No, this is not a QQ thread. No, I have not beaten him. No, I do not want him nerfed. What I wanna suggest here are some things that are obviously not by design, but make life harder during the Tequatl fight.
- Problem 1: AoEs may start ticking before the effect is up.
This one’s simple. Due to whatever reasons, the poison clouds don’t start displaying the effect (including the AoE ring) until a tick or two have passed. That’s a considerable amount of damage taken without knowing where it’s coming from. It doesn’t happen always, but when it does, it’s very dangerous, especially if it happens on top of a turret. The poison clouds are also pretty hard to spot from a distance.
- Problem 2: friendly AoE doesn’t even look friendly, really hard to spot.
The first time I saw the might/fury circle, I actually thought it was the “pull underwater” attack Tequatl has, because it looked like a risen attack. What’s more, the effect is a brown ring on the ground of a washed out yellow/beige ground full of water, it’s nigh impossible to spot it properly.
- Solution 1 and 2: AoE clarity through better effects.
The Tequatl fight, unlike most boss fights so far, takes place in a wide open field, and requires the interaction between groups of people that might barely make it to the draw distance. Make the AoEs more visible. Poison clouds could be denser or darker, whatever works, but make them easy to spot from a distance. Also figure out what’s keeping them invisible.
The friendly AoE ring could be something bright white and shiny on the floor, more a disc than a ring, kinda like a mesmer’s portal, but wet-looking (to go with the hylek potion theme). That would give players fighting Tequatl a clear tell of where they can get the most stacks of might, and turret players would be able to see where other turret players are firing more easily as well.
- Problem 3: it’s impossible to keep Tequatl targeted.
Now this isn’t that huge of an issue for the people fighting him, since target assist can help a lot with that when you’re that close, but it’s very much deadly for turrets. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I was manning a turret, and after a couple seconds struggling to click on Teq to get him targeted, my target swaps to the finger 5 meters in front of me just as I press 2, wasting a precious attack.
Or when you tag tequatl and are attacking him with your 2 properly, but the moment you try to buff your allies on the field between cooldowns, or when tequatl moves too much during an attack animation, the target is lost. Hell, even moving the camera to the side to make sure the area around you doesn’t have poison clouds can make you lose target.
- Solution 3: make the turret skill 2 automatically hit tequatl.
I know, it sounds like simplifying the mechanic, and I know it doesn’t fix the targeting problem, only band-aids it, but I honestly believe it’s for the best. The 2 skill doesn’t serve absolutely any other purpose, not even damage, so hitting anything other than Tequatl is not just a waste because that’s one stack of scales you didn’t take down, but you couldn’t even damage an enemy mob in the process.
Making the skill go for tequatl automatically (when applicable, it obviously wouldn’t work with bone wall up, of if Teq is flying around) would make the workload on turret players considerably lighter, as they now can spend less time struggling with the UI to land a shot, and more time doing what they actually meant to do all along.
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If anyone has any other suggestions, please add to the topic!