(edited by heerobya.2067)
How to make Tequatl the Sunless a better fight.
1k hp/sec is not a lot of regeneration. That would only offset 1-2 players DPS. The number can easily be adjusted, so assumign something along those lines could be made to work, we’ll jsut mvoe on to the other problems. The creepers have nothing to do with the turrets now, and they shouldn’t—there are plenty of waves of adds for the turret defenders to handle. The creepers are there to pose a threat to lazy players near the dragon. Additionally, would the neo-creepers walk through the bone walls? If a wall is up and the creeper can’t walk through it, how would it be shot by a turret to render it vulnerable? Would it just stand there waiting on the wall to be killed, or take the long way around? How do you deal with griefers using the few turrets but not contributing. How much margin of error do you have on that enrage timer? Can just 2 people interacting with but not using a turret cause a failure? The timer becomes meaningless when you allow a large margin, but a low margin allows just a little malice or ineptitude to ruin it for everybody else.
Maybe you should have thought about it for a minute instead of jut 30 seconds before touting your solution as a ‘fix’ to a fight that isn’t broken, just easy.
On my server we have people clear the walls, we have people fend off the adds on the turrets and keep them up. The fight is over in a couple minutes.
As it stands now, it is a pretty easy fight, I do agree. The mechanics are sound but there is no urgency with racting to the different components. The problem with adding complexity is striking a balance between peak and offpeak times. My server will throw well over a hundred people into that fight regularly, but in off-peak times, we’re lucky to have a dozen. How many roles are required, can they handle it during low-pop times? At peak times, we have adds hitting the turrets that 1-shot most players. People die and run back into the fray and we need to keep that avenue clear so we can keep presure on the dragon. We have so many people that asking them to compress into a smaller area during peak times will cause the culling issues that plague events in Orr and WvW.
If you really want to make these big events engaging, you have to add sub-events. The basic flow remains unchanged, but the parts that aren’t ‘make hte big red bar go down’ become more important. Simply bribing player with event rewards to do them is enough to shake things up. For example: after tequatl destroys the laser (which he would be able to do every so often), we have to reassemble it (the damage bonus it gives makes this worthwhile). Add DE markers for the waves that attack the turrets—this increases the appeak of protecting the backfield. Add destructible fortifications that protect the turrets and use the turrets/fortifications to protect the waypoint. When that waypoint is lost, reinforcing that location is a lot harder and dragon DPS becomes less important. I believe the waves of adds already scale up over time, so it is already only a matter of time before it becomes unwinnable.
tl;dr: The mechanics are generally sound, in my opinion, and the proposed changes do more to break it than make it more engaging.
Hutchmistress of the Fluffy Bunny Brigade [FBB]
Personally, I don’t see a need to scale these guys HP; just design them for around 10-15 people and then add in a few sub events for the “scaling” when more than that number of players join (these sub events could turn the tide of battle by being fairly difficult and would not disappear until completed; even if the main Dragon has been killed).
Also, I would love to see the Dragons in this game act and have more of the mechanics of the Vindictus Dragons (even if they are still stationary as few claw swipes and breath blasts instead of the “fear” skills would be nice, as I know that instanced vs open world tend to have different resource issues; movement and stuff could still work for the dungeons though). Also having a few rock out-croppings to hide behind when the breath blasts are about to be used would be a nice touch.
Even if they are still kept as more of a cinematic event and not challenging at all to beat, it would be nice to have them be a little more interesting. The mechanics work fine as is, but are just kind of boring and need a little more variation (actually right now it’s pretty much attack dragon -> get feared out of place -> run back and continue spamming)
I do like the idea of breaking “the fight” into multiple events – make the entire fight a chain series with multiple steps instead of forcing players to “play it right” with mechanical changes.
The main point is that right now, as Sollith says, “right now it’s pretty much attack dragon → get feared out of place → run back and continue spamming.”
Any change is a welcome one.
GW2 has been extremely disappointing the more I’ve leveled up.