Love for Sleuth Brawlfields

[Kris Knives.8513]

I really, really like Sleuth Brawlfields.  I've wanted a challenging event based arena since launch and the four challenging bear bosses are very fun to fight against.  Perhaps my favorite open world bosses in the game.  They feel fast, cool, dangerous and I love they actually have some personality.  Every-time I'm welcomed to  harvest den by Barbed Vale I get a thrill.  I really like the that they gave the bosses lots of personality both in what they say and how they fight. 

We've had some stuff like this in the past, Rhendak for example has a lot of personality with his crazed ranting as you kill him, but the Brawlfields really seems special.  I hope at some point in future we'll see some more of these sorts of bosses.  Their tight 10-minute event times, short cool down between events and relatively high diversity of events all combines to make the Brawlfields consistently fun.

I personally much prefer this sort of challenging PvE content to instanced content like strikes, convergences or raids (so far, maybe the new ones will change my mind) and feel like this is a step towards the sort of high level PvE content I'd like to see in the open world.  There is some cool stuff in instanced content and I get why some people love it, but the vibe there is always very different from PvE and I am never going to enjoy the whole process of lining up a whole group of 10 to 20 people as opposed to just jumping into the action and trying to push for victory.  Maybe it is just the bears reminding me of Voice and Claw but this felt a bit like that intense strike mission atmosphere in the open world content and I liked that so much more than the often repeated 2 arms and a head world boss design.  Heck Barbed Vale even has a second phases where things get real, something which feels often under employed in PvE.

I really hope this is a sign of things to come in future and would love to see this expanded upon.  Two features I'd particularly like to see somewhere down the line is a challenge arena or rare event where once killed you cannot re-enter a fight and second an escalation mechanic where a group trashes a boss a special more challenging foe appears similar to the Bandit Executioner.  Although the bubble mechanic is a bit awkward and would probably benefit from an update to something like the isolation mechanic when fighting your clone in the bastion of the obscure, I've always though the Executioners were a great mechanic.  As a new player the bandits were hard open world bosses I worked hard to over come and when I found out their was a secret legendary super bandit it was a thrill that sadly, has rarely been repeated in GW2.  I don't think all content needs to be challenge content, I love some of the chill parts of the Lowlands too, but I do think it would be nice if the same had some escalation mechanics beyond scaling.  I realize obviously such things will need to be few and far between as a special rarely seen bonus content isn't a efficient use of resources verse a normal event everyone will see and will pop-off every 3-5 times and hour but I think every once in a while would be welcome.  I've seen so many challenging and unique bosses flatted by overwhelming DPS when some event drives people back to old content that it would be nice if scaling to group size wasn't the only tool ever employed.

So kudos to the team for their excellent work on the Brawlfields, it is a jewel on one of the best maps in the game.  It really feels special and even if it is a one off I'm really glad it was added to the game, but if it is as popular with my fellow players as it is with me I hope similar spots were added elsewhere in Tyria.