Guild Wars 2

This is a long post, If you can manage to read all of it feel free to comment.

Simply put making bosses have more health or do more damage means that it just takes longer to kill them and that’s it. If you can dodge his lethal attack the first 5 times you can do it the next 5 if you know what to look for.

I want dungeons to be challenging, and give bosses the power to adapt to a players attacks and forcing a team to require teamwork to win. I don’t want them to be easy UNLESS the team is very well prepared, a good team should be able to do speed runs since they are working together optimality you shouldn’t punish players for good teamwork.

The AC battle involving two mesmers requires teamwork and coordination, you have to separate the two bosses to stay alive long, while most other encounters are a simple target and press 1, 2,3,4 etc without much thought.

1. Randomised elements

I use CM as an example since its one of the first dungeons people run.
Instead of nerfing rewards and making enemies stronger we first add randomised elements to the mix stopping players been able to know what will happen every time they start the battle.

Example:
Give the golem a randomised suitable skill that players can’t predict or plan for before the battle. for example this golem is fire tuned, he can spray the floor with oil and light it denying the party an area or making it harder to dodge, or he’s earth tuned and can smash the ground into a shockwave causing everyone to fall back or maybe at 50% health he goes berserk and attacks faster for 20 seconds and you wont know until his ability starts ( with a pool of 10+ possibles its much harder to plan ahead by making a generic tank + dps team) You could even go further as to have the boss adapt to your combat styles, if you all use melee weapons his body is now on fire causing you to take damage when close or he can now grapple you and bring you close if you’re using ranged and so on.

This also works if there’s a group of 10 creatures to kill, now all of them are randomised, you could get a group of healers or buffers added to the group or a veteran with a special ability you didn’t expect and will have to adapt too. You know they will be bandits but now one of them is a healer who adds regen to everyone around him then next run theres extra melee troops that poison if they get close.

With something you can’t predict and prepare for , dungeons now become harder and means a good team that can adapt will be needed to win over a team that just runs in guns blazing.

2. Rewards for succeeding.

Currently excluding the repair costs theres not much difference between winning without dying and winning where everyone has died 50 times. I suggest a system that evaluates the teams performance such as how many times they had to respawn and the time the dungeon took and factor it into the reward.

As an example lets say CM gives 100k for a perfect finish in under 30minutes.
Every player death reduces the prize by 2000 and every 1minute after that 30 costs the team 1000 exp with a minimum for winning of 50k
A team that works together, adapts to the bosses changes and keep each other live will earn much more than a team of random players who simply charge in and get slaughtered until they win.

3. Player punishment.
If a player dies in a boss event he usually respawns and runs back, I would make it so once a battle has started you cant re-enter that area until he’s either defeated or your team has won.

Why? Simple rezing just became a whole lot more important, having two players alive for a boss battle and the rest re-spawning and running back over and over is something like a zerg rush, its a battle of attrition not skill otherwise. If a player group is dying over and over you have to teach them that change is the only way to win, allowing a group to respawn and come back while the boss is weakened isnt a way to teach strategy.

Ive had to post it twice due to the limit on posts

4. Make boss battles short but a challenge.
Instead of doubling a bosses health, make him unpredictable with changes suggested in 1. Test a players dodge ability not how long you can make him sit there pressing 1 till the boss is down. Grinding isn’t fun for anyone so test how a player reacts under pressure not how patient he is will mean they are much harder and give a bigger accomplishment that boss that’s easy to kill but now takes twice as long to do it.

If I can kill a boss with 50000 health I can do it when he has 100000 and so on, It doesn’t mean its now harder or more fun it just takes me longer to do it.

5. Remove repairs and health reduction for dying.
Since players get rewards reduced for these things there’s no need for it any-more since a player can spend 5 seconds repairing there’s no real disadvantage. Take it off there rewards at the end instead.

6. Leavers
A system that allows leavers to be replaced no matter where you are on the dungeon, since they can’t collect the previous chest reward its fine. They can get a reduced reward depending on how much of the dungeon they were a part of.

I recently had a game where we got to the final boss of TA and our guardian left leaving us a man down and all ranged DPS builds, Players who joined our party after weren’t allowed into our instance to replace him meaning we had to end the dungeon after all of that work.
Also punish people who leave by preventing them from rage quiting and joining the same dungeon for 10minutes. People quiting because a friends come online when you are 30 minutes in not only ruins the experience it wastes a lot of time.

Summary:

Skilful challenges are more fun than grinding attrition challenges.

The problems I see with current dungeons are that they don’t change between runs so a player knows exactly what will happen every time resulting in a "target X first " command every game and not much thought going into anything else.
Next there’s no real reward for doing a dungeon without dying or as quickly as possible meaning that a great team will get the same reward as a zerg team which end game takes the skill out of combat.

With these randomised elements and skilful bosses it wouldn’t matter how many times a player runs one dungeon since every time it will be different to the last meaning if a team can run it over and over and win they are simply a great team.
Keeping your team alive is now the number one priority with these changes, since they can’t reinforce if they die and you lose your rewards

I wrote this in one sitting so expect mistakes and rant like sentences. Although I don’t expect Anet to read this post Id like for some sort of intelligence AI for bosses to be considered.

Agreed. Blade & Soul’s “difficulty” was all just in the form of beefed up attack and HP pools on enemies. It’s one of the things I hated about it. It’s not creative, it’s boring.

I’ve never played blade and soul if im honest.

I want bosses I have to think tactically to beat, To be honest if bosses attacked slow enough so that you could dodge 100% of the attacks but were insanely high damage or instant kills Id think this game would become much more skill based.

I like the idea of bosses been able to adapt to the player style of the group, if its taking a lot of damage from ranged attacks it drops a shield that forces players to move inside to hurt the boss, or if its melee it sets the area around it on fire and so on.

For the Golem that would make it a hell of a lot more interesting, and after you kill the door guard and that army of bandits floods in, if you didn’t know what combination you were getting its much harder to prepare for it. Even though they are the same mobs as before now they suddenly become much stronger without changing the health and attack for no reason

I agree, I want something closer to a puzzle. I want to have to figure out the only way to beat a boss, instead of just dodging and pewpewing. The boulders in CM were cool, but it was kind of basic and it has now been overdone (repeatedly used).

also not unlimited spawns. it is unrewarding and so underwhelming.

Good point, unlimited spawns seem not to give exp too to stop farming, its not fun since if you die and have to redo that area they have respawned, give you no rewards or items meaning you can lose a lot of cash.