Guild Wars 2

Currently we have waypoints which spawn after a boss is killed, but it should be spawned before the boss is fought. In addition, players should not be able to respawn after being defeated in a fight (until the boss dies or party is out of combat/dead).

This reduces several negative things:

Random 5 minute walks in the dungeon
Respawn -> Fight boss
Ignoring downed allies

I’m sure we can all agree it sucks to waypoint and run through half the dungeon before rejoining the fight. The only reason this is in the game is probably to prevent you from respawning on top of the boss and killing him without armor.

Respawning and continuing to fight a boss is a horrible option players have. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had fights where we would have lost if players couldn’t respawn, but this implies that we are doing it “wrong”. I think this causes the most frustration against “unbeatable bosses”. The party has a few members get defeated, and from there it becomes a slow trickle of player vs boss, leading to lots of broken gear and little teamwork. It would be much better to have a wipe and then players could calm down and talk about what happened instead of a defeated -> waypoint -> attack ASAP to prevent resetting.

For the last point, I think some players ignore downed allies and continue to hit the boss because they think “oh if he dies he can just res and run back np”.

I think the best thing about eliminating respawn is that groups can finally understand if they can or cannot defeat a boss with their strategy.

This is very much the PUG experience.

Anet made the decision to allow ‘in battle’ respawning with the punishment being in the repair costs. ‘zerging’ breaks the bank, yet still allows the uninitiated to struggle their way through, that is how the system is intended. Players eventually have to learn that this isn’t the best method as they’ll be broke pretty quick if they keep it up. This in turn makes a slightly easier learning curve requirement to an event/dungeon, you can make a few mistakes, still pull through and complete it rather than completely wiping, and hopefully learn from that and do better the next time. This allows for groups of players to run and complete a dungeon without requiring anyone in the group to have previously mastered the run and walk the group through (anyone from WOW who has fought raid bosses knows the ‘do you know the fight?’ chatter in order to have a hope of success is a clear sign of that system is ‘broken’ as there is no way to succeed without pre-studying a battle).

If you’re in a guild group or playing with people who know what to do, how to play their profession and pay attention to the boss and others around, death should generally be a rare occurrence (being downed is different, as there are always cases where you just situationally get the short end of the stick, but others should be able to stagger roles to revive). PUG groups tend to have the ‘zerg’/spam/respawn mentality because, there’s the ‘I don’t know {player} therefore don’t care if he dies’, lack of organization/experience, and some players just plain don’t know better and haven’t learned that spending ‘x’ silver every run on repairs is probably not a good thing.

//

Having a waypoint spawning before the boss is defeated is a bad idea, this would further build the zerg rush mentality to fighting bosses and would be an effective ‘insta res’ leaving only the silver as punishment for dieing; and additionally as the path has not been cleared makes no sense to have an active waypoint available.

The waypoint would only be accessible after all players were dead or the boss died/reset.