Guild Wars 2

So, I personally love the new Tequatl battle. It’s epic, it’s thematic, it’s chaotic and it encourages team effort. The multi-front nature of the battle truly makes it seem like a major conflict in a war.

That said, I feel like some of the mechanics could use some tuning.

Tequatl’s shockwaves: The hitbox for the shockwaves moves ahead of the graphical depiction for a number of reasons. Rendering speed, server latency, timing, so on. Once someone learns this fact then jumping it becomes trivial, except that there is just enough variance in when the actual force will hit you that you can jump or dodge as you expect to be able to 100% of the time and still have a 50/50 chance of failing and losing half your HP and all your mobility for a couple of seconds. In a battlefield where poison fields that can spike you down to death in a few seconds are flying around willy-nilly, this kind of unpredictability neither validates skill nor is it fair to those whose rigs meet and exceed the recommended requirements but still chug in massive conflicts like the battle with Tequatl, where framerates plunge by half or more.

Turrets: The turret mechanics are fine and the recharge rates on the skills seems about right. In fact I was glad to see the turrets receive some reason for existing on the battlefield, and it also gives players a combination of artillery and support with which to strategically attack the enemy and support frontliners. However, the turrets are known to glitch out and either start firing late or not fire at all until one exits and re-enters the turret. Again, this unpredictability can completely derail an effort in a battle so time-constrained as this one. This bug must be fixed. I also feel that the damage of the first skill needs a boost to give it some use because as of right now it is a trap for inexperienced players. Really, skill 1 is just filler between buffing allies and clearing poison clouds.

Losing conditions: The timer is basically the cheapest way to mandate a losing condition in the game. I personally think that the destruction of the megalaser is a more fitting condition for losing the encounter than a fifteen minute timer running down. That said, I feel like fifteen minutes is also much too constraining for the amount of toughness and vitality Tequatl has. I do not think that his power nor his durability should be tuned down, but rather that the timer should be extended by five to ten minutes. This I believe would give coordinated groups a fair chance at victory, and I feel that skill would still be validated, because boy, I have seen and been part of some terrible runs where an hour wouldn’t have been enough time to defeat Tequatl.

Besides those caveats, I feel this is quality content. Refine it a bit and it will be a worthy addition to the overworld.

The two main issues besides the timer are the fact that the 6 people on the turrets have a significantly greater impact on success or failure than the other 95% of the players in the event and the fact that getting to your home server is almost impossible during prime time because server pride in taking down Tequatl is causing people to exploit the overflow mechanic to taxi party members into the main instance and keep all others on an overflow map.

I havent been in the assault team so I don’t know antthing about the first thing.

Turrets: But about turrets, I think that a big reason to extreme failure on Overflows is becouse of inexperienced players are spamming skill 1 on turrets(I only think it is becouse of that).
That leads to low extra DPS, no poison cleansing and no support.
I don’t agree to buff skill 1 since then people will use it even more and then the point of turrets will go away again… Maybie lock skill 1 until megalaser has hit when Teq is stunned and then lock skill 1 once he becomes active… Like a friendly helper :P

Losing conditions: When I watched a live-stream if I remember correct the timer was 45min or something… I guess that’s becouse I assume Teq way harder then and people where complaining about a 45min fight so they tuned it down a bit… But I could agree that just a little more time would suffice since as it looks now overflows and servers where only a few good leaders are active manage to get him below 75%… So no reward for overflows, I usually don’t care about rewards that much but last night when I forgot to go to sparkfly a little earlier I got to overflow and asked my fiancee if we should do something else becouse we will not get anything from doing this (Daily was already done).

I am not realy saying that is needed, but I would have thought that this content had been more enjoyable if we could have an little bit of chance to succeed.
Like when you play with a cat or dog, I learned that I have to let it catch it’s “pray” sometime or else it looses interest and… well I guess we work the same way.