Guild Wars 2

secondary mechanics!

Let’s face it, many fights in this game are dull to say the least. I think this is because there isn’t really much emphasis on secondary/tertiary mechanics.

Take tequatl the sunless for example. Really interesting fight on paper. Guard the megalaser, turrets, and shoot the bone shield. However more often than not you just get players attacking the dragon himself and ignoring every other mechanic. A fix to this would be to nerf damage he takes from players from X % and increase damage he takes from turrets/megalasers by X %.

Another example of this would be the last boss in Honor of the Waves path 1. Ginva the butcher. I think that while the totems are up, he should take a lot less damage. Each totem should give him a stack of some sort of buff that increases his damage and decreases the damage he takes. And once all the totems are killed and he has no stacks, he is super easy to burn through his HP. Then the totems respawn again. Currently, the only totem that groups worry about is the Protection one. Other than that it’s basically a tank and spank other than is whirlwind AoE.

Another example would be the last boss of Citadel of Flame path one. Reduce the Effigiy’s health but increase the health of the crystals. Therefore the most efficient way would be to stay on top of the crystals that are spawning.

A fight that does this well in my opinion is the last boss of the Underground Facility Fractal. The lava spilling is a nice touch I have to admit, but I think it could use another mechanic. At intervals of maybe 25% of the bosses HP. Dredge would spawn and try to shut down the lava control panel.

The last boss of the Volcano Fractal is also a good fight. You have to keep moving, kill his shield, and kill the jellies while dodging AoE. I still think it could use another secondary mechanic though I haven’t thought of one.

Another example is the first boss of the Volcano Fractal. Rather than have grawl spawn at the start and then just tank the boss and watch for his aoe and shield, grawl should spawn THROUGHOUT the fight instead and if they kill a captive, the boss should get a buff/heal.

This is just some ideas, I’m sure others have better ones.

Tl;DR Fights should focus more on secondary and tertiary mechanics, rather than actually fighting the boss itself.

I didnt intesnively read this post but i did read everything a bit… i do agree that they should focus more on secondary strategies and mechanics, because it makes every boss feel unique and different.
Lowering damage or healing is in my oppinion not the way to do it, in fact, i think all bosses should have much lower health, its rather strange that it takes like 1000 arrows to a simple human to kill it… instead that human mob could just be very good at defending itself, like using dodge rolls when taking alot of damage from multiple players, or soemthing like that. I really would have no idea how, but everything shoul get much lower health and lower damage, to be more in line with players (autp attacks are maybe 30% of your total damage, but its the burst skills taht really hurt).
I think boss mobs should work a bit as if its pvp, take a warrior for example.
They auto attack you for like 1000 damage per attack, but they can burst you with a shield bash and eviscerate for 10000 damage. A boss could do something like this, the player would have to carry stunbreakers or stability, or even dodge. breaking the stun jsut before the eviscerate gives some satisfication of “i just prevented losing 75% of my health with only 1 second reaction time :O”

shockwave.1764:

secondary mechanics!
The last boss of the Volcano Fractal is also a good fight. You have to keep moving, kill his shield, and kill the jellies while dodging AoE. I still think it could use another secondary mechanic though I haven’t thought of one.

mhm, i know one.
First remove the annoying heal when you dont damage the shield in time before he eats a captive. healing is simply annoying.
A secondary mechanic could be: Every so often he uses a 4 second long channeled skill that raises the lava a bit, so the heigher parts of the ground will still be normal but there will be lava here in there. You can interupt the channel to prevent this from happening.
Maybe those captives you have to protect are water elementalists, and they will remove some lava every so often :O.
The grubs will attack teh captives, but they always prioritize players when a player is near, and the shaman can eat the captive ofcourse.
Maybe there has to be more burning (condition) and less direct damage! The captives would make a healing rain that automatically extuinguishes players for as long as theyre alive.
The captives can also be revived, but it takes a loooong time. Revive utilities will immediatally revive them, so those would be usefull in this fight aswell.

I think that bossfight is alreayd one of my favourites though ^^.

I do like your ideas; however, I’d also like to see improvements from the other side of the coin.

All the bosses attack extremely slowly and, for the meta world bosses, will only attack in a straight line. Right now on Shatterer you go beside him and attack upwards, and he just keeps firing in a straight line away from us. He also attacks extreeeemley slowly. Spice it up and have the dragon move, have it face us as we move around, have it attack more quickly and whip it’s tail or wings at us and knock us back. Right now it feels like I may as well be attacking a wall.

This sort of thing, as well as tying the event scaling to the mechanics of the fight instead of simply the health, damage and number of adds and having more than one mechanic at a time, they could make the fights quite challenging and require some form of group organisation, regardless of the number of players.

Jemmi.6058:

All the bosses attack extremely slowly and, for the meta world bosses, will only attack in a straight line. Right now on Shatterer you go beside him and attack upwards, and he just keeps firing in a straight line away from us. He also attacks extreeeemley slowly. Spice it up and have the dragon move, have it face us as we move around, have it attack more quickly and whip it’s tail or wings at us and knock us back. Right now it feels like I may as well be attacking a wall.

Agreed with this as well as OP. I would like to see the Dragons put up a more “active” fight. Move around the whole map, make us chase him, let him chase us. The maps are huge, the Dragons are huge and can fly, why would they just sit still and take it?

Jormag does have the mechanics of taking down the ice shield and then the ice pillars to protect the Golems…maybe more damage should be done by the golems and less by the players then more folks would pay more attention to taking out the pillars?

Tequatl does have some mechanics in place, but like you say, players just by-pass them and attack him directly. Same here, make the secondary mechanics do more damage than a mob a players.

The Shatterer…I honestly don’t know his secondary mechs. I have always stood with the group to the side and just attack till dead. This definitely needs sprucing up.

Zhaitan….ugh. boring. Bring him into the Meta in Orr, make us chase him around the map, make it a multistage process similar to the Kraka Queen, make it difficult to do but also reward accordingly to effort put into taking him down.

I have always thought that all these Mega-Bosses were actually quite lame and way to easy to defeat. I would like to see more action involved. Like some people have to collect and run ammo to some cannons while others man those cannons and other have to fight of hordes of adds to protect the cannons…that sort of thing

Replace all bosses with Simin, High Priestess of Dwayna.

I think the biggest problem is, rather than more interesting secondary mechanics, far too many bosses simply fall back on 1 shot gimmicks. Either that or they might be a braindead castle wall you beat against like shatterer. I agree shatterer would be amazing if he simply flew around the map, as long as they gave him a short bit of invulnerability when he arrived at his new location to give everyone time to get there, that would be the perfect time to implement secondary mechanics. I don’t really mind the massive wall of hp the bosses have, but I do mind those things i mentioned. No more 1 shot gimmicks, yes to more creative secondary mechanics. Jorlag gets close, and honestly I loved when he was bugged and would heal to full at 2nd phase. As for the fractal bosses, I think most of them are pretty well done. I don’t think making the dredge one even longer would be a good idea though lol. It’s plenty long enough now. Something could be added like he destroys each panel after you use it, and you need to send out a runner somewhere in the room to grab a tool or repair kit to fix it while continuing to kite him on to the next spot to keep him from regening. That way it doesn’t really extend the fight, but definitely requires more teamwork and more interesting mechanics.