Guild Wars 2

Recently I was talking with some guildmates while doing Arah story mode (end of season 0) and we were talking about how underwhelming was the end to that story. Shoot the defenseless elder dragon with turrets until the health bar goes to zero? Epic.
I say that in contrast with the greatest battles from Season 1, like the Marionette one and the Prime Hologram one, which were much more difficult and interesting. These ones very much worked like raids…
Unless for the zerglings that stayed out of the fight just to get some “don’t get hit” achievement, and the autoattack ones of course.
In truth, Guild Wars 2 already had compelling raid content, but they can’t be as compelling because the working people have to compensate for any selfish person that gets into the same instance as us. Even in Boss Blitz, people spend hours trying to get into a “gold blitz”, and when they enter, they see the people standing in the main circle AFK.
Considering is the wish of the developers to make the season 1 content available to replay, I think that one of the ways to do it without removing the grandeur of boss battles like the Marionette and Prime Hologram is to make them available to start by a commander.
Here’s how I imagine it:

A raid would have up to 60 people (magic number: 12 parties that can be divided in a number of ways)
A commander would have an interface in which he/she would choose people to be its liutenants. There could be from 2 to 6 liutenants. Each liutenant would lead a squad made of 6 to 2 groups, inverse to the number of liutenants. Each amount of squads would be adequate for a type of challenge.

2 squads: Some guild missions
3 squads: Scarlet knights or Great Jungle Wurm (if downscaled)
4 squads: Marionette (with adaptations)
6 squads: Boss Blitz, and probably Tequatl

As soon as the commander’s army is organized, the commander would start the event, that would transport everybody into an instance exclusive to the army.
If people were kicked from a party (or left it), they would be sent out of the instance, allowing for LFGs to be placed to replace the person.

Continuing the theme of hierarchy, the commander would be able to set the rule for kicking people from parties in the raid interface:
- Party voting (the way it is now)
- Decided by party leader
- Escalated to squad leader
- Escalated by the commander himself

When trying to kick someone, it could show a drop down with common reasons:
- AFK
- Staying dead instead of waypointing
- Doing things unrelated with objective (like the heirloom collectors from escape from LA)
- Insubordination (not following instructions from leaders)

While the current LS chapter is active, creating a specific instance would be merely optional for people that wished to do it with their trusted comrades, and there would still be a “main” instance like the Tower of Nightmares had.
In this instance, any person would be able to play as selfishly they wished without fear of kicking.
But, after that chapter ran its course, instancing would be the only way to access the raid-sized content.

Since Guild Wars 2 already does scale events with number of people, some content could have a variable instead of fixed range (for example: Great Jungle Worm could go from 40 to 60), but the rewards could be higher if you did it with less people since there are less people backups.

Well, that’s it. The post is already too long, and the developers may already be planning something like this, unless they want all great boss battles on Season 2 to be played by 5 people at most.
What do you think?

i too kind of find it annoying that the end boss that was advertised across the internet and beyond was little more than turret fodder. now i’m waiting over 2 living story seasons to see what happens next in the story. for me, almost all of the living story content can be labeled ‘interlude’, until the next actual part of the story comes out, the next dragon resurfacing. if it resurfaces. something needs to be done about the rebuilding of Orr too.

I actually think this is a very decent Idea that anet should, or is considering. But either way it would not be implemented for a least a year for now so dont get to excited.

Don’t know why this was moved to living world. I focused my title on it but the suggestion is generic to all “more-than-5 people” content in the game…

I’d much rather see ANet bring in FoW/UW/Urgoz’s Warren/The Deep/DoA. They were GW’s version of Raids and were much betterthan any Raid I ever did in other games. I’d say make them 8-10 man Elite Dungeons.

If there is one thing they learned it is the huge boss encounters. They continually increased the complexity and mechanics of the boss encounters.

The vanilla bosses are all pretty lame and boring (with a handful of exceptions). Encounters like Zhaitan is clearly rushed be cause they wanted to release the game before the Pandas. Also, they didn’t have so much player feedback. Also, they learned how to make the encounters more interesting.

Hence I think the new encounters will be more interesting for sure. I am not sure about big encounters. I still hope for a kind of instanced Raid so we can have organized groups (a Guild owned Open World map would work wonders…)

I hope that they continue investing in big encounters for season 2, because the change in scale from season 0 to season 1 already makes it seem like Scarlet (a tech-aided dragon “champion” at best) is more powerful than Zaithan (an elder dragon!). If season 2 goes back to groups, well, whatever elder dragon we battle now would be less powerful than Scarlet?

I’d agree to raid-style content, as long as it had LESS than 15 people in it.
All this open world trash is coming out of my ears… it all feels buggy, boring and not at all like I’m in the middle of a devastating event with grave consequences.

Rather, the contrary, it feels like I’m spamming skills at a badly designed boss that is face-tanking 50+ people who are also spamming random skills.

This debate has been going on since before launch.

On one side, there’s open-world raids, such as: Tequatl, Wurm, etc.

On the other side, there’s instanced dungeons, such as Fractals.

Anet countered the zerg mechanics, by changing Tequatl, and giving us Wurm. The big problem though, is, that it requires coordination on the spot, with a timer counting down.

Trying to get people to organize with a timer, without voice chat, without leaders, is almost impossible. Wurm, Tequatl, Boss Blitz prove this. Sure, it can be done, and it has been done, but this isn’t the norm.

All they have to do is get rid of the timer, and it would be much more enjoyable, and it would give the unorganized public a fighting chance to organize.

nexxe.7081:

This debate has been going on since before launch.

On one side, there’s open-world raids, such as: Tequatl, Wurm, etc.

On the other side, there’s instanced dungeons, such as Fractals.

Anet countered the zerg mechanics, by changing Tequatl, and giving us Wurm. The big problem though, is, that it requires coordination on the spot, with a timer counting down.

Trying to get people to organize with a timer, without voice chat, without leaders, is almost impossible. Wurm, Tequatl, Boss Blitz prove this. Sure, it can be done, and it has been done, but this isn’t the norm.

All they have to do is get rid of the timer, and it would be much more enjoyable, and it would give the unorganized public a fighting chance to organize.

Where’s the fun in that?
There wouldn’t be any challenge left for those who actually likes that.