Guild Wars 2

I will keep this short. I believe that mobs should be designed around existing trait lines, instead of wondering everywhere.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Trait

A boss should be experts in particular fields, that already exist in the game. A boss is considered “ahead of its time”, and the players will hopefully match these bosses’ level of power in the future.

I will use Reiko from GW1 as an example. She was “ahead” of her time in using illusion magic, called “mirrors” back in the days. Although she was evil and was killed, the other mesmers eventually followed her lead and adopted spells similar to hers.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Reiko

For example, we can have have a boss on “Inventions”, a boss on “Skirmishing” and a boss on “Soul Reaping”. Their fighting style will be vastly different from each other. Yet they will be strong in their own ways; each showing the potential of a traitline.

I think this is very important in showing the potentials and direction of a traitline. It is the developers way of demonstrating where they want these traitlines to go. When the players fights a super strong boss, they will know that this is the “future” of themselves. So the players can fight these epic bosses will a smile on their faces.

Thoughts?

I think bosses should simply be designed around the concept that any of the classes should be able to fight them. That’s a good enough start.

I agree with this idea and have thought the same thing for awhile. It would be a strong push away from the DPS-meta if all of the bosses weren’t HP-sponges, and a good first step to making this happen would be to create bosses that specialize in different ‘trait lines’, emulating a ‘build’ of their own to make them unique. Five Engineer bosses, for example, should be able to fight and combat a group in very different ways, and should require a different strategy to overcome.

It would also make Support roles more viable, as they would need to be used to properly counter the enemy’s own tactics.

The traits can also includes racial traits. For example a Sylvari expert in plant summoning might fight like this.

The reason other mesmers followed Reiko’s example is because she was a test of how mesmer mechanics were going to work in GW2.

Though I agree with the general idea: enemies should use all the skills available to players, like they did in GW1.