Guild Wars 2

What i’d really like in this game is a keybind that would always target the target most in front of you. I know the tab targetting sort of does this, but it picks the wrong target way too often (because it’s designed to cycle through everything on the screen). What i’m talking about is a keybind just to pick the target in front of you, for quick precision targeting.

So lets say i bind this key to tab, if i see some mob or player casting a powerful spell or heal, i can simply turn towards them, hit tab and shoot an interrupt at them as one quick action. The game is not going to randomly pick some other target and succeeding at this is purely based on my own skill. With the current tab targeting however, i turn at the mob/player casting the skill, hit tab, spend a second confirming the game targeted him and not something else, possibly hit tab some more to target him, and then finally shoot my interrupt late. This is based too much on luck.

If you want to take it a bit further, you could make it so as long as you keep the button pushed down, the game would keep targetting the target in front of you as you move your camera around, maybe even show a small target reticle in front of you like they have in TERA to indicate the spot you need to line the mobs on. While holding the button down you could move your camera around and shoot different skills on different targets.

It’d also propably make targeting with this easier if it valued the X-axis more than the Y-axis, so you’d always only need to move your camera left or right to get the right target, unless the mobs are in a straight line in front of you. It’d also propably need to value players higher than pets in pvp.

What do you guys think? I think the game would be more fun if targeting had only to do with your own skill and it’d make a big difference in pvp.

Anet should just make it so rolling short fractals would give you a higher chance to get long fractals later and visa versa.

Give every fractal a value representing their length and the game would roll the fractals so that the added value of your 3 fractals is always in a certain range. They could even do away with the 1st 2nd and 3rd tiers they have now.

If you rolled swamp first, you’d have a high chance to get dredge later, and if you happened to roll colossus first instead, you would get shorter fractals later and could be sure not to get dredge.

It’s funny because this is how i thought Anet was going to do this when they were explaining it pre-fractured patch.

If there are to be some new karma sinks, i think it’d be nicer if they added some expensive cool stuff like titles, glows, fun items like the halo and watchwork transformation potion that people could save up for. Maybe even a karma dye.

Also if they add things like fishing or housing which are sometimes talked about, they could sell some stuff for those for karma.

A legendary made entirely out of karma could also be cool, like an amulet or something. It isn’t that bad to have legendaries made in different ways.

Selling stuff like t6 mats or the like is a stupid idea in my books, as all it would serve for is transforming karma into gold, which you can already do. Black Lion keys are also unrealistic since that’s what the game makes it’s money from lol.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Sorry, but I need to disagree here. Scaling down Elite Content comes with various problems. What do you get when you have a boss whose HP can range between two points (i.e. 10,000 HP and 100,000 HP)? You get bugs with scaling, leading to over easy kills.

Plus, what’s the use of getting together 100+ people for a Raid, when you can do it with 15? Anet made these events with the intent of getting players to group up to overcome the challenge together. By allowing smaller groups to form, you would never have a guild like TTS. Servers would all have their segregated guilds running the Wurm. And then, as I said before, you turn what should have been Elite Content, into another Claw of Jormag.

I don’t mind if the scaling was minor, say a difference around 80%. So instead of having 150 people, you could do it with 120. As of now, the scaling might be a bit more than that.

So Elite Content must remain as it is. The barriers to success have to be artificially high, because it wasn’t meant for “everyone”.

But Tequatl already scales. If you’ve ever gone to one of those empty attempts and shot around a little you should have noticed how the fingers die really easily and the bonewall doesn’t have much health. I can solo those bonewalls in maybe 10 seconds on my staff ele.

It’d be interesting to see if some 20 experienced people went on an empty server and had a low people attempt. Just ignore the turrets and kill the wall like when teq bugs these days.

The reason why people don’t bother with Teq and Wurm is since you get nothing unless you win.

The 75% reward for tequatl is crap compared to what you get from other world bosses and it takes a lot more effort to reach. If you even manage to reach 75% hp with 4 minutes left, you will propably kill Teq.

Just “showing up” and trying teq is guaranteed to get you nothing at all. This is why only the few who can get a sure kill bother even doing it.

Wurm is even worse, since trying to go for the Silver or Gold chests means that you will likely not even get Bronze, and the loot from all 3 are still huge crap compared to even Shadow Behemoth (hardest boss ever).

If Teq gave similar daily rewards as the other WB’s just for killing it partway, it could be done regularly just like the other world bosses. People could come for the easy to reach regular reward and then try to aim for the harder to reach better rewards. It would cater to both the casuals and the hardcore.

Proposal Overview
Have 3 different levels of agony.

Goal of Proposal
Agony needs to provide a real challenge when you do higher levels without enough AR, but the way it just gets forced on you right now isn’t the right way.

Proposal Functionality
The current agony condition would be divided into 3 different agonies:

-Strong Agony: This is the one we have right now and it would stay pretty much the same. A high damage condition applied from telegraphed strong boss attacks.

-Medium Agony: Same functionality strong agony, but it wouldn’t apply the 50% healing reduction and would need 10 less agony resistance to negate than the strong agony. This would be applied by normal boss attacks and even by some stronger attacks from the trash and minibosses.

-Weak Agony: Would need 20 less AR than the Strong agony and no healing reduction. All the attacks not already aplying the other 2 agonies would do this. If you lack the agony resistance to even block this, you need to be a real wizard to win fights.

So in reality, if you were doing fractal 49 with 45 agony resistance you would still take some agony damage from boss attacks and need to pay attention to them, but otherwise you wouldn’t be bothered by agony.
If you did the same level with 35 AR however, the boss attacks would already be hitting you really hard with agony, and you’d need to be able to dodge even the smaller and harder to dodge attacks. Not impossible but definitely hard.
Trying to do 49 with 25 AR the boss attacks would already be fatal, the medium agony hits would take most of your health and even normal trash hits would be hitting real hard because of the agony. Still not impossible to beat in theory, but even most of the pro players would crumble at this. Would get even crazier when the small agony is enough to 1hit you

Associated Risks
It’d propably get pretty annoying to see the small agony and medium agony spammed on you even with enough AR to negate those. Would need to have the game not apply agony on you if you have enough AR.

Also Toughness and Vitality would become useless at higher levels when most of the damage you take is from agony, which ignores both. Maybe agony would need to start doing a set amount of damage and getting reduced by armor.

The World Bosses in this game are fun and engaging with ~5-20 people but as soon as you slap more players against them they just turn into punching bags unable to fight back. These bosses are supposed to scale with the amount of players but the difference is so apparent anyone can see it.

All of this becomes even more apparent in the harder encounters like the Karka Queen or the Halloween Labyrinth bosses where the tactic for success has always been “get more people”, just because the scaling can’t keep up. Even the 3 big bosses (teq, mari, wurm) scale poorly enough, so that most people won’t even bother trying them with “only” 80 people.

In this thread i’ll try to list all the major reasons i’ve found for this bad scaling:
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1)AoE caps
I was in disbelief when i first noticed this but yeah it’s true:
Many boss attacks only hit 5 players max.
Good examples of this would be the jump attack from The Karka Queen or pretty much everything from The Risen High Wizard. It’s silly how we can just stack in the High Wizard’s whirlwind while it only hits some guys in front. This is the major reason for the effect you often see where a boss just gets buried under a zerg.

Bottomline: if a boss does an attack and you stand in it, you should always get hit by it no matter how many other people are standing in it too.

There shouldn’t be any technical limitations to this either, since if 100 players can hit 1 boss without problems, this 1 boss should be able to hit the 100 players too. Not like 200 Champion Son of Svanir Shamans are going to log onto WvW and start spamming aoe on each other in a massive free for all.
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2)The scaling just stops
This is the most common problem with the Megaboss scaling. I’m aware that each event in the game has it’s own range of how many players it will scale for, and for most world bosses it seems to be ~5-50. This isn’t even near the typical map caps though, so often the bosses arent even scaled for the people there.

A great example of this was the Jungle Wurm (caleidon) when the megaboss rewards had just been buffed. The wurm only scaled for like 5 people and huge zergs often nuked it down before the event even started. Even now for most bosses you get situations where they die way faster than usual when you have a big zerg killing them.

I suspect even Tequatl is a victim of this. Originally anet stated that the encounter was designed for ~80 players but if you’ve ever tried it with less than a hundred you can tell that it dies a lot slower. I can bet that if you have a 150 players fighting teq, and 15 more join in, the boss is not going to gain any extra health. This is likely the reason the boss died earlier than anet expected too.

Bottomline: megabosses should always scale all the way up to the max players that can be in a map, especially the ones supposed to be a challenge. If you can get enough players to surpass the scaling of a hard boss, this will be the way it is killed, and very quickly this will become the “required” tactic. No one does Teq without a full map, even if it’s supposed to scale.
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3)Single Target Attacks
This is pretty similar to the aoe caps mentioned earlier, just more of a design issue.

Good examples are Ulgoth and Covington. Both have some aoe attacks but they aren’t really large or frequent enough to do much. The main threat of these guys is getting on their bad side and targeted by their high single target attacks, and if you can handle it, everyone else on the battlefield can just close their eyes and nuke. While quite challenging with small groups, both of these are just punching bags when met with a zerg.

I don’t think single target attacks really have much place on bosses meant to fight large amounts of players. They could use one occasionally for flavor, but it certainly can’t be the focus of the fight, and neither should it screw over smaller groups fighting the boss.
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4)Mechanics which a single player can handle for the whole zerg
Case to case stuff like blinds, reflects and bodyblocking attacks like the Jungle Wurm’s poison spread. The more people you have the more likely will someone handle this stuff for everyone else.
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5)Natural good sides of having a lot of people
More people is just naturally better. You have more revives, fields, conditions on the boss and while people die and waypoint the boss can just scale down a bit.

There are however downsides to big zergs too, like bad FPS, difficulty of organization and less space to move. Also as you’ve seen in the attack to LA, when you start scaling up the mob damage they really start destroying players and making it harder for more people. Big groups can have handicaps too but you can’t shy away from them.
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If Anyone has stuff to add or comments, please contribute. Scaling should get fixed!

Top 3:

1. More new mechanics (like interrupts!) getting added to the fractals and bosses as you keep getting to higher levels.

2. Agony should get reworked so it’s neither a totally unavoidable gearcheck nor does it affect only such a small part of the fractal that it can be totally avoided and ignored. Optionally it could just get removed.

3. Some less randomity in the levels high up if you ever want fractal progression to be competitive. Otherwise competetitive progression is going to detoriate into rolling until you get only easy fractals, which is neither fun nor cool.

Let me clarify this a bit.

I did a late-night attempt on the wurms now, with only ~12 people at Cobalt and found the eggs similarly easy to kill for the whole fight as i had found when they strangely weakened on other attempts. I could sometimes kill 2 by myself before they hatched.

This sort of proves that the wurm does indeed scale for the amount of players fighting it (atleast up to a certain number), and this scaling is pretty likely the source of this problem.

My guess is that the scaling is, for some reason, occasionally breaking and dropping the wurm’s max health to the minimum for a while, resulting in these huge overnukes. The health values seem the same and i don’t see the adds playing so big a role to cause such huge jumps in damage. I’ve even had “bad” nukes on the boss with 0 adds near him, and these big nukes seem really random.

It would be interesting to see how hard a group of 20 organized people could nuke a downscaled wurm. It definitely wouldn’t be as much of damage as the whole map can put out on these big nukes, but it might be enough to take the wurm down in 15min, when the people play it right.

Edit: I forgot to mention that i’ve also had high health eggs on a wurm with only me there and the rest of the zerg nuking a different wurm. The scaling definitely seems to be buggin both ways, or it’s designed to scale each wurm depending on the total of people on all wurms. Only when i did the late night attempt with barely any people in there did the mobs have low health continuously.

Earlier today we were doing the Wurm with the “zerg one wurm at a time” tactic on Seafarer’s Rest and the Cobalt Wurm seemed to drastically scale down in the middle of the fight.

First nuke phase we only managed to take 20% of his health down, but after that i noticed that the wurm eggs were dying way easier now.

After the first egg i simply thought i had gotten a lot of help from the other players, but when i proceeded to kill another egg (this time clearly alone) i noticed the case was actually the eggs having way less health now. I managed to kill the 2nd egg easily, even though i hadn’t been able to kill any eggs alone before the first nuke phase.

This made me guess that the wurm had weakened too, and i was proven right when we easily took his health down from ~80% to 5% in the next nuking phase, even with everyone yelling at each other to slow down and not daring to nuke properly.

I don’t know why this happened but i’m pretty sure this shouldn’t be intented. Any other similar experiences?

Buy gems, convert gems to gold, use said gold to level every crafting profession to 400 or more.

This used to get you to level 80 but i think it got broken when they upped some of professions to 500. It should get you atleast 60 levels.

You can also try just leveling in WvW. Twinked characters at certain level can be pretty effective even when upscaled, and if you like zerging anyways the zergs can just carry you most of the time.

I’m surprised none of you got this but the video was essentially about a group doing 2 sets of fractals in a row.

First set: Underwater, Snowblind, Volcano (even level)

Second set: Swamp, Ascalon, Colossus, Maw (odd level)

Also lol for not rolling swamp for both runs.

Saw that world 2 got nerfed and just popped in to say i appreciated the original version, while i do understand the nerfs.

I think games like SAB should always get harder the further up in it you get.

Unlike a typical game though, you can’t play through all of SAB in one sitting and instead only get 1 world every ~5 months. This is why i can totally understand the average player getting all excited for more of the SAB he remembers from world 1 and then getting destroyed when it’s actually harder than the first world. People are rusty, that’s part of the problem.

Luckily i managed to clear all the modes before the nerfs. I enjoyed this new patch of SAB and hope you guys can find a way to keep the difficulty ramp up without upsetting players for world 3! 2-3 was my favorite on TM. There were a lot less suprise spike deaths and more of hard platforming and iceskating.

Also like others have stated, these changes really shouldn’t reflect on Tribulation Mode which is supposed to be hard by design.

Reading this thread made me want to try this on an upscaled character.

http://imgur.com/hN2vmOT

Took me 5 tries, upscaling is fine if you gear the character up properly. The main problem with upscaled characters is that they’re all in random leveling gear while level 80 characters are most often in the best possible (or nearly) gear for their level.

If ungeared low level characters were upscaled to the power level of an 80 in exotics you could just imagine the kind of monsters geared up upscaled characters would be.