Guild Wars 2

I’d like to read some community speculation!
If the Xpac culminates into finally taking down the big bad dandelion what format will the fight be in?
Zhaitan was in a dungeon story mode but as we’ve heard around in the recent past, the Anet dungeon team is no more. And I’m of the mind that having it be a map wide event just wouldn’t make sense. Does this mean personal instance format like we’ve seen in Living Story episodes?

I don’t really mind, on the condition that I, the player character, am allowed to personally stab Mordremoth to death, rather than having to use an underpowered cannon, to press 1, over, and over, for a total of 15 minutes straight in order to kill it.

I’m curious as to why you think a map-wide event wouldn’t work? Killing the dandelion in Silverwastes is a pretty good example of map-wide efforts culminating into a big boss fight.

But yeah, anything other than a repeat of Zhaitan

Dedlaw.9130:

I’m curious as to why you think a map-wide event wouldn’t work? Killing the dandelion in Silverwastes is a pretty good example of map-wide efforts culminating into a big boss fight.

But yeah, anything other than a repeat of Zhaitan

Because it’s personal story. Vinewrath isn’t related to the story much.

I think something like a story instance would be best. The Elder Dragons shouldn’t feel like normal, commonly respawning bosses.

I don’t understand the complaints about Zhaitan though. Do you really expect that personally slashing a creature the size of a mountain would accomplish anything? Keep in mind, Zhaitan was scaled down from canon for performance issues. Kralkatorrik spanned a Guild Wars 1 zone. These things could squash an army without even noticing they were there. Confronting one of these things with a fleet of airships is one of the only things I can imagine actually working. The problem with Zhaitan wasn’t that we blew a colossal creature away with anti-dragon-powered siege weapons, it was other pacing and context issues.

Jokubas.4265:

I think something like a story instance would be best. The Elder Dragons shouldn’t feel like normal, commonly respawning bosses.

I don’t understand the complaints about Zhaitan though. Do you really expect that personally slashing a creature the size of a mountain would accomplish anything? Keep in mind, Zhaitan was scaled down from canon for performance issues. Kralkatorrik spanned a Guild Wars 1 zone. These things could squash an army without even noticing they were there. Confronting one of these things with a fleet of airships is one of the only things I can imagine actually working. The problem with Zhaitan wasn’t that we blew a colossal creature away with anti-dragon-powered siege weapons, it was other pacing and context issues.

Zhaitan fed on magic. Could have tried to give him bad magic that weakened him. Maybe set up a field to drain the magic from him. Asuran shrink ray. Anything other than the stupid King Kong fight where you aim a cannon at him while he calmly clutches to the side of a building while you repeatedly press 2 over and over again. After he dies, you don’t even get to see his corpse. He falls into the fog, never to be seen again. Even if we had to walk up to his body with a torch and light it on fire, it would have had more closure.

It isn’t our fault Anet wrote themselves into a corner making Elder Dragons so monstrously huge and making them the big bads we had to fight. They set them up as the enemies, it is up to them to make the fights compelling and rewarding. Turrets are NOT compelling or rewarding. They remove you from combat.

maybe they give us some 3 groups instances

and 15 people have to do it
or 10

and then some nice cooperative play

Ralanost.8913:

Zhaitan fed on magic. Could have tried to give him bad magic that weakened him. Maybe set up a field to drain the magic from him. Asuran shrink ray. Anything other than the stupid King Kong fight where you aim a cannon at him while he calmly clutches to the side of a building while you repeatedly press 2 over and over again. After he dies, you don’t even get to see his corpse. He falls into the fog, never to be seen again. Even if we had to walk up to his body with a torch and light it on fire, it would have had more closure.

It isn’t our fault Anet wrote themselves into a corner making Elder Dragons so monstrously huge and making them the big bads we had to fight. They set them up as the enemies, it is up to them to make the fights compelling and rewarding. Turrets are NOT compelling or rewarding. They remove you from combat.

I suppose we completely disregard the fact that more or less the last half of the personal story was all about denying Zhaitan the magic it feeds on, and thus making it weak enough to attack?

We fought Zhaitan long before we took it down in Arah.

Dedlaw.9130:

I’m curious as to why you think a map-wide event wouldn’t work? Killing the dandelion in Silverwastes is a pretty good example of map-wide efforts culminating into a big boss fight.

But yeah, anything other than a repeat of Zhaitan

Because defeating a massive unique boss just to have it respawn 10 minutes later is rather silly?

I would also say it have to do with performance. There is already issues for some people with lags when fighting Wurm and Tequatl. Just imagine fighting something that is many times bigger than those.

It’ll definitely be instanced, and it’ll definitely be a group event of some sort. Other than that, anything goes. From what we saw in the trailer, it looked like some of the story bits had a collaborative element to them (tons of characters we never saw, very possibly other players). Perhaps we’ll be able to go through the personal story with a party.

So far the dragons are known to do most of their living via their agents, except rare cases when they themselves take action and then tyria gets a major landscape makeover.

So i imagine fight with mordremoth being a mass event, but not focused on the dragon itself, but rather his agents that are helping it control the fleet-destroyer wines, it’s mordrem armies and defences shielding the dragon itself.

I imagine it as a fight where Mordremoth is about to fully awaken and raise above the ground. If that happens all the pact gets wiped out. Our job is to find a path to him before that happens and immobilize/weaken him, while pact readies it’s super weapon to kill it.

To achieve that we would need to go into the roots, cut our way through and inject the dragon with some anti-modrem toxin, facing champs, vines and numerous obstacles to do so.

All the while at surface other groups of players would have their hands full with mordrem army and killing it’s agents controlling said armies, as well as those giant, fleet destroying wines.

Only if all efforts on all fronts succeed at the same time, will the operation succeed and we’ll have fried vegetable dragon for dinner.

lordkrall.7241:

Dedlaw.9130:

I’m curious as to why you think a map-wide event wouldn’t work? Killing the dandelion in Silverwastes is a pretty good example of map-wide efforts culminating into a big boss fight.

But yeah, anything other than a repeat of Zhaitan

Because defeating a massive unique boss just to have it respawn 10 minutes later is rather silly?

Which is pretty much how every single world boss, dungeon & fractals work. It all requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelieve, I don’t see why a new boss would be any different

Dedlaw.9130:

Which is pretty much how every single world boss, dungeon & fractals work. It all requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelieve, I don’t see why a new boss would be any different

The world bosses are not unique though. Most of them are either a rank or just a random extra strong enemy.

Dungeons are locked in time. What happens in the Dungeons happens once. Not every time you do them.

Fractals takes place in the Mists, the rules of the Mists are mysterious and thus standard logic does not apply to them.

Getting to kill one of the Elder Dragons in a open world zone on the other hand would be rather impossible to explain. Especially considering the fact that it would have to respawn more or less on-demand so that people could finish it whenever they felt like it, rather than having to wait on a schedule.

It is also the fact that they are massive and performance as mentioned in the second part of my post.

lordkrall.7241:

Dedlaw.9130:

Which is pretty much how every single world boss, dungeon & fractals work. It all requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelieve, I don’t see why a new boss would be any different

The world bosses are not unique though. Most of them are either a rank or just a random extra strong enemy.

Dungeons are locked in time. What happens in the Dungeons happens once. Not every time you do them.

Fractals takes place in the Mists, the rules of the Mists are mysterious and thus standard logic does not apply to them.

Getting to kill one of the Elder Dragons in a open world zone on the other hand would be rather impossible to explain. Especially considering the fact that it would have to respawn more or less on-demand so that people could finish it whenever they felt like it, rather than having to wait on a schedule.

It is also the fact that they are massive and performance as mentioned in the second part of my post.

Let’s talk specifically about the three lieutenants then: Claw, Shatt & Teq. Very repeatable and are on a schedule.

Claiming dungeons are locked in time and logic doesn’t apply to Fractals is simply suspension of disbelief. The truth is that because of the mechanics of the game those events are repeated over and over and over ad nauseam.
Why is it now impossible to apply that same suspension of disbelief to another major event?

As for performance related issues, they have already proven it’s not plausible to make the dragons in the size they should be according to lore. Zhaitan was already greatly downscaled in the dungeon instance. So whether it’s in an instance or open world, they won’t be able to make it even closely up to scale, so the performance won’t be much worse than the average world boss fight (although I’ll agree that’s not saying much).

Claw and Shatterer are very clearly stated Ranks rather than the same creature. The one you kill today is not the same that you kill tomorrow, it just have the same rank (and thus name).
Tequatl is most likely the same, seeing as it is a name given by the Hylek and it is unlikely that they could see much difference between big dragon champion X and big dragon champion Y. Just look over the skies of Arah, there are multiple identical champions hanging around there.

I suppose so. But it is more a matter of lore vs gameplay I would say.
People only ever being able to do each dungeon once would not really work out all that well after all.
Because putting a main opponent on a set schedule makes it impossible for people to finish up their story on-demand, which is most likely not something that they would want.

Yes, they had to scale it down a bit. But adding it to the open world as opposed to a personal instance would require a even larger downscaling, so it would basically end up being the same size as Claw of Jormag or something like that. Which would just be silly.

What if the battle vs mordremoth take place in a dungeon, like arah story but more epic and not a “spamm 1 with cannon untill he die…”, with 2 mode:
-normal for 5 players
-world boss mode:
World boss mode, take place inside the dungeon (supposed it will be large like arah), people can join inside (with a limit of 30-50 players) like any other map.
Inside there are events like in silverwastes, and when there are the right number of player, mordremoth will spawn and he require a group strategy like in silverwastes and tequatl.

It would be better if we can have (i will continue to hope for this one…) raid with more than one Difficult and introduce dungeon raid party:
-10 players: not too difficult coordination, but a minimum of communication required
-20 player: more coordination and different mechanic
-30 player: even more coordination and different mechanic
(Or more player or different numbers)
What you think?
Ps: obviusly raid need some improvement in enemie AI (…i point my finger on you kitten “stack around corners exploit”), and in final loot, some possibility could be for each player:
-for 10 players: 5-10 blue-green, 1-3 rare, 0-1 exotic(maybe new skin only obtainable in the raid)
-for 20: 3-7 blue-green, 1-5 rare, 0-3 exotic
-for 30: 3-7 green, 2-7 rare, 1-4 exotic

There are only examples xD

Corvus.5836:

I’d like to read some community speculation!
If the Xpac culminates into finally taking down the big bad dandelion what format will the fight be in?
Zhaitan was in a dungeon story mode but as we’ve heard around in the recent past, the Anet dungeon team is no more. And I’m of the mind that having it be a map wide event just wouldn’t make sense. Does this mean personal instance format like we’ve seen in Living Story episodes?

Mordremoth is in the expansion after the next one

Just make it a 10 player dungeon/raid.

The best thing they can do is give the fight its own smallish map in the actual game world. Yes, it will be repeatable, but technically, so is the Zhaitan fight.

They are getting much better at giving the open world fights an epic feel. If they gave us a map about half the size of Drytop and then made the Mordremoth fight a two hour epic encounter (with Mordy’s body taking up almost the entire map ) that repeated 4-6 times a day, I think it would be very enjoyable.

The last thing many of us want to see is 10, 15 or 25 player raids in this game – especially with ultimate boss/LS content fights like this one. Remember that many people didnt like the Zhaitan fight because it was in a 5 player instance. Putting the fight in a rigid traditional style raid (which is a HORRIBLE idea in this game in general, for the record) would be taking that bad idea and making it much worse.

lordkrall.7241:

Ralanost.8913:

Zhaitan fed on magic. Could have tried to give him bad magic that weakened him. Maybe set up a field to drain the magic from him. Asuran shrink ray. Anything other than the stupid King Kong fight where you aim a cannon at him while he calmly clutches to the side of a building while you repeatedly press 2 over and over again. After he dies, you don’t even get to see his corpse. He falls into the fog, never to be seen again. Even if we had to walk up to his body with a torch and light it on fire, it would have had more closure.

It isn’t our fault Anet wrote themselves into a corner making Elder Dragons so monstrously huge and making them the big bads we had to fight. They set them up as the enemies, it is up to them to make the fights compelling and rewarding. Turrets are NOT compelling or rewarding. They remove you from combat.

I suppose we completely disregard the fact that more or less the last half of the personal story was all about denying Zhaitan the magic it feeds on, and thus making it weak enough to attack?

We fought Zhaitan long before we took it down in Arah.

This is true, however you have to mash 2 for way too long. If Zhaitan went down with a couple of cannon shots, I would have been fine. Instead, I had to sit there for awhile mashing my 2 button against a non-threat.

I think after the two Shadow of Dragon and Teragriff fights, it’s safe to assume that we won’t see a repeat of the famed Zhaitan Press One fight.

Most likely there will be a Personal Story green marker to start the instance, followed by a purple marker for the achievements. I notice that the last few episodes have achievements that are more catered for group play, even though they can be done solo.

If they want to throw in a large scale epic battle, they can place the purple/green marker at a location that is only accessible after a Vinewrath-like fight.

Maybe we do an epic battle against the exterior “Body of Mordremoth”, afterwhich a small group can breach inwards and do an instanced battle with the “Heart of Thorns”.

MrIllusion.5304:

I think after the two Shadow of Dragon and Teragriff fights, it’s safe to assume that we won’t see a repeat of the famed Zhaitan Press One fight.

Most likely there will be a Personal Story green marker to start the instance, followed by a purple marker for the achievements. I notice that the last few episodes have achievements that are more catered for group play, even though they can be done solo.

If they want to throw in a large scale epic battle, they can place the purple/green marker at a location that is only accessible after a Vinewrath-like fight.

Maybe we do an epic battle against the exterior “Body of Mordremoth”, afterwhich a small group can breach inwards and do an instanced battle with the “Heart of Thorns”.

This actually sounds plausible and would work well with a fight like this – kind of like the Tower of Nightmares (only permanent) where we worked our way through the zone (which would involve the main fight you discuss) to get to the instanced (1-5 person) fight with the Toxic Hybrid. I could definitely see them doing that.

I always thought it would kinda be like Scarlet. As in the whole map will fight him, and when he is beaten he falls back, and then in your own instance you finish him. Then your told some nonsense why he will still be kicking in the World.

I would very much love something like the shadow of the dragon battle, but on a much larger scale. However, I would still prefer it to be solo, or at least max of 5 people. I defiantly don’t agree with people wanting 30+ players fighting him. I would love something instanced.