Guild Wars 2

Just some general feedback about the bosses in this last season.

The Good:

Moving away from the DPS-and-dodge design that has dominated the PvE scene is a nice change of pace. Not that the old design was that bad when done well (see: Lupi), but having more active, mobile encounters is fun too. In this last episode, I found these elements of the encounter to be particularly nice additions:

I’ve noticed a lot of these elements in fights through the season, and think it’s a definitely a step in the right direction. I’d like to see a nice mix of these more active encounters combined with Lupis in future dungeons — that would make my day.

The Bad:

Too easy: no reset on wipe, OP rezzing by NPCs, actual fight went waaay too fast. Ofc, this is LS so the bar is necessarily lower than it would be in a dungeon, but I’d love to see a more challenging version of these fights in future instances.

The Ugly:

This is my biggest complaint, and the reason I’ll never enjoy these encounters as much as I’d like to: Accessibility.

Yes, the encounters are replayable. We can absolutely play them as many times as we’d like, and even party up to do it. But doing so requires spending an hour or more hopping around the map and clicking through dialogs to advance the story to get at the “interesting” bits. This has prevented me from playing any of these LS encounters more than once or twice.

I work; my playtime is limited. I don’t want to spend an hour speed clicking through dialogs, hopping around the map, and repeating puzzles just to do a 10 minute encounter. It’s not worth it, and poses a significant barrier to replaying (and thus fully enjoying) the content.

So my suggestions:

- Add subchapters to the story journal. Let us jump right into an encounter we want to play. This will make the replayability of these lovely encounters so much more enjoyable.
- Add a hard mode. I understand the current design is to add challenge through the story achievements. But a lot of those are just tedious OCD goals, and once you’ve done them, the challenge is gone. My suggestions for increasing the difficulty without much work on your end: (a) Reset the fight on wipe, (b) don’t provide resbot NPCs, and (.c) increase the damage and health of the boss a bit so it would take 3 or so rounds to finish. This last point would be especially interesting for parties in the last episode, as some players would need to be tanky for lighting walls, while others would need DPS for burning down the boss. Sounds fun to me
- A daily gold reward (something like 35s seems appropriate for a single encounter) would encourage people to add a few of these instances to a daily rotation.

In short, keep up the good work — the PvE encounters are improving, but need more challenge, reward, and accessibility.

Thanks for reading :-)

I second this suggestion. A lot of the LS encounters were fun, but were missing a bit on the difficulty, and going through all that clicking simply wasn’t worth it if you wanted to repeat it.

Agreed. My biggest gripe with the replayable achievements is how some of them are locked behind unskippable dialogues, cutscenes and other timegates before you get to the combat bits. The combat bits are the main appeal for replayability. So it would be nice to be able to jump right to them on a replay.

Could do a sort of LS2 boss room A.K.A. capcom boss blitz, fight the fun bosses one after another or one a day for a daily.

Gyler.8150:

Could do a sort of LS2 boss room A.K.A. capcom boss blitz, fight the fun bosses one after another or one a day for a daily.

Not a half bad idea. They did something like this in another mmo (probably more than one, just one I remember) and it was a fun filler until more story and large-scale raids came out.

Maybe this could be integrated into the fractal paradigm? Shadows of old enemies forming in the mists? That gives you the option to basically do hardmode versions of the old bosses too.

Silalus.8760:

Gyler.8150:

Could do a sort of LS2 boss room A.K.A. capcom boss blitz, fight the fun bosses one after another or one a day for a daily.

Not a half bad idea. They did something like this in another mmo (probably more than one, just one I remember) and it was a fun filler until more story and large-scale raids came out.

Maybe this could be integrated into the fractal paradigm? Shadows of old enemies forming in the mists? That gives you the option to basically do hardmode versions of the old bosses too.

I like the sound of that.

For LS2 specifically, I wouldn’t mind seeing something in the the chapter selection panel that lets you instance directly to an unfinished challenge. A smaller, tighter instance that would exclude chatter, get to the fight, and end once the achievement triggers. It might not even need to load most of the NPCs at that point, so mapping them into it wouldn’t be necessary. In, done, gone.

The fractal idea is something I’ve thought about too, though I really hate the RNG nature of it. But I have a feeling ArenaNet would be more open to adding these as FotM shards over doing anything else with them. TBH I would be surprised if they didn’t already plan to do so.

A lot of work went into designing these encounters and environments (ermagerd Glint’s Lair). It’d be a shame if they just languished in the story journal after this season ended.

dlonie.6547:

Too easy: no reset on wipe, OP rezzing by NPCs

That’s a good thing. I always hated when a boss’s health resets.
And npc’s ressing me is something I have wanted since day one. It was always so stupid when I died and npc’s were just standing there doing jack shid.

Don’t mention Glint’s Lair, it makes me cry. So beautiful. Such interesting encounters. All Locked behind 10 minutes of talking and waiting…

If they gave me a fractal of Glint’s lair, beefed up to warrant 5 people’s attention… my god I might actually be interested in doing fractals (god I hate the RNG)

Jerus.4350:

All Locked behind 10 minutes of talking and waiting…

That was the most important part of it…. you know, the story?
The boss fighting mechanic was boring as hell imo.

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Jerus.4350:

All Locked behind 10 minutes of talking and waiting…

That was the most important part of it…. you know, the story?
The boss fighting mechanic was boring as hell imo.

I don’t think you’re grasping the concept here.

The story is fine, it’s great, but why would I want to listen to it 5 times? 10 times? 20 times? Hell I raged the third time I had to listen to it while I was doing achievements.

We’re asking that the content they’ve already made, be tweaked to be made into more replayable content.

It’s a good idea to make them nice and easy first go around so people can eat up their story. But, it’d only take a few minor tweaks to take something like Glint’s Lair and make it into a bit of challenging content with high replay value.

Jerus.4350:

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Jerus.4350:

All Locked behind 10 minutes of talking and waiting…

That was the most important part of it…. you know, the story?
The boss fighting mechanic was boring as hell imo.

I don’t think you’re grasping the concept here.

The story is fine, it’s great, but why would I want to listen to it 5 times? 10 times? 20 times? Hell I raged the third time I had to listen to it while I was doing achievements.

We’re asking that the content they’ve already made, be tweaked to be made into more replayable content.

It’s a good idea to make them nice and easy first go around so people can eat up their story. But, it’d only take a few minor tweaks to take something like Glint’s Lair and make it into a bit of challenging content with high replay value.

Ah I see. Yes I can see that might get tedious. Maybe anet should make seperate story and challenge versions for each story mission. Story versions are, like the name says, just for the story. The challenge versions are for achievements and focus just on the combat.

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Jerus.4350:

All Locked behind 10 minutes of talking and waiting…

That was the most important part of it…. you know, the story?
The boss fighting mechanic was boring as hell imo.

The story is interesting the first time and maybe the second time. But most people will want to rush through those sections a bit faster and get to the actual interactive stuff like the combat. The fact that achievements are tied into missions to make them replayable. Means it should be a priority for anet to make these accessible.

Its really simple to do. Add a shortcut emote at the start of the instance on replays. Or divide the instances up so the dialogue sequence is separated from the combat stuff.

I completely agree with this. This morning I had 30 minutes to play before work, so I thought I would start the LS. You know how this ended up… with me glancing at the clock, telling myself one more minute, I hope this is over soon… but eventually I had to say screw it and left to go to work, with the first part of LS incomplete, with no way to save my progress, knowing that after work I would have to start from scratch. Probably won’t finish the LS til this weekend, unless I abandon any wvw play or SW play. Oh, and you expect me to do this content more than once? Can we get a little support for the people that have lives outside GW2, and can’t spend 18hrs a day playing?

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Jerus.4350:

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

Jerus.4350:

All Locked behind 10 minutes of talking and waiting…

That was the most important part of it…. you know, the story?
The boss fighting mechanic was boring as hell imo.

I don’t think you’re grasping the concept here.

The story is fine, it’s great, but why would I want to listen to it 5 times? 10 times? 20 times? Hell I raged the third time I had to listen to it while I was doing achievements.

We’re asking that the content they’ve already made, be tweaked to be made into more replayable content.

It’s a good idea to make them nice and easy first go around so people can eat up their story. But, it’d only take a few minor tweaks to take something like Glint’s Lair and make it into a bit of challenging content with high replay value.

Ah I see. Yes I can see that might get tedious. Maybe anet should make seperate story and challenge versions for each story mission. Story versions are, like the name says, just for the story. The challenge versions are for achievements and focus just on the combat.

Exactly!

Challenge versions or adding them to fractals or something. Such beautiful content that could be polished up and made into content people would want to do daily instead of just getting the story, going through a few easy but interesting fights, and moving on.

Glad that’s cleared up, Windu (thanks Jerus and spoj! Our mindbrains hum as one).

I really, really want more of Glint’s Lair, too, with a higher difficulty level. But like you said — it’s not worth the time it takes to get to into the good part.

Just to hit the important part again: This new direction for encounters is wonderful. And that’s from me, one of the more cynical and negative posters on these forums. The difficulty and rewards are too low and the lead up to them is too long to make them part of a regular content rotation, but these are easily addressed. I hope ArenaNet takes steps to make this fantastic content more popular.

dlonie.6547:

Just to hit the important part again: This new direction for encounters is wonderful. And that’s from me, one of the more cynical and negative posters on these forums. The difficulty and rewards are too low and the lead up to them is too long to make them part of a regular content rotation, but these are easily addressed. I hope ArenaNet takes steps to make this fantastic content more popular.

Well said.

I’m not even all that concerned about the rewards. I just ask that ANet respect my time when it comes to achievement hunting.

spoj.9672:

Or divide the instances up so the dialogue sequence is separated from the combat stuff.

If they could do this and also use it as a more robust checkpoint system (one that persists between sessions in the same instance), it would be a great QoL improvement IMO. I usually DC at least once per episode (usually right at the end of a chapter…), and have to replay the entire instance from the beginning. Not a fun experience.

Edit To complete the suggestion, all it would take, UI-wise, is an additional option on the popup that starts the instance:

“Resume from last checkpoint”

“Restart from beginning”.

dlonie.6547:

Too easy: no reset on wipe, OP rezzing by NPCs, actual fight went waaay too fast. Ofc, this is LS so the bar is necessarily lower than it would be in a dungeon, but I’d love to see a more challenging version of these fights in future instances.

….

- Add subchapters to the story journal. Let us jump right into an encounter we want to play. This will make the replayability of these lovely encounters so much more enjoyable.

I agree with getting rid of npc rezzing.

I think the biggest thing to increase replayability is rewards. Overall the entire structure needs to be changed a little bit for some of the instances if we want replayability on the scale of dungeon replayability. But if some these instances gave a new dungeon currency I think it would be minor tweaking to bring them up to par. Things similar to what you said.