OK, everyone is aware of how the gameplay mechanics hinders really hard group content in GW2 that moves towards another direction than just dodging red circles and boss signature attacks.
One quote from the main raid thread here says very precisely: Once you have your fury/might/protection/vuln, barring gimmick fights, it seems like it’d be back to the ’whatever’s max DPS after HOT comes out’
I fully agree on that. Whenever the full group is required for a boss encounter, it is like that: stack max boons and DPS the kitten out of the boss. There are very rare exceptions from that. Such exceptions are Tequatl and Three headed wurm. So why not take the hobbits to Isengard? Or in other words: why not scale such fights down to 10 man raid attemps?
Every position can play more or less everything, so every position can be manned with every class (good in terms of class equality). Just force players to spread for an encouter where every player has a different role to occupy.
For example:
- 2 players constantly need to run for something and place it somewhere while they are ganked by enemies. If they fail, the boss enrages and the group has failed.
- 2 players are required for constantly cc’ing enemies coming from opposite directions – if they fail and let enemies through, the whole raid is overrun and fails.
- make the taunt ability be awesome so that proper kiting is feasible (e.g. assign 1 player to kite the second boss during a fight until one is dead)
- 1 player needs to range cleanse the dps raid with a special device that’s placed off the raid, if he fails, the raid fails
- Rest focus on dps’ing the boss
- Make the boss not stand in just one place all the time, platformed fights are interesting where players need to get up first (jumping puzzle involvement) while they are under ranged boss attack. Boss changes platform during phase transition.
- Every boss has different vulnerabilities; e.g. boss #1 can only be hurt with poison and enrages when damaged with ice.
What makes boss encounters fun:
- You can FAIL them when you make errors (Tequatl wave kills whole 100 man raid). That said, Tequatl is the most fun enemy ever. Everything done right!
- Make raid bosses time gated – e.g. you have 10 minutes, after that the boss enrages
- ENRAGE mechanics! If a boss enrages (perma quickness & swiftness, applies weakness with is enraging roar etc.), you get instantly killed by this auto attacks. However you can still hurt him while enraged. This is much more fun than just despawning bosses (3 headed wurm) and you can prevent 1% failures when taking care.
- Punish individual player errors harder! Every player needs to be assigned a special task – if he fails, the entire raid fails.
I am playing GW2 since beta, have played GW1 since headstart. So I love this game and really want it to improve. Because I can’t stand brainless stuff anymore (did the Scratch Sentry Defense yesterday once again…how is this supposed to be fun at all?)
Kyrgyz Manas – Gandara[EU]