Samarin

Levistis, on 08 January 2013 - 12:20 AM, said:

There are a few core design problems with a lot of the bosses in the game. I'm gonna try to as clearly as I can put into words what I feel is currently wrong with a lot of these encounters.

1. Pacing. This is one of the biggest issues right now and I personally feel this is one of ArenaNets biggest weaknesses when it comes to the overall game design. If a boss does not require any meaningful coordination or strategy it CAN NOT take 15 minutes to finish the fight. Chopping at a HP tree for 15 minutes without any other meaningful interaction going on is not okay. These encounters (I'm looking at you Jellyfish/Norn Shaman/Moss Man/Roothunger and so on and so forth) are gear checks to see if you have the neccesery agony. The fights themselves are way to long and the length can not be justified by any meaningful game mechanic that would make the fight interesting.

2.Risk/Reward. This one sorta goes hand in hand with above paragraph. There needs to be a greater risk, and a greater reward in all boss encounters in the entire game. Let me explain, I don't mean we need better loot. I mean that the fights needs to have serious consequences for messing up, such as failing a boss fight X amounts of times needs to kick you out of the dungeon and force you to start over. There absolutely has to be a sense of urgency, a sense of real risk. Graveyard rushing is a lame ass tactic that should never have been allowed into the game because it significantly trivializes the risks and thus it significantly trivializes the content. Remember DoA? Remember UW? Remember FoW? You had to pay money to go in, and if you wiped you had to start over as well as lose the money.

Likewise performing well as a group needs to be rewarded, you need to be able to tackle and complete an encounter faster with a great group, if your group is only decent then it should be punished by having the fight drag on. A fight dragging on should be a sign of your group not performing as well as it should.

3. Increase the difficulty, A LOT. No ArenaNet, I did not say give the boss a bigger HP pool. Dear lord, it's like this is the only way they can possibly conceive of when trying to make a hard encounter. Remember when DoA was introduced and it took like 3 months before the first guilds managed to defeat Mallyx? Yea sure that fight took a while, but it sure as hell wasn't meaningless combat. You needed to perform incredibly specific tasks at the right times, coordinate your team in the right ways with the right builds executed correctly to beat this guy. Yea the fight took a while, but it consisted of much much more then hacking away at a enormous HP bar. The fight had pacing, and the length of the battle was justified by the mechanics as well as the skill needed by the players to complete the fight.

4. Rewards. Yes, now I am talking about loot. Seriously, make the final dungeon bosses have small, but attainable, chance to drop a precursor. Lets get those prices down to a acceptable level and lets give players some incentive to run these dungeons after they've gotten the dungeon armor they want.

5. Mechanics. Lets face it, a lot of the mechanics of the boss fights are not that interesting. Most of them do not encourage the players to take on a particular role, most of them do not encourage the player to coordinate in any meaningful way and it does not encourage them to preper or strategies before hand.


Final words:
Lieutenant Kholer is a example of a good boss fight that takes too long. Imagine if it took 5 minutes for a great group to get him down instead of the 10-15 minutes it currently takes a awesome group to get him down. Imagine that he did the same things he do now, only slightly more frequently. Imagine that if you wiped at him 3 times in a row you had to restart the entire dungeon. And imagine he had a chance to drop a skin that only he drops in the entire game. I would now consider this a totally good Boss encounter.

Of course I don't want all of them to be the same. Give us some variation, give us some tiered fights with multiple ways to complete it. Give us a bundle that grants buffs that allow a boss to be damaged and have one person fulfill a role during that fight, like the hammer in the cliffside fractal (the hammer is a great mechanic, the fractal however lacks pacing and drags on for far too long.) Have another person fulfill another role, perhaps that of distracting the boss in some sort of golem suit. And if he doesn't do it well the Boss can easily wipe the entire team. All in all the fight could take no more then 5 minutes if executed correctly.

Hey I'm not a game designer, I'm just coming up with random shit here. But please, force us to communicate, force us to strategies, force us to put our heads together and coordinate in a meaningful way.

This is what I want.

Before fixing anything, let's quickly identify the core problems with GW2's PvE today. And by "PvE", I mean only the open-world PvE here, not personal story or dungeons.

So, the problems:
- The world is dead. Other than cursed shore, the dragons, and lion's arch, it's largely empty.
- "Dynamic" events are hardly dynamic, as we were led to believe.
- The reward structure is really, really bad. This is actually the main reason for the first problem.

...aaand now how to fix all this, starting with the pre-requisites and moving on to more complex changes:

1. Better event scaling. Currently events don't scale well for large number of players (10+). You just get more mobs in pre-set spawn points that get aoed down just as easily. Anyone who's spent 30 minutes in Cursed Shore knows this. Some improvements were made in this regard compared to a few months ago, but it's very little. Events with more players around need to spawn veterans and champions and add additional spawn points, not just additional mobs. Basically, things that are not negated by AoE.

2. Iterative difficulty scaling for events. Most events never fail. Why not? Because they're too easy. Anet needs to add difficulty scaling that's not dependent on number of players, but based on the number of times the event was successfully completed previously (on top of number-of-players scaling in #1, not instead). Every event stats at difficulty 0 after a server reset. Each time it's completed successfully, the difficulty goes up by 1 point. 1 point of difficulty translates into 1 additional mob per wave, +3% mob health and damage, etc.

So instead of facerolling Shelter's Gate Camp for loot every 10 minutes, one day you might come there and get zerged by veteran spiders. Woah, what happened? Well, see, the last defense barely succeeded and turned the difficulty from 7 to 8. And they had more people than you did, so tough luck. But now that the event failed, the difficulty scale goes down by -3, so next time the event will be at difficulty 5. This system will calibrate itself to the average number of players in an area and add a huge amount of variety to the same events, while the +1/-3 system still ensures it succeeds most of the time. (The scale is hidden, so people don't intentionally avoid scaled-up events.)

3. More events. More, more, more. There are a handful of basic event "templates" in the game and 95% of all events fit in these: defend a point, assault a point, escort an npc, kill a boss, kill mobs until the bar gets to 0 (or 100%). I honestly don't see why anet isn't minting these like crazy. I highly doubt they take a lot of time to make, given that you already have all the components... just need to put the pieces together in a slightly different configuration in a different area. BAM, new event. Reduce the frequency of each individual event to keep the number of concurrent events the same, but increase the variety. I'm not asking here for a brand-new zone with brand-new armored crabs and a ton of scripting to be used one time and then abandoned. This would probably take far less work.

4. Balancing rewards. The base reward for completing an event is pitiful. 1.5 silver, some experience that you don't need at 80, and a bit of karma that's grossly outweighed by the daily jug. (The daily jug was a good idea, but it's just... difficult to outperform it. That's a different subject.) The bulk of the reward comes from the drops and drops from a single champion are much worse than from aoeing waves of mobs for 4 minutes. Most of the time the champion takes more effort too!

The second problem is the disparity between zones. Events in Orr are well-known (so everyone does the easy ones), highly populated and give max rewards for level 80. Events in every other zone are the complete opposite. To balance this:

- Normalize the silver/exp/karma rewards for lvl 80s throughout the world. Seriously, it's a tiny amount of money anyway and getting 1.5s or 0.9s won't really impact anything. All it does is make lower-level events look bad.
- Improve drops from champions. Duh. To avoid causing inflation, do not flat-out make them drop 15 silver, but simply add a chance for each champion to drop zone-specific items. Each zones or a group of zones could have things like unique armor sets and unique weapon skins. There are zone-unique weapon skins in the game currently, such as "Steam" weapons in Charr areas, but they're easily obtainable and thus can't serve as an incentive to go there.
- Also add tokens to champions. For X tokens from champions in Charr lands, you can buy a rare armor skin (that also drops only in this areas), but weapons can only be gotten as a drop. Something like that.

5. Worldwide and zone-wide event notifications. Another very simple addition, but once you've really made events dynamic (points #1 and #2), added more of them (#3), and gave the players a reason to go there (#4), tell people about them! Display all events happening in the zone on the map, with an option to toggle it off, and display MAJOR events happening in other zones on the world map, like Orr temple assaults, dragons, swamp monster in Queensdale, etc. People will see events and flock to them instead of wandering about empty zones alone or farming events in Cursed Shore as a zerg.

Also, display this next point in the corner of the screen (under your personal story) at all times:

6. Daily zones. Now we're getting into more ambitious things. It's time to really create a dynamic world. Each day 1 or 2 zones could become event hubs. Balefire means business today and made a pact with the ogres to attack Ebonhawke! The entire area turns into a warzone. You know, the Charr are really attacking. Basically, turn the area into Cursed Shore + difficulty scaling (#2).

Hearts are disabled (Farmer Joe doesn't really care about shooing away the gryphons from this cabbage when THE CHARR ARE ATTACKING). All regular events that fit the war theme are enabled with a majorly increased frequency (remember, we reduced it in #3 and increased the total number of events). There are additional events active: every outpost gets assaulted on a regular basis and after a successful defense, there are events to march out and take down a champ or recapture a lost outpost. Again, this is all just copy/paste stuff (#3). Optimize the templates and then make more events!

As a bonus, drops of zone-specific rewards are doubled for the day when that area is a warzone.

As a second bonus, if a critical number of events is failed during the day (this could be a rather high threshold), the zone is under Flame Legion's control for next 1-3 days, every waypoint is disabled, you still can't do hearts in it (Farmer Joe is dead, his head is on a spike, and so are the cabbage-loving gryphons), and after these 3 days, the map becomes a warzone for the day again. Same events are running with the aim of recapturing it. This time it can't fail.

7. Live GMs. All of the above would do a good job of making the world appear dynamic, as it was advertised in the beginning, but dedicated game-masters controlling the world would make it REALLY dynamic. Provided there's a good framework for creating events (#3), anet could expand it to create events out of pre-set pieces on the fly. Starcraft's map editor did it in 1999 by allowing you to create custom missions using building blocks already provided with the game, why can't we do it on a live server in 2013? This outpost is getting attacked by X waves, each one consisting of Y mobs for Z minutes. Oh and there's a dragon at the end, which I'm going to personally control and target people with it. Go!

A GM per server or even 1 GM per few servers could further spice up the "daily areas" and add an occasional special event to other places in the world. And once again, I don't mean "occasional" and "special" a la brand-new invisible precursor-dropping crabs that take months of development for one night of lag. No, "special", as in, there will be a unique event somewhere a few times per day that's not part of the game's default package. You know, something new.

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Well, that's pretty much it. A game like this would almost certainly keep me playing for years, paying a sub fee, and buying all the expansions. (Provided those expansions also expanded the above model).