[Column] Guild Wars 2: Is Adding More HP to World Bosses Enough?

SBFord

The balance of power between players and world bosses has shifted once again!  We’ve become so good at killing these monsters that they needed an HP boost!  But is it too much and does it actually make these encounters more of a challenge?

Read more of David North's Guild Wars 2: Is Adding More HP to World Bosses Enough?.

There are some challenges you must never try to face alone.

Righteous_Rock

More hp is never a good solution in my opinion. I actually don't want to spend more than one minute in a fight. Have you ever been in a real fight? Most of the fights I have been in lasted less than 20 seconds, it only takes one good crippling blow to get the fight to the point where it can be quickly finished. High hp is just boring, I like a precision and tactical fight where a skilled shot can end it, or a slip up on your part ends it for you too.

booniedog96

I've always wanted someone on the dev team or community manager/organizer would control the world bosses.  They can take out the healers first then make quick work of the tank and dps.

cerulean2012

No it is not.  It is a cheap way to increase the fight without doing anything.  The devs should be ashamed of stooping to this tactic.

Amjoco

Originally posted by Righteous_Rock
More hp is never a good solution in my opinion. I actually don't want to spend more than one minute in a fight. Have you ever been in a real fight? Most of the fights I have been in lasted less than 20 seconds, it only takes one good crippling blow to get the fight to the point where it can be quickly finished. High hp is just boring, I like a precision and tactical fight where a skilled shot can end it, or a slip up on your part ends it for you too.

In a real fight you would never have a necromancer sending minions after you or an elementalist hitting you with a flamestrike! Some of the best battles in top titles last much more than 20 sec. Fun and strategy has no time limit!!! C'thun from WoW was so fun to me. 

Nemesis7884

Its just more boring now

Po_gg

Originally posted by Righteous_Rock
More hp is never a good solution in my opinion.

I'm just an outsider (don't really care about GW2, unless it's SAB, that's fun), but I agree with Rock above, more hp is a pretty cheap solution.

In LotRO for example they went the exact opposite way, true this "world boss" concept is fairly new addition there. At launch those were huge behemoths (hp-wise), but after the responses, right with the following update Turbine lowered their hp pools, and instead boosted their damage and gave more, nasty moves to them. So it's a bit shorter fight, but with more awareness needed from everyone.

TSW has now the Anniversary with the golems, and they too did some changes (or at least that's rumoured), lowered the allowed participant number for the fights. With less people in the fight, it's a bit more challenge to take them golems down - only a bit, because of the advancements players made during the last year.

 

So yep, there are a few ways to add challenge into world bosses, simply raising the hp is maybe the cheapest one

mystik13

Tedious solution completely lacking in imagination.  Better solution is for players to have to pay more attention to visual cues and boss behaviour and respond accordingly or die.

Sovrath

While having a sufficient amount of hit points is important (I disagree with the poster that the fight should be less than a minute) as you don't want these bosses essentially being "one shotted by a group" you want the fights to be interesting.

How about better AI? Scripting interesting fights that are hard because of the boss's decisions?

 

Loke666

Giving certain bosses more HP might be a good idea but in most cases it just drag out the fight without making it more exiting. New abilities and attacks would be far better even if it takes more work.

The revamp of Tequatl worked becuase they made it harder, not just longer. So for me this is just a waste of everyones time. Of course the world bosses that goes down really fast do need more HP but that is just parts of it. Bosses like Claw don't need more HP, they needs more fearsome attacks and higher difficulty.

It is time to up the general difficulty back to where it was during the first beta weekend, it was awesome.

dlld

The hp buff was simply a knee jerk response to the uncapping of conditions causing world bosses to melt incredibly fast (access to more traits probably also lead to a general dps boost for many classes). A few bosses are good now like fire elemental. It practically insta died even before uncapped condition patch, whereas others has become a bore like shadow behemoth.

They need to tweak the hp on each boss individually from here to make it go back to roughly were it was pre patch they also need to drop the weird 'need to stand in a specific spot and aoe cleave' to be able to crit and just make em crittable from anywhere (if this was changed first perhaps HP values wouldn't need to be tweaked down as much or at all).

maskedweasel

Personally I feel like the double HP is annoying as others have said.  It makes me not even want to do those bosses as the rewards are rarely anything to write home about and there are other, faster ways to get rewards.  I think when they raised the caps on conditions they should have also allowed bosses to dish out more condition damage rather than just make it longer for people to kill them.

 

I really think they should largely leave early boss fights alone that people have been completing for 3 years.  Evolution is important, but that should be for the big picture game, make the new bosses tougher,  add MORE bosses,  instead of turning content people used to do and enjoy into hassles. 

MissAdventure

Originally posted by Sovrath

While having a sufficient amount of hit points is important (I disagree with the poster that the fight should be less than a minute) as you don't want these bosses essentially being "one shotted by a group" you want the fights to be interesting.

How about better AI? Scripting interesting fights that are hard because of the boss's decisions?

 

^

 

Creating HP sponges is lazy design.  Using CC spam (knockbacks, etc) is also terribly lazy design, but it seems that the ANET team likes doing both of these things. 

 

The problem is, they really like their zergs.  So, to make sure that everyone can participate (within reason), they simplify the effort needed so the average to low skill player can still contribute to world bosses.  HP sponges, and jumping around/dodging like spastic muppets is really easy to program, and relatively easy for the general population to combat.

 

If they, and heaven forbid, made the AI challenging and introduced mini events that could make you fail a world boss, dollars to donuts the forums would erupt in rivers of tears.  Remember, this is Costume Wars 2, not Dark Souls.  You can't break a sweat or think too hard when you are looking so amazingly pretty.

 

maskedweasel

Originally posted by MissAdventure

Originally posted by Sovrath

While having a sufficient amount of hit points is important (I disagree with the poster that the fight should be less than a minute) as you don't want these bosses essentially being "one shotted by a group" you want the fights to be interesting.

How about better AI? Scripting interesting fights that are hard because of the boss's decisions?

 

^

 

Creating HP sponges is lazy design.  Using CC spam (knockbacks, etc) is also terribly lazy design, but it seems that the ANET team likes doing both of these things. 

 

The problem is, they really like their zergs.  So, to make sure that everyone can participate (within reason), they simplify the effort needed so the average to low skill player can still contribute to world bosses.  HP sponges, and jumping around/dodging like spastic muppets is really easy to program, and relatively easy for the general population to combat.

 

If they, and heaven forbid, made the AI challenging and introduced mini events that could make you fail a world boss, dollars to donuts the forums would erupt in rivers of tears.  Remember, this is Costume Wars 2, not Dark Souls.  You can't break a sweat or think too hard when you are looking so amazingly pretty.

 

There are challenging boss battles, world bosses much less so in the grand scheme of things, but the world events in SW and DT are fairly challenging.  Granted there is only so much you can do so that everyone can complete these events - but some of the dungeon bosses and living world bosses show that they can create challenging content. 

 

I don't think zergs are what they specifically cater too its just... world bosses are always zerg parties, and so is WvW (or open world PvP).  It usually caters to larger groups, and because of that there is a limit to how tough or challenging you can make it.

Righteous_Rock

Instead of adding hp then, why not add more ai and divide up to responsibility. A boss fight doesn't just have to be one ai, I think it would be real interesting if everyone was counting on each other, and yes the actual fight could be longer than a minute without making it boring, let's say a group holds a boss up while others in the group eliminate the adds, the adds would be one shot capable and so would you, and once they were defeated a vulnerability to the main boss would be exposed in which you must rely on an accurate and precise killing blow or face imminent defeat and have to do it all over again, the fights would essentially become a masterful harmonic synergy of the efforts from the group, you rely on each other, you live and die together and you create epic moments that hhighlight heroes amongst your peers. ie... we missed on the first opportunity and boss X wiped over half the group, but the unlikely heroe among us was ready when the beast exposed his weakness one more time before he finished the rest of us off and little Suzy, the unlikely heroe pulled back her slingshot and slayed the beast, we will never forget the day a the town was saved by Suzy.

observer

This is what i've always hated about GW2's openworld bosses.  They just have lots of HP due to scaling, and i dislike that they have timers.

Moirae

I rarely ever log into this game anymore. The fact that you walk into an area to automatically gain quests, automatically group, and move on killed it for me. And I'm generally a solo player. 

maskedweasel

Originally posted by Righteous_Rock
Instead of adding hp then, why not add more ai and divide up to responsibility. A boss fight doesn't just have to be one ai, I think it would be real interesting if everyone was counting on each other, and yes the actual fight could be longer than a minute without making it boring, let's say a group holds a boss up while others in the group eliminate the adds, the adds would be one shot capable and so would you, and once they were defeated a vulnerability to the main boss would be exposed in which you must rely on an accurate and precise killing blow or face imminent defeat and have to do it all over again, the fights would essentially become a masterful harmonic synergy of the efforts from the group, you rely on each other, you live and die together and you create epic moments that hhighlight heroes amongst your peers. ie... we missed on the first opportunity and boss X wiped over half the group, but the unlikely heroe among us was ready when the beast exposed his weakness one more time before he finished the rest of us off and little Suzy, the unlikely heroe pulled back her slingshot and slayed the beast, we will never forget the day a the town was saved by Suzy.

they already do have bosses like this, but even with that they increased the health of some of the main boss monsters because the "burn" phases were just going too quick now that conditions can be stacked so high.  

bamwalla

without changing the mechanics of the battle itself then increasing the boss HP simply increases the tedium involved.

Octagon7711

You can't replace the first time you took on a world boss.   They would have to actually replace world bosses which is what the living story tried to do.  And if it's to far over the top players just stay away.  I can't remember the last time I did that 3 headed worm.

Reklaw

This was somewhat the case when I play Age of Conan, the difficutly level ust meant more HP on mobs/bosses yet everything else like tactics remained the same but only took longer.

Hopefully one day we will see more intelligent AI in it's difficutly settings.

 

Reklaw

double post..

 

Muke

Originally posted by Righteous_Rock
More hp is never a good solution in my opinion. I actually don't want to spend more than one minute in a fight. Have you ever been in a real fight? Most of the fights I have been in lasted less than 20 seconds, it only takes one good crippling blow to get the fight to the point where it can be quickly finished. High hp is just boring, I like a precision and tactical fight where a skilled shot can end it, or a slip up on your part ends it for you too.

It is a boss fight, so you want to be able to 1-shot it?

And what if that boss does it to you?

saurus123

they changed how condition works, increased stacks of bleed, burning and other condi now stacks

if they didnt increase the bosses hp, bosses would end up dead faster than before

Braghez

The HP raise was needed, not to make stuff harder, but to balance the now uncapped condition damage...still they're probably testing too, they just sent them 2x because they were taking them down too fast.

Raising HP can be a good move...sometimes...I mean, for easy bosses it isn't, it's just making them much longer without giving any challenge to them, the shatterer and claw of jormag are just two examples...I mean, the Golem mark II is actually more fearsome than them, lol...i understand that they will probably see a revamp in the future like Tequatl did, but for now it's pointless.

For harder stuff like Tequatl and Triple trouble I think it's good...they already have fearsome atks/mechanics, now they just require more teamwork and coordination to be completed. At revamp taking down Tequatl was hard...now it's just was just a joke...raising the life made it back to the difficulty it was (almost ) at revamp. Some can nag because they would prefer to farm them while sleeping by pressing 1, but thewy just have to deal with it imo :P 

Still everything will be balanced a bit with letting them get critically hit too in every spot ( not only "weak points" )

waynejr2

Originally posted by Sovrath

While having a sufficient amount of hit points is important (I disagree with the poster that the fight should be less than a minute) as you don't want these bosses essentially being "one shotted by a group" you want the fights to be interesting.

How about better AI? Scripting interesting fights that are hard because of the boss's decisions?

 

Just one shot the healers.