Guild Wars 2

I’ve now seen one of the large dragon fights, Tequatl the Sunless, and was honestly extremely disappointed.

Anet should make such fights more difficult and in the end enjoyable. Here’s how for that fight-

1) Players can no longer damage the dragon directly. Only the Super Laser can, which damages and brings Tequatl to weakened state, and the other turrets can inflict damage too but only when in the Weakened state.

2) The big / slow abominations mobs the dragon spawns (Bloated Creepers?) can only be killed if they are hit with the blast from one of the Turrets, which weakens them so players can kill them. Otherwise they regen health too fast for even concentrated player damage. A simple buff and debuff application – mobs spawn with insane regen buff, like +999 HP per second and Turret shot (aimed by player or NPC controlling turret) removes that buff.

If they get through to the turrets without being killed, they detonate and destroy one of the turrets.

3) The walls the dragon spawns between turrets and himself should be more easily DPS’d down by players, but perhaps they are fine it’s just that NO ONE ever touches them. (as you have to have walls down to hit dragon with Laser and Turrets.)

4) Slightly easier (non champion) mobs attacking Super Laser – but again may be unnecessary if players actually HAVE to use laser.

Point is, force players to actually do the mechanics of the fight.

1. You have to have players (or NPC’s that are kept alive) on the turrets, have to have players or NPCs that are kept alive repairing turrets and/or reviving downed Engineers.

2. You have to defend the super laser – force player activation of laser once it is charged.

3. You have to clear the bone walls the dragon spawns so the turrets and laser can hit Tequatl.

4. Put the whole thing on an Enrage timer, if players don’t keep the Laser up and active and use and defend the Turrets, dragon unleashes super awesome dragon power breathe attack and wipes the entire coastline.

Most if not MANY MMO players are already used to this kind of fight complexity from playing WoW, let’s be honest here.

There you go Anet, a suggestion for fixing one of your most touted/memorable fights from your demos. In 30 seconds of armchair game design.

Because right now? All players do is AFK wait for the timer to drop, stand in a big pile in front of Tequatl’s feet, and spam their attacks.

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.

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.