Feedback on World Boss changes from July 19 update

[abc.4918]

[Nevermind, I just need a break.]

Edited September 29, 2022 by abc.4918

[Drarnor Kunoram.5180]

I have only fought and killed Svanir Shaman since the update, and while I like the new fight, the boss really needs his health cut by like, a third.  Its current length goes way past " enough time to learn the fight" into "how long can you keep repeating this before getting bored?"

[Dante.1508]

On 7/31/2022 at 4:46 AM, Adzekul.3104 said:

I finally had a chance to try the 4 updated, low-level World Boss fights today and thought I should give my feedback, since I have seen no threads on this topic.

Great Jungle Worm

I rather liked this one. It felt like the difficulty scaled rather well, and it was not too long a fight, even in an under-filled map. Call this a successful update. Probably my favourite of the 4.

Svanir Shaman Chief

This fight seemed to scale rather poorly at low population. On my map it took almost the full alloted time (1 minute left, maybe?) to get a kill and lots of (seemingly) newer players were struggling with it. There were no puzzling mechanics, but the hitpoint pool seemed to be absurd. Please consider if this needs to be further tuned. To call this my third favourite of 4 underscores for me how I did not really like these changes. I understand the desire to add mechanics that we will see in end-game and to increase the health pool, but it feels like it was buffed too much, at least for 20 people.

Fire Elemental

This seemed to scale well and was a decent fight. I am not sure I liked some of the meteors spawning behind us, out of sight, but most of them were obvious and avoidable. Might be worth considering the range on these. My second favourite of the 4.

Shadow Behemoth

Did not like this fight. It seemed to take forever to kill, even with what seemed to be a full map participating in the fight. The portal phases just seemed to make the fight super slow and boring. The new animations were puzzling, because the range is very different, and these just seemed to emphasize the annoyance of the difficult-to-see red circles in the shallow water. Overall, this was my least favourite of the 4. Please consider ways to make the red circles more visible and whether or not there are too many intermediate phases where we have to kill the portals. I mean, what do the portals actually do anyways, in a lore or role-play perspective? I am not certain what the point of these is.

Two cents respectfully submitted for discussion and review.

Adzekul

Shadow Behemoth is like a Nascar of players these days lol

[DemonAtTheWheel.1804]

So, rather than posting a snap judgement on the World Boss changes from July, I gave it about a month to sink in and really see what the changes brought to the table.

Overall, I think the changes were a net gain. Fire Elemental no longer dies in 25 seconds after a 12 minute pre. Jungle Wurm and Svanir Chief new mechanics are pretty enjoyable.

Shadow Behemoth though, is a hard fail. It is now about as hard as Tequatl, but since the fight gives pidgin crap for loot, people don't show up to fight about 1/2 the time. The massive increase in time it takes to kill also negatively impacted world boss trains as a non-perfect run on Shadow will kinda derail the train. If you are trying to kill off world boss fights, that is how you do it..... increase the difficulty to almost require a full map of semi-seasoned players, then give really poor loot for the trouble.

Really, all four of the re-worked fights SHOULD have gotten reworked loot drops as well.

[Linken.6345]

6 hours ago, DemonAtTheWheel.1804 said:

So, rather than posting a snap judgement on the World Boss changes from July, I gave it about a month to sink in and really see what the changes brought to the table.

Overall, I think the changes were a net gain. Fire Elemental no longer dies in 25 seconds after a 12 minute pre. Jungle Wurm and Svanir Chief new mechanics are pretty enjoyable.

Shadow Behemoth though, is a hard fail. It is now about as hard as Tequatl, but since the fight gives pidgin crap for loot, people don't show up to fight about 1/2 the time. The massive increase in time it takes to kill also negatively impacted world boss trains as a non-perfect run on Shadow will kinda derail the train. If you are trying to kill off world boss fights, that is how you do it..... increase the difficulty to almost require a full map of semi-seasoned players, then give really poor loot for the trouble.

Really, all four of the re-worked fights SHOULD have gotten reworked loot drops as well.

It did did it not you get 4 times the rewards now.

[Yaki.9563]

Shaman: Auto-attack, optionally dodge every 10 seconds, repeat for 8 minutes. Boring. Double his damage output and decrease his hp by half. You should get 1 shot if you don't dodge the clearly indicated AE + charge move.

 

Fire Elemental: I like that you have to keep moving to avoid the roaming fire tornadoes. The meteor shock waves are pointless to avoid since they do so little damage. Has a reasonable amount of health. The pre-event takes too long.

 

Jungle Wurm: Almost perfect except that I realized you can't fail. The elite husks don't need to be killed because once he eats the 4 you just beat him down and he never summons more. I suggest reducing the max number of husks to 3 (so 1, 2, 3 progression) and making it so he summons them at the 75%, 50%, 25% health marks regardless of whether he summoned them already. So if he heals, you get to try the husks again. And again. And again if you can't figure out how to break defiance bars.

 

Shadow Behemoth: It's like a less interesting Jungle Wurm. Instead of husks you have portals which require nothing more than beating on them. Also a more annoying main phase because he raises up out of melee range half the time. I would improve this boss by having portals spawn continuously and the adds from the portals move to defend the SB. At the moment it feels like we have to kill the portals only because he becomes immune, not because they actually do anything.

 

Another observation about JW and SB is that the adds are...pointless. Particularly for SB, you ignore the adds and just kill the portals and they don't do anything.

 

Interestingly, you can do some or all of these bosses with less than 5 people. Did the Shaman easily with less than 5 random people and it took the same amount of time as with 50 people. Tried the FE with less than 5 but one guy lay there dead the whole time and our dps probably stunk so we only got him to 50%.

Edited August 17, 2022 by Yaki.9563

[MajinSoul.4512]

I definitely agree on Shadow Behemoth. The fight itself isn't too different except they increased its health way too much and now the fight feels like a massive drag with no increase in rewards. The boss fight went from "oh it's up, might aswell join it for a quick fight" to "I won't bother with this".

 

Jungle Wurm is a nice overhaul and teaches new players about CC.

 

Fire Elemental was also okay but it felt a bit hectic at times with all the AOE fields.

 

I haven't tried Shaman yet so I can't comment on it.