Guild Wars 2

There is absolutely nothing in-game outside of being in the right place at the right time to know that there even are such things as world bosses. Before this patch, the only official mention that we ever had was in the patch notes, telling us the loot structure had changed for them (a few times), and now telling us that they are harder. I’m still not sure how you can even tell if something is a “world boss” or not (I found out one through the new daily achievement). Is there something in the event name or somewhere that actually designates them? How can you know other than going to some random site that may or may not have correct information?

Don’t get me wrong: I think they’re very cool and apparently according to my achievements I’ve even stumbled upon one or two without even knowing what it was. And I am very happy that this issue is being more or less resolved by having an entire content update basically revolving around the idea of world bosses. But there could really be a bit more official and/or in-game information out there about them. For example, another basic question I have is about how often they occur. With the Scarlet invasions we knew it was every hour, but with world bosses there are tons of random internet sites that “track” them, although most are wrong and even the ones that get them right don’t help if you show up and are shunted to overflow. I have no idea how often the current world boss fight happens, for example, or where I’d even go to find out.

Thanks for making them more obvious but I just wanted to say that the majority of players have probably never heard of a world boss before this week. Are there other big, huge, cool areas of the game that are also kept effectively secret (other than whatever the end of jumping puzzles look like)? Was the secrecy sort of part of the deal with these?

The sooner you (and others) realize that GW2 is a game about personal discovery, exploration, and astounding in game revelations, rather than a farm train, the sooner you will be satisfied with the content and its presentation.

Nothing in game to indicate it? Map chat, guild chat, achievements tied to world bosses, most have dynamic events tied to them not to mention the NPC banter around each of their respective zones.

Don’t get me wrong, good that you’ve found them now too, but I don’t think you’ve really been paying attention if you’ve only just noticed them now.

Now if you want to do them more often and know when and where to be:
http://us.gw2stuff.com/en/events/sea-of-sorrows

just change it to your server.

Well, I would separate between “boss events” and “world events”.
Boss event is everything that gives you a bonus chest with a granted yellow item afterwars. The difference with world events is, that those have “world bosses”. You know, normal mob → veteran → silver mob → champ → world boss. Those enemies with a special design above their health bar, like shadow behemoth or the dragons.

Did you know that if you end up fighting an Elder Dragon later in the game? You probably wouldn’t know that if you didn’t do Story Mode, and explored/discovered along the way.

Actually there is alot of presentation for the map bosses if you look. On the right side of the screen, usually near the ‘end’ or highest level part of a zone a meta event box will pop up, this will show up even if the event is down telling you the status. things like ‘the swamp is dormant’ ‘so and so has been beaten back for now’ etc. This big orange box with a hint that the swamp is dormant, is telling you that sometimes its NOT dormant and if you follow the events in the area its going to lead to something BIG, every map has at least one of these, they all lead to a big fight and chest

Wow, what a bunch of mean spirited responses! I’m not even sure why someone would respond like that in such a rude way.

Thanks, Shemsu, for that – I had no clue what those sorts of things were for, other than sort of “meta” events going on, but I didn’t know those were tied to world bosses, specifically (again: how would I? Where is this mentioned in-game?). I recall those sorts of status bars tend to show up whenever you’re in the area of the map that has them, so I’ll pay more attention to that now. But how did you know that was what they were for?

I’ve also seen many enemies with “more than a champion” style frame around their portrait, but this happens constantly – I mean, look at Logan or Trehearne or any of the other major NPCs – so I just thought that meant “extra big” or whatever. It seems like there’s a big gap between champion and world boss; I mean, it would take like 100 Logans to hurt Tequatl.

Also, thanks for the help about tracking websites, but as I’ve already mentioned above: they tend to not work (including the link above, which is wrong at least half the time, but that’s still better than most), and they are all out-of-game random sites put up by whoever. There’s nothing official about that stuff. And how did those sites know (often incorrectly) what the timers are, or what counts as a “world boss?” How does anyone?

Hi arabeth! I think we were all in the same boat as you at one point or another. To answer your questions the best way I know, Arenanet released API information that let us know when all events in the game were up and active. Based on trial and error, people had been updating the wiki page with what was giving out a daily chest and what was not. You can see that here – http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Chest#Daily_chest

Websites like http://us.gw2stuff.com/en/events/us keep track of all of the relevant events to keep track of what is up and what is not to better guide people on where to get their daily chests. Keep in mind that the timers on each server are different. So the timer on Sea of Sorrows would be completely wrong for that of Sanctum of Rall. Here – https://api.guildwars2.com/v1/events.json?world_id=1013 is the event page for Sanctum of Rall. Within all that mess is the information for all the events currently for the game. Using https://api.guildwars2.com/v1/event_names.json you can decypher which event is which, like {"id":“568A30CF-8512-462F-9D67-647D69BEFAED”,“name”:“Defeat Tequatl the Sunless.”}, being killing Teql. The current state on SoR is {"world_id":1013,map_id,“event_id”:“568A30CF-8512-462F-9D67-647D69BEFAED”,“state”:"Fail"}, so SoR failed the last attempt at the event “Defeat Tequatl the Sunless”. That state is visually represented by having the fishheads and all that all over the place. That’s the failed state.

Anyway, I think I went on a little tangent, but I hope some of that helped!

Thank you for being helpful!

So this goes back to my “the secrecy was part of the deal” idea before; there’s really no way you could know unless you happened to be in the right place at the right time, or you were connected to someone else who knew, or you got tons of information from non-official websites (or sort of figured it out from the wiki). Which is fine: and I can see why they’d want to make a huge deal about world bosses, since the majority of the playerbase probably never heard of them until this week, and that’s a lot of coding and cool stuff to just get seen by a few people. (Not to mention those few people were probably also farming the events regularly and increasing the difference between the wealth of the average player and those in the know, which is why I am guessing they kept lowering the loot and made them harder.)

It still seems weird that you’d have to have a site that could read and interpret the API in order to know the timing. No regular person off the street is going to have access to that. And the site you linked is the one I keep saying is wrong at least half the time (and yes, I’m selecting the correct server).

It just seems like there’s a HUGE amount of stuff to this game, and barely anything in-game or on official sources telling people about it, and very little to know why it’s important or how it works or really anything. I mean, crafting alone is incredibly complex if you want to not lose a ton of money doing it, and that’s just one tiny (and well-documented) piece! Obviously part of the point is to discover parts of the game yourself, and as an MMO I guess it needs to just keep going on and on to keep your interest, but my point is that with some things (like world bosses) it’s very easy for you to never discover them – unless you’re plugged into a bunch of non-official sources. Which is fine for many people, but it’s still very easy to miss information that way.

I didn’t find out about dragons until a good 2 months after I started playing. Before then I’d done Fire Ele and Golem Mk 2 without even realizing they were world events. Heck, I think I soloed the Mk2 because there were no real rewards for doing any of the bosses back then.

Anyhow, like so much of this game, you definitely have to rely on outside resources if you want to find out about it.

I see your point. I think that ArenaNet’s point is that they want us, the player, to forcibly talk and interact with one another to come up with resources like gw2stuff or http://gw2crafts.net/ or http://www.guildwarstrade.com/ or http://gw2spidy.com

GW2 is a very odd game where they allow you to be casual all day and night, but there’s a very steep slope that turns you into hardcore right away with only a few steps.

This is my guild and I innocently doing a mini-dungeon and stumbling upon a daily chest world boss – http://www.twitch.tv/ragethehashtags/c/2659264 Little did we know this was a known thing!