Guild Wars 2

The two week Tequatl experiment is over. Some servers were able to defeat her. Some were not. On the successful servers, many people STILL have not had the opportunity to participate in a victory because of overflow issues. The unsuccessful servers rapidly became ghost towns, and remain so today.

There is a simple solution from GW1. In the original Guild Wars (after Prophecies) you were “graded” on how successful you were on any particular mission. To get certain titles, you needed to complete missions at the highest level of success.

Every server could take down Tequatl if they had all the time in the world. So kill the 15 minute countdown timer. Then base the time until she returns on how quickly she was defeated. (I.E. the faster you kill her, the less time between appearances). The servers that can kill her fast will have more opportunities throughout the day to do it again, and consequently more chances for a special dragon drop. The servers that need more time will finally be able to kill her, and might improve once people start coming back and believing their world can do it. This will reduce guesting and give people a chance to get out of overflow.

So the game will “grade” your performance. The better you do, the sooner you will be able to do it again.

While you’re at it, in all the zones with a World Boss event, you should provide a “Possible spawn time” clock in the upper right. ("The Maw is quiet. 35 minutes until actions can be taken that may cause evil to spawn again.)

Tequatl was my favorite dragon. She’s even more fun now, but my server is one of the ghost towns. Please do something to bring players back. Great content on many servers is now effectively a great black hole.

This is a surprisingly well thought-out idea. I say “surprisingly” because I’ve heard a lot of ideas on this subject that were barely developed, impractical, or would dramatically change the nature of the event, while this one retains the intensity for aggressive groups, yet enabling milder groups to eventually get it together.

Although, if there’s no time limit at all, that means Tequatl may well be standing there, making shockwaves, for hours on end. That seems…weird, so maybe it just needs to be a much longer timer, but still with the shorter respawn as an incentive to make the kill quickly.

From what I’ve seen of the successful Tequatl fights, that is not the way I want to play anyway. The attacking unit stands packed into one small area, so the characters with defensive shields can keep everyone protected. The rest of the group spams damage. Downed characters are revived quickly and dead respawn at a waypoint. Etcetera, etcetera. Success currently means choreographed, repetitive jobs that are no better than the earlier Tequatl fights, where people took her down by spamming skill #1 throughout the battle.

My server did break the 75% barrier once with no coordination. And it is more fun like that for me anyway, with damage coming at you from all sides and freedom to run all around the battlefield.

So my choice seems to be have fun and lose, or return to spam tactics if I want a chance at winning. Removing the 15 minute deadline would allow me to have fun and have a chance to prevail.

Sure, if you remove the timer any server can succeed at the fight. However, that also means its pretty much impossible to lose the fight because of zerg rushing. I for one don’t want players to feel like they’re entitled to winning every fight they come across just because they complained it was too hard. Honestly, I’d rather lose a few times than win something with no effort and no chance of losing. Thats the difference between the two versions.

Kill the timer..what he said..
A success rate would be higher, but it would also allow the developers to analyze and establish a reasonable timer in the near future. They can factor in number of participants in the Teq Event and average how much damage is given to Teq to reach each phase. But, this time they would get to see it from every player’s perspective and not from their beta testers who tried Teq out. From this analysis, they can then apply a variety of combat phase mechanics to the other world bosses.

Jormag was a good template to start with. Teq seemed over the top with a low timer compared to Jormag. especially with the overflow issues. Timers on the other world bosses are good. But I suspect that was just to pad the difficulty without making new attack phases for those bosses.

Raim.6123:

Sure, if you remove the timer any server can succeed at the fight. However, that also means its pretty much impossible to lose the fight because of zerg rushing. I for one don’t want players to feel like they’re entitled to winning every fight they come across just because they complained it was too hard. Honestly, I’d rather lose a few times than win something with no effort and no chance of losing. Thats the difference between the two versions.

I am not complaining that the fight is too hard. I love it just the way it is, but I am in the minority. And this fight is not possible with a minority of players.

No effort? It will still be hard, even without the timer. It is hardly “no effort”. Tequatl’s pretty good about breaking up zergs; she always leaves the field littered with dead and dying players. But that is far preferable to having the entire ZONE being dead like it is now. THAT is what ArenaNet needs to address.

No chance of losing? We are not losing “a few times”. We have never won, much less come close. My server has a dozen people showing up for Tequatl if we’re lucky, and even fewer now that it’s not a Daily Achievement. Other players on successful servers have never won due to inability to get out of overflow.

Redenaz suggests keeping the timer, but extending the limit. That is great with me. But they need to do something to bring people back to the Tequatl fight on the dead servers. That isn’t going to happen until folks believe they at least have a chance.

The next dragon “upgrade” might go down this way:

The biggest difference is that there isn’t the UI letting people know when Teq is up. As a result less people show up unless they are using an overlay like gw2stuff.com or have a guildie telling them is up.

While it would be nice to get all characters someasuran crystal ball that let’s them know what events are running around the world currently. It is fast easier just to educate you r servers about the overlays that use the anet supplied api info

Actually, that’s not very effective. I have posted that in MAP chat many times. Screamed that Tequatl is up (complete with Waypoint). Tried organizing. Tried prevailing to the Commanders who bother to show up. Our server is pretty casual, and you could see signs by the second day that people were just giving up. Even bringing back a visual and audible cue will be no help, as it didn’t help while we had it in the first place. The event needs to take a new direction of some kind that gives casual groups a reason to believe they can succeed again. Otherwise it will remain an anti-black hole on our map, pushing everyone away.

Hamfast.8719:

Actually, that’s not very effective. I have posted that in MAP chat many times. Screamed that Tequatl is up (complete with Waypoint). Tried organizing. Tried prevailing to the Commanders who bother to show up. Our server is pretty casual, and you could see signs by the second day that people were just giving up. Even bringing back a visual and audible cue will be no help, as it didn’t help while we had it in the first place. The event needs to take a new direction of some kind that gives casual groups a reason to believe they can succeed again. Otherwise it will remain an anti-black hole on our map, pushing everyone away.

why would you go back? i mean, if you got your living world achive and finished all the tequatl boss achives in that first 2 weeks (wich i think most people who care about living world stuff did) there 0 reason to go back…. it will be the same with the new TA path. once you got the achives theres nothing there to make you back.

The loot (I hear) is abysmal for winning. And of course you get nothing for losing. But by George, I think it’s fun! I’m probably in the minority. I would go back if I had a chance to win, even if the treasure is rotten. But I have a hunch that to make people visit Tequatl again, they not only will have to make it winnable by casual groups but also increase the reward to make it worth the time involved.

I understand that the “elite” players need their challenges, but they removed a whole section of the map from casual play to create their new monster. And many servers can’t scrape up 80 elite players to make the attempt. So the region sits empty.

Point here: why can’t this event scale down in difficulty? I thought scaling was supposed to control difficulty?

Yeah, that’d be cool with dungeons too when you can’t get a full group of 5 together. Maybe that will be their solution. It DOES scale a LITTLE bit. The Fingers are much easier to dispatch when there are only 6 players in the fight.

Boss Kill Timer/Rarity Swing +- 5 minutes / +-%5 based on graded server performance. Instead of removing the time and using grades to adjust the frequency of spawning. Use grades to microadjust difficulty by adjusting time to kill the boss. Say default of 15. challenge grows up to 10 minutes. But eases up to 20. Have it start out with the standard 15 minutes. Every 2 consecutive success in a server results in the timer shrinking by a 1 minute and a small increase increase in loot rarity.
Every failed run per server results in a 2 minute timer increase and a small decrease in loot rarity and a dramatic decrease in loot at 20 minutes resetting to 15 minutes automatically if the standard time is beaten even on a 20 min timer.

This would keep things challenging for more adept servers and provide further challenge after they have succeeded and would also allow smaller servers a chance to complete with out making it an automatic freebee and allow them to ramp themselves up to the the big time.

Finally this would help keep people from ditching their servers in hopes of success.
If they know the bad kitten servers have their dragon timed at 9 minutes and only succeed 1/3rd of the time but in their own server they have a much better chance of completion and achieving a drop at 17 minutes while teaching you what you need for a faster time i think they will do it. Conversely having the rarity drop off significantly at 20 minutes will keep people from guesting to smaller servers to take advantage of their easier time limits.

Basically allowing timer/rarity wiggle room based on past server completion grades will allow difficulty to zero in automatically on a servers skill level letting more people complete the boss with out taking the challenge away from the hardcore PvE players and still giving everyone a reward equivalent to their accomplishment.

the loot spectrum would show appreciable gain for upping the challenge but not so much that loot from the same boss on different servers would be incomparable. maybe 5-10%??? would need some deeper analysis to get the swing right but i truely feel letting the timer swing 5 minutes in either direction would give the big guys their challenge and the little guys a way to progress with ruining the challenge for everyone.

You have some good points here but the issue isn’t really time it’s whether the server is getting hosed or not. Instead we should be reducing the pain of the encounter based on damage to Tequatl or something similar.

Or maybe add a mini event at the end of the 15 minutes to delay Teq leaving. In essence a chance to buy your server nmore time to take him out. Maybe when there is a slight bit over a minute left an npc calls out ‘its going to escape’ at which point if x players get to nodes spread around Teq they can activate an energy net/dome that blocks teq from leaving for say 5 minutes and can only be used once. Maybe if very forgiving the devs could have a secondary event once the snare is used that allows a small group of 2to4 people to recharge and reset the snare. But it would be a race to get it ready before he broke free and escaped to reset and redeploy the snare and extend your time again.

I love this Suggestion!

GW2 was designed around mobility. We’ve been taught that standing in one place is going to get you killed. Learn to dodge and kite and maneuver. You certainly have to do these things in the Tequatl fight with as much stuff going on around you as there is.

What bugs me is that to actually WIN, the strategy seems to be for the attacking group to stand in one spot and spam the appropriate skills, whether it be shielding the party or DPSing the dragon. Ho-hum. That is what the time limit forces on us.

(Yes, I can defend the turrets I suppose. But I like getting my whacks in on the ol’ girl too!)