Buff The World Bosses

[Khisanth.2948]

On 10/4/2022 at 9:03 AM, LSD.4673 said:

Ley line anomaly used to run around the map.

A large part of that was also because people absolutely sucked at CC.

On 10/4/2022 at 9:03 AM, LSD.4673 said:

Claw used to...well, take ages with people slowly succumbing to the ice and being ressed.

That was not an issue even on an ele using full berserker.

It also went very quickly for a relatively short while when you can speedrun World Bosses via guesting and timers.

On 10/4/2022 at 9:58 AM, Einsof.1457 said:

I'd love if world bosses had more mechanics that required communication and coordination and had risk of failing. Loot pinatas are boring

Loot pinatas are better than HP sponges.

42 minutes ago, Morvran.8265 said:

Loved the shatterer

Sounds like you haven't done shatterer in a while. It is more or less back to giving Shatterer a manicure.

[Einsof.1457]

2 hours ago, Khisanth.2948 said:

A large part of that was also because people absolutely sucked at CC.

That was not an issue even on an ele using full berserker.

It also went very quickly for a relatively short while when you can speedrun World Bosses via guesting and timers.

Loot pinatas are better than HP sponges.

Sounds like you haven't done shatterer in a while. It is more or less back to giving Shatterer a manicure.

I didn't suggest hp sponges. Read again. 

[xivor.8754]

I stopped doing world bosses because the power creep made the bosses less of a challenge.  When Tequatl was revamped, I remember having to coordinate via TS (TTS or EG guild anyone?) to get good, complete raids.  I used to run it with EG back in the day, and their coordinated runs were top notch. I want open world bosses to feel like open world RAIDS.  And have rewards that match the challenge.

But, expansions and skill reworks have made huge DPS gains and the bosses (including Teq) did not get balanced to keep up in the DPS race. In my opinion, a battle of mechanics > a battle of DPS.  If I can auto-attack a boss with a guardian scepter and not have to do any other movement, then the encounter is not worth my time.  And any encounter that is that easy is not worth improving the drops on neither, because the required effort does not need any higher reward than what is already there.

Anet, please consider reworking the world bosses, and by doing so, consider enhancing the mechanics instead of just increasing HP. 

[Mell.4873]

I have suggested this in other threads but a CM mode for most Open World events that are triggered by pre-events participation.

Edited October 6, 2022 by Mell.4873

[ruikarikun.9402]

On 10/4/2022 at 1:42 PM, vegan.4329 said:

The title says it all. With all the new players these Wold Bosses melt all too quickly. 

Nerf the World Bosses.

[Astralporing.1957]

11 hours ago, xivor.8754 said:

I stopped doing world bosses because the power creep made the bosses less of a challenge.  When Tequatl was revamped, I remember having to coordinate via TS (TTS or EG guild anyone?) to get good, complete raids.  I used to run it with EG back in the day, and their coordinated runs were top notch. I want open world bosses to feel like open world RAIDS.  And have rewards that match the challenge.

But, expansions and skill reworks have made huge DPS gains and the bosses (including Teq) did not get balanced to keep up in the DPS race.

Teq went down from rarely being done highly coordinated affair to a popular boss on farm in less than half a year, and the only balance issue that affected that was the condition damage rework. Most of the reasons behind that change was caused by actual, targeted nerfs to that boss (especially the megalaser change). In the years since that, power creep didn't actually change all that much about that encounter at all.

Triple Trouble did not get any adjustments, and it's also still around the same difficulty as originally (as well as being the same level of unpopular).

11 hours ago, xivor.8754 said:

In my opinion, a battle of mechanics > a battle of DPS.  If I can auto-attack a boss with a guardian scepter and not have to do any other movement, then the encounter is not worth my time.  And any encounter that is that easy is not worth improving the drops on neither, because the required effort does not need any higher reward than what is already there.

Anet, please consider reworking the world bosses, and by doing so, consider enhancing the mechanics instead of just increasing HP. 

Unfortunately, when Anet hears that, what they end up doing is either just pump up HPs, or add mechanics that directly reduce dps (like Shadow Behemoth raising its hitbox up above the 1200 range for half of the dps phase), creating an indirect HP buff to that same effect. Fun mechanics that force player enagement without turning the battle into a long and annoying (or flat out boring) slog are extremely rare nowadays.

Edited October 6, 2022 by Astralporing.1957

[Garrison Storm.3046]

Whatever the solution, the fifty seconds it took a dozen or so turtles to take down the Claw of Jormag this morning was... is ridiculous too strong a word?  ... and that's including the 5 seconds or so it takes to move from the initial landing spot to the other!  I mean c'mon, this is an 80 level zone... How is this promoting the game to the wave of new users?  A moment of silence for the Claw....    

[Epsilon Indi.2031]

On 10/4/2022 at 6:40 AM, SinisterSlay.6973 said:

Teq could use a few new mechanics.

After the first 25% the win is almost guaranteed.

 

 

Teq just needs enough HP to not melt between cc phase and next phase.

[Astralporing.1957]

8 hours ago, Sir Alymer.3406 said:

Teq just needs enough HP to not melt between cc phase and next phase.

That one feature is the exact difference between an empty Teq instance, and it being a popular one. It started getting popular only after the megalaser change made burn-to-burn strat achievable by normal pugs. If we were to make it impossible once again, the event would empty overnight.

[Astralporing.1957]

On 10/4/2022 at 5:22 PM, Sobx.1758 said:

What "actual class"? The problem with power creep isn't a problem with "a class".

Indeed. It's an issue (how big is still a matter of discussion, btw) only with specific builds at best. And it mostly happens with PoF and EoD especs - there's no core class that overperforms, and HoT especs for the most part are also within reasonable limits (with maybe condi daredevil being an outlier here, but that benchmark is mostly theoretical and it's not a build a lot of players even bothers using anyway). Neither are all PoF and EoD espec builds overperforming. Which, against, points out that it's not a general problem, but at best a bunch of build-specific ones.

Edited October 7, 2022 by Astralporing.1957

[Sobx.1758]

3 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Indeed. It's an issue (how big is still a matter of discussion, btw) only with specific builds at best. And it mostly happens with PoF and EoD especs - there's no core class that overperforms, and HoT especs for the most part are also within reasonable limits (with maybe condi daredevil being an outlier here, but that benchmark is mostly theoretical and it's not a build a lot of players even bothers using anyway). Neither are all PoF and EoD espec builds overperforming. Which, against, points out that it's not a general problem, but at best a bunch of build-specific ones.

Nobody said anything about benchmarks, world bosses getting melted isn't the case of "benchmark that's mostly theoretical".

[evlover.6270]

I agree with OP that something needs to be done about a lot of bosses, but it depends on what he means with "buffing". If he just means straight up giving them more vitality/toughness, I disagree. If he means adding mechanics/invulnerability phases that force people to move instead of stacking on a hit dummy, I agree.

It's a complicated problem that's not caused by 1 issue but multiple issues that add on and aren't really revertible anymore since newer content is based on the newer (higher) dps/healing/boon application.

Reworking and buffing the base damage from a lot of basic weapon skills has improved the dps from the "low dps people". During world bosses, most of the times it's 5-10 people doing most of the damage and the rest just doing a few k each. But if all those few k people get 1-2k extra, it adds up to a lot of extra dps even though by themselves, it doesn't look like much. 

On top of that, the benchmarks of all the profs have gone completely overboard so those that do the majority of dps, do more dps as well. Back in the day staff ele got nerfed completely into the ground cause it outdps'd everything else like rifle mech has done the past month before the minor nerf this Tuesday, but staff ele at it's prime wouldn't even be top 10 on the current benchmarks.

The third thing that adds on to everything, is the availability of boons. Before HoT, the only prof that had access to quickness, was mesmer with timewarp, a few secs of quickness on a 210 sec cooldown. Over the years that got adjusted to 180s and 120s, it perfectly shows the direction the game went: now we have quickness flying in from everywhere since any prof can grant not only self, but group quickness as well. Alacrity got added into the game and what started out as a unique chronomancer buff to speed up skill recharge by a few seconds, has resulted in any prof being able to apply group alacrity, reducing your skill cooldowns constantly. So now you just permanently attack 50% faster with quickness, and your big hitting skills are recharging 25% faster all the time as well. 

Fourth thing is that might and fury have become more accessible as well and there is no such thing as "bad might" anymore. Now might just gets prolonged while it is applied to you so once you get to 25 at the beginning, you pretty much keep 25 through the entire fight from occasional might application around you. Back in the day, you could only reapply might once it ran out. That's why Empower used to be considered "bad might" because even though it apply 12 stacks, it had a short duration and when it ran out you'd be at 13 stacks and you would need new might applications to get back to 25. Which is why smaller stacks with a long duration used to have more value as it was easier to maintain 20-25 might with constant 1-2 might applications instead of 12 stacks of might every 10 seconds. Point being: you weren't capped on might all the time, and with every might stack adding 30 power/condi, it's a huge difference. Same for fury, if you didn't have fury, you would miss out a lot of crits, now with the random fury applications everywhere, you can pretty much count on perma fury and not missing out on a single crit.

Fifth thing that adds into burning world bosses are newly introduced things that make new zones interesting, but which also work in all the old zones that weren't meant with those new things in mind. Examples:  United legions waystation that grants loads of fast cc, making it childs play to cc and break breakbars that were (very) hard to be broken before the waystation existed. If you wanted to break them in the past, people needed to play with their cc oriented weapons or take extra cc utilities at a cost of dps but now people can just go full dps, used their special action key and continue doing even more dps on the boss with exposed debuff.

Jade bot grants you a free rezz and gives you an instant teleport if you've set your waypoint, and if you do die, with mounts you're back at the boss in no time (especially with beetle) instead of having to run back so the dps loss of dying is considerably lower as well.

There's probably also other factors adding onto it like a bigger percentage of the players being "endgame" players now and carrying new people during the world boss fights etc, and the heavy healers/barrier applications keeping people alive while there used to be no dedicated healers or barrier at all but well, can't really decrease those since new content is based with the healing/barrier in mind.

 

The solution though, isn't "buffing" world bosses their vitality/toughness and making the fight last longer, cause that would just turn a 30 second hit dummy into a 2 minute hit dummy, you need mechanics or movement so they aren't stationary dummies. That's why I like the idea of what they did with the 4 core world bosses recently: it's not just an increase of hp, the mechanics force you to move or you get punished (though it's mostly svanir and wurm that became more interesting, behe is just shorter phases and more portals, and ele is just dancing around a bit). Same for EoD: not hiding behind junk pile in Echovalds = dead, not hiding at Soo Won or staying in tidal wave = dead. We can only hope that they keep doing that for the other existing bosses. Maybe at jormag, they could do something that when you are on the top area behind the barrier, you get ported back in front of it and let the barrier only take damage from the charzookas. And in the second phase, make it invulnerable to damage other than the charzookas until you have forced it into its burn phase by getting some golems through. With DBS, make him completely invulnerable as long as a riftstalker is up just like normal shatterer during crystals phase. For tequatl, they could decrease the time tequatl is in his vulnerable burnphase after being hit by the megalaser. Now it takes 5x damage for 30 seconds so that's easy to mess around with. They could make it 2x for 30 seconds, 5x for 10 seconds etc.. They have the numbers of damage people do so just anything that would let people burn like 10-15% would be ideal so that people would still need to do the remaining 10-15% to the next phase in the tequatl his normal mode and making straight burns (nearly) impossible. And maybe make the finger poison ticks a bit deadlier.

That way people would have to do the original mechanics again: destroy the wall at jormag and escort golems through, move and kill riftstalkers at DBS to continue the fight, and keep jumping waves, using the turrets and killing/avoiding fingers at tequatl in between phases. The same could be done for any other world boss that's struggling: just give people no other option than doing the mechanics as they were intended instead of burning straight through them. Force people to move, because making people spread out is the biggest dps loss there is as it makes them miss out on boons.

We can ask for quickness, alacrity and might to have less of an effect and decrease quickness from 50 to 25 attack speed, alac from 25 to 15 recharge and might from 30 extra pow/cond to 20 but those are things that won't happen anyway, so why bother asking for it as so many people above? Reworking/adjusting bosses is something they have shown to be willing to do in the past so that's what we should be asking for. Because adding mechanics and invulnerability phases to bosses are an easy way to force people to move and increase active participation. Decreasing dps across the board is something they won't do, since they have been doing the complete opposite for years: constantly lowering the bar for new people to make it even easier than it already was to get into the game. 

[Astralporing.1957]

2 hours ago, Sobx.1758 said:

Nobody said anything about benchmarks, world bosses getting melted isn't the case of "benchmark that's mostly theoretical".

No, it's not. First, "mostly theoretical" was just about one specific build, not all of them. Second, those bosses being melted is nothing new, they have been that way for many, many years. Some were being melted even back in core.

But yeah, most of the increase in world boss meta dps is due to:

1. (since PoF) introduction of builds that can very easily generate massive amount of boons and spread those around

2. (far more recently) mechs.

[DeanBB.4268]

Just so you know, it was the Shatterer doing the melting of the few people that showed up NA 6:30 AM PST. Timing has a lot to do with it. I was just there in the zone doing other things, hopped over to discover nobody was there, and went about my business until someone put out an "everyone come" call.

Nobody came.