Guild Wars 2

If you are people who loves giant bosses, GW2 gives out one of the best giant bosses in MMORPG. They are beautiful, well thought designed, amazing fighting environments, harsh conditions and etc. However, if you have been fighting World Bosses for quite a while you will notice how boring the entire fight is and end up afk auto-ing majority of the fights. The reason for this boring and lame fight comes from static world boss AI pattern, and the “invulnerability”.

First, if you notice in GW2, how many Giant Bosses actually moves around? I’m not talking about bosses getting flying animation nor attacking animation. Do you ever see Teq, Journag, Shatterer, SB, Triple Wurm, and etc actually move around?
No, They do not move single inch from their spawning spot. (with few exceptions)
I mean, come on Anet, what kind of Dragons or Bosses will just sit in one spot and spam maybe 4~5 skills? Why is World Bosses I’m fighting is much closer to a Sandbag? This fight, no matter how hard the condition to kill the bosses are, is still boring and lame as there are zero action gets involved from the fact that players never needing to actively move around to survive.

Second most boring part is Invulnerable stage. I don’t know what is fun about Invulnerability and I don’t personally find it fun during this stage as for Teq, defending the Batteries doesn’t really excite me in anyway but makes it feel more like a chore.
Same for Journag, breaking down the glacial wall with charzooka and surviving Journag’s condition damage and Fear again feels like a chore than an action.

There are good examples of good Bosses like Modrem Teragriff from Silverwaste and Wyvern from HoT beta. They are obviously not Giant like these world bosses are but their patterns are very active and forces players to move around.
In GW2, Dodging is best defensive mechanic for sure but against Teragriff, your dodging doesn’t matter as lasting knock back hitbox will still hit you if you don’t get out of the way. Teragriff will punish people for not actively moving through his own active movement skills like hops and dash attacks, and also punishes players who likes to melee auto in one spot by adding short range AOE howling that can potentially kill in very short time if not backed out.
Wyvern from HoT, also has very great patterns. lasting fire AOE for players to carefully position, wyvern flying around breathing fire so players can actively move, and dashing toward the players to punish any range auto attackers who are sitting in one place.
They do still have flaws as AI is still not complex enough to create harsher fight and skill patterns are pathetically simple that there is 0 danger to who remembers the simple patterns.

This is my solution to the static boring world boss fights.
Make bosses move around like a real enemy would so people has to chase after. Make dragons fly around like a real dragons and spit fire to punish static players. Make dragon launch and dash toward the group to force players to be active and involved in fights. Make bosses have more diverse skills and have patterns somewhat unpredictable to increase its difficulty.
Through this solution, making a ACTIVE World Bosses, invulnerability period is no longer needed to lengthen the fight as complex pattern will keep players more mindful of DPS-ing all the time, moving bosses will make players to move around along to cut the DPS period, punishing static players will also cut the DPS itself in huge margin.

I’m not asking to make GW2 like monster hunter, dark soul, phantasy star online or god eaters. But why can’t World Boss be more active and action-full fights just like in GW2 PVP? Positioning, Moving, Dodging and Blocking should be used at all time in World Boss too. I don’t want to fight an enemy who would sit still in one spot for the whole fight. I don’t want to sit in one spot to kill an enemy. I want to actively move along with actively moving enemy like a real fight. GW2 WVW and PVP is great for that reason. Moving enemy and moving myself, trading skills and dodging each other’s skill. A full Active Action!!!

I am sure Anet recognize this problem and hope they fix all the world bosses in future patches. HoT Wyvern was great, why can’t world bosses be like it too?

Tequatl is fun, I think because there’s actually a purpose for having a ton of people there.

L2 memories of antharas and valakas bosses, that was so epic and challenging

Misguided.5139:

Tequatl is fun, I think because there’s actually a purpose for having a ton of people there.

I’m glad you find it fun but really though, killing non-moving object bores me no matter how people are involved in the fight. Wouldn’t it be much better if Tequati actively flies around and breath poison while we have to chase and bring it down to the ground to fight? Tequati simply disappears during defending battery stage rather than trying to help his risen army…

Vissarion.6509:

L2 memories of antharas and valakas bosses, that was so epic and challenging

I know right?…. why can’t our dragons be like them? They actually walk around the map…

Misguided.5139:

Tequatl is fun, I think because there’s actually a purpose for having a ton of people there.

Jumping trampolines to fight a dragon isnt quite the definition of fun for some lol, i actually when they released that i tough was a very childish event…

Possible technical issues with a World Boss moving around too much aside… every time they make challenging boss fights in this game, the forums erupt with enough QQ to fill the Mississippi river…
Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see more challenging world bosses on the level of Tequatl or, even better, the Marionette fight from Living Story 1. Hell, I absolutely loved the zone-wide invasions that could happen when Scarlet’s combined forces attacked in LS1.
But QQers cried, and Anet listened… I’m surprised that Triple Trouble even still exists to be completely honest…

ShinjoNaomi.1896:

But QQers cried, and Anet listened… I’m surprised that Triple Trouble even still exists to be completely honest…

Ironically, you have a subsection of QQers to thank for having fights like teq and TT around.

Epic.5401:

Vissarion.6509:

L2 memories of antharas and valakas bosses, that was so epic and challenging

I know right?…. why can’t our dragons be like them? They actually walk around the map…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6o9QtdUuxs

Btw this video is mine xD

that fight lasted 3 and a half hours , 3 am to 6:30 am :P

Because world bosses are open world and anet wants everyone to be able to participate no matter if you afk, noob, pro, etc

Epic.5401:

……
I am sure Anet recognize this problem and hope they fix all the world bosses in future patches. HoT Wyvern was great, why can’t world bosses be like it too?

Fun world bosses? Do we pay ANET enough for them to put resources into changing the World Bosses?

At launch all of the world bosses were fun. Heck, Clawr of Jormag was my favorite back then. We couldn’t figure out when it spawned, people had to work at avoiding fear, and so on. Now, of course, it’s a snorefest.

A lot of the Living Story bosses have been fun, too.

What happens in any game when the content doesn’t change substantially for 3 years is people figure out how to complete it more and more efficiently, to the point where even Tequatl rarely fails now.

The issue isn’t whether ANet can or cannot make fun world bosses. The question is how can they keep them fun, after the players evolve tactics?

world bosses were more fun before megaserver garbage made every event a 1 spam zergfest

SirDrygan.1823:

Epic.5401:

……
I am sure Anet recognize this problem and hope they fix all the world bosses in future patches. HoT Wyvern was great, why can’t world bosses be like it too?

Fun world bosses? Do we pay ANET enough for them to put resources into changing the World Bosses?

Depends on how long you’ve been playing. I’ve only been playing since January this year, but I think I’ve paid enough to buy a few textbooks for some Anet employees.

There are probably a few people out there who have paid enough since release to pay for half-time enrollment at a small community college. Maybe even a GOOD community college.

So…maybe for small improvements but not anything HUGE.

SirDrygan.1823:

Epic.5401:

……
I am sure Anet recognize this problem and hope they fix all the world bosses in future patches. HoT Wyvern was great, why can’t world bosses be like it too?

Fun world bosses? Do we pay ANET enough for them to put resources into changing the World Bosses?

we definitely pay enough to ANET to do anything.
That is why GW2 still exist.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

At launch all of the world bosses were fun. Heck, Clawr of Jormag was my favorite back then. We couldn’t figure out when it spawned, people had to work at avoiding fear, and so on. Now, of course, it’s a snorefest.

A lot of the Living Story bosses have been fun, too.

What happens in any game when the content doesn’t change substantially for 3 years is people figure out how to complete it more and more efficiently, to the point where even Tequatl rarely fails now.

The issue isn’t whether ANet can or cannot make fun world bosses. The question is how can they keep them fun, after the players evolve tactics?

And as mentioned in my post, keep it random, punish the static players, improve the AI, make it feel different everytime you fight the same boss. Monster Hunter is a game that you hunt same monsters hundreds and thousands times yet every hunt feels very different due to the random patterns and invasion of other random species during hunt. GW2 can do the same. Add random patterns and random events that people can’t predict. which they are force to change in style of fight or tactic of fight dynamically.

What a lot of people don’t understand about the world bosses is that they weren’t designed to have the massive amount of players that currently fight them. Pre mega-server the number of players you had to fight a world boss were the number who happened to be around when the event randomly started on your server alone. This meant that, when you fought the shadow behemoth, there were at most 10 people there. Heck, I remember soloing the Inquest Golem Mark II. This was before daily chests and dragonite ore, too, so you didn’t have trains of people hopping from boss to boss.

When you have only a handful of people, some of these bosses take on a whole new level of hard. Two that stand out for me are the Risen Priestess of Lyssa and the Risen High Wizard. The Risen Priestess shoots out bouncing chaos bolts, and in a party of sub 5 people this adds an enormous amount of pressure that you don’t see in zergs. The High Wizard is relentless in his attacks, and without other players to distract him he’ll make mincemeat out of most players.

World bosses can never be as hard as instance type combat. People will simply not do them if that happened and then the content would eventually die as the amount of participants fell below what would be necessary for it to succeed.

Imagine if Tequatal actually moved around the beach (instead of kitten ing out in one spot for 30min) and you had to follow after, actively avoiding getting stepped on and avoiding it’s tail. Now imagine if it was a random path. The thing would sort of just spaz out and you won’t be able to memorize “safe spots” to stand in.

People would die constantly and do the typical “I’m not going to release and run back for ‘reasons’” causing dps to plummet. This would effectively make the event uncompleteable for most attempts causing people to eventually not even try in the minimal numbers needed to meet dps requirements.

You need to acknowledge that the average player wants to put in the absolute minimal amount of work for their rewards. I see this in every game and I’m not sure if it’s more noticeable here because of the player makeup or because Anet enables it but it’s certainly an issue in GW2 as well.

TLDR; Save the stuff that requires active thought for instances. Best case scenario for open world would be a never ending kittenfest on the forums until it got eased down. Worst case; people simply avoid the content all together as people did back before world bosses gave the loot they do.

just from a realism perspective – the bosses moving around wouldn’t make much sense. if you could breathe fire (or poison, whatever) would you go chasing ants around? no, you’d stay in one spot and just breath at them.

Narrrz.7532:

just from a realism perspective – the bosses moving around wouldn’t make much sense. if you could breathe fire (or poison, whatever) would you go chasing ants around? no, you’d stay in one spot and just breath at them.

Which would be valid if even one of the three dragon bosses had even remotely lethal breath attacks.

It makes little to no sense for Tequatal to just sit there, getting shot over and over, when it can very easily crush the mega laser while it’s recharging as it does at the end of a event failure. The same goes for the turrets shooting spears at it.

The first stage of The Claw makes some sense since it’s shown that the cannons do cause a significant amount of harm to the dragon. They even used to blow it’s wings off at the last salvo.

The second phase, however, suffers the same issue as Tequatal in that why stand in one spot eating bombs over and over?

The Svanir shaman and the Fire Elemental are especially effected by megaservers. The Shaman used to roam the area and had numerous AOE fields and tornadoes. The Fire Ele was really hard with invulnerable mobs, smaller elementals that threw fire at you and ranged fire attacks from the boss. That one required a lot of dodging and there would be numerous deaths and people running back from the waypoint.

Then the megaservers happened. Those bosses simply don’t scale to the number of people there and are not made to respond appropriately.

Blix.8021:

world bosses were more fun before megaserver garbage made every event a 1 spam zergfest

Server-specific trains run by local commanders weren’t functionally any different (and a lot less forgiving, since back then it was mostly “run with the train or miss out” on most bosses).

The only fun world boss would be tequatl because it is perfectly balanced between being an open world boss still doable with random people who know what to do and not being a “press 1 to win” zergfest.

Triple Trouble is just too much trouble for too little rewards. I guess it’s aptly named at least.

There were a couple boss fights that are amazing:

Marionette was fun
Scarlet was kind of a fun fight
Vine Wrath was fun when it first came out

The new Wyvern fight looks like it could be awesome

although he is still pretty static, at least he attacks you directly as he’s flying

serenke.4806:

The only fun world boss would be tequatl because it is perfectly balanced between being an open world boss still doable with random people who know what to do and not being a “press 1 to win” zergfest.

Triple Trouble is just too much trouble for too little rewards. I guess it’s aptly named at least.

I’ve been doing it regularly, and it isn’t as hard as people think. You need to have some semblance of coordination, but it can be pugged. You just need a few things:

#1: At least 3 commanders. These guys can get a head count, so they can split up the squad into 3 equal parts.

#2: Reflectors. These are guards/mesmers/eles/engis who will periodically reflect the eggs spat out by the worm, preemtively killing 1/3rd of the adds). You need about 2 per worm, but it is possible to function with just one.

#3: A condi team. One full team per worm, 3 total. These guys will condi and CC the husks, dealing with the second third of adds. This is arguably the hardest part, since the condi’s team will be engaging the most dangerous enemies quite frequently.

And that is about it. Just say what the specific mechanic is at each worm, be sure to have 5 people do each escort event (15 total, they can be anyone), and above all know how to dodge the spit. With the larvae and husks taken care of, the ambient damage isn’t super high, so it isn’t hard to run around in glass cannon gear.

The only thing that prevents the event from being completely puggable is the whole “3 even teams” part. Nubbies don’t have the sense to split into 3 even teams without guidance.