Guild Wars 2

Here a thought to adress the huge number of players participating in the meta-event boss battles. Make them more punishing while giving better rewards for the people who make it to the end.

You can’t come back from a defeat. Once you’re dead you have to leave the map or stay on the ground (defeated) until the battle is over. No ressing allowed due to the condition “strain”.

Imagine you start with a huge amount of players and the boss does this one well telegraphed but deadly attack. 20 players go down at once, the boss scales down to the number of players still alive but there will be another of that attack.

(The dead player will get a smaller reward chest sent to him once the battle is over, even if he is in another map.)

Be careful though. If you make a world boss TOO punishing, you’ll end up with players avoiding it altogether because it’s “not worth it”. One good example of this is the Legendary Sandstorm Giant in Dry Top; he’s practically never killed anymore except in the rare T6 map (and even then, you often have to cajole the zerg into making the attempt since most T6 maps are all about serious geode farming during sandstorms).

If you want to avoid world bosses just being zerg trains, then perhaps what is needed is to split up player density. I’d do this by going the opposite direction and making the world bosses spawn more frequently. The low level ones like Shaman or the Shadow Behemoth spawn once every 30 mins (staggered across the hour, so maybe SB and FE spawn at 15 and 45 mins past the hour, while Jungle Wurm and Svanir Shaman spawn on the hour and half past.) Medium-level world bosses spawn once every hour, at various 15 min intervals. The Dragon Champions and Karka Queen spawn once every two hours. Tequatl and Triple Wurm continue to use their same schedule, owing to their increased need for preparation and coordination.

With world bosses now spawning much more frequently, but the daily rewards being capped as they were, you should now see less players at each spawn window.

The aforementioned giant is defenseless against the zerg like almost all others, but is a huge dps sponge, an incredible time sink in comparison to the poor fire elemental, which dies in like 15 seconds tops.

Just make more rewards around the level of the boss.
All these 80’s taking on a level 10 at the Frozen Maw is nuts.

What, exactly, is this suggestion in aid of?

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Imagine you start with a huge amount of players and the boss does this one well telegraphed but deadly attack. 20 players go down at once, the boss scales down to the number of players still alive but there will be another of that attack.

Imagine that there’s a little bit of lag, and you die because of it. Now you have to leave the map, but the map might already be so full, that you have no guarantee that you’ll make it back inside.

I don’t think this is a good suggestion.

I think the lack of trinity in this game is what holds it back at the same time.

Anet can’t make the bosses too hard because of the lack of tanks to hold threat and take aggro. Along with that the lack of healers to obviously heal and/or mitigate said damage.

No player has any defined roles which hurts this game imo and makes just about everything a zergfest.

However Anet has achieved what they set out to do. Made an MMO that anyone can play expertly with little effort and practice. It’s basically a MMO for people who need training wheels with very little to offer hardcore gamers imo. That is their target audience, their company and their prerogative.

This is fun game, but lets face it GW2 doesn’t have or ever will have the staying power of WoW. I highly doubt they’ll have the player base they have now when GW2 is 10 years old. WoW does a lot of things right, they create content for every facet of their audience not just one or two.

Azathor.2845:

I think the lack of trinity in this game is what holds it back at the same time.

Not true at all. The Trinity in GW2, that is Damage/Control/Support works very very well, Just take a look at any form of PVP, tPVP or WvW (WvW with actual opponents not NPCs)

There is tons of control going around (knockdown, daze, stun, immobilize, fear), lots of support (boons, healing) and of course lots of dps of all forms (both direct damage and condition damage), there is a great amount of different builds utilized, a good amount of different stat combinations, not everyone is zerker, in fact most people aren’t zerker.

Also, in PVP players have clearly defined roles, the Hammer Warrior is there to Control, the Staff Ele is there to DPS, the Staff Guardian is there to Support.

So the problem in the game is not in profession balance, skills, stat combinations, trinity, condition damage, support or control being useless. It’s PVE design that’s faulty, plain and simple. It’s important to note that doing what lots of people are suggesting all over these forums would harm PVP, for example making Condition damage scale better, or adding more mitigation for Toughness or buffing Healing Power.

The real question is how to implement PVP-like features in PVE, what “forces” players to use all different roles and builds in PVP but in PVE it’s only about damage? Why is Support, Condition Damage and Control so great in PVP but nearly useless in PVE? Answering those questions and finding appropriate “fixes” is what can really change PVE in this game.

If you do that, you need to scale the rewards to damage done too. Else everyone will just try to stay alive, while not necessary do damage.

Azathor.2845:

I think the lack of trinity in this game is what holds it back at the same time.

Anet can’t make the bosses too hard because of the lack of tanks to hold threat and take aggro. Along with that the lack of healers to obviously heal and/or mitigate said damage.

No player has any defined roles which hurts this game imo and makes just about everything a zergfest.

The only thing the trinity does it make it easier for the majority – the DPS – by making the encounter predictable. The boss is always going to be primarily focused on that one player while everyone else just runs through their rotation, tunnel visions and dies in a fire. Remove that one player however and now the person with the most threat is the tank. This is when you use control to “tank” the boss, either through evasion or kiting. Any trinity encounter could be made into a non-trinity encounter, but everyone basically has to play every role dynamically.

What’s holding ArenaNet back from making this type of content is the majority. ArenaNet could however solve this problem by designing encounters where the majority could be carried by the minority by feature challenging mechanics that only need a certain amount of people to successfully complete it. Take Tequatl for example and imagine if a player could be swallowed to fight a Liadri-like encounter. When a certain amount of people succeeded, Tequatl would enter the weakened state, allowing for an alternative method. ArenaNet did somewhat try this style during the Marionette by allowing a certain amount of failure.

Azathor.2845:

However Anet has achieved what they set out to do. Made an MMO that anyone can play expertly with little effort and practice.

What ArenaNet made was a casual-friendly game that is very forgiving to a point where you basically can’t fail. The people that put in little effort either hide in the zerg and never learn to play or die continuously. GW2’s average open world content is actually fairly challenging compared to what the average MMO offers.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Here a thought to adress the huge number of players participating in the meta-event boss battles. Make them more punishing while giving better rewards for the people who make it to the end.

You know that the main problem are just the mega-servers ? Before that there were
seldom so big numbers at those events .. i often did even Claw of Jormag and Shatterer
with 8-10 people. Frozen Maw sometimes with 3-4.

And btw.: i hated the fail timer when it was invented, because that often led to the
fact that people didn’t even try Claw anymore late at night because it was nearly
clear to fail .. why before it was done even if it took maybe longer.

Healix.5819:

Azathor.2845:

I think the lack of trinity in this game is what holds it back at the same time.

Anet can’t make the bosses too hard because of the lack of tanks to hold threat and take aggro. Along with that the lack of healers to obviously heal and/or mitigate said damage.

No player has any defined roles which hurts this game imo and makes just about everything a zergfest.

The only thing the trinity does it make it easier for the majority – the DPS – by making the encounter predictable. The boss is always going to be primarily focused on that one player while everyone else just runs through their rotation, tunnel visions and dies in a fire. Remove that one player however and now the person with the most threat is the tank. This is when you use control to “tank” the boss, either through evasion or kiting. Any trinity encounter could be made into a non-trinity encounter, but everyone basically has to play every role dynamically.

What’s holding ArenaNet back from making this type of content is the majority. ArenaNet could however solve this problem by designing encounters where the majority could be carried by the minority by feature challenging mechanics that only need a certain amount of people to successfully complete it. Take Tequatl for example and imagine if a player could be swallowed to fight a Liadri-like encounter. When a certain amount of people succeeded, Tequatl would enter the weakened state, allowing for an alternative method. ArenaNet did somewhat try this style during the Marionette by allowing a certain amount of failure.

Azathor.2845:

However Anet has achieved what they set out to do. Made an MMO that anyone can play expertly with little effort and practice.

What ArenaNet made was a casual-friendly game that is very forgiving to a point where you basically can’t fail. The people that put in little effort either hide in the zerg and never learn to play or die continuously. GW2’s average open world content is actually fairly challenging compared to what the average MMO offers.

The game is way to much friendly in some aspects, its a game for mmo babies mostly, just look at th edesign of some classes pretending player is good while build makes almost a press buton to win, i dont see what kind of design Anet might adopt to make bosses harder, besides one hit KO.

Just get rid of their timers and problem solved. This will give players time to coordinate and try again. And also, get rid of the synchronized timers too. The bosses needs to be more random with an in-game alert system that announces it everywhere in the open zones.

There are some simple improvements that need putting in place before introducing punishing world bosses
- Improve graphics performance for massive events with many spell animations
- Reduce graphics flare over bosses so that all animations can be seen by all players
- Force players at long range to dodge and move

Tl;dr: You want to have challenging rather than punishing bosses. Of any sort.

maddoctor.2738:

The real question is how to implement PVP-like features in PVE, what “forces” players to use all different roles and builds in PVP but in PVE it’s only about damage? Why is Support, Condition Damage and Control so great in PVP but nearly useless in PVE? Answering those questions and finding appropriate “fixes” is what can really change PVE in this game.

Condition damage and control don’t work in PVE because both are balanced for use against other players. Virtually all the control skills have ridiculously short effects on gigantic cooldowns, for example.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Here a thought to adress the huge number of players participating in the meta-event boss battles. Make them more punishing while giving better rewards for the people who make it to the end.

I don’t know about you, but i don’t play in order to be punished. Even if i get a reward for it later, it’s still not fun.

Players: Prepare to be de-Clawed!
Punishing Boss: Oh, stop. Jormaging me laugh.

well here’s an example of something I’d like to see:

The Shatterer 2.0

• he still spawns the crystals, which heal him and should be destroyed to get to the next phase
• once the crystals are spawned he charges a huge cone-attack – very visible telegraph
• players that don’t hide behind a crystal (line of sight) will get downed, they still can be ressed if players react fast (Warrior banners etc.) Every downed player gets a bleeding stack though, so they can’t ress by themselves.
• the attack would feel trivial if you just could respawn at the nearest waypoint and graveyard-rush the boss until he’s death, so players have to leave the map or stay dead. (they still get a smaller reward chest for their participation).
• The players who know the drill are behind the crystals at their new safe spot. The old safe spot at Shatts right leg isn’t safe anymore.
• If the crystal gets destroyed too fast, players get hit by the cone attack, so attacks on the crystal need to be paused until the cone-attack is over.
• If the crystal doesn’t get destroyed, Shatt heals back up.

The most important part: Scaling

The battle doesn’t get more difficult when some players die, because the Shatterer scales to the number of participating players. If too many die though, the battle does get more difficult – since you need a minimum number of players (say: 30) to have a chance.

AND: players need an incentive to do this difficult encounter – so exclusive Shatterer-skins are a must imho. Nobody wants to do a difficult encounter, when you have an easy encounter with the same rewards somewhere else.

So you want another Teq, with the added “feature” of not being able to rez in the zone… Your description sounds like about as much fun as pulling out one’s toenails.

No. If ANet wants to add another raid-sized encounter in the open world, it should be done by adding a new boss, not replacing an existing one.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Nobody wants to do a difficult encounter, when you have an easy encounter with the same rewards somewhere else.

If that is indeed true, it should tell you something about what people really want.

I’d like the big open world bosses to capture the spirit of true raid bosses. In a raid/dungeon you can’t just graveyard-rush back into the battle because this would massively trivialize the content.

What I was asking you guys are ways to avoid this. I just added my suggestion, which I’m sure, would make the encounter more tense and exciting.

If you can’t remember some simple rules (like standing behind a pillar when the boss charges a huge attack) then yes: this one’s toenails should be pulled. The guys who survive will have a blast though.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

What I was asking you guys are ways to avoid this. I just added my suggestion, which I’m sure, would make the encounter more tense and exciting.

And it seems quite a number of people disagree.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

If you can’t remember some simple rules (like standing behind a pillar when the boss charges a huge attack) then yes: this one’s toenails should be pulled. The guys who survive will have a blast though.

During the marionette event, the people that did everything right did not have a blast while watching those on nearby platforms fail due to not remembering simple rules. And Marionette did have a “comeback from defeat” mechanics, which is why it’s still hundred times better encounter than the wurm, for example.

“No errors allowed” approach is not really fun in the longer run. At least not for me. And having it be tied to better rewards would only make me more angry – regardless of whether i would be able to consistently do it or not.

Anet needs to add some world bosses that aren’t on rails, meaning varied and truly random and not limited to particular zones.

That would make things more interesting because players would have to work together and spread the word versus just piling up into a zone waiting for a shoe to fall at the scheduled time.

Yes, by all means, keep the Bosses currently on rails, but how about we get some real dynamic and random world bosses as well?

And don’t screw it up by tying unlocks to these random events.

They should simply add lose conditions to world bosses, that are tied to an objective, not to a timer or one attack. If all the players collectively fail that one objective, the fight is lost. Because timers turn everything into a bloody DPS fest.

If you want to make world bosses more interesting to fight then you have to do three things:

1. Give them more attacks, perhaps in phases based on time or health or both.
2. Either remove the timer or, more preferrably for the masses, have the tiers of bosses overlap so we don’t have a single world boss going off one at a time.
3. Redistribute rewards so that it’s more rewarding to not zerg.

What I would proper for a timer set up is to divide the world bosses into five tiers:
Tier 1: Starter bosses (10 or 15). Frozen Maw, Shadow Behemoth, Fire Elemental, Great Jungle Wurm, and a revamped Siegemaster Lormar
Tier 2: Mid-level bosses (35-60). Taidha Covington, Modniir Ulgoth, Dredge Commissar, Foulbear Kraal Chieftain, Branded Devourer Queen, and Nonmoa Lake Krait Witch
Tier 3: High-level bosses (60-80). Golem Mk II, Megadestroyer, Karka Queen, and Iron Marches Fire Shaman.
Tier 4: Mega bosses (50-80). The Shatterer, Triple Jungle Wurm, Tequatl the Sunless, and Claw of Jormag.
Tier 5: Guild Mission bosses. Tier 4 bosses + Twisted Marionette, and new specially tailored world boss-like enemies.

Each tier, sans Tier 5, would have their own timer. Set up as:
Tier 1: Every 15 minutes.
Tier 2: Every 30 minutes.
Tier 3: Every hour.
Tier 4: Every 3 hours.

Thus Tier 1 would begin repeating every 1:15; Tier 2 would begin repeating every 3 hours; Tier 3 would begin repeating every 4 hours; and Tier 4 would begin repeating every 12 hours.

The main point is to have the overlapping bosses, where currently we don’t have such (current Tier 1 bosses at the :15 and :45 marks, current Tier 2 bosses at the :00 and0 marks – only time there’s an overlap is when a current Tier 3 spawns). There’d be up to three bosses spawning at the same time, spreading people out amongst them.

Changing the reward is most important, as in the end that’s what most of the zergers do the bosses for – not the entertainment of the fight, but the guaranteed drops and the chances at exotics. What I would do is thus:

Tier 1: 1 guarantee rare (low chance to be exotic if level 60+)
Tier 2: 1 guarantee rare (medium chance to be exotic if level 60+) and 1 exotic champion bag
Tier 3: 1 guarantee rare (medium chance to be exotic if level 60+; low chance to be ascended if level 80), and 2 exotic champion bags
Tier 4: 1 guarantee rare (medium chance to be exotic if level 60+; low chance to be ascended if level 80) and 1 guarantee exotic (low chance to be ascended if level 80) and 3 exotic champion bags
Tier 5: 2 guarantee rares (medium chance to be exotic if level 60+; low chance to be ascended if level 80) and 1 exotic champion bag and guild commendations

Thus limiting the rewards based on tiers, making the higher tiers more desirable as they offer better rewards, but still having some decent reward to the lower tiers so that they’re still worth doing, will keep them off of the lower tiers, allowing a better experience with those. Thus the higher tiers need to be redesigned to better fit having to fight a zerg – where the real work comes in.

-continued in next post-

Though in my opinion each world boss needs a look at, with this set up at least the low level ones would theoretically have fewer players going to them – partially due to their commonality (ever 15 minutes instead of every 30 minutes – same one every 1:15 instead of every 2 hours), and partially due to lesser rewards. Each tier should be capable of being done with enjoyable difficulty at a range of players, based on the boss’s level and tier.

Tier 1: Minimally doable by 5 players of equal level in masterwork gear; maximally by 30 level 80s in ascended gear
Tier 2: Minimally doable by 10 players of equal level in rare gear; maximally by 50 level 80s in ascended gear
Tier 3: Minimally doable by 15 players of equal level in exotic gear; maximally by a full map of level 80s in ascended gear
Tier 4: minimally doable by 30 players of equal level in exotic gear; maximally by a full map of level 80s in ascended gear
Tier 5: Same as Tier 3.

In terms of reworking, the bosses need to establish five rules in their skills:

1. No safe spots. You should not be able to stand ANYWHERE in these battles and be unable to be hit by the boss or its minions.
2. No weak and slow attacks. Unless you’re specced out for full damage absorption, you should not be able to stand in the center of an attack and not take at least 20% damage. And if it’s less than 33%, then there needs to be an equally or more powerful follow-up – be it DoT, or a new attack landing in the same place.
3. Changing things up. Phases are a great and simple way to enjoy different kinds of fights in the same fight. Claw of Jormag, Triple Wurm, Marionette, and Prime Hologram are all simple examples, where how you fight changes but it always changes the same way. A better way to utilize the phase technology would be the Molten Facility Duo, where the second phase has multiple forms depending on what happened during the first phase. The fail point with the Molten Duo is that it’s too easy to manipulate by the players, and one outcome is much simpler than the other outcome. The best way to do it is to have a RNG outcome – when hitting a certain point (health, timer, etc.) one of many outcomes is chosen for the next phase’s fighting style, thus each time is not only unpredictable but different order too (note: should not be used for Tier 4&5 fights due to the amount of planning they’d need).
4. Fear is not the only CC. A lot of the “more challenging” bosses love the use of fear spam – Claw and Tequatl especially. This is a sad way to force crowd control, as there are better methods. The vine prisons in the one Iron Marches event is a neat method – players must pay attention or else they’re imprisoned. And CC spam just to use up those stun breaks to make another CC unbreakable is just a band-aid usage which in the end only annoys players, reducing the fun.
5. Finally: Unpredictability amongst predictability. I covered this lightly in the phase part, but being unable to predict the entire fight (to a more or less accurate degree) at the beginning makes it far more itneresting. That first time you face a boss in a new game will always be more pulse racing than the tenth time – it’s only natural that after a while you begin to get how things are done. Thus we need to introduce a level of unpredictability into the fights. Have some skills require specific conditions (be it very specific or just generally specific) to be met before being used, or skills that can chain, but aren’t always – for example, if players group up not too far from his own self in 20+ numbers, he’ll stand up and slam his fist down in that spot, doing an automatic 85% damage with crystal imprisonment. Give bosses their own unique combo effects, where if two specific skills follow each other and land in the same spot, a devastating result occurs – for example, let’s give the Claw of Jormag a player-bunch targetting Blizzard skill – if the skill happens to strike one of the crystals it spawns, the crystals and icebrood within the AoE instantly die, however the Blizzard expands to engulf the entire area and instead of just damage+chill over time, it now damages, bleeds, chills, cripples, and blinds over time.

I have ideas on how to improve each world boss, but I think I rambled enough for now.

Astralporing.1957:

“No errors allowed” approach is not really fun in the longer run. At least not for me.

“No errors allowed” is never fun. It’s frustrating. It makes people give up.

I don’t think a single person I know enjoys a “no errors allowed” gameplay unless it’s fully optional and super-quick to re-enter from scratch. Otherwise it isn’t “challenge” it’s “punishment.” And punishment is not fun.

Difficulty tends to come into two general forms: Challenge and Punishment

Challenge is when players are given visible hurdles to overcome, with visible means to do so. It may take trial and error, but it’s fully possible to overcome them on the first go without specific care and focus for them.

Punishment is when there are invisible hurdles, or visible hurdles with invisible means to overcome them, or incredibly high hurdles with means only to clear lesser hurdles. Typically, the only way to overcome them is to know they’re there and plan specifically for those hurdles, not just enjoying the game as you go.

The OP? It falls under that last one: “incredibly high hurdles”.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

“No errors allowed” is never fun. It’s frustrating. It makes people give up.

It seems you’ve never experienced raid-bosses in games like WoW, correct me if I’m wrong. A battle like Heigan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmArX8GvHLo) was frustrating at first but got really really awesome the more you were accustomed with the mechanic of the battle. This is just a tiny example, raid games build their excitement on such mechanics.

and it IS possible in open world encounters. We experienced something similar with the Marionette encounter. Sure, people were angry when others failed while they were successful, but the feeling of a successful run was something no single Shatterer-encounter can come up to…

So let’s agree to disagree here, but realize that there ARE players who find “no errors allowed” fun. I also can’t see the problem since it’s a matter of balancing how visible those attacks are. Good telegraphs which give you enough time to react isn’t that hard to realize. It certainly would filter out the guys who watch tv next to their pc with the autoattacking charakter.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

We experienced something similar with the Marionette encounter. Sure, people were angry when others failed while they were successful, but the feeling of a successful run was something no single Shatterer-encounter can come up to…

Yes, I’ll agree that beating the Marionette was quite satisfying, but I don’t think it was worth the vitriol and attacks that occurred after a failure. Invariably, people would start hurling accusations to “GTFO non-80’s!” or “Stupid Rangers/Necros failed it for us!”

Yet another great way to make the game less enjoyable.

Majic.4801:

Yet another great way to make the game less enjoyable.

It’s sad to see people who think it’s enjoyable to kill a boss without any effort semi-afk just to get a few daily reward chests. Leaving bosses like the Shatterer with the graveyard rushing available (something which has been fixed for dungeons for a while now) would be a lot of wasted potential imho.

It’s sad to see people who think it’s an accomplishment to beat ‘opponents’ that exist only to be beaten.

KarlaGrey.5903:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea6UuRTjkKs

Tl;dr: You want to have challenging rather than punishing bosses. Of any sort.

^Yes, yes, and yes.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Here a thought to adress the huge number of players participating in the meta-event boss battles. Make them more punishing while giving better rewards for the people who make it to the end.

You can’t come back from a defeat. Once you’re dead you have to leave the map or stay on the ground (defeated) until the battle is over. No ressing allowed due to the condition “strain”.

Imagine you start with a huge amount of players and the boss does this one well telegraphed but deadly attack. 20 players go down at once, the boss scales down to the number of players still alive but there will be another of that attack.

(The dead player will get a smaller reward chest sent to him once the battle is over, even if he is in another map.)

It sounds like what you’re pining for is an honest-to-god raid. Which doesn’t fit into the framework for “open world” in quite the way you’re imagining.

Restricting peoples’ ability to “zerg” a boss is something that works in an instance because you can put up walls and such (e.g. if you die and come back, you won’t be able to go past X wall to attack boss until after the fight is resolved). A buff that constrains people won’t work because then it counts people who aren’t involved in the fight as well (and are tragically on the map at the wrong time). I suppose you could do it by proximity, but it really comes down to being extra work for something unnecessary.

GW2 is already designed around ease of rezzing, especially if someone is not fully dead. Restricting that for no other reason than “arbitrary difficulty” goes against the fundamentals of the game’s design. The existing design encourages people to lend each other a hand. The system you’re proposing would encourage an “every man for himself” attitude; why help my fellow player when I can focus 100% on my own survival and get more rewards?

Raids are cool and all, but let’s accept that open world is a somewhat different beast, with its own structure for how to impose difficulty. The wurm-head-timer design, for example, does a good job of requiring coordination, without stepping on the toes of how the game works.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

We experienced something similar with the Marionette encounter. Sure, people were angry when others failed while they were successful, but the feeling of a successful run was something no single Shatterer-encounter can come up to…

So let’s agree to disagree here, but realize that there ARE players who find “no errors allowed” fun.

Marionette wasn’t “no errors allowed”. It had builtin failure recovery mechanics. And while i agree, that it was fun if it succeeded, it usually turned very, very ugly and definitely not fun if it failed. Even if it failed due to no fault of your own.

Personally i think, that it’d have done better with more (not less), of failure recovery options. The most popular suggestion at the time was for the people on the succesful platforms to be able to help still fighting ones somehow – not being able to do anything, except watching a trainwreck in progress was definitely not fun, just frustrating.

Does the Op want us all to play super tanky builds? Let’s all play guardian and spam 1!

The major problem this game has is a lack of trinity, which means it struggles to make things hard enough without wiping out 95% of the other classes.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

It seems you’ve never experienced raid-bosses in games like WoW, correct me if I’m wrong. A battle like Heigan (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmArX8GvHLo) was frustrating at first but got really really awesome the more you were accustomed with the mechanic of the battle. This is just a tiny example, raid games build their excitement on such mechanics.

You’re entirely right, I never did raids in WoW – I never played WoW, either. But from what I know they aren’t punishing, but challenging. Something being “challenging” instead of “punishing” does not mean there’ll never be frustration. People enjoy challenging content, not punishing content.

From what I understand in raids – and do correct me if I’m wrong – but there are save points, so if you fail you don’t have to start from scratch; if you have to leave, you can restart further in than the beginning, and if you’re group wipes you don’t have to restart the entire thing from absolute scratch – or in the situation of world bosses like in GW2, you don’t have to wait for other players to revive you or risk missing out on the boss fight entirely. Raids are not “no errors allowed” where even one mistake will prevent you from beating it. Such designs aren’t so bad in of themselves, except when added with hard-to-restart conditions, such as world bosses or long-lasting content.

The OP’s suggestion isn’t challenging in any right, unlike raids – as far as I understand of them at least. That’s where the difference in.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

and it IS possible in open world encounters.

I agree, but the OP’s method is far from the appropriate method.

And the Marionette was not a “no errors allowed”. There were probably two or three failed attempts at the generators allowed before it was a guaranteed fail, if memory serves me right. That means that some errors were allowed. The problem with the Marionette is that it required people you have no influence over not to fail as well as those you do and yourself.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Good telegraphs which give you enough time to react isn’t that hard to realize. It certainly would filter out the guys who watch tv next to their pc with the autoattacking charakter.

Good luck surviving with the lag then!

I have not-so-great internet. Just about every world boss is laggy for me. The OP’s change would downright prevent me from participating because I would be lagged to death. Hell, the lag already makes most encounters impossible because I either get d/c’d or unable to act – in the case of the former, getting back into the map means it either takes so long that it’s done, or I’m in a different map where it was beaten already; in the case of the latter, I don’t receive credit because I wouldn’t attack.

Making a “if you die, you must leave the map” set up would just prevent players who lag a bit from doing any world boss unless there’s small numbers at it – which unless the timer system is changed, won’t ever happen.

If you want to filter out the auto-attackers, you need to stem down the zerg’s numbers or increase the challenge. Do not create punishment, but challenge. Rather than preventing reviving, you change how the boss acts and reacts, you reduce the number of the zerg by giving them reason to spread out that’s more beneficial to them than clustering together. The OP’s suggestion only punishes those who lag, not those who auto-attack.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Majic.4801:

Yet another great way to make the game less enjoyable.

It’s sad to see people who think it’s enjoyable to kill a boss without any effort semi-afk just to get a few daily reward chests. Leaving bosses like the Shatterer with the graveyard rushing available (something which has been fixed for dungeons for a while now) would be a lot of wasted potential imho.

There’s a fine difference between not wanting to make the content punishment, and thinking it’s enjoyable to kill a boss without any effort semi-afk.

Majic never said he preferred the later, so it’s rather false for you to assume such. As I understand, no one’s advocating a policy of “no change” – but rather “not the OP’s change”.

Honestly, the only thing the OP’s suggestion does is thus:

1. Promotes guardians using Ventari/Nomad gear – aka full out tanking, instead of full berserker gear. That way, you can just stand in place, spam one, and not be killed by those silly boss attacks.
2. Demoralizes those without optimal computer or internet set-ups, thus segregating the playerbase.

It’s not a good suggestion in the least.

Astralporing.1957:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Nobody wants to do a difficult encounter, when you have an easy encounter with the same rewards somewhere else.

If that is indeed true, it should tell you something about what people really want.

I hate thinking about it, but its possible Anet has ‘metrics’ backing this up, and the general avoidance of existing difficult bosses like the sand giant nobody does are merely confirming the numbers they pull.

I’d like difficult content. Lots of people like difficult content. Would the majority like difficult content? probably not.

People wont say something is too hard often. but they’ll definitely show it through inaction. I think the first step to actually getting players seeking challenging content on the radar would be getting groups to start burning Karka/wurm/teq/evengiant more frequently, to show that there are more people willing to do the content if Anet spends time and money getting the encounters set up.

How many people did liadri anyway?

Before any more world bosses that require large coordination to defeat (TT/Teq) how about sorting it so that organization is easier, right now the means needed to be done to get people organized into one map is a bit RIDICULOUS considering the scale of people.

I really have no desire for more teamspeak-oriented bosses like TT or Teq… I’d just like the current ones to gain some heavy, really punishing anti-zerg AoE that would force the crowd to dodge a lot or die trying.

I’d also like the megaservers to be a bad dream, but that’s a completely different story.

With the megaserver in place, I think it is past time they made a pass at the world boss mechanics and difficulty. Tequatl is going down regularly and, if enough people are on the map, it is posing only a moderate challenge at best (it is still fun though) – even if no one is in teamspeak together.

- Shatterer, Jormag and Karka Queen should be brought to the Tequatl level in regard to complexity and difficulty, with rewards similar to that dragon champion.

- Shadow Behemoth, Caladon Worm, Fire Elemental and Maw are fine as they are – they should be considered the “starter” bosses (a fifth should be added to the Charr area).

- Ulgoth, Taidha, Megadestroyer and Mark II should receive overhauls to complexity and difficulty and they should definitely scale from 20 to more than 100 participants. Difficulty level should be just a little above where Jormag or the Temple of Grenth is now (just not as long as Jormag). Additionally, several other world bosses should be added to this tier and given the same treatment.

Finally, this should apply to non-boss metaevents as well, such as temple chains, the centaur assaults in Gendarren, etc. Thinking about them as starter/standard/difficult would make it easy to ensure there is adequate support for all open world content challenge levels.

NOTE: I did not mention Evolved Worm. While I like that the fight is in the game, it is at a different level than any other fights. Fights like this (requiring 80+ organized players) should be added to the game extremely rarely (but do still have a place).