Guild Wars 2

Since the Living Story started and new mobs were introduced, I’ve seen a few interesting and difficult encounters along the way. At least, until the mechanics of these bosses were studied and gotten to the point where its no different from the old encounters we have. We still have roughly the same list of issues with both open world and dungeon bosses big and small, and I hope there are some sweeping changes done to them even for the lower level zones. Things like:

-1 shot mechanics are all too common, just because evasion and block are in game doesn’t mean there should be so many high scaling effects that flat out cannot be survived by any amount of health or toughness. They are getting better having red outlines of where these skills connect for the larger skills but for some encounters they still have the kind of effects that follow like a trail of dominos with no chance of surviving.

-Defiance is getting reworked but I still feel like cc in general is impossible to regulate in the open world encounters. The change will help dungeons for sure but some of the larger bosses need some counter cc to be introduced or for cc skills to be a little more thoughtful in how they work against certain types of enemies.

-Dps is still the #1 tool against these bosses. A few times blocking/reflecting walls are called for but overall its might stacking, cleaving, and crits. There is little to no opportunities to get away from that.

-Stacking for the sake of mob gathering is still #1. I can understand it being appropriate for the party so they can benefit from their outgoing boons and finishers but for the sake of gathering trash mobs they need to solve this in a reasonable manner so “trash” mobs aren’t incredibly threatening unless using this method.

-little to no enemies really change up their skill bar throughout the fight or between encounters. This is a huge issue with them becoming farm tools rather than a boss because people know exactly what they’re going to do and get away with it before the fight even starts.

Suggested Fixes (Broad Details)

-For 1 shot mechanics, simply pull back raw damage scaling based on things like # of players and fractal levels so a simple auto attack isn’t going to down you. In response, introduce more methods of these bosses reaching you and/or breaking through your defenses all the while having exposed weaknesses themselves. By this I mean, say the boss has “unblockable leap” as one of its noted effects. Ofcourse, it means their leap attack cannot be blocked however something to counter this could be something like they are susceptible to knockback effects during that leap regardless of how their defiance bar is set. There are many defensive measures, many types of CC, and many types of attacks. They should become a little more in depth other than a chain combo to just keep them from moving or firing and forgetting to dps the boss as quick as possible.

-This kind of ties to the last point with bosses having moments of exposure or being less/more resistant to certain types of attacks and effects so you feel like you can focus on more than his heavy hits and busting out all your skills to kill it quickly.

-Part of the issue with support is, dps support is a very common tool in parties and some support builds really don’t bring a whole lot to the group to keep them going. It’s kind of sick that there are dps builds that can self stack 25 might and perma fury, it makes any aspect of a support build irrelevant when they can do that and maintain their dps role in the group. This is a major issue that pvp faces too and it’d be nice to see some effort made to change this. Perhaps reworking might to be stronger but difficult to apply and in response giving the tools of a potential support build to have a much easier time dishing these things out? This can apply to other boons to as far as being reworked to help pvp and pve see a stronger presence of these boons but not being so easy to acquire. Don’t forget, they are different game modes so adjusting a value really shouldn’t be an issue. If someone honestly wants to try to keep their build the same when going from fighting AI to a player, they need to realize no AI will behave like a player in a MMO. Get used to things changing.

-I’m not sure what to suggest for fixing trash mob gathering aside from giving environmental tools to help. It seems more of an issue that these mobs spawn in such spread out locations and like to bounce around a lot since there is no controllable “agro” in this game. Except for Mesmer and guardian there aren’t a whole lot of AoE pull skills so only thing I can suggest is adjusting trash mobs to not be so ridiculous in dungeons like the spiders in AC that can stack 20+ poison on you and even if you reflect them they hardly are touched by it.

-Lastly, there needs to be more evolving or updated fights so you aren’t always going to walk into the same rotation. For example, the Frozen Maw event has misc chilling twisters, a slow attacking mage who eventually morphs into a hard hitting golem but moves very slowly. There should be a little more thought like having the twisters encase players in ice if they stay in it too long, using a whirl finisher in a twister automatically launches you away, the golem form should use seismic leap towards groups of players that are >600 units away, chilled players deal less damage towards it, etc. Don’t make this paragraph for each boss but even the veterans or champions randomly around the game, they need to be a little more interactive with their surroundings and respectively, get some worthy loot. The collection achievements helped with this a lot but even bounties of crafting components for players seeking them.

tl;dr I really don’t want to see old content become irrelevant. There have been minor details on the new mastery system and it was said in a post from anet that they are aware some world bosses are too easy, but the few attempts to change that have done almost nothing. There are ways to deal with a huge crowd and the smaller scale fights should easily of been balanced by now to be a little more unique.