To illustrate this, I will target one boss in particular and then expand from there.
Mossman is unfulfilling as a boss experience, through and through. The dungeon team clamors that it has learned a lot from its past shortcomings and that Fractals bosses supposedly reflect that learning, and that these bosses are supposedly more interesting and satisfying. In some cases, that is true. I particularly enjoy the Grawl boss, the Cliffside boss (the last one, not the waste of time at the start of the zone), and the Dredge bosses.
But Mossman? No.
Some quick info:
- He throws Agony-inflicting, bouncing axes
- He summons constant non-threatening adds
- He melees you
- He does these things while invisible half of the time
- He has a ‘million’ HP
He’s not fun. Do you know why he’s not fun? Because for something like half of the battle you cannot effectively damage him. You spend half of the fight running around in circles about either his house or that God forsaken bridge waiting for him to become visible again. Bosses with invulnerability mechanics like this that serve no purpose are shallow and unsatisfying.
People on high fractals (40+) prefer to reroll for Bloomhunger than deal with the waste of time that is Mossman.
Let’s also talk about his mechanics and how boring they are. He throws axes, summons worthless adds which serve only to rally you, melees you, and then can do all of these things invisible. That’s it. For ten minutes, you sit there and endure this experience just to move on. He’s not even hard, the only “hard” part comes from anticipating Agony being thrown from invisibility.
I could create a similar thread about how terrible bosses like Bloomhunger, the Dragon Shaman, Ashym, Maw, the first Cliffside boss (Why does this guy even exist!!), the Jellyfish, and so on are. The point is that these bosses are unfulfilling and I don’t think ANet has properly learned what we as a player base want and expect from our supposedly challenging content.
We want:
- Diversity
Bosses should be dynamic for the entirety of the fight. If we can tank and spank them for 1/4 of their HP, then we can do it for the last 3/4 of it. That’s not fun. This can be achieved with changing the mechanics of the boss in phases (Hello best boss in the game, Giganticus!), or by creating bosses which don’t have a lot of life but are extremely engaging for the duration of the fight.
- Meaningful Difficulty and Challenging Mechanics
Boss fights should be legitimately hard. Grawl boss is a great example of this. You can’t stay still or you get burned, he has fast-action high dps arrows, massive aoes, mechanic shifts at every 1/4 of his HP that spawn adds you must handle (who immobilize, bringing you back to the first mechanic of burning), lava pools that spawn randomly across the battlefield. I mean, come on, this boss just oozes awesome compared to the others. GL also has these challenging and yet manageable mechanics. This is also a reason why so many people like Kohler; he can legit down and beat your team if you don’t pay attention!
- More threatening, better telegraphed abilities
Some bosses are threatening because they just punch you in the face really hard, but that’s not fun. What’s fun is those skills with big wind-ups that you know will screw you up when they hit. Giganticus’ poison projectiles of death, Kohler’s spin-to-win, Rumblus’ rock-crusher… It’s sad that I can’t think of many more examples like this. We need more of this!
- Less Agony, more DPS
Agony is a crutch for many of these bosses because they are so bad they couldn’t kill you otherwise. For instance, I enjoy the Dredge boss mechanics because it forces someone to handle levers, but the bosses are other than their agony absolutely pathetic. Step off the Agony a bit (I understand some of it is necessary for the purpose of FotM) and boost their dps otherwise.
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