I’m also against zerg play, but I disagree with one of your points.
1. No meaningful difficulty will ever be present in a fight.
I don’t think this is so. With thoughtful design and other constraints on encounters, even world bosses can be challenging if they give enough tasks for players to do that are necessary for event success. Proper enemy scaling that includes new skills (or new enemies) that are better at dealing with massive amounts of players that don’t pay attention will also help. Making it so player attack don’t affect the bosses unless certain conditions are met will further add strategy to the encounters. Limiting zone player cap size can also help (i.e., the size needed before creating an overflow). Unfortunately the overflow system does not retain the state of the zone, so this is an undesirable option for many reasons.
I agree the events aren’t challenging 1, but I don’t think this to be an unsolvable problem, just an engineering problem in need of a solution. Whether or not Arena Net has the creative and technical resources available to solve it, I can’t say.
1 – Though some do fail even with a zerg, like the risen priest of grenth event.
Yes you’re definately right.
I should’ve elaborated that most “good” mechanics they design for a boss will be trivialized by zerging and would need to actually put in the effort to design a good encounter all together.
I was actually going to give an example of a dragon fight such as Tequatl, back in beta when I first heard of the fight, I thought it would going to require true teamwork and effort to beat, because it has so many different objective that people need to be on top of.
Siege equipment needed to help dps the dragon, mobs that attack the siege equipment need to be stopped, if siege dies then people need to escort siege repair squads to the siege equipment. The giant laser needed to stun and make the dragon vulnerable needs to be defended til it charges up. The giant exploding abominations the dragon summons need to be kited and dealt with or else it kills everyone in a large area.
Dragon finger tentacles that throw people toward their death need to be avoided and killed, bone walls need to be destroyed so siege can help DPS the dragon, poison aoe’s dropped on the ground need to be avoided and you need good condition cleansing to deal with it, well telegraphed fears need to be stabilized/cleansed/avoided or you run into fingers/aoe/abominations and die. Etc.
This is what the big events should be like, there needs to be difficulty and teamwork, and the rewards should be in BEATING the encounter, not making the mob spawns and abominations drop loot so people ignore the dragon to farm the mobs or anything like that.
