Guild Wars 2

For the most part, every boss in Guild Wars 2 is a Marathon Boss. That is to say, Guild Wars 2 champions and bosses have an extremely high amount of health relative to the amount of damage a party can deal. The problem here is that most bosses do not have varied or interesting enough mechanics to warrant their fights being as long as they are. This leads to a general feeling of tedium—boss fights just turn into an endurance test.

To put it another way: instead of asking, “Can you figure out how to defeat this boss before it kills you?”, the game asks, “How long can you keep this up?”

My suggestion: lower the amount of health that veterans, champions, and bosses in dungeons have by at least 25%. This would in no way make them “easier,” just less tedious. I also think this would go a long way towards making dungeons simply more fun.

Agreed. Examples include the Epic Golem boss in CoE, the Destroyer, even the plant boss and the ice giant, and then theres alpha, the king of “I understand! now repeat for 25 minutes”. It feels very rewarding to figure it out, but afterwards you realize they are at 80% and it’s simply a rinse repeat cycle.

I think maybe 25% reduction is a little steep on the epic bosses, since they are supposed to be extremely strong and durable, but on the champion and elites I agree. The trash mobs should not be more dangerous than the epic boss fights. this is the case in CoE. After figuring out alpha and the epic bosses, they aren’t all that dangerous, but get pounced on by a pack of icebrood wolves or the nightmare hounds and you are done for.

Well there are tricks that your party can do to make a lot of encounters extremely easy. A guardian can drop Hallowed ground, followed by stand your ground for about 16 seconds worth of stability, in turn making the “pouncing mobs” or ANY mobs that chain stuns for that matter, a huge easy joke.

As far as HPs goes, I believe they’re meant to “slow down” the progress of people. If boss HP was cut, along with mob HP, then the dungeon runs would go from already short 25-30 minutes on average, to 15-20 minutes. Combined with the fact that the dungeons are designed so that you can just “run past” a lot of the trash, you’d be making dungeons too fast.

I’m all for “more difficult” dungeon encounters myself. Many of the bosses are easy and are just big-HP pools to hit. But I don’t think lowering the HPs alone will solve anything.

But a few things you need to factor in. 1. Many people are already complaining about dungeon difficulty being too high (I disagree, but I’m not an average joe player AKA the majority of the player base).

2. Length of time per dungeon. With less HP, the mobs simply retain their “easy mode” status, and just makes dungeon farming speed runs easier.

My proposal would be a multi-step plan.

First make it so mobs in dungeons either don’t break when you run too far, or have each area inside the dungeon have gates that drop once all the mobs are dead. To prevent running past the mobs like many people do. The “gates” are already in the dungeons, but there aren’t enough of them due to mobs leashing way too soon. So maybe extending the leashing range in combination of adding a few new gates would be the best coarse of action. Once this is done, lower Mob HP by 25% or so.

Second, lower HP pools on bosses, but make them much more dangerous. Make picking players up, dodging attacks, using combo fields, etc… more of the focus of the fight, not the HP pool. Also by tweaking

I see no problem with most bosses’s health pool. Most fights are around 5 minutes. None of the exploration bosses are longer than ~5-8 minutes in total fight time as far as I can remember.

There exist a problem when there is no performance measurement native in the game.

You can never accurately tell how optimal your build is and how much damage you are outputting aside from recording it and analyzing it via video length. This causes people the false illusion of doing “decently” when in reality they are dragging the group down. This also causes social loafing when optimal DPS rotation and high DPS time is not rewarded, and poor performance is not frowned upon.

The health pools are outrageous.

I’m an 80 Guardian and I do use stability.

Boss fights only taking 5 minutes? Seriously Kevin? What ever you’re smoking I’ll take some.

Xetelian.9278:

The health pools are outrageous.

I’m an 80 Guardian and I do use stability.

Boss fights only taking 5 minutes? Seriously Kevin? What ever you’re smoking I’ll take some.

What encounter takes longer than ~5-8 minutes if done correctly?

First of all I genuinely don’t think that the hp are that big of a deal. Some are really high – but hey: those are boss fights – and they don’t take much more than 10 minutes – they might feel longer but i don’t think reducing hp would change that.

That being said I like the idea of some kind of barrier before and after each area.
Maybe a short jumping puzzle (5-6 stones should be enough) with a drop at the end so you can’t pull mobs out of their area. This would also make it harder to get to the next area without killing at least a little bit of the trash (i’d prefer jumpin because you know – gates might not open/bug out, leading to lots of frustration).

I would also like to see them adding a few more mechanics to bosses to make the fights more interesting – there is only very few bosses that require some kind of teamwork (like giganticus lupicus maybe).

Most bossfights can be explained in 2 sentences.
It’s usually just a “don’t waste your dodge for fun – use it for channel/aoe/combo” and “oh one person needs to take care of this or that special element” – two sentences written —> almost every boss is doable with pugs
Although that’s not a bad thing – seeing that there’s people out there who are unabled to hold out against three (or five?) normal mobs in the CoF path with the flame barriers – I think that the challenge is too hard (for newer players) and too easy (“just a lot of hp”) at the same time as it is.

Also reducing the boss hp by 25% might be a little too much.
It might make dungeons less frustrating if you’re getting frustrated by just pounding on one guy for a few minutes – but i think that a better solution would be to make the bossfights more interesting – although that might lead to more people saying dungeons are too hard.

So my suggestion would be :

• maybe implement a difficulty indicator for each path – this way new players don’t get frustrated by taking the most difficult path on their first try.
• Give some bosses a few new mechanics so they get more interesting. Like giving them more offensive capabilities (not just more dmg – different attacks/more cc) and/or a nice boss room u need to utilize to be effective (for example: every tree-boss in TA should have “Pulls”).
• add barriers in front of and after each section of every dungeon to make skipping lots of content less rewarding
• this might lead to lower hp pools in the end

(wow just realized that this is a lot of text)

nagnag.4058:

So my suggestion would be :

• maybe implement a difficulty indicator for each path – this way new players don’t get frustrated by taking the most difficult path on their first try.
• Give some bosses a few new mechanics so they get more interesting. Like giving them more offensive capabilities (not just more dmg – different attacks/more cc) and/or a nice boss room u need to utilize to be effective (for example: every tree-boss in TA should have “Pulls”).
• add barriers in front of and after each section of every dungeon to make skipping lots of content less rewarding
• this might lead to lower hp pools in the end

(wow just realized that this is a lot of text)

I’m not concerned about difficulty or even about skipping bosses. Your second point would be a nice thing—if bosses had varied enough mechanics to warrant their high health pools I wouldn’t be so bored with them. As it is now, though, bosses are too “one-note” to sustain many players’ interest for the full duration of their fight.

A boss fight is too long when I get bored fighting it for the first time.
You can probably clock it down to a certain minute, but in general if I feel it’s gone on for too long, it probably has.

Kevin.2176:

Xetelian.9278:

The health pools are outrageous.

I’m an 80 Guardian and I do use stability.

Boss fights only taking 5 minutes? Seriously Kevin? What ever you’re smoking I’ll take some.

What encounter takes longer than ~5-8 minutes if done correctly?

The timeframe is virtually irrelevant. The fact that bosses have burned all their easily avoidable and uninteresting mechanics in the first thirty seconds so the rest of the 5-8 minute fight is just plain boring? That’s not okay.

One of the most common solutions to this is to have fights with several phases to serve as an anti-boredom measure. I would welcome a change of that nature, so I actually have something to do on most of these fights.

Of course, there are still a few encounters that are supposed to be more interesting than their current incarnation, but are not really working as intended (Effigy says hi) and have become unfun zergs as a result. Those need fixing too.

Not only the bosses have this issue, the whole dungeons have this issue. The problem is that they are trying to fit 15 minutes of original content into a 60 minute timeframe by artificially lengthening it. Very bad game design, something which I would not have expected from ArenaNet, especially considering how good dungeons in GW1 were. Did they even have someone properly design these dungeons?

Nethelli.4023:

Kevin.2176:

Xetelian.9278:

The health pools are outrageous.

I’m an 80 Guardian and I do use stability.

Boss fights only taking 5 minutes? Seriously Kevin? What ever you’re smoking I’ll take some.

What encounter takes longer than ~5-8 minutes if done correctly?

The timeframe is virtually irrelevant. The fact that bosses have burned all their easily avoidable and uninteresting mechanics in the first thirty seconds so the rest of the 5-8 minute fight is just plain boring? That’s not okay.

One of the most common solutions to this is to have fights with several phases to serve as an anti-boredom measure. I would welcome a change of that nature, so I actually have something to do on most of these fights.

Of course, there are still a few encounters that are supposed to be more interesting than their current incarnation, but are not really working as intended (Effigy says hi) and have become unfun zergs as a result. Those need fixing too.

You are being unrealistic if you want interesting and fresh boss mechanics through out the whole encounter, especially for a $60 game.

Repetition is fine, if its on punishing mechanics, Gigantipus or the more annoying version of Alpha is a good example.