The World Bosses in this game are fun and engaging with ~5-20 people but as soon as you slap more players against them they just turn into punching bags unable to fight back. These bosses are supposed to scale with the amount of players but the difference is so apparent anyone can see it.
All of this becomes even more apparent in the harder encounters like the Karka Queen or the Halloween Labyrinth bosses where the tactic for success has always been “get more people”, just because the scaling can’t keep up. Even the 3 big bosses (teq, mari, wurm) scale poorly enough, so that most people won’t even bother trying them with “only” 80 people.
In this thread i’ll try to list all the major reasons i’ve found for this bad scaling:
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1)AoE caps
I was in disbelief when i first noticed this but yeah it’s true:
Many boss attacks only hit 5 players max.
Good examples of this would be the jump attack from The Karka Queen or pretty much everything from The Risen High Wizard. It’s silly how we can just stack in the High Wizard’s whirlwind while it only hits some guys in front. This is the major reason for the effect you often see where a boss just gets buried under a zerg.
Bottomline: if a boss does an attack and you stand in it, you should always get hit by it no matter how many other people are standing in it too.
There shouldn’t be any technical limitations to this either, since if 100 players can hit 1 boss without problems, this 1 boss should be able to hit the 100 players too. Not like 200 Champion Son of Svanir Shamans are going to log onto WvW and start spamming aoe on each other in a massive free for all.
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2)The scaling just stops
This is the most common problem with the Megaboss scaling. I’m aware that each event in the game has it’s own range of how many players it will scale for, and for most world bosses it seems to be ~5-50. This isn’t even near the typical map caps though, so often the bosses arent even scaled for the people there.
A great example of this was the Jungle Wurm (caleidon) when the megaboss rewards had just been buffed. The wurm only scaled for like 5 people and huge zergs often nuked it down before the event even started. Even now for most bosses you get situations where they die way faster than usual when you have a big zerg killing them.
I suspect even Tequatl is a victim of this. Originally anet stated that the encounter was designed for ~80 players but if you’ve ever tried it with less than a hundred you can tell that it dies a lot slower. I can bet that if you have a 150 players fighting teq, and 15 more join in, the boss is not going to gain any extra health. This is likely the reason the boss died earlier than anet expected too.
Bottomline: megabosses should always scale all the way up to the max players that can be in a map, especially the ones supposed to be a challenge. If you can get enough players to surpass the scaling of a hard boss, this will be the way it is killed, and very quickly this will become the “required” tactic. No one does Teq without a full map, even if it’s supposed to scale.
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3)Single Target Attacks
This is pretty similar to the aoe caps mentioned earlier, just more of a design issue.
Good examples are Ulgoth and Covington. Both have some aoe attacks but they aren’t really large or frequent enough to do much. The main threat of these guys is getting on their bad side and targeted by their high single target attacks, and if you can handle it, everyone else on the battlefield can just close their eyes and nuke. While quite challenging with small groups, both of these are just punching bags when met with a zerg.
I don’t think single target attacks really have much place on bosses meant to fight large amounts of players. They could use one occasionally for flavor, but it certainly can’t be the focus of the fight, and neither should it screw over smaller groups fighting the boss.
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4)Mechanics which a single player can handle for the whole zerg
Case to case stuff like blinds, reflects and bodyblocking attacks like the Jungle Wurm’s poison spread. The more people you have the more likely will someone handle this stuff for everyone else.
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5)Natural good sides of having a lot of people
More people is just naturally better. You have more revives, fields, conditions on the boss and while people die and waypoint the boss can just scale down a bit.
There are however downsides to big zergs too, like bad FPS, difficulty of organization and less space to move. Also as you’ve seen in the attack to LA, when you start scaling up the mob damage they really start destroying players and making it harder for more people. Big groups can have handicaps too but you can’t shy away from them.
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If Anyone has stuff to add or comments, please contribute. Scaling should get fixed!