The new Tequatl fight is amazing. Our server hasn’t taken it down yet though. It requires everyone to know what to do and when and is a big ask for random players of varying skills jumping into the fight. There is also the problem if you get stuck in the overflow server with a less than optimal group. I expect ArenaNet will probably nerf this fight slightly in coming weeks…
Lake
5922
I have participated in the Tequatl fight five times and find myself asking “What is the definition of insanity”?
The Tequatl revamp is promising and disappointing both. On the one hand, it’s a clever encounter which requires local and long-distance movement and a lot of coordination. On the other hand, it takes the Guild Wars 2 approach to add difficulty, which is to say, “Just give it a billion hitpoints.”
I took part in one pretty organized effort last night. I jumped onto the EBay teamspeak channel with a good chunk of the people in zone. It started out well but we just didn’t have enough DPS on the dragon to make it into phase 2. Best attempt I’ve been on so far though.
fdsaion
5925
Basically what seems to need to happen (for P1) is
- Everyone dragon bashing being able to stay out of red circles and jump the wave (and also have stability so they don’t run into red circles when feared) - this seems to be the primary problem, though 2 may be related to the first issue
- Turrets need to on the ball in clearing poison clouds (red circles) and buffing players, as well as keeping dragon stacks below 20
- Turrets need to have just enough people to stay alive - it seems that northern turrets seem to attract not enough people, for instance
No idea what’s needed in P2.
Phase 2 basically requires that the group attacking the dragon split up and defend the megalaser and the three laser batteries. Once the laser is charged it fires off and stuns the dragon and allows the group to rush back up and do a ton of damage. Then he shakes off the stun and it goes back to phase 1.
Oh come on, this is simply not true. You even contradict yourself. It’s nothing like old encounters that were boring, easy but time consuming. This dragon doesn’t just have tons of hitpoints, it has a lot of interesting mechanics that require coordination, knowing what to do and general ability to play your class well. This is what world boss is supposed to be, not just “stand in one place and shoot it to death” like it used to be.
This dragon has good mechanics but also superfluous tons of hitpoints. Those aren’t contradictory at all. The Tequatl event presents no serious danger of wiping, and the only failure condition I’ve seen anyone even consider is, “We couldn’t do enough damage.” Some of that is failing to understand the mechanics (using the turrets to buff people, not doing the megalaser bit right), but some of it is also that the dragon has oodles of health and has, to date, only gone down with more than a hundred players beating on it for fifteen minutes. The timer is my biggest gripe—you can do almost everything right, protecting the hylek turrets and winning the megalaser events, and still fail the event because a clock ran out. There are many more dynamic ways to add time pressure or force coordination, but ArenaNet took the traditional path of health+timer.
fdsaion
5929
Partially disagree. I think the issue of people not doing enough damage is probably because enough people are not getting the mechanics/coordination correct, therefore dying, therefore not able to do damage due to lying dead on the ground.
At least for Phase 1. I have yet to see megalaser.
I’ve only taken part in the event once, two nights ago, and we got Tequatl down past the first megalaser stage. Not many people died, the ones who did were revived/waypointed promptly, people protected the turrets, we completed the megalaser stage. The turret users might not have been hitting us with the damage buff enough (if that’s a thing; I wasn’t on a turret), but Tequatl’s invulnerability buff wasn’t up even once. That was about a 60% effort, which isn’t bad for a not-top-tier-PvE server like Ehmry Bay. We just ran out of time, and rather than a straight timer (lazy game design), why not additional adds, or a sort of rising tide mechanic where Tequatl builds his invulnerability stacks faster and progress gets harder, until eventually you don’t do any damage to him for ten seconds and he wins? You could make the encounter just as hard as it is now, changing nothing else, and it would already feel less forced.
Edit: What I’m trying to get at is that the encounter design is great in the micro scale, and the moment-to-moment play is fun, but it falls down a little over the course of the whole encounter: it’s ten to fifteen minutes of the same moment-to-moment play. It’s probably too early for me to be leveling judgement either way. We’ll see if people get into a rhythm with him in a week or two—if he starts to go down more reliably (but not automatically) without bumping into the timer so much, as the turret folks get the pattern down, I’ll have a lesser beef with it.
geggis
5931
(I’ll put this in here too seeing as the other thread doesn’t seem so active)
Hi folks! I’m in a bit of an awkward spot and could do with some help.
I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2 since just before release and being a UK player attached to my brother’s (rather large) guild on Gandara I’ve never been able to join you fine people. Over the last year though I’ve found that, aside from being out of the loop with GW2, I’ve not played much with my brother or the guild (they’re super dedicated, hell, my brother’s a professional MMO journalist). Recently a friend in the US (on Ehmry Bay) has suddenly taken an interest in the game and wants to do some adventuring with me. The problem now is that I’m on an EU server and he’s on a US server so we can’t play together without one of us transferring which’ll cost us gems. This isn’t a major though. My biggest concern is if I switch to Ehmry Bay as a UK player, will I suffer lag and connectivity issues? When all the world transferring was free I seem to remember Ehmry Bay playing almost identically to Gandara on my old 1.2Mbps connection (my new one is about 72Mbps though), but what it’s like now is anyone’s guess. I just don’t want to spend money to abandon my brother and current guild and end up with a less enjoyable experience due to latency. If the experience is the same then I’m willing to make the jump though. Does the Qt3 guild have many UK players? I see a few so, what are your experiences over the Atlantic divide?
IMO a terrible idea. Instead of a clear goal and clear failing state, you propose to make the encounter gradually harder, again, on a timer but without showing an actual timer. I prefer clarity.
What I’m trying to get at is that the encounter design is great in the micro scale, and the moment-to-moment play is fun, but it falls down a little over the course of the whole encounter: it’s ten to fifteen minutes of the same moment-to-moment play.
The encounter has multiple phases and each phase has multiple activities you can choose from. So unless you spent the entire encounter sitting in a turret no matter what, no it’s not “15 minutes of the same moment-to-moment play”. The choice is there for you to make YOUR moment-to-moment play more interesting, if you choose to just rez people for 15 minutes, you can do it but you really shouldn’t complain “the encounter is stupid and boring, all you do is rez people for 15 minutes”. :)
At the same time, I agree that as it is the encounter is probably too hard to complete, I guess the devs wanted to make it feel really epic. :) I am sure, they will balance it more over time, hopefully adding some dynamic scaling, so it would be hard but possible whether there are 30, 50 or 80 players participating. But IMO this encounter shows that the team is thinking in the right direction. :)
BTW I took about 7-8 months break from the game and returned about a week ago, it’s amazing how much the game has changed and for the better.
I still lean toward a timer being lazy game design, and for MMO boss fights, I’ve always considered “Kill it and don’t get killed” sufficiently clear for success/fail states. :P In all seriousness, I do like encounters that take a little bit of sussing out first.
The encounter has multiple phases and each phase has multiple activities you can choose from. So unless you spent the entire encounter sitting in a turret no matter what, no it’s not “15 minutes of the same moment-to-moment play”. The choice is there for you to make YOUR moment-to-moment play more interesting, if you choose to just rez people for 15 minutes, you can do it but you really shouldn’t complain “the encounter is stupid and boring, all you do is rez people for 15 minutes”. :)
I’m sticking to this point: you can either be in a turret at the beginning (and if you leave, someone else will be in it instantly) and play that version of the encounter, or you can run between the DPS groups and the megalasers. The boss doesn’t do anything new over the course of the fight, as far as I’m aware—if you know the first part, you know it all, and it devolves to dodging a few attacks/using your turret skills until he’s dead. I think they could have done a little more with it.
As for the break, that’s how I felt, too, after I jumped back in over the summer (having not played since a month or two after release). One of GW2’s best qualities is how easy it is to put down and pick back up again.
I was a bit intimidated to go back to my lvl 80s, so I rolled a new character. There was a bit of a hiccup trying to deal with all the new collectibles, going through all the stuff the game sent me but I was back in the game in no time. After a couple of days I even logged into one of my lvl 80s (mesmer) and immediately remembered why I loved it so much :) The good thing about the game is that I can ignore most of my abilities/weapons/traits for awhile until I remember what to do with what on my screen and then I can dig in deeper. Pretty painless comparing to my previous returns to other MMOs.
Our server (Sea of Sorrows) made some more attempts on Teq last night. Actually “attempts” is a poor description. Basically the attempts have degenerated into a core bunch of people trying to fight the boss and about 30-40 bystanders mostly afk or dancing and putting in a token effort to get their daily achievement. The other downside to the Teq fight is that it has brought the worst out of people who are now abusing and swearing at each other in local. On one of the fights most of the group left the fight early after they realised they were not getting any drops from the veterans and champions. The rest of us who were there to make a serious attempt got swamped and that was that.
Seems to me if people are just going to get angry and abuse each other then why turn up to the fight. Until our server gets organised and has a large cohesive group to fight the boss I don’t see the point in attempting it and as it stands is simply a large waste of time if they are not going to put any effort into succeeding.
MrPerson
5936
And that’s why hard world bosses aren’t really the best thing to have in game aimed at a casual market.
Bliz made a similar mistake with Oondasta, and have had to nerf the everloving hell out of it. You can’t really have a design where you say for a year+ that world events are supposed to be zerged down with 99%+ success, and then try to go (back to) a serious business design, unless you’ve done some serious work to train players for that and manage expectations.
I agree. GW2 was always promoted as a casually friendly game that gave casuals access to epic dragon fights for some easy loot and the hardcore had access to gated 5-man instances. The sudden about face by the devs is puzzling. I have also read that both Shatterer and Jormag will also be getting the Teq “makeover”. If so I hope ArenaNet is prepared for the cries of the angry hordes that can no longer complete these events.
My personal belief is that the fights should be epic using animation and sound. But don’t make them so hard that the majority of players who are casuals in the open world can not handle the fight or if they do attend the fight then make it impossible for the serious players to succeed by forcing people into overflow servers.
They wanted this encounter to be challenging and epic, so they went a bit overboard with difficulty. I am sure they will nerf it repeatedly until the difficulty is right. This approach makes more sense than the alternative - release a pushover dragon and then ramp up its difficulty - because in this case by the time the fight is where they wanted it to be, everyone killed the dragon a hundred times. Plus when you make stuff harder, everyone whines but when you make stuff easier, everyone is happy.
GW2 was always promoted as a casually friendly game that gave casuals access to epic dragon fights for some easy loot…
You’ve got to admit that even the most casual players are probably getting pretty bored right now with all the world bosses on easy rotation.
Much of the criticism they are getting now is that there “isn’t any endgame” in GW2. While I don’t believe that is true, necessarily, but rather not the bog-standard raiding end-game, I think they are trying to mitigate this somewhat.
I took a break from EU4 to log in and complete my dailies and I am still so infatuated with GW2; the art, the music, and the world are so great.
I haven’t logged into GW2 in ages, but I did so today, as I have a cold and am sort of just moping around at home. Wow, they keep changing stuff. Now, my highest level is like 35, so I haven’t even touched most of the stuff you folks are talking about, but it sure looks like they are evolving the game pretty constantly. I wonder if I should just start a new character to get the feel for it before anything else.
