Guild Wars 2

The Fire Elemental has a rather slow pre-event buildup, and then the event itself lasts maybe 10 seconds before it’s dead. It seems a bit ridiculous that it doesn’t scale up more for such a massive amount of players. This is the second time in a row I’ve tried to do it for a daily and have not been able to get even a bronze medal. And the second time, I was even in a party with someone who got gold!! In contrast, the Frozen Maw is a low level event as well, but takes a good effort before it dies, no matter the massive amount of players thrown at it. A world boss should not be dead in 10 seconds!!

It could stand to have some more hitpoints and the ability to light large swathes of the area on fire, especially the raised platform area.

World boss events, ALL of them, need pause stages during which they take either greatly reduced damage or no damage at all, so players in other parts of pre-events and arriving a bit late but well within the time limit can reach them without other players taking them down in less than 10 seconds.

• The Behemoth already got the portals.
• The fire elemental should have stages that makes it change color to green and purple, and become invulnerable while chaos portals would appear at random spots and summon streams of random creatures. Enough creatures must be defeated to make him vulnerable again. These portals would push players when they spawn, and one of the random spots would be on top of the platform where people love to stand safely so much.
• The Great Jungle Wurm should, burrow, and 3 mounds pop in 3 spots of the swamp. The wurm is under one of the mounds, and the other mounds have a large wurm grub inside instead, and players can either go one by one to focus damage and take down one faster which may not be the one or attack all 3.
• The Shatter already has his flight stages.
• Triple Trouble already has stages.
• Tequatl already has stages.
• The golem Mark II already has his defense stages where he covers his ‘head’ with his arms.
• Jormag already has the boring ice shield first, which could be improved, then the bombs.
• The Vinewrath alrady has decent stage mechanics.

• Thaida teleports around, but that’s not enough she dies too fast, often before she can teleport for the first time. She should actually teleport to a random location and ‘hide’, losing her boss icon, so players must find her within the ship fortress, then stay invulnerable a little after being found so players can reground, during which time players fend a wave of pirates.
• The eye of zhaitan can also die too fast, and won’t even get a map icon.
• For the karka queen, the settlement events must be put on hold so the waypoints won’t go contested right away after the queen spawns. And a waypoint should be added to Steampipe Steading. It’ll be even better if Southsun was reworked to go on a cycle like Dry Top and Silverwastes, making her a spawn on a second event like the sand giant and the skritt queen.
• This is another that just goes down with numbers. He should have another mechanic, like leaving the Narthex try to walk to each statue in the Promenade of the Gods, activating them. When he reaches one, he’ll become invulnerable and summon adds based on the statue, like a champion priest of balthazar and fire elementals when he reaches a statue of Balthazar. Players must CC him when he gets a Defiance bar during his statue ritual to stop him at each statue. Instead a timer, if he reaches the last statue, the event fails.
• The sand giant is actually hard to miss. Probably because of the massive health combined with being timed.

• Champion Dredge Commissar is one of the worse offenders. There’s people camping the spot to kill him before people can reach to both increase their chances at a manifesto and reduce anyone else’s. This guy should start invulnerable, run to the area with the constant cannon barrages, and do not get lured away from there. And become invulnerable at 66% and 33% HP. The first time summon APCs (immune to conditions and cirical hits), the second time summoning mining suits (high armor, weak vs conditions), these adds must be killed so the commissar becomes vulnerable again.

And so on.

Fire Elemental, and (I think) the Caledon Jungle Worm need hit point buffs at the least.

Almost exactly 1 year ago the trait changes wrecked downscaling so that high level players do far too much damage in low level zones.

And around the same time we got megaservers, which changed up the worth bosses such that they will always be populated by tons of people.

And as has been noted countless times before and since, many of the world bosses don’t scale well beyond a handful of players anyway.

The results of all of this are hardly surprising… 10 second boss kills… players wishing that other players wouldn’t show up… etc. I can’t believe that A.Net is unaware of these things. So apparently they must not care. Or at least they apparently must prioritize fixing these things so much lower than working on the next new release (Living Story, Heart of Thorns, etc).

While I don’t want to discourage anyone from giving feedback, I don’t hold much hope of these bosses ever being interesting in the near future…

It does die rather fast, I have to bring my elementalist and use ice bow to have any chance of doing enough damage to it.

Anet needs to bring back the Fire Elemental we had at launch where it spawned and then you saw a large blob of 50 dead players and a couple of live ones running for their lives. Good times!

Boysenberry.1869:

Anet needs to bring back the Fire Elemental we had at launch where it spawned and then you saw a large blob of 50 dead players and a couple of live ones running for their lives. Good times!

A balance between the old version and the current version would be nice. Scaling is very out of whack for these low level world bosses. They can’t be too difficult for new players to participate effectively, but nor should they be a ten second romp.

I do recall my first encounter with FE just after launch….most people couldn’t even get across the bridge safely.

I find elemental much more of an issue than the worm. At least the worm drops a fair amount of area attacks & knockbacks to cause people to move. Though a bit more hp wouldn’t hurt I guess.

Elemental just.. dies in no time. I don’t think portal summons fit the elemental very well though. Maybe a stage where it splits into multiple smaller fire bosses that have to be defeated before continuing the main one.

O_o
I mostly autoattack with shortbow on my thief, maybe a couple of Cluster Bombs. 2/3rd of my stats are also useless on the Fire Elemental.

Haven’t really had much problem. On the other hand event credit in general is something that really needs to be adjusted. Taidha’s pre is probably the worst. Barrels count as minimal contribution while killing things is what really gives credit even that is the opposite of what it takes to make the event succeed.

Khisanth.2948:

Barrels count as minimal contribution while killing things is what really gives credit even that is the opposite of what it takes to make the event succeed.

Not really as the mobs are protecting or firing the cannons which are killing the ship which is destroying the gate.

Maw takes effort? How cute is that….

Jana.6831:

Khisanth.2948:

Barrels count as minimal contribution while killing things is what really gives credit even that is the opposite of what it takes to make the event succeed.

Not really as the mobs are protecting or firing the cannons which are killing the ship which is destroying the gate.

The cannons fire on their own. If you kill the cannoneer and then ignore the cannon it will just continue shooting.

You can ignore the mobs and just do the barrels and the event can succeed but if you ignore the barrels and only fight the mobs the event will fail.

The ship does nothing.

Haha I remenber the good old Fire Elemental, one of the most dangerous “regular” bosses in the game. It took a very long time to kill, fire where everywhere and you couldnt even get close with melee. If you didnt constantly dodge and move, you died.

Now he die in seconds before the fire even spawns.

Khisanth.2948:

Jana.6831:

Khisanth.2948:

Barrels count as minimal contribution while killing things is what really gives credit even that is the opposite of what it takes to make the event succeed.

Not really as the mobs are protecting or firing the cannons which are killing the ship which is destroying the gate.

The cannons fire on their own. If you kill the cannoneer and then ignore the cannon it will just continue shooting.

You can ignore the mobs and just do the barrels and the event can succeed but if you ignore the barrels and only fight the mobs the event will fail.

The ship does nothing.

It does – I’ve soloed the event in the past (before megaservers) and all I did was killing the cannoneers as I couldn’t do anything else beside that, obviously.

The fight can maybe last longer .. but for all thats holy .. make that annoying pre shorter.

I prefer Claw of Jormag 10 times over this “waiting for Godot” event.

Fire elemental’s last pre event takes place at its spawn location. The only people who should have issue are the ones who afk through the pre and come back too late. I went on a level 18 or so mesmer the other day and got credit without a party, with staff autoattack.

I agree that it is too easy, but I don’t feel bad for people who afk on the platform and miss it.

Confession: I don’t res people on the platform.

I agree, it’s a long build up for one of the shortest of events. I know Maw, Behe aren’t hard events, but they do at least last enough time since the previous patch. Elemental should be brought into line, especially as it gives a slightly better reward iirc

Beldin.5498:

The fight can maybe last longer .. but for all thats holy .. make that annoying pre shorter.

I prefer Claw of Jormag 10 times over this “waiting for Godot” event.

That too. They should reduce the pre time and increase the boss time.

For example:

• The C.LE.A.N 5000 will no longer wait for the chaotic material event to start the escort event. Both will start at the same time.
• Slightly increase the health and scaling of the chaotic material shards, and greatly increase the health and size of the last shard in the fire room.
• Players can greatly speed up the escort by destroying the shards before the C.LE.A.N. arrives to each one.
• If the C.L.E.A.N. arrives before the shard is destroyed, the shard becomes invulnerable to players and players must defend the golem from inquest while it destroys the shard.
• If the shard is destroyed before the C.L.E.A.N. arrives, it’ll stop, and turn to the next shard, skipping those rooms.
• The fire room shard will be different, the shard can only be reduced to 20% health before it goes invulnerable to players and only the C.L.E.A.N. can finish it off. The defense event can be reduced to just 1 minute by getting the shard’s HP to 20% before the C.L.E.A.N. 5000 arrives.
• Increase the health and scaling of the fire elemental, and add mechanics that force players to move.

So if players go to the shards and destroy them before the golem arrives, an escort and defense that may have taken over 15 mins could be reduced to less than 3 by working together and focusing on the objectives.

rhapsody.3615:

Fire elemental’s last pre event takes place at its spawn location. The only people who should have issue are the ones who afk through the pre and come back too late. I went on a level 18 or so mesmer the other day and got credit without a party, with staff autoattack.

I agree that it is too easy, but I don’t feel bad for people who afk on the platform and miss it.

Confession: I don’t res people on the platform.

The problem is that for some people it won’t count even if they were from the very start, because other players hit so much and so fast that it dies before they can get participation credit, even in a party.

Everyone needs to keep in mind that the following 3 World Bosses are in STARTER zones, Fire Elemental, Jungle Wurm and Shaman/Maw, even though those rotate through on the Level 80 dailies, in essence they’re still starter zone bosses and are designed accordingly, so don’t expect changes anytime soon!

The other starter zone bosses have much more reasonable pre event times and take 2-3 minutes to kill. Fire elemental has 10 minutes of pre event and takes only 24 seconds to kill. It’s way out of line.

Zaklex.6308:

Everyone needs to keep in mind that the following 3 World Bosses are in STARTER zones, Fire Elemental, Jungle Wurm and Shaman/Maw, even though those rotate through on the Level 80 dailies, in essence they’re still starter zone bosses and are designed accordingly, so don’t expect changes anytime soon!

cough Shadow Behemoth cough
Even if they are designed accordingly to zone doesn’t mean that they could be changed.
Behemoth is good example. With Megaservers changes, he is no longer 10sec boss and people with all levels can do it. I know that Anet’s primal stuff is HoT now, but they could change some things in “Vanilla” content.

Alegz.6870:

Zaklex.6308:

Everyone needs to keep in mind that the following 3 World Bosses are in STARTER zones, Fire Elemental, Jungle Wurm and Shaman/Maw, even though those rotate through on the Level 80 dailies, in essence they’re still starter zone bosses and are designed accordingly, so don’t expect changes anytime soon!

cough Shadow Behemoth cough
Even if they are designed accordingly to zone doesn’t mean that they could be changed.
Behemoth is good example. With Megaservers changes, he is no longer 10sec boss and people with all levels can do it. I know that Anet’s primal stuff is HoT now, but they could change some things in “Vanilla” content.

Behemoth is only plain annoyong now .. the only thing the last rework did is that
people that are late have a chance now to hit him. Else another endless wait now
for some people do the portals.

Perfect low level worldboss for me is still Maw Shaman since the pre-events just
lead directly to him without taking forever, and so there are not masses of people
waiting at the boss forever while 3-4 people do the pres.

And the 5 minute wait at fire elemental is really the worst of all. But maybe they
can also implement an ice-wall there on that we can shoot 10 minutes with
charzookas .. that will make it really great of course.

MithranArkanere.8957:

World boss events, ALL of them, need pause stages during which they take either greatly reduced damage or no damage at all, so players in other parts of pre-events and arriving a bit late but well within the time limit can reach them without other players taking them down in less than 10 seconds.

I don’t have a problem with the status quo, but I support all of these changes. They sound fun.

bosses need phases

Beldin.5498:

[…]

Behemoth is only plain annoyong now .. the only thing the last rework did is that
people that are late have a chance now to hit him. Else another endless wait now
for some people do the portals.[…]

The problem I see with that one is that you have to hit the portals. Hitting objects is always boring. And since the achievement is only for destroying the portals in less than 20 seconds, what you see is only a few newbies going for the portals, and the rest sitting at the damage spot.

There could be improvements made to that. For example:

• The portals should work like GW1’s chaos rifts: Each one gets a small “capture” area, and players have to kill, lure away or push away all enemies within the area and stand inside a few seconds, and the portal only spawns more enemies several seconds after the previous ones die. Ever wanted to play of them bunker-decapper builds in PvE? There’ll be your chance!
• There should be very good reasons to take down the portals faster so newbies have better chances to get the achievement. Like the behemoth never going untargeteable, but instead Determined, so players can read a new stacking effect that reduces more damage the behemoth takes from all sources the more stacks the behemoth has. These stacks increase over time while the portals are up and go down over time while there’s no portals, and the effect itself explains this mechanic in its description: The faster the portals are taken down, the less stacks the behemoth will get, and the more damage it will take.
• The behemoth should give players reasons to attack from more directions and run in circles around it, and it should also turn around and attack in more directions. Like erecting invulnerable shadow walls that prevent damage from a direction where it was attacked after taking enough damage from that direction. It could have 4 of these walls, one for each cardinal direction, and go invulnerable himself and summon the portals when the 4 walls are up. When the portals are closed, the walls also go down.
• And it could also have an attack you really, really want to avoid, like having an unblockable and unevadible orange area attack that brings whoever is inside the area when the attack lands to a “pocket shadow dimension” (actually an pitch black dark room under the swamp) in which they have to fight some shadow demons to spawn a portal to get away and return to Tyria. When Determined bars are introduced, this would be the attack that gets the Determined bar and players will prevent with their control spam.

Hey, anyone also remember back when Fire Elemental was actually scary/hard?! Back before people knew how to dodge and use blast fields and dodge.

yeah.

Good times.

Then Anet got real helpful and nerfed it, and then flooded the maps with the Megaservers and tweaked world boss schedule.

I can’t remember the last time i even tried to get to FE.

Boysenberry.1869:

Anet needs to bring back the Fire Elemental we had at launch where it spawned and then you saw a large blob of 50 dead players and a couple of live ones running for their lives. Good times!

So much this.

I hated it back then, we struggled hard to get over the kitten bridge into the fiery hellhole beyond and more often than not failed.
But this current incarnation is simply a disgrace.

I always get credit for the fire elemental with my mesmer no matter how many are there and it may be because I never get near that platform. I did have issues getting credit when I stayed near it. I’m not sure how they could change the FE, but it does need to worked on. 10-20 seconds is too fast for a world boss to go down. SB could stand 1 change and that is by moving the damage spot during the battle. It would move to wherever the last of the 13 portals went down each time.

If they lessen the pre-events time yes, else is fine, cause you have 15minutes of a window to kill each boss and FE takes the most cause it has 12-13minutes of pre-events and then a few seconds for the boss, taken down right on time for the next one.

Boysenberry.1869:

Anet needs to bring back the Fire Elemental we had at launch where it spawned and then you saw a large blob of 50 dead players and a couple of live ones running for their lives. Good times!

came here to suggest this :P
let me paint you a picture:
piles of dead players, refusing to wp because you wouldn’t get credit if you weren’t nearby when it died, scaling the FE to where it would take the live players an hour+ to kill if they were able to attack uninterrupted.
most players were dead near the bridge, which as you may know, is where you enter the area :P that’s how quickly people would die to the fire balls.
fire balls from hell. they would target players, not just randomly placed. this is the order of events if a fireball hit you: take ~40% of your health in damage, receive high-damage burning, knock back and stunned for 5 seconds, THEN you see the animation, 3 seconds later another one would hit you while you were still stunned. it would literally hit you before you saw it coming. the general strategy was: run zig zag, dodge when not changing direction, attack maybe 3 times, get hit, stun break, attack once or twice, get hit, attack once or twice, down, maybe attack once or twice, die, wp, run back, repeat :P

now… maybe not quite so rough. definitely show red circles before they land, but I liked the targeted fireballs. so if people clump up, there will be 50 fireballs coming their way. and more life; it should be alive at least a minute.

The fire elemental event was great about a year ago after the first or second rework. It became too easy after the most recent rework.

I think it was in a good spot at one time, but that was before Megaservers. Before then, it was dangerous enough to down then kill you if you weren’t alert. Now, there are so many people it’s overwhelmed before the defenses can start up, the fire elementals dropping AOE fields and the lines of fire it would spit out.

They can probably look at scaling but in the future maybe they should make these bosses instanced with an instanced cap of 10 players or so for ones that don’t need large numbers.

Any pre-events can be done outside the instance and then a green star marks the instance spot. It remains there for a set period of time. While it’s there you can enter up to max capacity then any more people will go in another one. You have X minutes to kill the boss in there.

I once missed Fire Elemental because I got a text and look at my phone.

I couldn’t see the harm in them adjusting the scale for it to take an additional 10-15 seconds to kill with the current numbers that we have doing FE now. That should give more than enough time for everyone to get their tags in without dragging on the fight.