Guild Wars 2

At its simplest level the objective of combat is to kill the opposing side. However in content that involves large groups of players, death isn’t much of a factor which has a negative impact.

Rather than having encounters where the goal of the monster is to kill off the group of players, we instead see lower forms of difficulty, often referred to as “artificial”, such as timers before an automatic defeat, turning much of the content into “DPS tests”.

Instead of the encounter being about how well the players perform in the combat itself, the difficulty comes from how well players can coordinate and if they can deal enough damage in time.

This is most apparent in the living story releases which have focused on open world content involving masses of players, where the player group is pretty much invincible. The monsters aren’t designed to be able to wipe out the vast amount of players that can be around them, and even if they do manage to kill a few players it doesn’t have much impact due to how easily players can recover through revives or simply using a waypoint and running back.

This has caused a lot of frustration and hatred throughout the community regarding open world content. Combat loses its appeal when it doesn’t challenge the individual and since the difficulty of the fights doesn’t come from how well players perform in the combat, but instead on group coordination and damage, they are left feeling insignificant.

Large scale content needs to be redesigned, putting more emphasis on player death and individual skill for survival, continuation of the fight, and success. Monsters need the capability of wiping out entire groups of players and the punishment for death needs to have more impact.

A rough suggestion I have is is that a new tier of events be created called world events, replacing the group event status of some events.

Monsters in world events would be given more AoE damage capabilities. For instance, their melee attacks would be able to hit every player within range and they would drop massive AoE effects in order to deal with the amount of players. They would also need a larger variety of these attacks, not just repeat the same 2-3 attacks like in most content so far.

If players die within range of one of these events there would be restrictions on reentering the fight. For instance, there could be a barrier of entry to the fight, only allowing players to enter or reenter during certain phases. Upon death players would be kicked out of the fighting area. Players outside of the fighting area would be able to complete objectives to assist the players inside the fight area while waiting for it to open back up.

I feel something like this would be a huge improvement to large scale content. It would make the fighting much less dull and put more importance and challenge on the individual, not just the group.

The problem is, they have to design the encounter to work with a minimum number of participates and a maximum number of participants.

Make it too difficult and those on the non-main shards won’t do it because they likely won’t have enough people to do it.

Make it too easy and the main shards will just breeze right through it.

And there is already problems with getting people to do what is necessary to match the zerg difficulty. Now add on personal difficulty, which would add in factors that commanders don’t know and don’t have the time to learn? Events become barren as no one as the desire to deal with it. Except for the hardcare. And if you stick anything beyond the typical rewards the casuals will come crying to the forum.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t personally mind some things that I can’t get because I don’t have the skill for, but ANet has yet to really put anything behind a wall that the casual players can’t overcome.

And in this instance hardcore vs casual is for those who care vs don’t care about being perfect in their rotations and using the right build, etc.

Agreed with OP.

A simple solution that I think would probably work would be to scale event rewards based off of several factors:

a) how much damage you dealt/how much you contributed in x ways
b) how many deaths you’ve had (the less the better)
c) the time you were present in the area while the event was taking place

Well… it definitely wouldn’t be simple to implement, but the idea itself is simple.

Purple Miku.7032:

Agreed with OP.

A simple solution that I think would probably work would be to scale event rewards based off of several factors:

a) how much damage you dealt/how much you contributed in x ways
b) how many deaths you’ve had (the less the better)
c) the time you were present in the area while the event was taking place

Well… it definitely wouldn’t be simple to implement, but the idea itself is simple.

This method I would agree with more and I’d open that to other events, not just world bosses. Your reward being tied to how well you do in the event.

Now, if these world events were instanced and more like what I’ve heard about raids in other MMO’s, then I’m all for it needing organization and having the individual ability matter. Or if there were instanced versions of the current world bosses. I wouldn’t even have an issue with the instanced version giving considerable more loot if it was actually a considerable amount more difficult. Because I feel rewards should tie directly to difficulty and I don’t mind not being able to get something because I don’t have the skill for it or the desire to spend the ages it would take for me to get the skill for it.

But the moment it is out in the open world, it becomes impossible to really truly organize for any level of true difficulty. It’s why all world bosses become zerg content. Just because you need the DPS to knock away at the HP sponge. Some having interesting mechanics.

And Teq and Wurm being the most difficult due to their mechanics and requirements for X% of players to be doing certain things at certain times.

Seera.5916:

Purple Miku.7032:

Agreed with OP.

A simple solution that I think would probably work would be to scale event rewards based off of several factors:

a) how much damage you dealt/how much you contributed in x ways
b) how many deaths you’ve had (the less the better)
c) the time you were present in the area while the event was taking place

Well… it definitely wouldn’t be simple to implement, but the idea itself is simple.

This method I would agree with more and I’d open that to other events, not just world bosses. Your reward being tied to how well you do in the event.

Now, if these world events were instanced and more like what I’ve heard about raids in other MMO’s, then I’m all for it needing organization and having the individual ability matter. Or if there were instanced versions of the current world bosses. I wouldn’t even have an issue with the instanced version giving considerable more loot if it was actually a considerable amount more difficult. Because I feel rewards should tie directly to difficulty and I don’t mind not being able to get something because I don’t have the skill for it or the desire to spend the ages it would take for me to get the skill for it.

But the moment it is out in the open world, it becomes impossible to really truly organize for any level of true difficulty. It’s why all world bosses become zerg content. Just because you need the DPS to knock away at the HP sponge. Some having interesting mechanics.

And Teq and Wurm being the most difficult due to their mechanics and requirements for X% of players to be doing certain things at certain times.

Reworking how rewards are distributed wouldn’t address the problem I’m trying to get at as it wouldn’t change how the encounter plays out. Players would still be an invincible blob that could get away with standing in the same spot the entire fight repeating their typical skill rotations.

If they move away from group challenge and more towards individual challenge they could up the difficulty in a way that would scale better than the current system. The issues they have with difficulty are caused by the type of difficulty they are trying to create, being based around reaching a damage amount before a timer ends and coordinating the group of players. If they were to base it more around player survivability the role of an individual would dramatically increase and a few skilled players could be the difference between winning or losing.

When it comes to scaling the event, even a small amount of skilled players would be able to complete the content because more importance is placed on the individual. This hasn’t been the case in any challenging open world content thus far because it is designed to be completed by numbers, not skill, and failure is based around a timer, not death.