Guild Wars 2

If you and I, as players, were against a group of enemies one of which is a veteran and the others regulars of the same type we would target the regulars first in most circumstances to kill them first.

Why is it that AI is forced to target enemies (players) with the highest armor? Isn’t that counterintuitive? We wouldn’t do it unless there was a gimmick reward to it but raids are always designed this way.

It confuses me. Raid bosses should target players with the lowest defense first… Because they have the lowest defense.

Because tank. If they did that, thieves would be dead quick sharp, and the can’t tank.

If enemies, especially bosses, targeted players with the lowest defence first then there would be very little incentive for players to play those classes. Meanwhile the players with high defence would be left alive the longest, and have the easiest time against the enemy.

Instead, players who will die quickly are infrequently targeted. That way in the event they do become the target they feel a very real threat but still have a chance to win, meanwhile the players with high defence can take the brunt of the damage but still need to be careful about what they’re doing.

The way it is set up may not seem logical in a real warfare type situation, but it’s necessary to making fights in an MMO seem balanced regardless of the inequalities or differences between different professions.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

If enemies, especially bosses, targeted players with the lowest defence first then there would be very little incentive for players to play those classes. Meanwhile the players with high defence would be left alive the longest, and have the easiest time against the enemy.

But let’s think about this. Players that are well armored survive the longest, are targeted last, and have the easiest time (doubly-so because they are well armored) meanwhile players that are running in practically naked with no compensation whatsoever for that behavior are completely obliterated.

People complain about stupid AI. Then they turn around and hope for stupid AI.

Under this system I would never take toughness of be a warrior. Problem solved for 6 out of 9 classes when dealing with the bigger bad.

Instead, players who will die quickly are infrequently targeted. That way in the event they do become the target they feel a very real threat but still have a chance to win, meanwhile the players with high defence can take the brunt of the damage but still need to be careful about what they’re doing.

But if you think on this for just a moment players who die less are targeted. So they aren’t dying. Worse yet let’s say we have a team of 4, 1 is a healer who is running around booty-nekkid chanting and keeping the one being targeted who weighs a metric ton due to his armor alive while the other two nekkid mages cast fireball over and over and over because the enemy for some reason, despite being aflame on his butt, can’t figure out just where all that pain is coming from.

It is literally catering to the idea that light-armor classes (which shouldn’t exactly exist in a game like this without “roles” but another discussion for 2017) should just build DPS no matter what because Gargantua the Mighty is going to leave you alone for Grobarth the kittened barbarian who keeps stumbling into walls and tripping over his own feet simply because he has heavier armor without taking a single point of toughness.

The way it is set up may not seem logical in a real warfare type situation, but it’s necessary to making fights in an MMO seem balanced regardless of the inequalities or differences between different professions.

But that’s brick dumb AI. “Oh no, if the thing that is balls to the wall defended to the teeth dies I will have to endure on my own.” sounds like a wipe set-up; if your toughest bro dies and the bigger bad simply farts in your general direction you will die. Instantly. So not only is the game encouraging you to never take a defensive stance on stats or whatever but it puts the onus on just keeping one dude alive and having him run amok stumbling over himself drunk on Christmas ale.

My brain cannot handle this, (But the image is cute and will be drawn later)!

kinda ironic isn’kitten To hype up a “non traditional mmo composition” …..and then reverts back to that system XDDD

Actually its kinda counter intuitive. What if the whole group went in as zerker gear and absolutely nothing toughness and all use the same profession?

Hello to bad design.

I know ANet was trying their best to keep GW2 from having the holy trinity or the quad-role version (Tank, healer, dps, caster/hybrid). Yet, in reality raids basically gave this. And its not just the raids, some other open world PvE content bosses (the ones with the bull head/horns over them) often agro on a person too that has high toughness or higher toughness than others. Its what I notice when I’m using minion master with Flesh of the Master trait. I can easily get to top of the toughness in open world content.

I avoid using minions in raid content. Yet I found that just having tanky gear of Minstrel or Trailblazer gear, can make me top it over any other player too In Minstrel as Druid, you kind of don’t want to get hurt yet you also want others to tank Bad combination. Try it in trailblazer, and its just as bad if you aren’t wanting to tank. Hence why people run multiple armors.

The developers could have just made it so that the boss randomly targets some one every so many seconds, this would make the game more of what it was originally trying to be. And yet, they didn’t.

There’s a flaw in your logic. ANet never specifically wanted to get RID of healer’s and tanks, it just wanted every class to be able to do most anything.

Example they used way back when was an Elementalist swapping to Water Attunement to provide healing for the group.

The goal they set out to achieve wasn’t to get rid of tanks/healers per se, but to make it so X class isn’t REQUIRED to perform Y role in a group.

What you have to consider is the benefits of not ‘officially’ having a trinity is that there is no one class you have to have to complete content, so if everyone chooses to go in all zerker and can manage to survive using dodges and blocks good for them,  but if you would feel better having a stong healing class and a high defensive class then good for them. The point was to not make it mandatory.

Ykfox.3825:

There’s a flaw in your logic. ANet never specifically wanted to get RID of healer’s and tanks, it just wanted every class to be able to do most anything.

Example they used way back when was an Elementalist swapping to Water Attunement to provide healing for the group.

Do you know why Elementalist was the first thing you said? It’s because Elementalist is really the only class that does this well. It really is. I run an Engineer main and when Elixer-Infused Bombs went so did the very concept of creating an engineer that was good at healing others. Engineers are great at healing themselves but of their heal opportunities only 3, 2 of which are in direct contest due to being in the same trait line as grandmaster, are even able to heal people who are not themselves.

It’s just not a thing. Last time I saw a healing warrior with remarks and high praise was about never.

The goal they set out to achieve wasn’t to get rid of tanks/healers per se, but to make it so X class isn’t REQUIRED to perform Y role in a group.

I’m pretty sure it was. Relatively sure they sought to make characters self-sufficient which is not the same as making characters viable for all three of the “holy trinity”. Good luck with your … thief healer?

Ykfox.3825:

There’s a flaw in your logic. ANet never specifically wanted to get RID of healer’s and tanks, it just wanted every class to be able to do most anything.

Example they used way back when was an Elementalist swapping to Water Attunement to provide healing for the group.

The goal they set out to achieve wasn’t to get rid of tanks/healers per se, but to make it so X class isn’t REQUIRED to perform Y role in a group.

Explain Druid then?

Explain why there so many ways to make tanks of Scrappers, Reapers, Necros, Guards, Warriors, and others…

Explain why healing on classes like Reaper/Necro is almost non-existent (yeah, use blood magic, but its still not as effective as Ele’s staff water and Druid)… And thieves don’t even have heals that are even worth using for party use?

They actually made the trinity show up in Raids and all.

A lot of the problem was created early on in gaming, tanks did little damage but took all the damage. They needed to keep aggro from the boss so heavy armor became the target. The healer was there to keep people alive, everyone else was there to do the actual killing. This made the trinity.

The problem anet found was people and the professions were effectively typecast, a warrior was expected to tank, even if they wanted to try DPS. A monk was expected to heal, even if they wanted to DPS. If nobody wanted to monk then you were stuck. The Ritualist provided a second healing profession in GW1 but not everyone thought it a good option.

anet wanted to change it so that no group healer was needed. Effectively they removed the need for a monk, which is why GW2 doesn’t have one. In the original GW2 pack that is what they managed – professions supposedly became self sufficient at healing.

The problem was to keep players alive they introduced active damage avoidance. That meant people could go with minimum armor/max damage builds and kill the foes in a very short time.

The introduction of the first raid wing didn’t stop the DPS bandwagon. The fact that each section is effectively timed simply extends the need for extremely heavy DPS. If you don’t have maximum DPS you are going to run out of time and, in the case of the Vale Guardian, suffer 300% damage.

The tank is back because everyone else in a raid group has to use minimum armor in order to maximize the DPS they provide, The healer is back because AoE attacks cause massive damage to weakly armored characters.

Short answer, if the boss went for the party members with the weakest armor first then far fewer teams would ever get through.

I dunno. You kinda right. But imagine VG randomly slap people kinda give me headache or some glassy class have to run for life because 1 attack chunk down his hp by half.

Not talking about how messy his mechanic is if he is “clever”

Nah..

Serious.6940:

Short answer, if the boss went for the party members with the weakest armor first then far fewer teams would ever get through.

You make good points but isn’t that actually the idea?

The concept of making “harder content” while keeping a traditional “easy mode” ritualistic behavior is self-defeating. The simplest solution to the problem is to just lower the boss HP and raise the potential of death by causing the boss to target characters in the order of least to greatest armor or at least pursue a character voraciously at random for a set amount of time with a barrage of truly deadly attacks.

I actually cannot figure out why they even have toughness in the game half the time.

DGraves.3720:

Serious.6940:

Short answer, if the boss went for the party members with the weakest armor first then far fewer teams would ever get through.

You make good points but isn’t that actually the idea?

The concept of making “harder content” while keeping a traditional “easy mode” ritualistic behavior is self-defeating. The simplest solution to the problem is to just lower the boss HP and raise the potential of death by causing the boss to target characters in the order of least to greatest armor or at least pursue a character voraciously at random for a set amount of time with a barrage of truly deadly attacks.

I actually cannot figure out why they even have toughness in the game half the time.

Exactly. I hate talking about games I rarely play anymore, but in TERA, I use to run with “elitist” there as I was the only tank they found that could keep agro longer than most when they did their huge damage bursts. It was a pain in the… but yeah…

I had to spam all my agro skills the instant they were off cooldown and keep tapping the boss with auto attack while the agro skills were on cooldown to maintain agro against the high damage +12 glowing red DPS’ers could do to the boss. The healer didn’t have to heal much, just keep up the damage buffs for the DPS’ers.

If they did their burst faster than I could stack agro, the highest DPS’er got agro and it would take about a minute or so before I fully got agro back.

In GW2, its sad that ANet has fallen back on this as well. I mean seriously it doesn’t matter who tanks. But all others run zerker or high damage gear. And boom… Sucks.

Because pve enemies are programmed to lose.

Aggro mechanics in RPG video games come from charisma in tabletop RPG’s. Since most devs don’t want to put in charisma since everything in their games are combat based (more easily quantifiable), intimidates, taunts, etc, are usually tacked on to attacks or abilities. It isn’t about who is the scariest, it’s about who looks the scariest, and who spams tripping to keep things from moving. All about distracting enemies from what’s really important: support/buffer/healer.

Since Anet doesn’t have aggro numbers tacked on abilities, but they want somebody to be able to maintain some control over the motion of raid bosses, they decided toughness makes you look scary. start hypersubjective Which isn’t necessarily wrong, if you see somebody eat all your attacks and keep coming without knowing the game-based stat limitations, you might assume they’re the one you want to get rid of first, either by being a danger individually or offering something important to the rest of the group that makes it critical that you survive (i.e.: if there was enough unavoidable damage that you needed survivability, a prenerf alacrity chronomancer might want to stack toughness to ensure survival). end hypersubjective That’s not the way it actually works, and we all know this, but it’s some game-world logic. Yeah, it’s kinda all a bunch of tosh when you get down to it, but that’s the way of seeing it through the lens of metagaming. Doesn’t help that depth is reduced because you don’t have to actively distract the bosses to protect the healer, so it seems a little unexciting.
If you had really smart enemies, they’d go straight for the most pivotal/squishiest support/buffer/healer nine times out of ten. My two cents.

KayCee.4653:

Ykfox.3825:

There’s a flaw in your logic. ANet never specifically wanted to get RID of healer’s and tanks, it just wanted every class to be able to do most anything.

Example they used way back when was an Elementalist swapping to Water Attunement to provide healing for the group.

The goal they set out to achieve wasn’t to get rid of tanks/healers per se, but to make it so X class isn’t REQUIRED to perform Y role in a group.

Explain Druid then?

Explain why there so many ways to make tanks of Scrappers, Reapers, Necros, Guards, Warriors, and others…

Explain why healing on classes like Reaper/Necro is almost non-existent (yeah, use blood magic, but its still not as effective as Ele’s staff water and Druid)… And thieves don’t even have heals that are even worth using for party use?

They actually made the trinity show up in Raids and all.

Any class can tank, in theory.

Also, many classes have/had group healing abilities at one time or another.

Thieves had their venom-heal, Guardians have shouts and symbols.

Engineer’s have healing turret, Elementalist Water Attunement.

Ranger has (and always had) Healing Spring and Water Spirit.

Necro’s have Blood magic for minor group heals. (I never said every class was good at healing)

Mesmer’s have their Well-heal now, and have had various minor group heals through traits.

Warrior’s… yeah. They never really had much in the way of healing

Revenant’s… yeah. Ventari, etc.

Every class is capable of healing to some extent. They’re not necessarily great or even good at it, but they can perform the role. And before raids that was plenty.

With raids, well. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few months from now we see a team do it with no healing at all.

Self heals don’t count in a team situation. that means that the person has to stop doing damage to self heal that’s a half a second or longer of no damage. That ruins the DPS burst rotation

Rev Ventari, Ele Water, and Druid staff set, means very little damage if any being doing to help the DPS race. Therefore a determent to the group when you’re in a DPS race.

I think anet is making a mistake with holy trinity & non traditional mmo composition.

they said you can fill any role right?
like ele can be healer & dps both (non traditional)

they still need holy trinity for raids . but as the bosses of the raids doesn’t do few things they should they still force all the players except the tank be zerker (for timer ofc).
but one thing that still doesn’t need a healer in raid is simple. the boss mechanics:

1.boss doesn’t attack more than 1 target maybe 2
2. no hard hitting aoe (that doesn’t 1 shot you).
3.no constant pressure on health on player that needs a healer to handle.
4.no conditions applying on player.
5.1 mistake= dead
6.bosses attack with huge cd. (mostly feels like boss spam 1 every 15 sec that takes tanker’s 80% health )
7.nobody else gets aggro at all
8.no few other mobs spawn that can pressure on players

most of the time either player have full health or dead by 1 shot. so who need healer?
dodge attack & spam 1 & you are done, just bring dps.
raids are just stand on this & stand on that & dps the kitten out of the boss.

no use of combo fields yet at least.
like water, static, poison, light, nothing except firefield cuz burn got buffed with stack

DGraves.3720:

Serious.6940:

Short answer, if the boss went for the party members with the weakest armor first then far fewer teams would ever get through.

You make good points but isn’t that actually the idea?

The concept of making “harder content” while keeping a traditional “easy mode” ritualistic behavior is self-defeating. The simplest solution to the problem is to just lower the boss HP and raise the potential of death by causing the boss to target characters in the order of least to greatest armor or at least pursue a character voraciously at random for a set amount of time with a barrage of truly deadly attacks.

I actually cannot figure out why they even have toughness in the game half the time.

I understand that and yes it is. It is against everything anet have said they wanted.

The problem is actually more complex though, armor is simply not a worthwhile tactic in GW2.

Many other games have reduced the problem by simply making investing in pure damage output less effective through diminishing returns. The mechanics need to be adjusted so that going in with no armor means you are going to get killed.

Before HoT going into WvW with a pure zerker build had a very high chance of you dying. Most WvW builds had some armor and vitality. Until the recent changes in PvP Celestial amulets were extremely common.

Then more armor would simply slow down fights, most PvE peeps simply want to get in there and come out with the loot in a short a time as possible.

The main reason for having Toughness be the primary aggro mechanic in raids is because otherwise, there is no way to keep a boss’s attention. Imagine if Vale Guardian just kept picking whoever had the highest DPS to attack. That would change frequently throughout the fight, which could potentially result in a split group that just juggles him between them.

Imagine if Sabetha did that. She doesn’t have the issues of being kited, but if she’s constantly shooting her fireballs at whoever has highest DPS…the entire raid group will quickly wipe. Granted, Sabetha has a very different set of aggro mechanics compared to Gorseval and Vale Guardian already, as she targets furthest away rather than any other factor.

Serious.6940:

I understand that and yes it is. It is against everything anet have said they wanted.

The problem is actually more complex though, armor is simply not a worthwhile tactic in GW2.

I see all you said as true however this was their chance to change that. Raids were new and untouched and unsoiled by previous gameplay. They even announced it being unlike other aspects. The team could have done anything … And they did nothing. I’ve been in this raid before. I was in this raid ten years ago. Same BS now with dodging.

I miss games where armor is a tactic. Sadly most of those are 1P games or PvP. Rarely is there a PvE game that really encourages defensive intelligent play which isn’t a roguelike. I mean even the prospect of death is not frightening; if you died and got kicked from the whole instance and could not re-enter that would change people’s tunes immediately and they’d be in Knight’s faster than you can remember that the “k” is silent and that English is senseless.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

The main reason for having Toughness be the primary aggro mechanic in raids is because otherwise, there is no way to keep a boss’s attention. Imagine if Vale Guardian just kept picking whoever had the highest DPS to attack. That would change frequently throughout the fight, which could potentially result in a split group that just juggles him between them.

Imagine if Sabetha did that. She doesn’t have the issues of being kited, but if she’s constantly shooting her fireballs at whoever has highest DPS…the entire raid group will quickly wipe. Granted, Sabetha has a very different set of aggro mechanics compared to Gorseval and Vale Guardian already, as she targets furthest away rather than any other factor.

Instead of highest anything why not base it on the lowest? Lowest armor is primary target. Party wipes because people weren’t thinking on some level of balance between offense and defense. See, if the tank went in a heavy armored class then the light armored would need more toughness but this also encourages the tank in his heavy armor not to take toughness. It keeps the players in check because the light armored need say greater than 2,200 to beat the 2,200 from heavy armor and the tank would take no toughness and only wear heavy armor so now not only do you have a standard for behavior but you a damage sink as well as a factor that encourages stronger and more sensible gameplay.

All you’d have to do from there is lower boss HP and raise boss damage to match out the expectations. You should be punished for running pure damage in a raid because the entire idea of teamwork isn’t “hey, he’s gonna get you, okay?” and then 9 people standing there being buttcheeks and casting who cares with one running too and fro.

Ykfox.3825:

There’s a flaw in your logic. ANet never specifically wanted to get RID of healer’s and tanks, it just wanted every class to be able to do most anything.

Example they used way back when was an Elementalist swapping to Water Attunement to provide healing for the group.

The goal they set out to achieve wasn’t to get rid of tanks/healers per se, but to make it so X class isn’t REQUIRED to perform Y role in a group.

No they said they want to get away from it. I don’t feellike doing this again and searching for all tthe prerelease qjuotes. But they legitly said that and even made fun of those roles. Which is why for a long time Healing Power was a useless stat.

Truth is that design concept sound good on paper but that’s as far as it goes. Just like the water combat idea. Sound cool but never really was a good practical idea. So the Anti-trinity concept was abandoned.

DGraves.3720:

Why is it that AI is forced to target enemies (players) with the highest armor? .

Not sure how you figured this out. I never understood the agro mechanics on this game.

I have had many cases in which spirits weapon like the bow or the shield (from guardian) can keep agro on a mob even thought these weapons don’t do damage. Don’t get me wrong, I like my spirit weapons to keep agro but I don’t understand how it works.

In most games you have agro skills to keep agro, or the one doing most damage gets agro, if the dps is not too high and tank agro skills are low, the mob attacks the healer.

I know the game is not supposed to have Trinity per say.

The other thing is that is hard to read who has agro on the boss, on when the boss is casting an AOE. In most games, the boss is doing some fancy movements (or lighting , something very visual) that tells you an AOE is coming in couple secs.

The other problem I have noticed on this game is like you don’t have ways in which vets teach the noobs naturally in the game.

A Game I used to play was Perfect World. Every ten levels, you had to do a special dungeon in which pretty much you need higher level players with you. That way you learn boss mechanics, your role, your skills, etc. The higher level players would help you for the exp points. Again it’s a way to meet other players.

I don’t agree with forcing people to squad but finding ways to motivate players to learn to play the game and socialize with others are good.

Most boss fights on this game is everybody ganking on the boss and fight mechanics (if any) are hard to pickup.

Because this is a video game where the encounter is supposed to be fun, not intuitive.

If you want a game with good Aggro/hate mechanics play final fantasy ARR. Their system makes a lot more sense and is much more complex. However the combat is also very repetitive and more strategy based where GW2 feels more skill based and more dynamic. I would love a game that could combine both but it might be too difficult to pull off or too challenging to actually play a game that could do both.

9 ppl equip 1 toughness trinket. Healer/tank in one with magi gear with no toughness. Or zerker daredevil evade and life steal tank. It barley changes anything to have the boss go for the lowest toughness person.

DGraves.3720:

Serious.6940:

I understand that and yes it is. It is against everything anet have said they wanted.

The problem is actually more complex though, armor is simply not a worthwhile tactic in GW2.

I see all you said as true however this was their chance to change that. Raids were new and untouched and unsoiled by previous gameplay. They even announced it being unlike other aspects. The team could have done anything … And they did nothing. I’ve been in this raid before. I was in this raid ten years ago. Same BS now with dodging.

I miss games where armor is a tactic. Sadly most of those are 1P games or PvP. Rarely is there a PvE game that really encourages defensive intelligent play which isn’t a roguelike. I mean even the prospect of death is not frightening; if you died and got kicked from the whole instance and could not re-enter that would change people’s tunes immediately and they’d be in Knight’s faster than you can remember that the “k” is silent and that English is senseless.

Easy way to answer, go read some of the posts in this thread.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Raid-Timers-lazy-way-to-increase-diffuclty/first#post5974473

You have a small vocal minority who want to preserve their way of max DPS no matter what.

I certainly agree that we should be going for play that requires tactics rather than just stack and mash, but that is the hole anet has dug for itself here with timers rather than tactics.

When GW2 was being created, the professions were seen as roles, with differences in profession meaning different play-styles and contributions to group success. This was less than successful, in part due to ANet’s dungeon encounter design and in part due to the inability of some players to get the idea that gear and role did not have to align. So, there was a lot of agitation for the more traditional MMO trinity of tank, healer and DPS.

So, with some adjustments to mob aggro, we now have Armor serving as the main determiner of aggro. It was always a factor, but proximity, damage and healing used to play more equal parts, as well as CC use (at least those were the things I noticed). This is now so because enough players wanted tanking in the game that Anet capitulated.

Yes, it is counter intuitive, as much so as mobs in older MMO’s going after the guy calling them names rather than the ones killing it, or the one healing the guy with the insults. It seems, though, that aggro mechanics are going to be a part of GW2 that is more for those who like other MMO’s, rather than for those who dislike them.

This makes no sense.

If the boss would attack the person with the lowest toughness or armor everybody on the team would take tank-ish equipment and the actual “tank” would just take 1 less toughness than the rest of the group.

So what’s the point of it? It would be “more realistic”?

You are trying to change something that makes totally sense from a game design viewpoint. Remember this is a GAME. It has mechanics and rules to make it FUN.

DGraves.3720:

Why is it that AI is forced to target enemies (players) with the highest armor? Isn’t that counterintuitive? We wouldn’t do it unless there was a gimmick reward to it but raids are always designed this way.

It confuses me. Raid bosses should target players with the lowest defense first… Because they have the lowest defense.

While I could answer this question, this video will do so in a much more amusing fashion. (Link)

DGraves.3720:

If you and I, as players, were against a group of enemies one of which is a veteran and the others regulars of the same type we would target the regulars first in most circumstances to kill them first.

Why is it that AI is forced to target enemies (players) with the highest armor? Isn’t that counterintuitive? We wouldn’t do it unless there was a gimmick reward to it but raids are always designed this way.

It confuses me. Raid bosses should target players with the lowest defense first… Because they have the lowest defense.

Because then the only classes that can run berzerker are rev and warrior given that a berk ele at 10k base HP and cloth level armor would be forced to just go PVT and do no damage whatsoever to not get torn apart.

So in essence you’d be encouraging the baseline durable classes like warrior and rev to build for DPS while the elementalists and thieves and rangers would be forced to spec into toughness/vitality, and then see that stat investment wasted because it shifts the boss’s attention to the zerker revenants and warriors by which point you are dead weight as a PVT/Knight ele/mesmer/thief.

So your “solution” would bring us back to “HEAVIES ONLY” and worsen the already pretty bad PvE class balance.

Nokaru.7831:

While I could answer this question, this video will do so in a much more amusing fashion. (Link)

That is a great vid,
thank you for sharing that.

DGraves.3720:

Worse yet let’s say we have a team of 4, 1 is a healer who is running around booty-nekkid chanting and keeping the one being targeted who weighs a metric ton due to his armor alive while the other two nekkid mages cast fireball over and over and over because the enemy for some reason, despite being aflame on his butt, can’t figure out just where all that pain is coming from.

It is literally catering to the idea that light-armor classes (which shouldn’t exactly exist in a game like this without “roles” but another discussion for 2017) should just build DPS no matter what because Gargantua the Mighty is going to leave you alone for Grobarth the kittened barbarian who keeps stumbling into walls and tripping over his own feet simply because he has heavier armor without taking a single point of toughness.

“Oh no, if the thing that is balls to the wall defended to the teeth dies I will have to endure on my own.” sounds like a wipe set-up; if your toughest bro dies and the bigger bad simply farts in your general direction you will die. Instantly. So not only is the game encouraging you to never take a defensive stance on stats or whatever but it puts the onus on just keeping one dude alive and having him run amok stumbling over himself drunk on Christmas ale.

10/10 would raid with such people

to the people that grumble about raids reintroducing a more rigid and traditional trinity, phiws and idiots all over the world have been up in arms about playing tank and healer in gw2 for years. You simply let them win. Or anet did, I suppose they bring good money or something

An interesting question. You have to be careful when you try to bring real life logic into the game like that, though. It is a question of how far you can actually go with “smart” AI until it simply stops being fun.

Designing raid bosses to do the following things wouldn’t be a problem:

- Target the healer first
- Target the squishies first ( if healers are too tanky like in this game )
- Move randomly or even move into the dangerous areas on purpose ( Wrong wall at Gorseval, or damaging area at VG )
- Avoid player AoE circles ( they wouldn’t have had to nerf burnzerkers then lol )
- Mix up skill rotations or even use the most dangerous attack only
- etc.

And my favorite:

- Have all of the bosses gank up on you if the players look too strong

Doesn’t that sound exactly how a “smart” AI would act?
On a serious note… All of these “realistic behaviours” sound really gimmicky. Something you’d want to torture yourself with for some achievement. The boss targeting the healer first would already make most raids in most games almost impossible.
Some games even have a mechanic that let’s a player take over bosses. Those games would need to be balanced quite different, though. Having a raid boss that acted even close to a smart human mind simply doesn’t work here.

Going with the highest toughness as your only source of threat was just a simple way to give the raid group the much needed control over VG and Gorseval ( doesn’t apply to Sebetha ). This person can run ahead and take some hits while others focus on green circles or taking down walls. It works surprisingly well.

Also, others have already pointed out ways to abuse the target “lowest toughness first” system. Have everyone use one more toughness then the tank. Use someone who is naturally ( not depending on toughness) tanky as your “tank”.

Games are still games at the end of the day.

I was kind’of hoping raids would be a group of coordinated players against hordes. Group mechanics would be like WvW. Bunkers charge in first. Support keeps people up. DPS melts and throws out utility.

Even if there were big bads, I kind of hoped they would have minions.

Instead we’re standing in circles, a tank is just someone with barely the highest toughness and maximized DPS, healers max dps too. I feel like I’m gimmicking the boss, not fighting.

DGraves.3720:

If you and I, as players, were against a group of enemies one of which is a veteran and the others regulars of the same type we would target the regulars first in most circumstances to kill them first.

Why is it that AI is forced to target enemies (players) with the highest armor? Isn’t that counterintuitive? We wouldn’t do it unless there was a gimmick reward to it but raids are always designed this way.

It confuses me. Raid bosses should target players with the lowest defense first… Because they have the lowest defense.

They did that as the “cheap” fix to tanking. Removal of amulets in spvp was another “cheap” fix.

So instead of designing good “roles” and really working on professions, expect more of these types of changes.