Guild Wars 2

First for all the fame seekers and “hardcore” players: this has nothing to do with difficulty. I like difficult content and enjoy being rewarded for my skill. What i dont like is artificially difficult content. Content where i m battling the system instead of the game. Overflows, lag, framerate, too many effects on a single target, damage sponges… horrible game design and combat mechanics. Many of these points have already been brought up by people like WoodenPotatoes but they need to be brought up again and again till ANET actually takes note because all of this has already happened before and unless something is done will keep coming up.

So as much as this might offend some people at ANET i need to ask this and call some people out on this:
What manner of clueless game designer designed this fight? What QA team let this horror past the door and what superior let this whole thing happen in the first place?
I know i will not get a response to this but i hope at least one dev reads this and raises hell in the company because this stuff simply will not do!

So lets look at what you did wrong. Lets start with the most obvious things:
-Forcing a hundred players into one spot to DPS a single point. The main complaint with the dragon fights was this one exact thing! Your game engine is horrible, your servers can not handle the load and your game mechanics (conditions, etc.) dont allow for this but you still managed to yet again completely ignore those facts and make the same mistake again! You could have spread out the players all over the big area if not half the map but no. A single 300 radius area will do.

-The fact that you need that many people to begin with. Less populated servers wont ever do this. The more dedicated people on those servers just guest on the bigger servers making the whole experience hell for anyone but the lucky few.

-Hinging the whole success of the fight on 6 people. The moment you allow a player to have control over such an important mechanic is the moment griefing is let trough the door. In an open world encounter no less! Not only that but any player who doesnt know what exactly he needs to do will get yelled at as he is decremental to everyone else.

-The “rewards”. Provided you manage to kill Tequatl or should i say deal with overflows and finally manage to enter the real server after several hours you get… greens!

-Achievements that are counter intuitive to what you are doing. Same thing as in the aetherblade dungeon. You learned nothing ANET. Get sucked into the vortex, stand behind the dragon, use the turret even though you dont know what it does and how important it is!

And finally the problems that you would have to work around or fix already before making any more new content:
-Viability of different builds and specs. I dont think i need to say much more on this. It has been a year and with ascended gating you have forced people into a single build and in most cases berserker gear.

-The dreaded overflow system and minimum player numbers.
Even before the game launched i was against this. Overflow is as bad a system just like the original HA system in GW1. It needs to go. It prevent players from playing with players they know and destroys communities. WvW should be the only thing based on worlds and even then an alliance system would be much better.

For several months now (with the exception of SAB – thank you Josh) we have had nothing but pathetically designed zerg battles fighting respawning enemies to get money. Yes, just like in any other MMO! The thing as you said you did not want to do! Now we have raid like content with all the flaws and more but without real rewards. This needs fixing now.

Considering the above here is how an improved Tequatl fight would look like:

-Arcanist lab houses another power station and its event cannot be active during Tequatls. The quagan event provides extra NPCs for the north station. Completing the gorge quest reduces the number of mobs assaulting the SE station.

-Event starts, hordes of undead start spawning across the entire coast length and start walking inland. These mobs will continuously assault 10 points: 6 turrets and 4 power stations. Bloaters will head directly for the stations and try to blow up on them. Mob rank is adjusted according to the total of players in the entire area but never goes past veteran. With this system the event could be scaled all the way down to 20 players and still be just as challenging.

After 2 minutes Tequatl makes his entrance and starts spawning his fingers and small waves. Tequatl has a individual damage threshold on each of his 3 points that resets every few seconds – damaging all 3 points at the same time does the most damage. The undead increase in numbers and start running. Fingers spawn poison around them. Hylek turrets deal increased damage to Tequatl, bone walls and fingers and clense their poison. Batteries begin charging the laser. If a battery is destroyed the charging is slowed. If all 4 batteries are destroyed the laser will not fire and the event fails. Laser does 20% damage to Tequatl and fires every 2 minutes with all 4 stations charging it. It is the primary source of damage and stuns Tequatl.
After the stun ends Tequatl roars, spawns a wall and a champion for each of the stations. If the wall is not destroyed before the laser fires again it instead destroys the wall with no damage to the dragon.

If Tequatl is not defeated in 13 minutes he spawns the big wave, then destroys the laser. At this point a massive army of undead overruns the area and a new event spawns to recapture it.

SonicTHI.3217:

Considering the above here is how an improved Tequatl fight would look like:

-Arcanist lab houses another power station and its event cannot be active during Tequatls. The quagan event provides extra NPCs for the north station. Completing the gorge quest reduces the number of mobs assaulting the SE station.

-Event starts, hordes of undead start spawning across the entire coast length and start walking inland. These mobs will continuously assault 10 points: 6 turrets and 4 power stations. Bloaters will head directly for the stations and try to blow up on them. Mob rank is adjusted according to the total of players in the entire area but never goes past veteran. With this system the event could be scaled all the way down to 20 players and still be just as challenging.

After 2 minutes Tequatl makes his entrance and starts spawning his fingers and small waves. Tequatl has a individual damage threshold on each of his 3 points that resets every few seconds – damaging all 3 points at the same time does the most damage. The undead increase in numbers and start running. Fingers spawn poison around them. Hylek turrets deal increased damage to Tequatl, bone walls and fingers and clense their poison. Batteries begin charging the laser. If a battery is destroyed the charging is slowed. If all 4 batteries are destroyed the laser will not fire and the event fails. Laser does 20% damage to Tequatl and fires every 2 minutes with all 4 stations charging it. It is the primary source of damage and stuns Tequatl.
After the stun ends Tequatl roars, spawns a wall and a champion for each of the stations. If the wall is not destroyed before the laser fires again it instead destroys the wall with no damage to the dragon.

If Tequatl is not defeated in 13 minutes he spawns the big wave, then destroys the laser. At this point a massive army of undead overruns the area and a new event spawns to recapture it.

THIS oh please THIS…this is the fight I was waiting for with the tequatl event. This is the fight I would pay money to play…not the current Tequatl KITTENfest.

I agree. Plus there’s mass AFK. When you have an event this difficult on a long timer, its bound to happen.

Yeah the hardcore may love it. Teqatl is almost a guaranteed failure unless you come across the most pristing or circumstances. Even then you can fail without sufficient numbers. Now that people are giving up it’s gettimg even harder.

You know what really sucks though? Knowing that when the event begins that your chance is nil (based on the number of people present) even if everyone plays well.

I remember trailer before game came up something like, you will have to position yourself, you can’t hit with your sword and arrows trough other players etc. now year after, bunch of ppl stacking at each other, “swinging their swords” untill something drops dead. So to conclude, you guys lost the track of how this game should look like and where it should go, because you are going against your own words.

SonicTHI.3217:

Considering the above here is how an improved Tequatl fight would look like:

-Arcanist lab houses another power station and its event cannot be active during Tequatls. The quagan event provides extra NPCs for the north station. Completing the gorge quest reduces the number of mobs assaulting the SE station.

-Event starts, hordes of undead start spawning across the entire coast length and start walking inland. These mobs will continuously assault 10 points: 6 turrets and 4 power stations. Bloaters will head directly for the stations and try to blow up on them. Mob rank is adjusted according to the total of players in the entire area but never goes past veteran. With this system the event could be scaled all the way down to 20 players and still be just as challenging.

After 2 minutes Tequatl makes his entrance and starts spawning his fingers and small waves. Tequatl has a individual damage threshold on each of his 3 points that resets every few seconds – damaging all 3 points at the same time does the most damage. The undead increase in numbers and start running. Fingers spawn poison around them. Hylek turrets deal increased damage to Tequatl, bone walls and fingers and clense their poison. Batteries begin charging the laser. If a battery is destroyed the charging is slowed. If all 4 batteries are destroyed the laser will not fire and the event fails. Laser does 20% damage to Tequatl and fires every 2 minutes with all 4 stations charging it. It is the primary source of damage and stuns Tequatl.
After the stun ends Tequatl roars, spawns a wall and a champion for each of the stations. If the wall is not destroyed before the laser fires again it instead destroys the wall with no damage to the dragon.

If Tequatl is not defeated in 13 minutes he spawns the big wave, then destroys the laser. At this point a massive army of undead overruns the area and a new event spawns to recapture it.

This. Yes. This.

I worry that, because of the somewhat harsh tone of your first post, this thread will be deleted and/or people will skip over your second post, which is full of awesome ideas.

These are GREAT ideas for improving the fight. This is the kind of thing I thought Anet would actually do when they said they were “changing” the fight (since we didn’t really get a change; his damage and health just went up and the turrets actually became important, but otherwise this is the same basic fight).

What’s great about your ideas is that they break up the typical “zerg” mentality. Having to defend multiple points would make people split up into smaller, coordinated groups; several 5 man parties working to accomplish small tasks would be more important than blindly following a blue Dorito. Because there would be a large number of targets, you eliminate the issue that is common to most boss fights (i.e., classes that depend on crowd control, like necro with fear, are useless due to Defiant/Unshakeable, and conditions are useless due to the 25 condi caps).

Plus, it just makes absolute sense to me that the primary source of damage to a gigantic dragon would be an epic freaking laser. People hitting his knees with a scepter (I play necro) SHOULDN’T be capable of taking down something like that with autoattacks. And because we would be actively fighting the zombie hordes, we aren’t just “crippled” out of our class skills (like we were in the Zhaitan fight where we just shot fireworks), but can still feel important, and for other roles than the normal DPS cannon role (condi necros with epidemic would feel important! aoe cripple/immob to stop the advance of suicide bombing zombies, anyone?).

And finally, the dragon would still actually be threatening. He could still one shot people (power level appropriate to a dragon) if they’re stupid enough to stand where he could step on them or lean that big, long neck down and munch on them.

Please, Anet, listen to this man’s ideas. Even if you don’t apply them to Teq, you can apply them to other bosses in the future. Making something feel “epic” doesn’t just mean hitting a giant object; coordinating to achieve something like ten different objectives at the same time, as suggested here (defend turrets, defend arcanist lab, escort quaggans, clear gorge for reinforcements, defend charge batteries) would feel much more epic than hitting the kneecaps of a giant, immobile lizard and jumping over some waves/out of some poison.

Excellent post. It sounds like it would make the fight challenging but fun. A lot better than it is now.

I agree with a lot of the OP, not everything.

I don’t think the fight itself is a horrible idea. Being a damage sponge is sort of a requirement for open world. I don’t think overflows are a bad idea either.

The event though. The “Tequatl Rising” part. The Living Story part. It just isn’t working. The fight against Tequatl is meant to be something that happens like current world events. People will wait for the window before attempting to gather and every overflow created will be created by an overflow of ACTIVE players who are willing to fight.

However, since there was no systems put in place accounting for the crowds caused by the Living Story. (No guesting restrictions, no AFK timer changes in Sparkfly.) I think it’s going to be a long time before the fight truely reaches its target. So even after it slows down we may continue to see:

• People not even trying on Overflow
• Hatred of guesters
• People who went through the nerve wracking process unwilling to try the event again

I think what ArenaNet needs to do, despite their fix-content-rather-than-develop-failsafes mentality, is create a bunch of crowd control tools that they can utilize for future events. Basically stuff like:

1. The ability to create different AFK timers around certain waypoints
2. Guest join delays that guarantee that natives can always slip in first on full maps
3. The ability to change parameters of certain events while they are running without a build update
4. An overflow mercy system that completes 5-10% of the event in question to give people a motivating advantage for trying on an overflow as well as accounting for the extra time it takes to organize one