For those who played Guild Wars 2 at launch may understand. Unless they do it right, I think world bosses might look cool but may be uninteresting to play.
If it’s like GW2, it just feels like a large amount of people show up and spam skills, zerging the boss. Unlike organized dungeon/raid runs, each player’s contribution seems insignificant in the grand scale of things.
Sure, it’s fun for a handful of runs but then it gets old fast.
Thoughts?
From my understanding, anyone can participate in tackling a world boss without having to organize or join a party. I actually would prefer it like that in all honesty.
I’m not saying that it would be better to form groups. My concern is that if it’s like GW2, it’s just a bunch of people zerging the boss. You die, you rez, you go back and spam some more. The battle itself doesn’t feel interesting and your own contribution doesn’t seem impactful.
Not saying grouping/raid is the way to go. I wouldn’t want to see that in D4. But if it’s zerging a boss, I’d rather they design something different. Zerging the boss is fun to try and see a handful of times but after while, it gets pretty dull.
If it’s like GW2, you can show up late and just watch or hit the boss a few times and go… okay loot. And run off again.
Honest Question, how would you make it more interesting and impactful then?
I don’t have any good ideas, just that if it follows the GW2 formula, I don’t see it enjoyable for long. Maybe D3 team has something up their sleeves to tackle this, but if it’s copy and paste of GW2, I think time is better spent on developing other end game content and maybe just ditch this idea. I mean, I hope it works out but just don’t want it to be like GW2.
If I had any ideas, I would have put it in my original post. It’s something that looks fun on paper but often doesn’t feel so in reality.
And over a short time, people get bored with it and don’t show up. And those few who do, aren’t strong enough to defeat the content, leaving the event just a dead zone.
I don’t see a problem in having something where anyone can turn up and join in. Reminds me of public quests from Warhammer mmorpg.
They could even have it so it’s not just fighting single bosses, but even hordes of monsters as well as giant bosses. Basically public quests that anyone can join and everyone in rewarded for.
In Warhammer you got ranked for how much you contributed to the public quest, with better rewards if you did more.
I think that is the way to go. Split up the objective and tackle it in smaller pieces so it’s more engaging.
Instead of show up, spam skills and move along.
GW2 world bosses are on a timer. If they are not way less people would show up.
I suppose they could have some world bosses change up their tactics when their hp reach certain levels; anything beyond that though, I’m not sure what else could be added to make it more impactful as you’ll still be spamming skills to kill it or it’s minions.
Diablo is a game based on spamming skills to kill things.
Did Uber Diablo was boring in Diablo 2? Uber Tristam was boring in Diablo 2?
I played it at Blizzcon and would say this is exactly how it felt, but I’m not sure it’s a bad thing. Diablo isn’t an MMO and there’s never going to be raid level cooperation and planning between players.
The map lit up showing a circle that indicated the boss was active. By going there I suddenly was playing alongside 10 or so other player and more or less zerged it down, grabbed the loot, and was on my way.
I never experienced UBER bosses in D2 but I think the limit was 8 players per game? As long as the party size remain small, I’m sure your contribution will feel impactful. But if it gets too large and to a certain point, if too many people are able to participate, what you do doesn’t seem to matter.
When you die does it matter? No, coz someone else will rush in to take your place. Does your skill level/knowledge matter? No, because there are a dozen other spamming skills to make up for the lack of skill/knowledge.
When you play with a small group, if you die, the battle might be lost. If you play solo and spam skills and die, the battle is lost and you’re hit with a penalty.
In a large group, you die, you come back to find boss dead and collect loot. Yay!?
Yea, I think it’s fun the first few times but imagine the same formula over and over. At some point, it’s going to feel very meh and you’ll just show up and wait for the loot.
I will say the boss was pretttty epic. It was huge and moved around a lot, and the camera actually zoomed out and seemed to focus in the middle of where your character was and where the boss was, so you weren’t centered in the camera.
The boss did some huge AOE attacks that could one shot you so it was important to stand behind him to avoid his sweeping attack, but he also had like a back elbow move so you aren’t 100% safe behind him either.
There was never a point where I felt safe standing in one spot, so it was overall pretty engaging having to watch what the boss was going to do.
Problems:
1: Telegraphed Attacks can be hard to distinguish due to amount of effects/players
2: Aggro might be out of whack
3: Way too much clutter when it comes to what is going on screen and player spacing can make things feel… odd. Imagine 10 melee heroes all clustered around the boss - that to me doesn’t sound good at all.
4: A static boss that spawns in the location while you are being notified of it’s spawn if you are in the area just turns said boss into a walking treasure piñata which to me is problematic as it devalues the amount of tension in the fight and from the monster itself somewhat.
There is a way to have World Event Bosses but this way heavily devalues what one might feel during and after the fight itself.
I agree with you, i think 8 to 12 players is a nice number. I would feel a little bit of with 20 players in the same screen.
I guess if there’s different bosses with different mechanics and attacks, it would increase the replayability.
And if you can stagger or deal a significantly amount of damage to a boss you would feel meaningful in the battle and help to kill the world boss faster.
And I mean, in D2 we would kill mephisto 1k+ times in a row just to get Arach’s, i wouldn’t bother to kill this world boss 100 times just to get some specific item
It needs to be rewarding. It needs to be hard. It needs to be as unpredictable as possible with several different attack patterns chosen at random or have multiple stages. The timer before spawn should lock in a set amount of players and the boss should scale accordingly. Respawning right next to the boss after dying is an insanely bad idea and must not be the case.
If events are nothing but an HP bag boss spawn, then yeah, they’ll suck.
I’d probably say the Rift MMO had the best iteration of world events, though imo still lacking. Each event typically had phases where you’d have players across the zone needing to do numerous things to progress the encounter. Sometimes it was defending key points. Other times it was closing rifts (mob spawners) or a specific number of event mobs. In the end, you’d still likely have a big boss encounter. Of course, the main issue Rift had was people often didn’t care about the early parts of the event because it was the boss that would drop the good stuff (currency). So, it was possible you’d see events fail because no one cared, or people who did all the work not actually getting to the boss in time because they weren’t camping a portal, and thus none of the good rewards. Fairly measuring participation is key here.
FFXIV is similar to Rift with their FATE system, but my main beef with them is they’re incredibly localized and lacking in meaningful reward. There’s never a consequence for one failing and people aren’t really encouraged to drop what they’re doing to participate if just running by or doing something else. These had the usual bosses, fodder kills, escorts/defenses, collections, and a couple more categories, sometimes leading into FATE chains, but even compared to Rift, they were lacking.
Having played GW2, yeah, I’d also say most events were lame. Sometimes as a direct result of never really being able to see what killed you or being guaranteed to die because resurrections had to be useful somehow. And while a few events corresponded to players having dungeon access for a given period of time, I’d say the system was still inferior to the previous 2 games I mentioned.
In the end, I do like world events, particularly as a counter to raid culture. However, you also can’t make them (exponentially) inferior to raids in rewards or lacking in variety. You just create DOA or soon after content.
Anyone know what the maximum party size will be for these? I also wonder what the rewards will be because if it’s not rewarding enough, I see participation dropping to a point where those who want to do it, can’t, just because not enough people show up.
It was also the loot that dropped from them.
Between Uber Tristram dropping Hellfire Torch.
Uber Diablo is another story as you have to spend SoJ’s but again the loot drop from kill is Annihilus small charm.
It was always exciting.
Imo they could do world bosses in areas that when a certain number of players entered the area it automatically closed off. Boulders fall, gates shut, lava rises, etc. That way one player could engage the boss, but a set amount of participants couldn’t be exceeded and if they died well fighting it they couldn’t rez within the area. The area and boss health would reset after the boss hadn’t taken damage for X amount of time. This would make the fights more impactful and not respawn spam fests.