Guild Wars 2

I have played HoT since launch, but cannot get my mind around how unpolished the levels of different bosses are when it comes to trying to kill them. I feel this area needs some attention, as some veterans are harder to kill than a champ, and just seems like either an oversight, or it will stay like this indefinitely. I find this frustrating, and it spoils the dynamics of the game for me.
I have also just come off a Verdant Brink map where we tried to kill the legendary wyvern with 20 players, and after 20 minutes, boss was on 5% but event failed. I find this pointless, as their are multiple bosses, and the Meta takes so long to get back to this event. This is one of the frustrations I find with this game, and for the loot versus effort, its actually quite pointless, and one of the reasons players don’t bother much, unless they either farming, or need something for an achievement/levelling.

There are multiple bosses to encourage the playerbase to split up and fight them all at once, rather than running a train to kill each in succession. In order to obtain the best rewards (Maximum Security Level/T4, the Bladed Chest) players will need to do spread out and do that.

The loot for the HoT zones is quite high, but it does help to be able to actually kill the bosses. If you were fighting the Patriarch, you need to be faster with using the eggs. If you were fighting the Matriarch, your group needs to be able to take down her break bar more effectively, so you avoid the strafing attack and get bonus damage for beating on her while she’s down. If your group is having troubles breaking the bar, you should try to communicate what’s needed to the other players there, they might not understand what kind of opportunity they’re passing up.

MarkBecks.6453:

one of the reasons players don’t bother much

Please don’t speak for the rest of us, I play all the maps for different reasons at different times. Sometimes it’s for a mastery point, sometimes for map complete, sometimes for map currency. Also depends what toon I’m on, if I’m something really squishy, I won’t do patriarch on that.
If you fail patriarch for whatever reasons, it’s down to team makeup and nobody can predict that. Get 10 new rangers flying around.. might not be as successful as nine tanky berserkers and a revenant. I have no idea what is the optimal for any of those things, I’ve relied on zergs just doing their thing.
If there is something you need to do, something you need to guarantee happens then you should join a guild that does those maps or events. They have the best chance of success for you. TD fails all the time. DS doesn’t. There’s an AB guild. I imagine there’s one for VB, keep an eye out but even if not.. consider asking in map chat for more dps or more CC for the boss you are at. See what happens.

The problem sounds like too many players rushed to the same event. They scale intensely for the reason the map needs to split up and fight all the bosses at once. If the boss you’re fighting takes more than 10 minutes, you probably have too many people there or ignoring the mechanics.

Everyone zergs to Matriarch because she’s easy. They don’t use CC before she gets away. So the entire fight takes much longer than it should, leaving no time to hunt the other bosses.

Matriarch is easy to get to, which happens because players abandon bases the moment they’re captured, so there aren’t any other helicopters to take players to the canopy. Sadly, that fault lies very heavily on the players.

Out of the other four bosses:

• Patriarch requires Updraft Mastery and mechanics that slow the fight down. The very slight puzzle requirement probably turns some players off.
• Tetrad is actually a straightforward enough fight, but it requires a joint force to start off. Lack of coordination and not knowing where they are tends to make people skip it.
• Frog bros are frustrating with their teleporting and healing, so players skip them.
• Axemaster is hideously designed and not worth doing, so no one does Axemaster.

As for the other critters out there, most vets are readily survivable or ignorable, unless you’re going for hero points. I will agree that many HoT mobs are lazily designed, which causes their attacks to be unnecessarily overpowered with zero cooldown.

Rauderi.8706:

Everyone zergs to Matriarch because she’s easy. They don’t use CC before she gets away. So the entire fight takes much longer than it should, leaving no time to hunt the other bosses.

Matriarch is easy to get to, which happens because players abandon bases the moment they’re captured, so there aren’t any other helicopters to take players to the canopy. Sadly, that fault lies very heavily on the players.

Out of the other four bosses:

• Patriarch requires Updraft Mastery and mechanics that slow the fight down. The very slight puzzle requirement probably turns some players off.
• Tetrad is actually a straightforward enough fight, but it requires a joint force to start off. Lack of coordination and not knowing where they are tends to make people skip it.
• Frog bros are frustrating with their teleporting and healing, so players skip them.
• Axemaster is hideously designed and not worth doing, so no one does Axemaster.

As for the other critters out there, most vets are readily survivable or ignorable, unless you’re going for hero points. I will agree that many HoT mobs are lazily designed, which causes their attacks to be unnecessarily overpowered with zero cooldown.

10 likes—and thumbs up. I don’t bother with any of the ones you mentioned anymore, let alone mainly blues and greens for rewards.

I don’t see why equality of difficulty is a good thing.
The new creatures are more challenging than vanilla creatures. This is primarily due to special mechanics which was lacking in vanilla creatures.

Legendary rank indicates a special boss and the difficulty can vary widely.

Veteran, Elite and Champion is an indicator of strength relative to the creature type.

Most notably, champion creatures are designed for group content. They have high health, and are very resistant to cc. Mobs without high health and breakbar are near-useless against a group of players.

It’s not that people don’t use CC, it’s that the wyverns’ (all of them) break bars scale really harshly and become effectively impossible to break if there’s more than maybe 10 people there. The Mouth of Mordremoth also has a break bar, and you can’t stop people from breaking it most of the time, so clearly people have plenty of CC to throw around.

Hyper Cutter.9376:

It’s not that people don’t use CC, it’s that the wyverns’ (all of them) break bars scale really harshly and become effectively impossible to break if there’s more than maybe 10 people there. The Mouth of Mordremoth also has a break bar, and you can’t stop people from breaking it most of the time, so clearly people have plenty of CC to throw around.

Break bar scaling is pretty bad, to be honest. Matriarch’s is pretty beefy, and some other critters (Punisher, Mushroom King) have such short openings on their bars that, between typical human reaction times, ping/latency, and cast times, it’s pretty much mathematically impossible to break them in a skillful manner.

Break bars need an overhaul.
Matriarch is very easy with 10 people that know their stuff.
The more people. the harder to break the bar, if not impossible.
As for new vs old, take a look a The Shatterer’s break bar. I for one, have not succeeded yet.
But what am I talking about. Given that my pet STILL cannot attack some objects I can, after soooo many time has passed by, I am confident the break bar will not be fixed in our lifetime. Thank God new fluffy gem items come to market so frequently.

The Shatterer break bar is more of a gimmick then anything else. It can only be breaking with Gliding dive bombs(each attack drops 5 bombs that knockbacks). You may get into some maps that break it once but always breaking the bar hard. The Shatterrer tells for his break bar are not that accurate. The time it take to run to a jump pad and drop bombs is to long. If the shatterer just glowed blightly purple before the purple flame everyone would know to run to the jump pad to break his cc.

The scaling on some break bars needs to be looked at but it more of a LTP issue. When I use to run VB a lot most of the time players did not even know what cc was or the skills they class could use to cc. Crowd control skills are not needed much outside of pvp and HoT.

Rauderi.8706:

Everyone zergs to Matriarch because she’s easy. They don’t use CC before she gets away. So the entire fight takes much longer than it should, leaving no time to hunt the other bosses.

Matriarch is easy to get to, which happens because players abandon bases the moment they’re captured, so there aren’t any other helicopters to take players to the canopy. Sadly, that fault lies very heavily on the players.

Out of the other four bosses:

• Patriarch requires Updraft Mastery and mechanics that slow the fight down. The very slight puzzle requirement probably turns some players off.
• Tetrad is actually a straightforward enough fight, but it requires a joint force to start off. Lack of coordination and not knowing where they are tends to make people skip it.
• Frog bros are frustrating with their teleporting and healing, so players skip them.
• Axemaster is hideously designed and not worth doing, so no one does Axemaster.

As for the other critters out there, most vets are readily survivable or ignorable, unless you’re going for hero points. I will agree that many HoT mobs are lazily designed, which causes their attacks to be unnecessarily overpowered with zero cooldown.

Patriach: just turn left, the updraft will make you go up.
Tetrad: never saw a problem there. you are making excuses.
Frog bros: when you learn that they heals when they reach 25% of their HP & that there is a direct mushroom to their healing foutain.
Axemaster: when he Tp get to him & CC. :x

Basically you are just highlighting the thing that I hate the most: don’t learn the boss strategy, then proceed to cry because you still want the reward.

Matriarch has a mechanic. CC her break bar when she tries to fly up. When you knock her down she doesn’t get a flight phase and since her bar is broken she takes a debuff for several seconds where she takes, like 300% incoming damage. That’s how you kill the boss. Your map scaled it and then didn’t CC this is a group of bad players not an unbalanced boss. They refused to play into one of her mechanics.

Verdant Brink is also an “Anti-zerg” map, if you zerg during the nightphase you lose bases and will not get your map rewards up.

papry.8096:

Rauderi.8706:

Everyone zergs to Matriarch because she’s easy. They don’t use CC before she gets away. So the entire fight takes much longer than it should, leaving no time to hunt the other bosses.

Matriarch is easy to get to, which happens because players abandon bases the moment they’re captured, so there aren’t any other helicopters to take players to the canopy. Sadly, that fault lies very heavily on the players.

Out of the other four bosses:

• Patriarch requires Updraft Mastery and mechanics that slow the fight down. The very slight puzzle requirement probably turns some players off.
• Tetrad is actually a straightforward enough fight, but it requires a joint force to start off. Lack of coordination and not knowing where they are tends to make people skip it.
• Frog bros are frustrating with their teleporting and healing, so players skip them.
• Axemaster is hideously designed and not worth doing, so no one does Axemaster.

As for the other critters out there, most vets are readily survivable or ignorable, unless you’re going for hero points. I will agree that many HoT mobs are lazily designed, which causes their attacks to be unnecessarily overpowered with zero cooldown.

Patriach: just turn left, the updraft will make you go up.
Tetrad: never saw a problem there. you are making excuses.
Frog bros: when you learn that they heals when they reach 25% of their HP & that there is a direct mushroom to their healing foutain.
Axemaster: when he Tp get to him & CC. :x

Basically you are just highlighting the thing that I hate the most: don’t learn the boss strategy, then proceed to cry because you still want the reward.

I know the boss strats. I’m also highlighting how many players are going to view those bosses, because it’s not about how the fights are designed, it’s about how they’re played. It’s a level of meta-thought most don’t engage in, either because they’re secure in their own skill and don’t think about others, or they roll over for bad game design because they’re not willing to engage in assessment.

I actually like Patriarch to some extent. But, he’s not done as often as he should, because players don’t hold chopper points and for the little details I listed above.

Go ahead and solo the Tetrad. Guarantee it’ll end poorly. The strike team for that one either needs a really good distraction (solo Lupi candidates, maybe :P) or a team of 5-10 who are decently coordinated. After that, a pack of Flamethower Juggernauts can handle the 4th boss there with no problems.
Thing is, players aren’t going to wait more than about a minute for others to show up to do Tetrad. So Tetrad doesn’t get done that often.

Frog bros aren’t so bad, but there are a lot of misleading jumps on that island. And most players are going to see the loss of progress as a reason to skip the fight in the future. Design versus Play. I got credit for it and now I just shrug at it when it comes time for VB bosses. Probably won’t ever do it again.

Axemaster is by far the worst when it comes to design vs play. Newer players just can’t do it, and that’s bad for something that shows up on the first map. It’s a shame that Axemaster’s bad design qualities far outstrip how interesting a fight it could have been.

Now:

• Constantly spawns veteran smokescales. Basically, killing his adds doesn’t work because he almost immediately makes more.
• Requires Nuhoch Stealth Detection. This is a mastery nestled deep into the Nuhoch line, that is also nestled rather deep into expansion territory. While Axemaster’s stealth wonderful thematically, it’s inappropriate for Verdant Brink.
• Unmanageable instant-KO. I’ve labeled it an ANet fetish for a reason. I get that the area-wide KO is a shtick, and I’m not necessarily mad at that. It’s that it cannot be avoided short of breaking his bar, and that’s a short-sighted gameplay demand. Design vs play. It would be a bigger marker of individual skill if it could be evaded/blocked or if taking to the air stopped the ground-based attack from triggering. (Seriously, wrapping deathvines out of nowhere while I’m in flight?…)

Should:

• Downing an Axemaster minion should force a longer delay in respawn/recovery, perhaps even forcing Axemaster to do more than toot a horn to get all three back.
• Not being against masteries being used in fights, but why not give more love to Poison Mastery? It’s more appropriate for the zone, and it’s available in a reasonable timeframe compared to any of the Nuhoch masteries. Also, the teleport is already hide-and-seek enough without needing stealth detection.
• Noting the previous item, I only see poison mastery used a handful of times, and so far, never in actual combat. In thinking about that, Axemaster could be dramatically redesigned to actually feel engaging instead of stupidly punishing. Write-up for that is below.

For an instant-KO mechanic, Poison Mastery should be the vector for mitigating it. When Axemaster teleports, he calls his smokescales (forcing players to have to fight through them) while the players have to find and CC him. If they fail, he lays a blanket of poison fields on top of each player. The bulk of the damage comes from the sort of uber-high-damage toxin found on the static areas of the map, but those with the mastery still have to put up with the regular damage and stacks of poison that persist until the fields dissipate. 3-4 seconds ought to do it. Characters without Poison Mastery need to take to the air or risk getting downed in one of the toxin fields.

So, looking at the actual skill requirements,
Before:

• Nuhoch Stealth Detection or “gtfo ur ded stop making fight harder”
• Plenty of CC

After:

• Itzel Poison Mastery and/or Updraft mastery (much more appropriate for VB players)
• Plenty of CC
• Condition clearing

It’s a reasonably more robust way of making the fight interesting while retaining the skill requirement to breaking Axemaster’s bar and having a reasonable, not inane, punishment for failing it.

We wouldn’t have this discussion, at least in my opinion, if player builds in PvE would be more spread out in terms of: What does this character actually do?

And in regards to CC?
I quite often get to hear from people, yes, now just as often as at the start of HoT: Why should i use CC when i don’t need it most of the time.

Yes, in Dragon’s Stand CC is quite common but honestly? I’ve seen enough players so frustrated with the difficulty in HoT, and the need for specific (“specific”) mechanics, in contrast to how easy the core game is that they don’t even bother going there.

If anything a few things from HoT should get carried over to the core game to ease players into this whole thing.

LouWolfskin.3492:

If anything a few things from HoT should get carried over to the core game to ease players into this whole thing.

Certainly. We could certainly do with event areas in early game that teach players about proper crowd control use and what the Defiance bar is. They most often run into it in open world, where it’s either not necessary for core Tyria or it’s done for them by more experienced players.

And feedback is important as well. Especially after three years of CC having no effect, players are likely to ignore CC on larger bosses because they don’t see it working. Some forumites have suggested “blue damage numbers,” and I definitely agree with this. Include the same kinds of condition symbols for immobilize/chill/weakness, so players are aware of the blue damage over time effects.

LouWolfskin.3492:

We wouldn’t have this discussion, at least in my opinion, if player builds in PvE would be more spread out in terms of: What does this character actually do?

And in regards to CC?
I quite often get to hear from people, yes, now just as often as at the start of HoT: Why should i use CC when i don’t need it most of the time.

Yes, in Dragon’s Stand CC is quite common but honestly? I’ve seen enough players so frustrated with the difficulty in HoT, and the need for specific (“specific”) mechanics, in contrast to how easy the core game is that they don’t even bother going there.

If anything a few things from HoT should get carried over to the core game to ease players into this whole thing.

I agree. I think that central tyria is actually in a good place difficulty wise for new players. Even up through the Orr maps if you are still learning your profession they can be decently challenging depending on your class. But Dry top needs to made harder, and then silverwastes needs to be made harder than that so that players are properly scaled up to HoT content without the large jump in difficulty that currently exists. But the difficulty in HoT is fine where it is

I wonder if HoT events should have more instructional NPCs that are invulnerable but do not fight leading the players through event strategy. There is a lot of guidance, already but more may help.

Things like telling players who die to go to this or that particular way point and place an arrow on the map to the chopper.

Regarding builds, helicopters could take players to a NPC explaining the need for Cc and what to watch for. Give players a minute to check their builds before leading the group in.

MarkBecks.6453:

where we tried to kill the legendary wyvern with 20 players, and after 20 minutes, boss was on 5% but event failed.

Were there a load of AFKers standing in the caves below whilst only a few were bombing him in his invulnerable phase?

20 people should have downed him just fine…unless you were crippled by AFKers.