Guild Wars 2

spending a lot of time on /r/guildwars2 and paying attention to not only my own perceptions in the Tequatl fight as well as those of /zone chat, I’ve discovered that on most servers, even big ones, ending up in an Overflow pretty much guarantees not downing Tequatl.

by no means am I saying that the fight is tuned too high and needs to be nerfed. I think the fight is where it needs to be. the problem is that each Que has it’s own seperate Tequatl fight and most of the commanders and experience players are grouped into the Main. which means the overflows are lacking cohesion and experience and are guaranteed to not succeed due to the difficulty of the fight.

possible solution. have all ques work off of the same Tequatl health pool. the game is designed to naturally “ramp up” health pools based on how many players are there, so the framework exists to ramp it up for 15 Ques worth of players. everyone works off of the same health pool, so the entire server has a chance of downing the boss, rather than just those 80 or so in the Main Que. the difficulties are still there, the mechanics are the same, but now everyone, in every Que, has a legitimate shot at downing him, with no Nerf required.

TLDR: connect all ques and have them work off the same, ramped up, health pool

I am all for this idea. Overflows linked to a common event health pool. I also agree that the event does not need a nerf. It’s excellent where it is. Succeed or Fail as a server, not as an instance.

absolutely.

and another issue I forgot to address was the waiting times required to make it into the main que. there is enough waiting in GW2 as is, we don’t need more bosses that require us to forego playing the game, just to wait in a zone for hours to get a spot

The problem is overflows pool from all servers that have population issues so that people aren’t the only one on the map.

This would mean Overflow Teq would always be up as long a server had Teq running. At least while new Teq is still new.

It could also lead to the following scenario.

Crystal Desert spawns Teq. Enemies in main and overflow are fighting wonderfully.

They get it down to 10% health when Yak’s Bend spawns Teq. Overflow from Crystal Desert wasn’t full so Yak’s Bend players pop into that Overflow.

Common HP pool = the dragon on Crystal Desert main server jumps from 10% to 60%, but that 60% is 10% higher than the original Teq HP.

So, assuming no other server goes active on Teq and sends people to the same Overflow, those from or on Crystal Desert have to kill Teq 2 times. Those on Yak’s Bend or from Yak’s Bend have to kill Teq 1.1 times.

It’s too early to determine if it needs a nerf or even another buff. Once the newness dies down and it goes to its new average # of players, that’s when the decision to nerf or buff should take place.

I don’t think the OP means all servers connected, just the over flows on one server.
Say, Blackgate Main, as well as Blackgate Overflow 1, 2, 3, 4, etc would be fighting a common Boss event and HP bar across Blacgate only. Not one common Boss event across all servers and overflows.
Looking at it that way, there’s no way that could work across all servers. I wouldn’t want to see that at all.
But across one server, yes. Most definitely.

Like I said, I believe the Overflow servers are cross server to ensure there are people around to play with. Or at least I remember when in Overflow one day hearing a lot of advertisements for guilds for different servers. More than I would expect for someone having transferred over to try to get new members.

Which would cause a problem for having a combined HP pool between main and overflow.

If that’s the case… bummer… eww…

if all the overflows are just willy nilly like that, then no wonder they’re having so much trouble.

As much as I hate the overflow issue I don’t think this is anywhere near the solution we need.

Technical issues:
- Overflows are probably needed because the engine can’t handle synchronising the influence more than 200 players can have on the same environment. Merging overflows in the way described would contradict the purpose of the overflow.
- The Tequatl fight would have to start at exactly the same time on each overflow. As new overflows can be generated even during the ongoing event people there would encounter a half-dead dragon and be required to join the fight without any preparation. Preparation is key to this encounter.

Gameplay issues:
- As it is now even organized groups don’t have enough influence over the outcome of the fight. A few players being afk or trolling in the wrong place can screw the whole event. The level of control over the actual fight would be reduced even more by this change and make the issue worse.
- The fight mechanics wouldn’t work the way they were meant to anymore. Should Tequatl still take damage if the bone wall went up on one of the overflows? One overflow can’t defend the laser and the tidal wave comes up. Should the fight end right there or can the other overflow still win it?

Technical issues asside, for this to work ANet would have to dumb down the encounter and although I have my issues with it right now I don’t wan’t them to be resolved that way.