Boss Blitz goes against a pillar of the game

[Orion Templar.4589]

I dropped into a map the other day where there was a single tag and a huge zerg on one boss. The commander was asking people to please split up. I decided to obey and moved off to another boss. I was alone there, and not able to do much solo. I tried another boss, and another, and no one would join me or split up. Finally I gave up and re-joined the zerg. Not surprisingly, we got the lowest level event rewards when it was all done.

[moonstarmac.4603]

Wow...the Boss Blitz is designed to draw people in to lay the smack down on some challenging enemies. Seriously...world bosses, even though they have been tuned, are still faceroll fights. Same goes for most Bounties. However, these bosses give everyone that true raid boss feel or challenge that so many crave in the open world. Top it off with angry mobs running in to fight you and dangerous terrain...yeah, this is exactly what was missing.

I understand that people get upset that they can't pull off a gold every single Blitz, but hey...remember when TD and DS were almost guaranteed fails? The challenge is what makes the Blitz so much fun...even for casual gamers like myself who prefer to solo the world. So yeah...relax and remember...it is only a game. It isn't like we are in SAO.

[Rauderi.8706]

@Ashen.2907 said:Weird, I have yet to see all of this yelling.

I haven't seen any yelling, yet.

..Just a lot of sighs and resignation when a map doesn't have commanders to split the 40-man zerg up, making every boss take 5+ minutes.

[Algreg.3629]

@"moonstarmac.4603" said:Wow...the Boss Blitz is designed to draw people in to lay the smack down on some challenging enemies. Seriously...world bosses, even though they have been tuned, are still faceroll fights. Same goes for most Bounties. However, these bosses give everyone that true raid boss feel or challenge that so many crave in the open world. Top it off with angry mobs running in to fight you and dangerous terrain...yeah, this is exactly what was missing.

I understand that people get upset that they can't pull off a gold every single Blitz, but hey...remember when TD and DS were almost guaranteed fails? The challenge is what makes the Blitz so much fun...even for casual gamers like myself who prefer to solo the world. So yeah...relax and remember...it is only a game. It isn't like we are in SAO.

Personally, I don´t care a lot about this event and the gold reward, but your attitude really does not fly. I hear that so often when people mess up "hey, it is only a game". You know what is real? Players' time and emotions. These things matter to them apparently. So no, "it is only a game" does not excuse anything. It is not a life or death situation, sure, noone should be blamed or shouted at for not playing perfectly. But to bring that attitude of not caring, I do what the heck I want, to the detriment of other players' experience.... nah.

[Danikat.8537]

@Rauderi.8706 said:

@"Ashen.2907" said:Weird, I have yet to see all of this yelling.

I haven't seen any yelling, yet.

..Just a lot of sighs and resignation when a map doesn't have commanders to split the 40-man zerg up, making every boss take 5+ minutes.

I've seen it once. First time I tried commanding a squad (very last minute - the blitz started when we had 4 commanders so me and someone else filled the gaps) I told my group to stop when we got to 10% and I was literally shouted down. 2 people spammed ALL CAPS messages about killing the boss as fast as possible until my instructions were off the top of the chat box, then declared that 'the group' had agreed to kill our boss and then move on to "help" the slower ones.

Thankfully this was all in map chat (because only 1 person joined the squad) so they got all 5 other commanders and several other people telling them not to, we eventually got most people to stop at about 4% and the two who didn't wore the boss down to 2% before the other groups were at 10%. So we were the first to kill our boss, by several minutes which was not good because it was the pirate who lays down lines of bombs so all the other bosses got that ability. But even so we only narrowly missed the gold award and we got silver.

I've done the blitz about 5 times so far (mostly not commanding) and been on the map when other people were doing it and thankfully that's the only time I've seen it happen. Lots of debating tactics and people who want to blob up and zerg all the bosses and disagree with anyone saying different, but mostly it was fairly civil.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

@"Boogiepop Void.6473" said:I want to emphasize that my problem isn't about working together. Working together is why I like events like Tarir. But recent events made for working together, like Serpent's Ire, suffer from scaling problems that we don't see in older events, like Silverwastes, Tarir, or even Gerent. These problems undermine the actual design of the event by making people want to prevent the entire map from participating, because it causes the event to become super-long and/or prone to failure. Anet needs to work out what is going on with the scaling algorithm now that wasn't during HoT-era and fix it so that having more people doesn't make the event "worse" and encourage toxicity. That dosen't mean "set it so the giant zerg works to shut people up", but it does mean that when you play the event properly by evenly spreading, the scaling stays more sensible.

If you like Tarir, then you have to know that this works the same way. When AB was first released and people didn't know how it worked, there was lots of heated discussion in the maps about what people are supposed to do. Some got very annoyed when others didn't seem to grasp how the event was supposed to work. This included people being told to go away.

And again, VB uses the same mechanic: spread out or you'll scale up the events too much they can't be completed on time.

This is about working together, which requires enough people having enough understanding about the mechanics to help those who don't. That takes time for people to learn, just as it has done for every event in the game, although many can be done through brute force so we forget.

This is an event which is going to be repeated in future years, so while this year is going to have a long transition period, next year's will be shorter.

[killermanjaro.5670]

Maybe the saclaing could do with a bit of an adjust, but I don't really think there's any other issue in the design of the event, I like events that need cooperation. Really any issues that come from it are caused by the players.

The only thing I could think to change for next time would be maybe implement a mechanic where you get attuned to the first boss you hit (a bit like the vine wraith bosses) so you can only fight that boss, that way players have to coordinate/split, and work together properly in order for the event to succeed.

*edit - at the end of the day though does anyone really care about getting a few extra loot bags for getting gold? That's all you get isn't it?

[Ayrilana.1396]

If it’s true that people are not pulling their weight, I don’t think that the scaling should be adjusted to match that.

[MiguelM.3795]

If cooperation is such a key factor for Boss Blitz, then why can't we see at a glance the health bars of all six bosses once the event starts? Octovine is setup that we can see North-South-East-West and most of the time players know to stop once one or more of the wings are down under 10% in order to wait for any of the others to catch up. I've done Boss Blitz twice so far and you can only see the health bar for the boss you are battling. Regardless of the number of players on in the event, how do you effectively coordinate a six boss battle to where you can get your group to stop at around 5-10% if you can only see the health status of 1 of the 6 bosses?

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

@"MiguelM.3795" said:how do you effectively coordinate a six boss battle to where you can get your group to stop at around 5-10% if you can only see the health status of 1 of the 6 bosses?

"Hab at 50%" seems to work fine. Even in the least-effort of all coordinated metas, Auric Basin, that indicator is never enough; if people don't call for a slow down of damage using /map or /say, inevitably one lane finishes too soon.

[Astralporing.1957]

@Warscythes.9307 said:

@Boogiepop Void.6473 said:

@Warscythes.9307 said:I don't understand. The original problem was that you don't want people here so you don't compete for the loot. Boss blitz doesn't have a problem with that. Your loot is the same, in fact your own loot will be worse if you run around and zerg. It doesn't go against anything since you are not competing for rewards. You are all working together towards the same thing.

But it's not. More people SEVERELY scale the bosses, to the point where you can't get gold and full rewards. You actively want people to leave in order to not scale the bosses up. It might not be direct competition, but it's the same issue: you want to claim the event for your team and actively hate and yell at people who come and "ruin" your run for full loot.

Right, so you split the people up. They are yelling at you for essentially not doing the mechanic correctly, not that they don't want you to participate. Is basically the same to how people yell at you for not CCing when the breakbar is up or keep standing in AoE because you are failing the mechanic. Just go to any other place that needs people.

The optimal squad size for the bosses is

much

lower than 1/6 of the map population.Optimally, you'd not want more than 6-7 people per boss. Any person above that just increases difficulty. 10 is already too much.

[HnRkLnXqZ.1870]

As far as I remember we had two versions of the crown-pavillion event so far. The first time it appeared in August 2013. The area was a just a huge warzone with a special theme. The trash mobs gave loot and the boss blitz did not exist. Back then we had no defiance bar. As some of the other people already mentioned, this first access was used to introduce champion-bags. Back then it was a one-time-event to celebrate Queen Jennah's 10 year jubilee. We had our first encounter with the Aetherblades. The most powerful bosses of that time were Kholer and his Troll, probably Lupicus and for the personal story the Mouth of Zhaitan in the Estate of Decay mission. The last one was extremely difficult and caused people the same problems as the original unmodified Eater of Souls from Path of Fire. Honestly I claim that the Mouth of Zhaitan caused more trouble. PVE content strategy of that era was to out-damage everything. "If you want to support your team, go full dps!" People like me, who tried to play support back then were seen as anti-social idiots. No trinity and except for the phalanx strength no real buffer and definitely NO healer at all. If you fought a boss, you just hoped it ran out of HP before you. The "smart" players watched bosses like Kholer and tried to dodge the pull-attack, but the majority just ignored those mechanics straight. If you wanted fast gold, COF1.

The second crown-pavillion event occured after the destruction of Lion's Arch, after the scarlet war - back in may 2014. It was more of a filler for the upcoming Living Story 2, which was months ahead in the future. So the pavillion returned together with the Labyrinthine Cliffs' second appearance - The Festival of the Four Winds (original). As all the other upcoming filler events, it was a downgraded version of the original one. In this case only minor things were added and a few lore tings to connect up with the LS2. The Boss Blitz was introduced and the trash mobs no longer gave loot. If you wanted to gain loot from the area, it was basically the Blitz or nothing. We still had no defiance bar. During the war, combat mechanics changed a little. We were introduced in more powerful area attacks. We learned to monitor our bosses and to evade the devastating attacks. However it was still the stack-era. The dps/full-zerk mentality was still there. Support was still seen as a total waste of resources. Elite specializations were long in the future. The durid, the buffbo ... revenant not planed into fighting mechanics yet. However events like the Twisted Marionette and the fights in the Battle of Lion's Arch tought us the importance of splitting up in groups and do coordinated bossfights. So the Blitz suited perfectly into the era. It utilized all present combat mechanics and styles. Compared to the previous events, it was not a walk in the park, but we got used to this way of combat by now.

We are currently in the third appreance of the corwn-pavillion events, which is surprisingly more than four years after the last one. It is quite hard to find anything which has not changed since then. Combat changed entirely. We have some sort of roles by now which are even public accepted and in certain cases (fractals/raids) requested, depending on your group ofcourse. Crowd control is a real thing and living nightmares like the Vinetooth Prime showed us what happens if we ignore this mechanic too much. The meta has changed for most classes. It is no longer dps at all cost. We have the efficiency-era. Support has its place in the gameplay. We even have healers by now.

The Boss Blitz has seen a few minor changes. Its core mechanic remained untouched. Trash mobs give finally loot again. We have a new area and a new rotation-mechanic. The core-mechanic is what people try to explain in this thread over and over, the idea of splitting up and killing all bosses simultanously and not zerging up on a single one. For us veterans this absolutely makes sense, because we have been there four years ago. But we do have a lot of different people by now. We have returners from different eras of the game, we have newbies and we have people who joined somewhere in the middle.

As I mentioned above, the core-mechanic was designed and developed in an age where zerg-dps was the only option. Today we have buffers, healers, tanks and a lot of people who play a mix of all types. We still have the blood-thirsty pure dps machines, but they are no longer alone. That is one of the issues with the Blitz. Although the dps has drastically increased, thanks to the elite specializations, there is a good chance your group has 1-3 pure damage-dealers. Given the fact that more people just scale up the bosses HP pool, it is quite easy to overload them.

So I think the Blitz event has to be adjusted to our modern ways of fighting. This might not be an easy task but I think it is worth the trouble. A minor adjustment to the upscaling should to the trick. Just allowing more people in a single group.

[Gemnaid.4219]

I like to help the team by afking by the waypoint. Great strategy.

[Airdive.2613]

And a bit of additional perspective.What actually makes Boss Blitz different from metas like VB, AB, or even SW, is that it's not located in a level 80 zone, it's just a festival in Divinity's Reach. Any player can and probably will participate, no matter how new to the game. Some of those players can still wear blues and greens and run a random open-world build.So it's not just about scaling, but scaling to the point where newer players are (hypothetically) unable to pull their weight.

This, of course, doesn't change the fact that the fights themselves got easier (some bosses have lost some of their abilities), and the event was already being done reliably in 2014. So I guess people will learn over time.

[maxwelgm.4315]

Even when only 10 people are present, the gold (and silver to some extent) definitely expect players to be able to DPS, and not just pressing 1 while away from boonsharing/combo fields. That would be good if it gave actual rewards (even getting zephryte boxes would do) but for the rewards it does give the timer is way too strict.

I think the scaling should remain the same. Unlike Octovine and Serpent's Ire where you must split for specific reasons and to fulfill specific mechanics, the sole incentive anyone has to not zerg here is for bosses to upscale, otherwise a mindless zerg could overdamage all but the most organized guild groups. The boss blitz meta would probably cause less grief among players if the gold timer was just a bit more lenient and rewards were not awful. Think of it like this, if we can get dozens of gold per hour for pressing 1 inside labyrinth during Halloween, why does Anet reward us with ~8-10 champion bags for a meta that takes that much organization and requires much more skill in terms of DPS and CC?

Finally, I think much of the frustration players meet in the boss blitz is also something Anet has stimulated by presenting content that differs so much from what they usually pull off. The blitz bosses basically have a DPS check if you want (very bad) gold rewards, which is something people already abhor/never see outside of raids, and also every boss has a CC bar mechanic that must be used in your favor (PSA: bosses take 50% MORE damage for seconds while broken). There is no CC tutorial, no NPC ever talks about combo fields during your whole story/map completion, and so having that be "mandatory" as part of festival gameplay is kinda weird.

[Reiver.5461]

@GDchiaScrub.3241 said:I have yet to run across this issue. So I guess we're both anecdotal. o.o

You missed the guy who spent 5 minutes ranting because his DPS meter was showing how little damage some people were doing and they didn't know anything about CC. Also that they weren't listening in chat and how he wasn't going to tag up so that he could then spend time during the battle monitoring and berating people for not doing what he thinks they should have been doing and not having a meta build. This after we missed gold by about 10 seconds due to an unlucky BB healing turret spawn.

This is a way out example, thought the guy was going to stroke out, but the knives can come out at times.

What people need to bear in mind is that the festival is open to all. AB for example you generally have an idea of game mechanics by the time you make it that far so you should be able to figure it out when the octo gets low and a hold gets called. For some people in the pavilion this might be their first boss fight and they might not know what CC is.

In any case if the festival stresses you out this much, you might want enjoy the summer, specially if you're in the UK at the moment :)

[Drecien.4508]

New cheevos for gold- Work smarter not harder?

[TheOrlyFactor.8341]

To everyone making a big deal out of getting gold:

The difference between Bronze and Gold rewards is four more champ loot bags, forty more festival tokens, and gauntlet entrance tickets.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Boss_Blitz!_Defeat_all_the_champions_in_the_Queen%27s_Pavilion#Rewards

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for trying to coordinate to get gold but if it doesn't happen, is it really THAT big of a deal to miss out on extra loot you can get easier elsewhere?

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

@"TheOrlyFactor.8341" said:To everyone making a big deal out of getting gold:

The difference between Bronze and Gold rewards is four more champ loot bags, forty more festival tokens, and gauntlet entrance tickets.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Boss_Blitz!_Defeat_all_the_champions_in_the_Queen%27s_Pavilion#Rewards

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for trying to coordinate to get gold but if it doesn't happen, is it really THAT big of a deal to miss out on extra loot you can get easier elsewhere?

It's also how long it takes. 8 minutes for gold is already a long time considering the rewards.

[Astralporing.1957]

@Airdive.2613 said:This, of course, doesn't change the fact that the fights themselves got easier (some bosses have lost some of their abilities), and the event was already being done reliably in 2014. So I guess people will learn over time.Only on organized instances. It was the same it is now - the organized instances that were able to get gold (but were fully packed and you couldn't join them), and the rest, that were unable to kill even a single boss within the timer for silver )most didn't even try).

Also, notice that the rewards didn't really change that much since then - and then (when farms were generally of lower quality than now) it wasn't considered to be worth the time unless you went for gold. Which was probably the result of the original implementation being considered a good farm (although nothing compared to some we have nowadays).

Same with Gauntlet bosses - their rewards were reduced to almost nothing the second time, because they were too good initially. Now, even those bad rewards were completely removed, even though the initial ones wouldn't be considered all that outrageous in present times.

I'd say it's the Serpent's Ire case again.

[Carighan.6758]

@Boogiepop Void.6473 said:Look at it this way: Blitz is similar to Octovine, in that you want to split up about evenly and kill at the same time. But it's octovine if you were actively trying to harass players not in your group to leave because it couldn't be completed in time if more than 60 people (out of 250 who could be on the map) were doing it.

Erm, the map doesn't hold 250 people :sunglasses: Where did you get that idea from?

@Danikat.8537 said:2) Players who understand and care about the mechanics teach those who don't know. Explain before the blitz starts what everyone needs to do and why.Don't just tell them not to join the group they've chosen and to go to a different one - explain why it's beneficial to spread out evenly.Don't just order them to stop at 10%, explain that the bosses pass on a skill to the others when they die so killing one too soon makes everyone else's job harder.Don't just tell them to stay where they are after the fight - explain that they will get the same rewards no matter how many bosses they fight and that too many people scale it up.

And I honestly don't think this is a bad way of handling it. This is a MMORPG. If we didn't have to meaningfully interact with one another, the game failed its genre definition.

[Astralporing.1957]

@Carighan.6758 said:

And I honestly don't think this is a bad way of handling it. This is a MMORPG. If we didn't have to meaningfully interact with one another, the game failed its genre definition.I'd say that telling players to gtfo because your group is already over quota falls in the same category.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@"Carighan.6758" said:

And I honestly don't think this is a bad way of handling it. This is a

MMO

RPG. If we didn't have to meaningfully interact with one another, the game failed its genre definition.I'd say that telling players to gtfo because your group is already over quota falls in the same category.

Are you saying that this is the first event time a newly popular event is attracting people who acted like jerks in some way? Even these days, some people in some Tequatl instances react disproportionately to perceived slow downs. That's even true at AB meta, which succeeds largely on first burn even when one lane starts burning too quickly. New metas with time limits to complete them bring out the worst in some people. That alone doesn't make it a "failed design" to require that people cooperate to succeed.

[Ashen.2907]

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@"Carighan.6758" said:

And I honestly don't think this is a bad way of handling it. This is a

MMO

RPG. If we didn't have to meaningfully interact with one another, the game failed its genre definition.I'd say that telling players to gtfo because your group is already over quota falls in the same category.

Are you saying that this is the first event time a newly popular event is attracting people who acted like jerks in some way? Even these days, some people in some Tequatl instances react disproportionately to perceived slow downs. That's even true at AB meta, which succeeds largely on first burn even when one lane starts burning too quickly. New metas with time limits to complete them bring out the worst in some people. That alone doesn't make it a "failed design" to require that people cooperate to succeed.

Honest question here,

If each boss is already at the player limit before scaling gets obscene, how does one join in to get credit without adversely affecting other players?

[Astralporing.1957]

It's not "perceived" slowdowns. It's the scaling when you get above 5 people. It's really bad. It's very simple - the more people you get there, the slower it gets.Remember, that the current "widely acknowledged" limit of 10 players per boss is not only already too high (the best is likely around 7, anything above that doesn't help anymore), but is also only half of the map population.

It's like Teq had a big chance of failing if more than 40-50 players were attempting it. That would be a bad design as well.