Guild Wars 2

Since surely there’ll also be a revision to our poor safe spot smackfest dragon Shatterer, maybe Anet can benefit from some creative input from our community.

Add your own wild ideas about what challenges Shatterer can bring to the table, here are some of mine:

• Shatter ground ability: The ground erupts and splits in true volcano eruption style where you can get caught and fall to your doom. (Beware where you stand)
• Become Branded: Random players can acquire a condition and become Branded, attacking friendly enemies.
• Labyrinth of Chaos: Shatterer shatters reality and you get teleported in groups of five to a labyrinth filled with branded creatures, you have to make it out of the maze to join your team.
• Rotation: For once a dragon can actually turn around and attack to the sides perhaps?
• Air Attack, Vulnerability Stage: Why not have some users fly Asuran aircraft to bombard him to make him vulnerable for a while? (Turrets are getting old isn’t it?)

Add your own ideas guys, perhaps Anet can incorporate some of these ideas! It’s our game too after all…

While friendly fire idea is interesting, I think that’s more fitting for an organized small group content. One or two inexperienced players being able to ruin the whole thing will cause way too much drama I think. Other ideas, I quite like. Aircraft would be awesome.

I think to remedy the safe spot problem, they should punish stacking and being stationary. (and/or not paying attention to his tells) I think we can borrow some ideas from Dwayna statue fight.

• Add some attacks that target each individual players, doing considerable but non-lethal damage, but explodes in an AoE. if you are tightly stacked, you and everyone near you will just be wiped out. It leaves a moderate damage pulsing AoE behind, so if you are downed alone, it won’t kill you and people can res you, but if you were stacked, you are out of luck.
• Also, something that will make ‘being in range’ a bit more risky. it still should be manageable and dodge-able, since we want melee to still be an option.
• Make turrets more interesting. I like the new tequatl turrets a lot, it’s easy to use but you have to pay close attention. Give people on turret more things to do and less ‘pressing a button for 2 seconds to charge up one attack, repeat forever’. Or we can turn it into a mobile bundle, like in Jormag fight. I like the idea of an event giving people a melee option or a ranged option if they aren’t built for the specific situation.

And make it so that some of its more dangeous AoEs can target people in the safe spot more reliably. Seriously, this should have been done way earlier.

We’ve already seen the branded players in a beta weekend event, pre launch. I liked it then, even though it was very short.

This reminds me of how that Branded Devourer event happened.. I would like to see real off-th-cuff “live” events happen, where staff members will throw a random event into a populated area, with no warning. Something truly dynamic, and without a timer. The manual launching of the Scarlet events has worked out well.

I also seem to recall that branded players did not see themselves as branded..? This would be great.. You see all these branded showing up, but really they are other players.. Who at the same time see YOU as a branded! No one even knows the players are fighting amongst themselves.

i dont want a main focal point like the turrets in the teq fight being where you can win or lose at if the wrong people get on them and dont know what to do. maybe make them so they get rid of all brandedness only and if your on them your helping your team stay unbranded which in turn gives your more dps on the shatterer. have a lot of his attacks turn people branded. have vets attack the turrets sao they have to be defended. a power source being defended isnt a bad idea or you lose all your canons and turrets. with canons being a big dps thing on shatterer himself. with his attacks make them aoe shots(that make people branded) so its better for people to spread out all around him. make regular attacks do nothing so everyone must use a charzooka. thats all i can think of that way damage is done through charzookas and canons batter must be protected or you lose main way of getting rid of brandedness and ability to lose canons and turrets used only in keeping people out of branded state which when you anything you heal him.

How about in stead of having people man turrets, have some people tasked with supplying ammunition? Make it a short run through hazardous territory with ground AoEs, maybe some light jumping challenges, etc. The twist is that the ammunition for the turrets/mortars is highly volatile, taking any damage or entering combat will cause it to explode.

Each successful delivery adds some stacks of ammo to a turret, and the turrets display via the raising of a flag or somesuch what their ammo level is so the runners can easily determine which turrets need ammo.

As the fight progresses, Shatterer will create more obstacles allong the ammo run path, destroy ammo stores creatin small escort sub-events to set up now ones, and even create fissues that make players need to pass ammunition over a chasm or something, kinda like really high stakes keg brawl.

Good ideas, though. On paper, I’ve got a small plan:
-What if every boss’ difficulty is adjusted to match Teq’s?
-Then keep the same rewards?
-Then make them spawn at the same time?
People should split between the content and do whatever they like the most → 1. Less overflows – 2. More epic fights with dragons (they are DRAGONS, not butterflies; they should be epic, like Teq) – 3. Scaling of bosses should be taken into account if instead of ~200 participants, there will be between 50-100-150 per fight.

However, it’s just a plan on paper :P

Firstly and foremost, you need to stay within the capabilities of the game engine.
- Keep in mind, Teq is really just a big King Toad. His foot-stomp is a wave that’s almost exactly the same

Adding specific inflictions like the branding will likely simply not work, because it is not written into the game engine to handle that kind of player interaction. You might be able to have a ‘flying’ craft of some kind, but it will also likely need to be stationary. That many moving characters in the air, with that many players below would likely cause havoc in the physics engine (pun intended..).

What I would expect is something like a Phase-X where Shatterer takes flight, and strafes the entire battle field, causing something like a ‘wave of crystal bombardment AoE’. Think: once he takes off, circles and comes back you will see the battlefield lit up with row-after-row of red AoE circles, which a few seconds later are impacted by giant crystals.
Completely plausible within the current game engine, and a boss-appropriate effect, with Crystals also being the motif.

Next you could go with something cooler – think of what was happening in the Queen’s Gauntlet fights.
If it were something like the ooze.. and my word that would be hilarious.. each time he takes some damage, he gets slightly smaller :P
Or an effect like the whirlwinds would be interesting – have him spawn a dozen random-moving whirlwinds that throw the players around, particularly in those places where we currently stand for safety.

Basically there’s a lot that they could do, but it needs to be related to a game mechanic we currently have too, albeit on a much grander scale.

My Ideas:
*Crystal Eruption: An AoE attack that locks everyone caught in it in one of the dragons crystals.
*Crystal Shatter: An attack that targets a player (so it will display over their head). It only targets players frozen in crystals, and if it hits them, it frees them, but is a one-hit kill. It is done as fall damage so that you are sent right to the defeated state. If you are freed before it hits you, your a simply knocked down and take damage.
*Stomp: Similar to Tequatl’s stomp, but it is an AoE attack and has very high knockback. Cannot be dodged or jumped over.

I really like the labyrinth idea.

I’d love to see him flap launch players under his wings when he flaps them.

Personally, I think the same dragon should attack in more than one zone and occur randomly both in time and location (to foil the people who watch timers and such).