Guild Wars 2

Out of curiosity, since I didn’t see much of a debate on the matter, what was the purpose of adding timers on the world bosses? Was it just as a shameless gear-check? Was it to more tightly control the spawn windows? What was the purpose?

I never have trouble making and clearing most of them, occasionally Teq doesn’t drop in his window, but TC has a nice success rate, otherwise it just seems that the timers are there to provide a false sense of difficulty to make up for the bosses complete lack of otherwise good mechanics.

Timers as seen in GW2 are failure conditions that are extrinsic (outside of) the design of the event. Intrinsic (inside of) failure conditions can be seen in events where mobs capture an outpost by occupying it, reducing the morale of NPC combatants to zero, etc. An extrinsic failure condition is much easier to program. Adding a timer is simple, though balancing the time allowed to expected player DPS and the scaling of the event would require some calculation.

I don’t think you understand what gear check is.

It’s a mechanic used to artifically extend the life of content by requiring a certain level of gear to complete it and then gating the acquisition of that gear behind weekly lockouts. Some particularly heinous developers then charge monthly subscription fees so you have to pay to wait to get the gear.

The only content with anything close to a gear check in GW2 is higher level Fractals where you need gear with AR. Even then it’s very easy to acquire since there are no lockouts.

They were added simply because being able to solo a world boss just because you have enough time is silly.

There should always be a way to fail events, and before the timers it was impossible to fail most of them.

I see, well that rules out it being a gear check, so what is the point of the timers then xD

lordkrall.7241:

They were added simply because being able to solo a world boss just because you have enough time is silly.

There should always be a way to fail events, and before the timers it was impossible to fail most of them.

Ok then why such arbitrary low timers then. If they are there to keep them from being solo’ed, then wouldn’t more time make sense with the HP buff they got? The only one without a HP boost thus far is Shadow, hell Fire Element isn’t killable without at least 15 people that I’ve witnessed.

No matter how much you buff the health of a mob it would be fully possible to solo it, as long as there isn’t a timer (world-bosses doesn’t reset if no on hits them as far as I know), since you can just run back forever and keep hitting it.

The timers are not low. They are quite perfect for the events. Since it means you actually have to do stuff other than standing there waiting until the boss is at 10% HP and then rush in and tag it. With the 15 minute timers everyone present need to actually take part of the fight if they want to succeed.

Probably because people kept talking about there being no chance of failure.