I’ve been seeing a lot of people talking lately about why they think raid boss enrage timers are lazy design by Anet and I have to respectfully disagree. I’ll try to explain why adding timers to most of the boss fights is absolutely necessary.
1. Anet did not design raids so that every player would be able to succeed. While the idea of increased rewards for completing the bosses within the time limit, with lesser rewards for defeating them past the timer sounds appealing, in reality, one of the biggest rewards when killing a boss is knowing that you were able to kill that boss. It puts you in a very small percentage of players who are able to say they have done it. Plus, we already have a system in place where players who complete the boss within the time limit (or close to it as you can go past it) are rewarded much more than the players who are unable to complete the encounter within the time limit.
2. It is quite difficult to design mechanics that are challenging, while the entire party is in full tank gear. Take VG for example. There is nothing particularly challenging about having four people stand in some green on the floor every 15 seconds to prevent a raid wipe. That content is made challenging because the timer is requiring you to maximize your dps at the same time. Without the timer (and thus with a full nomad’s group), two things happen: 1. You can have 4 people literally never dps the boss but instead just take their time running from circle to circle. This makes the circles much easier to cancel out (not to mention that even if you miss one, it probably won’t even down your group because you’re all in full nomad’s gear). 2. There’s no longer any pressure of people going down on the circles. It’s not the fact that the circles exist that makes the mechanic very challenging. It’s the seekers and aoe damage that are putting pressure on the circle team to provide healing and cc in order to stay alive while on them, and pressure on the tank to make sure the boss is in the correct section when the circle spawns to reduce pressure on your circle group. 99% of the wipes I’ve had on VG are because people aren’t reaching the circles in time or are going down on them due to damage pressure. The timer ensure that your group is not all wearing tank gear and will actually feel this pressure.
3. The timers are actually quite forgiving. This is true in two ways. 1. They’re soft enrage timers, meaning you don’t actually automatically wipe if you reach the limit. (Gorseval and Sabetha actually both have pseudo-hard-enrage timers.) 2. The dps put out by a good full-glass group (with a healer and “tank” – tanks are usually just dps with a little bit of toughness), is more than enough to beat these bosses with plenty of time to spare. I just watched a video of a group killing Gorseval with 3 minutes left on the timer, and VG has gone down with about that much left as well.
4. Continuing that point… Timers aren’t what causes a group to wipe 99% of the time. What does kill you is poor execution of mechanics. People not getting to/staying alive on green circles; failing to dodge Gorseval’s slam attack, resulting in not enough dps and his one-shot move hitting before the phase is reached; cannons not being destroyed, and bombs not being cleared from Sabetha’s platform, resulting in the platform being destroyed. Etc. etc. etc. If you’re feeling a lot of pressure from timers, it’s probably because your group either isn’t bringing enough dps builds, you’re executing mechanics poorly, or a mix of both.
5. Bad execution of mechanics doesn’t always result in a wipe, but it does result in hitting the enrage timer. I’ve seen groups complete phase 1 of VG incredibly sloppily and phase him after 3 minutes with nobody down. Theoretically, without a timer, they could continue at this pace, keeping everybody alive and beating him in about 15 minutes. But that doesn’t seem right, does it? Timer forces you to not only execute the mechanics in a more difficult way (with glass builds), but in a more precise way as well. Players not dodging attacks and repeatedly going down will result in a wipe even if your group is always able to rez them because going down is a huge dps loss for you and everybody who has to rez you.
Arenanet doesn’t what people to be able to kill these bosses without some serious teamwork and effort. If you’ve spent several hours on a boss with the same group of people, you’ll understand that as you wipe over and over again, you make progress. Your earlier phases become cleaner. Your dps improves. You stop hitting up against the timer. You get the boss down to lower heath percentages. And all of that with consistency. Our VG kill this week took us 1/4 of the time from last week. Our work was rewarded. That is the challenge we’ve been asking for and we certainly got it.
If there are any points here that are confusing or you disagree with, feel free to let me know and I’ll try to clarify/explain further! Just thought the forums could use a little positivity with regards to new content. The content group right now is much quieter than the upset group, but I promise we exist in no small numbers.
Thanks Anet <3