Guild Wars 2

Visually, is epic.
The placement, dunno a better place than a dark gloomy swamp.
The boss mechanics? meh.

Problem I’ve noticed with many epic world bosses, is they don’t work well against large groups. Why? Well who can anticipate 30+ people would be farming this fella, and make the mechanics to support them without introducing more 1-shot mechanics. Hp scaling goes a long distance but it still doesn’t push the bar to high, it just makes the boss last longer. Also the fact that ranged players can avoid dieing simply by standing still doesn’t seem right.

Ok, so SB is in the middle of this huge clearing in the swamp, yet he only attacks the front, with very few attacks tbh. The attacks do a good amount but they are so few in numbers that it hardly grazes the players. Lets vamp this guy up already, even the Champion shaman chief in the Frozen Maw is more threatening than this and he is a popsicle stick in size compared to this thing.

1. Instead of only in front, the Shadow Behemoth can make a full 360 attacking anything around. His spawn placement should be slightly adjusted to better fit this.
2. Some new moves that the sb can have could be:
-Swipe both arms around to knockback and damage players
-Screech causes vulnerability to players(15 for full screech)
-while the portals are open, sb will drop the spikes all around the field
-Another attack, sb will pierce the ground with his claws all around, heavily damaging players. The hand angle is as if it’s playing a piano, so his claws are perpendicular with the swamp base but it will smash the ground quickly after a red circle appears. The red circle is for each talon, so the center of it all would basically 1 shot a player if they happen to be in the absolute worse place. Each talon does damage, but at the same time, quickly after a red circle for it appears.
3. When he opens up portals, there are portals all around him. This forces players to spread out a bit more. The portal health is fine imo, it’s just they are so close to each other it’s hardly any work to shut them down. Additionally, each portal should start summoning veterans if they stay open for X amount of seconds. Lastly, any spawns from them should not die if the portal dies.
4. Speed up the falling spikes projectile speed. Those circles are a visual queue to get out, but they are so slow it’s almost like they don’t want player’s to worry about them.

Many bosses have been adjusted to survive much more (thank you, very much, for the jungle wurm buff) but some world boss mechanics are completely lacking (maw, sb, every dragon). Also epic bosses can be blinded, which I think should be removed (as in, epic bosses are immune to blind, not remove blind). Aside from that, the visuals truely are enjoyable, its just the fight isn’t on par with it.

None of the world bosses are any good at the moment and need complete reworks.

Doomguard.5094:

None of the world bosses are any good at the moment and need complete reworks.

Basically thats the fine print in this thread. Either way, I wanted to share my thoughts on what can be done about the sb. Personally, I’d rather work at arenanet than throw ideas at them through the forums (ideas are dime a dozen) but I’ll need more than ambition to climb up in the video game market.

Doomguard.5094:

None of the world bosses are any good at the moment and need complete reworks.

TBH I’d say the main issue with the lower level ones (SB, Frozen Maw, Jungle Wurm, Fire Elemental) isn’t with the bosses themselves, but with the player scaling.

A level 80 rare – exotic – ascended level player is just ridiculously overpowered in the 1 – 20 level areas (less so as you advance in levels). On my low level engineer it can take me a while to kill a mob, if I agro more than one mob at the time I can kill them but I better stay on the move and evading if I want to survive… on my level 80 guardian I can agro several mobs and kill them all in one or two attacks (the GS swirly attack is usually enough to kill most mobs).

These bosses are low level bosses, they’re level 15 events meant to serve as an introduction to multi events chains and bosses for starting players, they can’t be buffed too much or you’ll basically be locking people at the apropiate level from doing them and efectively making them high level content in low level areas.

I’d even say even make the gear downlevel to never be better than the best gear you can get on that area, if it’s not done already (can’t say it isn’t, just the feeling that my exotic geared level 80’s are significantly more powerful when downleveled than characters of the apropiate level on the best gear I could find at the level). If you’re downleveled to level 10, for example, your gear should be taken down to the equivalent of a level 10 blue gear (since there’s no greens until level 14), at level 20 you should get the equivalent to green gear (since rares don’t show up until level 30) and so on.

Some people say the downscaling is already too harsh (primarily about crit chance/damage). Although I think the scaling isn’t optimal atm, the mechanics are what really make it challenging. If boss A requires players to stay alive and damage it, thats fine. But if boss A has no moves to scare players from standing in one spot with a ranged weapon (or melee in some cases) then there is the problem. Bosses need ways to deal with both melee, and ranged, something the Golem Mark II does well (the field, and then his turret circle). But not only can these epic bosses be blinded rending all their aoe skills, which are aimed at thinning players or atleast making them stay on their toes, useless. They also arn’t very threatening. For the first time since I started, I get to see the jungle wurm’s true colors. It isn’t a breeze in the park as it once was, but I still feel like it doesn’t hurt enough (still, being the first time I get to start experiencing it, I do enjoy the jungle wurm. Interesting skills, just not harsh enough).

Most bosses are just too straightforward, there needs to be things on the side for them. Take the Ancient karka for example. You broke down trees, exploded gas pockets, even shot rocks at it. Aside from the message on the top right guiding you, it wasn’t just hack and slash straightforward. Many dungeon bosses have great mechanics, and the temples in orr have some good mechanics (I like grenth the most) but these other “world bosses” couldn’t change anything if their design depended on it atm. They cannot fail, and are very simple fights even though they look badkittentastic. I enjoyed the feeling of roaming a zone only to come across some giant beast reigning havok all around it, something I don’t see often in gw2 (the champion icebrood in NW corner of frostgorge comes to mind). Downscaling was a great idea to make low level areas still relevant, but boss mechanics should be fun and challenging at all levels. Currently I don’t feel either one from the majority of them. As from the number of posts about this topic, I reckon several others don’t either.