Guild Wars 2

Since ANet is doing a complete rework of many bosses, I though it would be nice to write a list of GOOD bosses and BAD bosses, and the reason why. The key for a good boss is usually original and funny mechanics, and that does most of the work.
Feel free to disagree, these are my personal thoughts as an experienced dungeon runner (I don’t dare to use the word “pro” ).

Good bosses
- Kholer from AC. Probably the first serious dungeon boss most player encountered and got steamrolled by. The key here is simply to learn when to dodge his wires, so he becomes very easy once the teams gets the mechanics and timing. Still, he’s always fun to fight because it requires attention, and with a very bad team it’s still possible to mess it up. His HP are also ok.
- The Howling King and Colossus Rumblus. Two pretty solid bosses, with many different mechanics, they require players to avoid standing in the way of their scream and their tunnelling, clean the spawned mobs, and know when to chain stun to remove “Defiant” stacks.
- Samus in CM. Team needs to keep distance from him, spread out, and possibly getting behind him whenever possible. It’s easy to spot an inexperienced CM player just by looking at the Samus fight.
- Bloody Victoria in CM. While not the most difficult boss around, she is different from others because she stealths and reappears dealing tons of damage, and that is enough to make her somewhat original.
- Frost in CM (yes, I like CM). Requires heavily use of condition removal, or the team will experience many deaths. Also, factors like rocket turrets and golems add something different to the fight, forcing a player to distract Frost while the others deal with other threats.
- Nightmare Vine in TA. Pretty tough fight, even after getting the basics. Can become frustrating at times, but neverless a pretty good boss with different strategies available, depending on the team. The enviroment here is also a very important factor, with blossoms that can both be your death or your salvation.
- Subject Alpha from CoE. Another difficult but extremely tactic fight. If you don’t know the boss patterns, you die: simple as that. And even once the groups knows what to do, it still remains challeging. Definitely one of the best boss designs in GW2.
- Gigant Lupicus in Arah. Except for the nearly invisible green “things”, that are usually dodged merely on intuition, this fight is very solid: three different phases, with different tactics to use. I did this boss with an experienced group from the very first time, but newcomers in Arah would be trashed again and again by big Lupi for their lack of strategy. Only problem is health, that is stupidly high.

Very bad bosses
- Bridgette in CM. Incredibly boring boss, which only difficulyt consists in stop attacking when her retailation is hitting too hard.
- Vallog in CM. One of the weakest and boring bosses around, all he does is standing still, deflecting projectiles from time to time, and knocking back melee attackers. Never a real threat, and nothing to worry about except stopping auto-attack while he reflects.
- The Defiler in TA. As he does very little in terms of damage, the only thing to do is rolling when the green icon appears on bar. Other than that, it’s 5 minutes of ranged boredom.
- Fyonna and Laurent Nightmare Trees in TA. While the tree is visually impressive, the fights are incredibly boring, and just consist on staying at the chamber entrance and slowly taking down the huge pool of health. Fyonna in particular is really terrible as AoE attacks must be avoided at all costs, making it a 111111 spam with occasional dodge.
- Basically ALL bosses in HotW. Very pretty dungeon, with ice, underwater sections… and terrible bosses. I seriously can’t remember a decent one, with maybe the exception of Ginva, which still wouldn’t describe as “fun” anyway.

I like the green rays that Lupicus shoots, without those the fight would definitely not be as good. The random factor that OMG THEY’RE GONNA HIT ME, you dodge, or you don’t…it may hit you, it may not. That dodge you just used could’ve saved you from shadow walk or all the AOE…in all I love those little green bolts.

I agree with HOTW, with the exception of Ginva and the Wolf guy in P3.

Bad: Almost every HotW boss, amen.

You had to remind me the HoTW underwater bosses exist didn’t you.

COE
Good:Subject Alpha – Things to fix still with him but Alpha is good.
Evolved Husk – Unique strategy with the guns and trees combined!
Bad: Destroyer? according to most people but it seems OK.

COF
Good: Legendary Searing Effigy – Unique with crystals.
Path 2 End Rock Boss – Sticks to COF teamwork themkittend boss
Path3 End Boss – Knockback AoE
Bad: Bridge Boss that is skipped in p1.

SE
Good : General Molradovich P3. 1 Hit Tunnel Attacks and 5 stacks of bleed per melee hit.
The Destroyer of Worlds – End boss with lots of fire aoe and spawns baby destroyers.
Bad : p3. General Zadorojny – Nothing special as I can really tell. Also the bridge General boss needs buff on damage for players ignoring the fire de-buff as now it can be ignored but is a great idea for boss.

Bascially in short:

Good bosses: Something that encourages player skill. Dodging, using utility, working with allies. Generally something that moves about and discourages auto afk 100 bladesing. Something that does a bit of damage too, so that it’s kind of a challenge. Lupi, Kholer, Alpha. Good bosses also tend to be pretty low in health because hitting something for 5 hours is not fun.

Bad: Damage sponges that encourages this passive “4 warriors 1 mesmer” all DPS min/maxing play. Bosses that require no utility. Boss that don’t even move and just repeat one or two low damaging attacks that a shouts warrior or a guardian or some other healing ability can just out-heal, like the flame effigy or hotw bosses. Damage sponges fall into this, because they are repeditive and boring.

I want to be challenged, I don’t want to play the numbers min/maxing game. I want to be kept on my toes. I don’t want my toes to get RSI.

Bosses that encourage players to stand at max range and just spam 1 until it’s over aren’t enjoyable at all…. TA forward/up and up path end bosses are really bad. Not even fun. I like the forward/forward end boss though. The first boss in TA, the nightmare vine is an awesome fight that I never get tired of doing.

I love all the boss encounters in Arah exp. Imo, Lupricus is the best designed boss in this game. Alpha in CoE exp is great also. The bosses in SE story mode are great, especially the last two. There are more that I like, but these just stand out the most to me.

Darkever.9732:

- Gigant Lupicus in Arah. […] Only problem is health, that is stupidly high.

The main problem in the health pool is in phase 1, I think. Once you got timing for dodging the grub production or the 4 DPS / 1 on grub duty strategy, this phase is really too long and boring.

I also concur, as many of us do, on the HOTW bosses and their gigantic health bar. The rest of the dungeon is quite enjoyable though, I run it frequently.

I can’t recall all the bosses from memory, but here are a few bullet-points that separate good and bad design:

Rule of thumb:
Your average combat length should be based on the number of ability/mechanics a boss has. Every mechanic means a boss-fight remains engaging for another minute.

Ergo, if you have a boss with only 2 different abilities you shouldn’t be fighting him for longer than 2 minutes. Lupius on the other hand has about 6 or 7 different abilities so fighting him for 6 or 7 minutes is ok.

Things to avoid:
-Don’t have overly melee-hateful mechanics
-Avoid having excessively high auto-attack damage
-No untelepgraphed “instant-gib” mechanics
-No frikkle or unresponsive mechanics (like Simin in Arah)
-Decisions have to have meanigful consequences. You decide to destroy a totem to remove a boon from the boss then it should stay off for at least 15 seconds.

@Dee Jay: Great list. I’d also add the bullet point:
- Don’t balance the health pool / toughness on full berzerker. A solid team with rare / exo stuff shouldn’t take ages to put a boss down.

Very good thread. I actually wanted to make one of these.
This will hopefully impact how future changes/bosses are created.

There are some other ones with great potential:
Sorrow’s Embrace:
1. Tazza (? misspelling) – The asura mesmer in path 1. Atm it is only a challenging fight if you fight both her and her Champion thief henchman. But the thief champion deaggros if you want to fight them in the bigger open space outside instead of near their spawn locations. Fighting both near their spawn location can prove difficult because its so small and mediocre parties would have trouble manuevering in such a confined space.
2. The singularity, gravity control boss is interesting too, it has a big tell on its gravity freeze skill so its almost like the Kholer fight.
3. First boss in Sorrow’s Embrace Path 3, burrow Shoryuken instant downs most players, always fun.
3. Path 2 end boss fight has good concept but still too straightforward.
4. Path 3 destroyer of worlds is a decent fight too bad most ppl cliff snipe it AKA exploit.

CoE:
Agreed on the Alpha. I feel the Norn and Husk gimmick fights are not as fun as the destroyer one.

Writetyper.1985:

Bascially in short:

Good bosses: Something that encourages player skill. Dodging, using utility, working with allies. Generally something that moves about and discourages auto afk 100 bladesing. Something that does a bit of damage too, so that it’s kind of a challenge. Lupi, Kholer, Alpha. Good bosses also tend to be pretty low in health because hitting something for 5 hours is not fun.

Bad: Damage sponges that encourages this passive “4 warriors 1 mesmer” all DPS min/maxing play. Bosses that require no utility. Boss that don’t even move and just repeat one or two low damaging attacks that a shouts warrior or a guardian or some other healing ability can just out-heal, like the flame effigy or hotw bosses. Damage sponges fall into this, because they are repeditive and boring.

I want to be challenged, I don’t want to play the numbers min/maxing game. I want to be kept on my toes. I don’t want my toes to get RSI.

QFT.

A GOOD boss keeps you active, makes you use most skills, gives value to the skill choices you did before the battle, and encourages teamwork.

A BAD boss is something that does few of these things, or even none.
I am quite certain that HotW underwater boss in p2 can be beaten by a naked character lv1 with a ranged weapon and a lot of patience!

Orpheus.7284:

CoE:
Agreed on the Alpha. I feel the Norn and Husk gimmick fights are not as fun as the destroyer one.

Imo all these three bosses are “do this action again and again until it is dead”, rather than exciting battles against strong enemies.
- Norn is boring as hell, and his threat level is minimal.
- Husk doesn’t feel like a boss, but rather a task like deactivating the alarms… but in that it’s not bad. A good variation I would say.
- Destroyer, in its pre-18/01 patch incarnation, was basically dooming three players to eternal boredom and the last two to the same dodges again and again. I’m not sure now, but before patch was clearly the worst boss in CoE (no wonder few groups did p3…)

Geoffroy.3685:

The main problem in the health pool is in phase 1, I think. Once you got timing for dodging the grub production or the 4 DPS / 1 on grub duty strategy, this phase is really too long and boring.

What? You do phase 1 in 20-30 seconds with dps setup and about 1 minute with more tanky group. What grub duty are you talking about?

Darkever.9732:

- Destroyer, in its pre-18/01 patch incarnation, was basically dooming three players to eternal boredom and the last two to the same dodges again and again. I’m not sure now, but before patch was clearly the worst boss in CoE (no wonder few groups did p3…)

You’re doing it wrong. Thanks to the complains that he took long, he now takes about 15-30s to kill. Legendary boss, right.

haviz.1340:

Geoffroy.3685:

The main problem in the health pool is in phase 1, I think. Once you got timing for dodging the grub production or the 4 DPS / 1 on grub duty strategy, this phase is really too long and boring.

What? You do phase 1 in 20-30 seconds with dps setup and about 1 minute with more tanky group. What grub duty are you talking about?

Darkever.9732:

- Destroyer, in its pre-18/01 patch incarnation, was basically dooming three players to eternal boredom and the last two to the same dodges again and again. I’m not sure now, but before patch was clearly the worst boss in CoE (no wonder few groups did p3…)

You’re doing it wrong. Thanks to the complains that he took long, he now takes about 15-30s to kill. Legendary boss, right.

how do u do it right?

PetricaKerempuh.7958:

how do u do it right?

3 people use lasers and everyone goes down to kill the boss.

haviz.1340:

PetricaKerempuh.7958:

how do u do it right?

3 people use lasers and everyone goes down to kill the boss.

Ok, you mean the new version. I was talking about the pre-patch one, when shield regenerated in 10-20 seconds… which meant three players had to stay on lasers all the time.
If it now really takes 30s… they may have nerfed a bit too much. A good boss must be a challenging one, else there is no satisfaction in deafeating it.

Darkever.9732:

Ok, you mean the new version. I was talking about the pre-patch one, when shield regenerated in 10-20 seconds… which meant three players had to stay on lasers all the time.
If it now really takes 30s… they may have nerfed a bit too much. A good boss must be a challenging one, else there is no satisfaction in deafeating it.

No, you were doing it in same exact way, it took 2-5 tries to kill him.

Good: all bosses except subject alpha
Bad: subject Alpha

Dee Jay.2460:

Things to avoid:
-Don’t have overly melee-hateful mechanics
-Avoid having excessively high auto-attack damage (Anet devs forgot that we don’t have tanks and healers with us)
-No untelepgraphed “instant-gib” mechanics
-No frikkle or unresponsive mechanics (like Simin in Arah)
-Decisions have to have meanigful consequences. You decide to destroy a totem to remove a boon from the boss then it should stay off for at least 15 seconds.

Strangely this list desribes every boss in GW 2. And that’s why I don’t really bother killing bosses in GW 2.