who were there to wait for the even in the beginning.

Either wait your entire playtime in one spot or miss your epic battle? Neither sounds epic to me.

But i do agree even stuff like the shatterer/claw of jormag dont feel truly epic. They look like it but i still dont feel epicness.

Asmodeius.2751:

Well, Daimasei that’s the best i came up with. You have a better idea to make the timed dragon events feel more epic? the way it is right now is just go do it once to check it out and forget.

As a matter of fact, no. I do have ideas however, and I already posted in the forum (if my ideas are good or bad is up to other to decide).

And by the way, I wasn’t trying to be rude and like many other, I agree with you. The Dragon Events are awful (we shouldn’t be allowed to even get near the dragons and stack at their foot).

Unfortunately, for the Devs, is way easy to add cheap but somehow desired loot like guaranteed rares and multiply the HP x10, add invulnerable things and insta-kill mechanisms seems to be enough to revamp any event.

This game has no epic battles.
Large Sized enemies, yes, but nothing I#d call an epic battle.

To an epic battle belongs far much more, than just only an ememy with

1) Quadgazillions of HP
2) super overpowered attacks that can 1hit kill you
3) require just mindless zergs to be able to kill them at all
4) have so less skills, that they just repeat permanently the one and the self 2-3 mechanics ad absurdum
5) are just overpowered alone by the fact that they have such OP boons like defiant making them immune to all CCs, what makes basically sense for large group battles, but surely not for small group battle,s because conditions also have only like 10% of the effect durations on them like normal >.>
6) or are on the other side way too weak and get killed in like under 2 minutes.

Sadly I think, anet will not be able to give this game ever any real epic battles.
anet tried it with Tequatl and imo they failed super hard with it.
If Tequatl is ANets vision of massive epic battles, then good night.
Every small kid of the age of like 6 has far more fantasy to imagine epic battles, than this battle against Tequatl or agaisnt the most laughable Dragon Fight, that I have ever seen in my whole life – Zhaitan

What epic battles and fights belongs, i thing it would help the developers very much, if they try to get back more to the roots, that they should use more inspirations from games of the past on consoles for example, because many offline rpgs have had also way more epic enemies, than anything we see here in GW2.

AN epic battle is then an epic battle, when the battle just didn’t took way too long time, but also wasn#t just over in a matter of seconds to only a very few minutes.
An epic battle is then epic, if the battle was very challenging, but not too frustrating hard draconically punishing instantly every tiny mistake of the player with an instant 1 hit death!!
An epic battle is then epic, for a group, if the group has to cooperate with each other to be successfull, but not just with borign repetitive mechanics, like in the Zhaitan battle, where you havre to do 3x after another in a row the exactl same thing, just to beat that boss.
The battle against Tequatl needs many different PHASES, phases, which can RANDOMLY be used by the boss, so that players have to accordingly adapt their stretegy to beat those bosses.
Time shouldn’t play a matter.
What should play a matter is the amount of player kills that the boss can make and if the boss reaches a certain amount of player deaths, before the boss has been beaten, then the event will fail.
But limitating boss battleson silly timelines, is just outdated and boring.
or there could be from boss to boss different thing,s that could lead to the fail of the event, than just player kills, timelines ect.
Each boss could have different things, that could lead to a fail of the event.
Putting players permanently onto time pressure just brings the battles only down into 1 single huge DPS Check and people being forced to min/max their builds and strategies to be able to beat the bosses, see again Tequatl.

Now that people have found out the most best strategy to beat Tequatl, you see no server doing anythign else anymore, that to beat that boss each tiem with the same things.

Tons of Frost Bows
Tons of Fiery Great Swords
Tons of Flame Djinn Summons
Tons of Seed Cannons
ect.

Without all of this, would have no single server imo been able to beat the current version of Tequatl 1 single time I strongly guess, because all what these utilities and tools doo is increasing massively for a short time the DPS.
if you just bring enough DPS together as a zerg, you can basically beat even Tequatl in 3 very quick rounds after the first hard 25% HP have been chopped down around Minute 7 being left, if then the zerg has super high DPS with tons of bos, swords and djinns, the zerg can breeze through the follow up defensive events of the batteries.
Its nothing epic about those events

We’ll see if GW2 will catch the curve in the future and will improve the other bosses like the Claw of Jormag, Shadow Behemoth, Shatterer ect. also alot like they changed Tequatl alot and andded achievements to that boss.

1. Create Individual Scaling Formula’s tied to the Mechanics of that Boss.

A large part of the zerging is caused by mechanics being able to be ignored, simply because of the large amount of people. For example, take Shadow Behemoth’s Portals. Regardless if there are 10 or 100 people, 3 portals will always spawn at fixed locations. It’s also quicker to take down them 3 portals with 100 people than it is 10.

This suggestion would cause mechanics such as these to scale depending on the amount of people. For example, 3 portals would spawn in ‘random’ places within a defined area if there were 10 players in the area. For every 3 players, an extra mob spawns out of each portal. When there are 21 players, an extra portal will spawn during this phase.

This will hopefully make all participants in the event to take note of the mechanics.

2. Get Inventive with the Fail Conditions

As it is, time is the main one.

Instead of time, get a bit more creative with the fail states.

For example, The Shatterer has been lured down and trapped with a Gravity Anchor, an Asuran invention that intensifies the gravity in an area. This area is created by a number of pylons (which scales with the number of people) which need to be defended. If half of the pylons go down, then the event fails.

3. Have Multiple, Separate Objectives happening at the same time.

As it is, these big events have a single objective at any one time. This doesn’t help to break the zerg up at all.

Make it so the meta event has multiple events going on. You could also tie it so if one of these events fail, then the meta-event fails.

For example, as a pre-event to the Shatterer, we could use building the pylons. At separate locations you could have a defend the engineers event, while another group of players hunt the Shatterer down and lure him into the trap.

Hopefully having the big event divided into multiple smaller events will break the zerg up a bit, alongside the need for communication.

4. Show me the Bootay!

• Have each successful fight spawn a vendor that sells recipes for themed skins (much like Corrupted weapons) with no stats attached. Crafting this skin requires max crafting, and makes it unlockable in the Wardrobe system that’s in my head. These skins also have a chance to drop.
• Have each boss chest have the chance to drop a themed Ascended weapon, alongside guaranteed tokens OR add an achievement progress for each meta fight (kind of like the repeatable events that give bags of loot) that when you reach a certain number, you can pick a weapon of your choice (tied to that boss, of course), with the stats of your choice as well.
• General improvement of loot.

Tequatl and Zhaitan are disgrace to epic battles, that’s some thing i believe every one agrees upon.

Tequatl is simply zergable. when Zhaitan i did once and never ever returned. The graphics are good thought, however the mechanics and the reward system is really bad for the battles that are supposed to be epic.

Yes. I would love to see Random Events kick off in a zone or a city and it turns it all around. Like the events in Rift, those zone events are really well done, as they affect the entire zone. Mostly invasions though! which it doesn’t have to be. It could be much like the krait event with that huge tower or some bandit King that plans on doing something evil and if the event goes too far it will spread to other zones nearby.

GW2 really have the necessary tools for this to work. It’s just ArenaNet that needs to prioritize what they want to do. As far as the living event has gone they haven’t been that huge until the latest living event with the krait tower. The Flame and Frost and Karka were pretty big and impactfull as well though.