Guild Wars 2

Something that has been bothering me about (most of) the boss encounters in GW2 is that they’re simply designed poorly.

On one hand, we have the ridiculous auto-attack snooze fests where I’ve literally went afk to browse the internet as I left my character on auto-attack. The “challenging” part seems to be adding a few too many zeros to the boss’s HP.

Then we have a few bosses that will one shot (or close to) the player with very little warning or poorly telegraphed skills (due to tons of flashy particle effects or just poor design in general).

Honestly, the thing that has bothered me the most is that for the vast majority of bosses, I honestly simply have no idea or don’t remember what their skills were. This is quite an issue. Fights are not memorable because they’re frankly designed poorly.

I think in general, there needs to be a massive design philosophy overhaul of just about every single boss in the game from your everyday champions/veterans to the big dragons. They are just not fun to fight and if/when they are “challenging”, they are “challenging” in all the wrong ways.

I think if I were to describe things in detail, it would take far too long and my point would probably be lost. I believe a good example of what bosses should be like is a game called Vindictus. This is a pure action MMO (F2P on Steam if you want to check it out).

In Vindictus, when I walk into a boss room, my first impulse is to figure out how to survive. I must first figure out how to avoid the boss attacks effectively before I do ANY real dps. The fights typically play out in a way such that avoidance is greatly emphasized and dps happens during windows of opportunity. This I believe is how “challenging” and “skill based” boss fights need to be designed in GW2.

Right now, people are rushing in head first. If something does happen to kill you, the easy res system or even just graveyard zerging is sort of a crutch for players to fall back on. You really don’t need to “learn” a boss at all. Everyone just DPS’s. Some people die, no one knows why… and call it a day.

Boss auto attacks need to be removed (especially ranged ones). An auto attack implies damage soaking on the player’s part which just reeks of the MMO’s that GW2 tries so hard to not become. There needs to be emphasis on well designed / telegraphed fatal special attacks that really put your dodge to good use. I can only dodge a boss’s auto attack for so long.

TBH I couldn’t agree with this post more, and am surprised that others haven’t already done so.

The raid encounter replacements AKA world boss fights are a joke. They might look pretty and be entertaining the very first time because of that fact, but all following instances of that encounter are boring as hell because there is nothing genuine behind the flashy bitz. No complex fight mechanics. No multi stage phases. No threat, no challenge, no thrill.

If that is the price Anet paid to vanquish the Holy Trinity. . . then I’d say get a refund.

I’m curious what the expectation is of players these days when stepping into a brand new MMO such as GW2. What their prior experience is with other new MMO’s and the learning curve and complexity of the boss encounters in those games were when they too were first released.

I agree but the overhaul, even though much needed, is never going to come. That’s too much time/resources to do it when they already have a finished product.

I literally have alt-tabbed out a few times while in a fight to check something and come back and nothing changed, this was a matter of 20 seconds

I am SO glad that I’m not alone in believing that the combat needs to be altered. I hate being one/two-shotted for no apparent reason. That’s the WORST thing that can happen in a game.

I know this may be too much to ask to have one fight like this, but this one is an example of a fun fight in action games and even MMOs.

Try having Guild Wars 2 base off on such fights and I’m happy.

(This is played in the highest difficulty possible, so moderate this)

I just want a smaller target frame. Giant, epic looking bosses are great, when they aren’t blocked by the giant red bar on my screen.

As it stands at the moment, world bosses are far too easy.
And downed state against them is too over powered, simply because when you have 30 people fighting a boss, 2 of them can spare the time to pick you up and boss dps barely drops. Having to go down so many times before you are killed is too far too much on world bosses.

My suggestion is simple however:
Make it so each of a bosses moves has a unique on death debuff. If this debuff stacks 3 times you die. The debuff would persist until it dies or resets.

This will encourage players who die repeatedly to the same move to find a way to not get downed by it. But give players who are all out dying to everything some leeway.

A great example of this is the megadestroyer. It’s fireballs are powerful but i’ve seen casters not even bother dodging because hey… they’ll get picked up.

The world bosses need better moves, they need stronger more menacing moves. They need the ability to win. Epic fights aren’t epic if they aren’t challenging.

Tradewind.6913:

I’m curious what the expectation is of players these days when stepping into a brand new MMO such as GW2. What their prior experience is with other new MMO’s and the learning curve and complexity of the boss encounters in those games were when they too were first released.

Lets assume you are assuming we are all talking about WoW (because I know that’s what your talking about).

Pay attention around 2:57 mark

This is the Baron Geddon fight. This is vanilla WoW.

There’s only one remotely tricky fight mechanic here. Someone is THE BOMB and if they are standing near people when the timer goes out, it blows them all up. Easy. But that is a fight mechanic you have to learn, control, and adapt to.

And it’s STILL better than what GW 2 has.
———

To recap my opinion:

1) Raids are not evil. People who think all raids are evil have a very narrow minded opinion and think that it belongs only to the top 1% of the most hardcore of gamers, and therefor has no place in a casual friendly game. You’re just wrong.

Raids are FUN. The only reason they were exclusive in the past? Gear progression. Now that gear progression doesn’t matter, why not include something proven to be FUN in Guild Wars 2?

2) Unfortunately, the PvE here certainly does not have that kind of depth, and perhaps more importantly, a huge percentage of the player base seems to hate even the idea of raiding based on past preconceptions carried over from other games.

I’m not an advocate for turning GW 2 into WoW 2. I’m an advocate trying to say that a progressive, smart game trying to break the mold is a good thing – but don’t knowingly leave behind strong feature concepts “just because” someone else used them before. Make them newer and better.

Real raiding without long term time commitments for gear progression? I’ll pay for that. Here’s hoping Anet does it with an expansion or content patch.

Lord Jaguar.9504:

Tradewind.6913:

I’m curious what the expectation is of players these days when stepping into a brand new MMO such as GW2. What their prior experience is with other new MMO’s and the learning curve and complexity of the boss encounters in those games were when they too were first released.

Lets assume you are assuming we are all talking about WoW (because I know that’s what your talking about).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YO4Gor9mSRI

Pay attention around 2:57 mark

This is the Baron Geddon fight. This is vanilla WoW.

There’s only one remotely tricky fight mechanic here. Someone is THE BOMB and if they are standing near people when the timer goes out, it blows them all up. Easy. But that is a fight mechanic you have to learn, control, and adapt to.

And it’s STILL better than what GW 2 has.
———

To recap my opinion:

1) Raids are not evil. People who think all raids are evil have a very narrow minded opinion and think that it belongs only to the top 1% of the most hardcore of gamers, and therefor has no place in a casual friendly game. You’re just wrong.

Raids are FUN. The only reason they were exclusive in the past? Gear progression. Now that gear progression doesn’t matter, why not include something proven to be FUN in Guild Wars 2?

2) Unfortunately, the PvE here certainly does not have that kind of depth, and perhaps more importantly, a huge percentage of the player base seems to hate even the idea of raiding based on past preconceptions carried over from other games.

I’m not an advocate for turning GW 2 into WoW 2. I’m an advocate trying to say that a progressive, smart game trying to break the mold is a good thing – but don’t knowingly leave behind strong feature concepts “just because” someone else used them before. Make them newer and better.

Real raiding without long term time commitments for gear progression? I’ll pay for that. Here’s hoping Anet does it with an expansion or content patch.

Yes I agree, the carrot on a stick technique is still in this game, I don’t know why some people believe it isn’t. It’s with your traits, all the trophies and the exotic gear.

I agree with the above posters/OP. The world dragon fights in GW2 are completely underwhelming with mass Hit points and very little strategy or fun. So far there is only one boss fight that I have truly enjoyed and it was the Asura Starter zone. That should be the bare minimum I would expect of a boss. Remove the majority of auto attack crud, add phased combat stages and heavy hitting attacks (with tells), give bosses attacks that force us to change tactics. To use a world dragon as an example, a
Dragon has a devastating breath attack that focuses on ranged players, but the dragon has a hard time focusing on those attacking its belly. attacking the belly is
subject to being stomped, but the dragon cant bite, breath or tail slap them. Add an Air
phase when the dragon gets to X% health. etc etc

Tradewind.6913:

I’m curious what the expectation is of players these days when stepping into a brand new MMO such as GW2. What their prior experience is with other new MMO’s and the learning curve and complexity of the boss encounters in those games were when they too were first released.

If you’re curious about other MMO’s, I will show you a few videos of Vindictus since I mentioned it in the OP.

This is a pretty standard boss, Titan. He’s big and he has big attacks.

Here’s a “Raid” of 8 people (contrary to popular belief, you don’t need 24 other players to make a fight interesting). At 1:07 – 1:15, Titan does a series of attacks that two players fail to avoid (they are marked with red signs indicating they’re dead on the ground). Our main player has avoided these attacks through good use of the “slip dash” (dodge) mechanic. You note how he avoids all of Titan’s attacks while fitting in his DPS instead of just hacking away mindlessly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5lUxDuLGeg&feature=player_detailpage#t=56s

Here is an example of the immense skill ceiling in the game. This player has managed to solo Titan without taking a single hit. He has 1 HP for almost the entire fight due to a mechanic that spends HP for stamina (think life tap from WoW). Everything he does… every little move is for positioning to stay alive. This player is an expert and clearly demonstrates his skill. This is a true dodge mechanic. GW2’s is somewhat of a joke. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WL70fEQj8XY

Big, fatal, well telegraphed attacks.

Some more videos of the same player from the 2nd one. Every attack he does skillfully positions him in a way to avoid the boss’s attacks. These bosses hit hard, very hard.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Faqru14NoE&feature=plcp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY8oinpmipE&feature=plcp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0sM-OZawiQ&feature=plcp

To anyone who’s curious about Vindictus. Download the game for free from Steam. Play the first “boat” until the Gnoll Chieftain boss (takes a couple of hours). He’s one of the most rudimentary bosses but he’s harder, more well designed, and more deep than any GW2 boss.

I don’t think that “poorly” is the right choice of word but I agree with you in that the boss attacks are not as memorable and/or noticable as they could be? To be fair I have not even checked the settings to see if this is available but I don’t think it is (since I cant even monitor my ping -_-), but being able to turn on a “more detail” setting that actually gave the bosses cast bars with the name of the ability they are charging up would probably help solve this issue mostly.