It Feels bad when i can just ress rush Bosses.

joneirikb.7506 · July 25, 2018

Suggestion for ANet:

every new story boss you create: Add an area you respawn to when you die, that is within LOS but out of reach of the boss, where you can either jump back in and try again. Or use a giant ballista to 1shot the boss, but lose out on any rewards you might have gotten (until you beat it normally, incentive).

Purpose: Let people get through the story, but with no rewards.

Gehenna.3625 · July 25, 2018

@Algreg.3629 said:
@Gehenna.3625 said:
@Algreg.3629 said:
@Gehenna.3625 said:
@zealex.9410 said:
@"Magnus Godrik.5841" said:You do realize that by doing this people will rage on reddit and force anet to nerf the kitten out of it.

Doesnt that happen already?

Yeah and the thing is that an MMO has to cater to casuals and more hardcore players at the same time. This is their solution but it means that neither group is really happy with it. I mean it's pretty clear that this game's style of boss fights has to do with bosses littering the ground with stuff you have to dodge out of and not every player is quite that agile or interested in long fights of constant rolling around. I always like to picture a GW2 movie where you have a main encounter and the hero is just rolling around dodging stuff for 10 minutes and each hit barely seems to scratch the bad guy but then eventually many small hits make a big one and the bad guy dies. I think people would fall asleep and not be excited at the victory but rather relieved it's finally over.

Well, that's how it feels to me in game as well. To me the biggest problem is that the fights take so long because our attacks are puny and in a way it seems very implausible that you killed Dragons and a God while struggling to off some lieutenant. My fight against Balthazar was certainly a lot easier than some of the other fights. So overall, I just don't see the point in how they make the boss fights. I bet that the fights would be a lot more fun if the bosses had half the HP they did. Not because it's easier but because it's not such a drag to go through.

And yeah when you are new in a fight there often is a mechanic or two you have to figure out. I remember this fight in LS4 where the boss had a ton of defense so it wasn't dying a lot. Then I figured out what to do to summon this special add that you could damage and his health percentage will become the boss health %. Now, having raided a lot in other games, I could figure this out I guess. But because you're dancing around a lot and the special ability you got from killing other adds didn't seem to do much, it took me a while to summon that special add the first time. I just noticed that after he disappeared again that the boss had the same health percentage and then I figured it out. But I can imagine that for a lot of casual players this can be really hard to figure out and then this fight becomes an even longer fight.

Someone mentioned having a normal and hard mode version of these fights and I think that's a better solution. The baseline story experience shouldn't take forever and it should be pretty straightforward and then the hard mode is where people looking for a challenge can go. You could say that by killing the boss in story mode, you then unlock the instance for HM that you can go to at any time for the challenge for example.

I think though that people who are pretty good at gaming because they have the ability and experience often underestimate their ability and think everybody can do what they can because they feel it's simple. But speaking from my previous experience of raid leader, teaching players how to do boss fights, I've come to realize that in fact most people really struggle with things that you may think are simple but are actually a sign of your ability.

And I think the truth is that whereas gaming 20 years ago was a more specialized group of people who were up to the challenge, MMOs nowadays mostly attract more casual players who just love to walk around in a beautiful world and feel like a boss. GW2 delivers on the first for most people I'd say, but not so much on the second because a lot of people do struggle with the difficulty or the annoyance factors.

I agree on most of this, but not on the casual player "typology". If you have a brain and eyes, you can put the pieces together as much as some super raider. I think one of the problems is this game really conditions casual players into mindless activities by measure of rewards. When you see people with really low mastery scores and AP in the Istan farm e.g. asking questions that imply they have absolutely no idea about basic game concepts/mechanics, you know GW2s reward system really does its best to discourage people from improving - the mindless stuff is just too attractive. It seems people jump into the game, level to 80 and off they go to 24/7 mob farming. Queensdale champ train anyone?

Not all casuals are the same but I've seen in other games that my definition of an average casual players was set a lot higher than the reality. Now that doesn't mean all players are like that but there are a lot more players than you might think that really struggle or simply don't care about the specifics in combat. They just want to go in, whack around a bit and move on. And if that's fun for them that's cool too. I get that. In this game I also play as a casual though I admit that I find the approach to combat here a bit lazy in design and it bores me easily because even when it's challenging it tends to be challenging for the wrong reasons.

And I really think that your classification of "a brain and eyes" is simply overestimating a lot of people. I used to think like you by the way. I just learned that actually it takes more than that. But I do distinguish still between people who don't care because it's not for them and those who just can't figure things out or even when they do still struggle a great deal to get there. It may feel unkind to say it but the truth is that we have a tendency to underestimate our own abilities when we do have them. You'd be surprised how many people struggle boiling an egg. You'd think that having a brain and eyes should do the trick...but it doesn't. And some can learn if they want and others can't. But bottom line is that people should not make assumptions about the level or ability of others because you tend to create those assumptions based on what you find easy yourself. I mean, in a way I wish you were right but in the last decade or so I just started noticing more and more people struggling with things I found easy to do and I just had to rethink my way of looking at things.

I have this feeling that the type of people MMOs like this attract are less and less the hardcore players and more and more the casual players, who want things to be simpler either cause it's their level or they don't want the hassle of difficult or long fights. And that is ultimately my point as well. I find the combat uninteresting in this game to really get in depth into it. No matter what class you play you can be ranged or melee DPS basically and dodging is key to every single fight...which is the same for every class. And every boss fight of some sort has lots of circles on the floor to jump out of. I get that some people like that but at some point it just feels like they just add more of those circles or shapes on the ground and faster and give the bosses loads of HP or defense to slow you down. That's an endurance test for your patience and fingers more than an interesting fight to me. And I can't blame people who struggle with that or find it boring. But ok, it's my view and nobody has to agree with me as I said before.

I cannot agree on that, I have a fairly high opinion of human abilities in general, we are problem solvers by nature.

You don't have to agree but this sounds more like delusion than reality to me. A lot of people are problem solvers in the sense of avoiding or dodging problems or diverting them to someone else. Just like water we tend to find the easiest way and this is why when there are bosses where you can attack, die and ress, some people will do exactly that. I fear you are victim to the common problem that indeed we mirror ourselves onto the world as if we are the template for mankind, but when you actually look around then there comes a point that you can't escape the conclusion that although we have brains that set us apart in nature, we are not using them that well at all.

And a lot of people look to others to solve their problems for them. They seek examples or leaders and when the leaders do what they want it's all good and when they don't they start looking for another. Why do we even have countries with borders? Why fight over territory? People are unhappy with what they have and that drives some to be inventive and creative but that doesn't mean we all solve problems the same way. You see, when there are some mobs I have to pass and I don't want to fight them I can be a problem-solver. I can attack and kill them, basically biting the bullet and getting it over with...or I can wait and have someone else aggro them so I can sneak by. That also solves my problem. So if that's what you mean then yeah, but the same goes with players versus ArenaNet. You can bite the bullet and do the fights, even if you don't enjoy them or you can push the issue towards ArenaNet so they solve the problem for you. And that's what happens on these forums a lot. Sometimes I think the critique is fair, sometimes not. But even there people will have differing opinions.

But never underestimate the ability of people to try to put the problem on someone else. And I stand by the point that there will be a fair amount of people that have no or little affinity with combat mechanics in games in general. I mean, I played SWTOR for the better part of 6 years and the stuff that people couldn't figure out just baffled me. And yet, people really insisted it was too hard or they couldn't figure it out and people thought they were trolling, but they weren't. They really just couldn't make it work. We had people going into raids that just used their primary attack and basically not contributing to DPS and they just couldn't figure out why or how to do rotations, even simple ones.

So, well, we are clearly not going to see eye-to-eye on this topic, but I will say that I base my views more on what I've seen and heard around me once I left the raiding guilds and looked around at the rest and I think that if you surround yourself with players of a decent to better level, which makes sense, then you're going to believe that this is the norm.

And I'm no longer convinced that it is because of what I've seen in various games. Doesn't mean I can see the whole truth and I always do account for the possibility I might be wrong, but I just can't ignore running into people regularly who just really don't get these things and just wanna hang out, beat stuff up in a simple way and carry on.

But ok, it's the last I'll say on the topic because I don't mean to convince you but just hope to give you a reason to at least question if your belief is indeed nothing more but a belief. Beyond that, I don't mean to force any outcome of that questioning.

Thanks for the exchange on this point, but I think you'll agree that keeping on going back and forth on the same points probably has outlived its usefulness by now :)

Algreg.3629 · July 25, 2018

@Gehenna.3625 said:
@Algreg.3629 said:
@Gehenna.3625 said:
@Algreg.3629 said:
@Gehenna.3625 said:
@zealex.9410 said:
@"Magnus Godrik.5841" said:You do realize that by doing this people will rage on reddit and force anet to nerf the kitten out of it.