Guild Wars 2

My guardian just finished showing the Shatterer’s toes who’s boss yet again and it occurred to me (not for the first time). With all these “epic” encounters, there is no possibility of losing. Get in the zerg when the event is happening and make yourself somewhat useful. There you go, within minutes, it’s done. Even if anybody dies, you just get rezzed. there is no fail condition. My understanding of DEs, at least the more advanced ones, is that events are supposed to chain in one direction or another, if you succeed or fail. But for encounters like this, I have never seen failure. The way it’s set up, it doesn’t even seem possible. People just farm these great and terrible creatures over and over, pretty mindlessly. This doesn’t seem right.

SO, here’s what I’d like to see for existing encounters like this and future ones (I’d also like to see future elder dragon as OW events, maybe once a day or something, instead of tied to a 5-man dungeon). First, make the dragon/champion itself invincible to normal attacks. None of this “zerg dps until it’s done”. Zerg all you want, but you won’t even scratch it and you will just end up with a field of dead bodies (to be farmed for daily?). Like Gandalf said about the Balrog in lotr, “Swords are no more use here!”.

Make more use of asuran lasers or other “special” means to employ against the dragons, and fight to defend them from waves of minions, in various locations. Also, maybe the dragon shouldn’t be attacking us directly, but working to destroy some strategic building or something. There must be a timer until it succeeds and we need to find ways to stop him in that time. This alone doesn’t solve the problem though. It would break up the zerg into numerous smaller groups (and each of these groups must stay on top of things. If one area falls, the whole thing is pretty much over).

I want to some sort of mechanic in place to pretty much screw everybody over. Anet should aim for a certain % success rate. Like 60% fail, 40% succeed, and put in mechanics for the boss to change its routine, in fact change the rules of the encounter all together. Any system that is always the same, no matter how complex, WILL be figured out at some point. Then the trick, “ideal build”, whatever will become common knowledge and then we’re back to a mindless routine again. They should find a way so that no matter how experienced you are, no matter how well everybody knows where to go and what to do, …it’s still just as likely as not that the event will fail.

I want the majority of these things to fail really, and I want it to be a fairly big deal when one actually succeeds. Especially for future elder dragons. Again ..open world, not instanced. But their time should be much less frequent than their champions. Probably no more than once a day (once a week might be excessive, but maybe that too). As big of a deal as it is to actually win vs the champs, it should pretty much be server-wide news when an elder dragaon falls.

People would still farm the events of course. Even for failure, you still get credit for trying. And also failure should result in another event. But success should be something special. It shouldn’t be guaranteed every time, and it probably shouldn’t even happen the majority of the time. Have some kind of RNG that determines the rules of the event. There should be probably a handful of different ways the battle can play out, most of them almost certain to result in defeat. Your average dragon farming attempt WILL be a failed event. But sometimes it will give conditions that allow for success (or make it more likely).

I imagine a lot of people would not like this idea, because they want to get maximum loot/rewards every single time. But we already don’t anyway. The chest at the end is pure RNG. Might as well throw some RNG on the encounter itself too and mix up the actual game-play experience to have some different outcomes too. Put us up against a foe that should be borderline impossible, and more often than not, is. But then when we get that ever-rare victory, it would actually be worth something to be able to say “I was there for that”.

What do people / Anet think about this? Obviously it would take a lot more work to set this kind of thing up. But shouldn’t something be done? Is the way it is now how we all really envisioned it would be?

in a dugeon sense yes but in a world full of real gamer no . The reason to why this won’t work is because you will hit that antifarm too quick and….. no chest no good loot at least this way you can get it.

I loathe the whole farming mentality. Like, nothing is “worth doing” unless you can count on getting super duper loot, even in a game like GW where loot only gets so great anyway. What about the actual game experience? What about having accomplishments that can’t be mindlessly farmed in another 3hrs? What about events that actually fail? Remember that fail condition that was supposed to exist? How often do events (dragons or otherwise) fail? They don’t. Just zerg dps and you win, period.

I don’t do dungeons. I dislike the elitism. This is one aspect from other games I’m sad to see still going strong in this one. I also prefer larger party sizes. 5 is ok, but 10 would be better. That’s another topic though. My GW2 experience is ALL about the OW content. I absolutely want to see lots and lots of people involved. But not how it is now.

Don’t get my wrong, I generally like zergs. They have their place. But they shouldn’t be the universal solution for everything. There should be things where zergs just won’t work, and things that are not guaranteed success every kitten time. Whenever there is a single set pattern, even if it was challenging the first time, it becomes trivial every time after when everyone knows what to do. It boils down routine mindless farming like any other game, and I still believe ArenaNet can do better than that. It IS doable for OW content with the right parameters. Even if it does come down to routine stuff, at the VERY LEAST, give rules / mechanics to break up the zergs.

Right now it’s optional ..different places you can be, roles you can do. But nobody does the other stuff, they just run straight to the big baddie and join the culled dps army for the few minutes the encounter will last. Just make it so that doesn’t work, period. Make the dragons simply “beyond the normal means of mortals” so they MUST be fought by other means on multiple fronts. Preferably have the different attack options depend on each other or have to all need to be active in order to succeed. You can’t tell me this isn’t doable. What we have right now is just lazy imo. Lazy players taking advantage of lazy design for a mediocre experience (that was supposed to be “epic”).

Fighting a dragon like they have in this lore is supposed to be spectacularly difficult, and defeating it should generally be unlikely, and a big deal if you do. But currently they’re just a joke, something that can not possibly fail, and doesn’t require any co-ordination or thought. Pretty disappointing.

For already existing events they could probably add a timer, that’d probably be the easiest loss condition to implement.

I don’t think rng should have much to do with the outcome, if they feel the success rate is too high they could just ramp up the difficulty and let that serve as the mediator. Just because people know what to do doesn’t mean they’ll be able to execute something perfectly each time. If they can do it perfectly each time, then just let them have their stuff. They probably enjoy running events over and over if they’re that serious.

I’ve never had the loot rng screw me, it always gives me something I can use. Even if I get 6 crap items, they can be salvaged, and I’ll buy what I want inexpensively on the TP. The only way I could see events being rewarding is if they had exclusive items, BoP/unsalvagable stuff. As it currently is, I get what I want whether I get it or not. If I want something gold can’t buy, that’s fine, since I still need sigils/runes from time to time, and I’m showered in karma/laurels for playing the game which is what buys the best stuff anyway :-|.

tldr respectfully disagree with parts, but agree overall.

What we see too often is “increased difficulty” = enemy has more HP and more damage. When what is really needed is better mechanics, different options and situations. We need several points of failure (such as 5 cannon placements, you lose if any 1 gets destroyed. And a timer too!).

What we have right now is one way to win and zero ways to lose.

Side note about timers:
I’m not crazy about “just a timer”. I want the timer to represent something that you can visually observe happening. Like some fortress getting physically torn down and you can see the damage happening, and the timer just represents time until total ruin. Maybe add a repair mechanic where if players repair a certain portion it adds x-time to the countdown. There are all kinds of ways they can go about this that would make it more involving and demanding on a large scale, and make success at least a little less guaranteed.