I posted this on my blog, but I want to hear some thoughts and discussion on this:
A week and a half in, I’m at difficulty level 31 in Fractals of the Mists. Truth be told, I’m feeling a bit of burnout at this point, so this will probably be the highest I push for some time. But now that I have a solid amount of experience in my belt, I’m a bit more interested in looking at what the new feature in Guild Wars 2 did right and what it did wrong. Specifically, I’m interested in looking at boss mechanics.
Boss design in Guild Wars 2 has definitely not been the strong point of the game. Anyone who has done the other dungeons knows progression is bizarre and a lot of bosses are nothing more than dodge-and-kill fights akin to the simplest boss fights in other MMORPGs. So fractals were ArenaNet’s chance to show some improvement.
At level 31, I feel I have a good enough grasp of the content to gauge if ArenaNet succeeded or failed. To give the too-long-didn’t-read summary, my verdict is ArenaNet succeeded at improving, but failed at going far enough.
To give my verdict some context, I think good boss fights exemplify one or both of two key elements: variety in mechanics and phases. Both keep bosses fresh as they keep going, and both can provide twists in challenge. The two ingredients provide logical progression throughout a boss fight, which keeps players feeling like they’re accomplishing more and more as the fight goes on. If there’s a variety of mechanics, players typically feel like they’re conquering more and more odds as the boss gets lower and lower in health. With phases, clear mid-fight progression is added as players transition from one act of the boss to the next.
The problem is that, as the game stands, too many boss fights lack either of these elements. Take the Jellyfish Beast in the underwater fractal. What makes players say that the fight is too long, even with the electric cage mechanic? It’s not that the fight takes an extraordinary amount of time; it clocks in at three to four minutes, which is standard in fractal encounters. It’s that the boss has few mechanics — electric cells that can be used to shock it, an AOE pull that applies agony, and jellyfish adds — and the mechanics remain static throughout the fight. That makes players feel like they’re doing the same thing over and over for much too long.
Same thing applies to the final bosses in the dredge fractal. When I first started fractals, these two fights seemed fun. They assigned one player to a unique role — pour lava — and involved coordinated kiting from the group. The problem is the mechanic is repeated almost mindlessly for three to four minutes. It’s pretty much the only mechanic in the fight, barring some dodging and AOEing here and there. There’s no progression or twists.
In contrast, there’s the colossus fractal. Ignoring any exploits, the entire fractal is essentially a multi-phase boss fight centered around seals: Kill a legendary mob, which drops a hammer. Use the hammer to break two seals while handling adds. Destroy another seal while dealing with more mobs. Break two more seals while managing mobs that heal them. Finally, eliminate the last seal while fighting a legendary mob and adds.
Some might complain the colossus fractal takes too long relative to the other fractals, but I think it’s the perfect build-up. Mechanics get more and more complex, players change roles as the hammer is traded off, and it all culminates with a big fight at the end.
In between the colossus fractal and the dredge and underwater fractals, there is some middle ground. Among these, the Legendary Imbued Shaman in the grawl fractal gets to be one of the more interesting fights at higher levels as the transition between fighting the boss itself and dealing with its bubble shield and adds becomes harder to deal with. However, the fight ultimately remains static. The encounter makes players repeat the same task over and over, and there’s no notable mechanics except the high difficulty of dealing with transitions.
That’s the big problem with boss design in Guild Wars 2. Too often the boss fights feel like an unchanging dodge-and-kill. Too much of the time a boss is difficult because of numbers, not mechanics. In the end, too many of the bosses don’t feel like bosses; they feel like mobs with greater health pools and damage.
Moving forward, it’s definitely something ArenaNet can fix, especially with the promised dungeon revamp. For now, I appreciate Fractals of the Mists as a wonderful medium of content and progression, but some parts leave a bit to be desired.