Why do PvE bosses seem to equate to...

#1 - Jan. 3, 2013, 11:31 p.m.

…“high health” rather than “boss”?

Just something I’ve noticed after doing various dungeons, fractals, and world events.

Any time something is intended as a ‘boss’ fight, rather than making them have interesting mechanics, high damage, or some other such thing, the simplest thing that ArenaNet has done is smash the 0 key on the keyboard until they have obnoxiously high amounts of health. This just makes bosses tedious to fight, rather than fun or interesting. Bosses typically have one or two mechanics to learn, at most, then you know the fight inside and out, yet the fight can continue for up to ten minutes simply because they have so much health. It’s not fun. It’s not challenging. It’s annoying.

Why did they choose this as a design philosophy? It makes the PvE side of the game incredibly frustrating.

ColinJohanson

#135 - Jan. 9, 2013, 11:07 a.m.

One of our goals for 2013 will be evaluating all of the bosses and creatures in the game, from open world to dungeons, to try and make them more exciting and fun to fight against.

In general if anything has a really high health pool, it needs to have unique abilities to make it exciting for the entire time, or actually change abilities/tactics as it goes down in health to ensure it stays fun and exciting to fight against.

We realize there are a number of bosses in the game, from the open world to instances that all can be more fun to fight than they are now. We’ll be tackling that this year in part of our goal to make our core game as strong as possible.

ColinJohanson

#136 - Jan. 9, 2013, 11:07 a.m.

On our goals for 2013 will be evaluating all of the bosses and creatures in the game, from open world to dungeons, to try and make them more exciting and fun to fight against.

In general if anything has a really high health pool, it needs to have unique abilities to make it exciting for the entire time, or actually change abilities/tactics as it goes down in health to ensure it stays fun and exciting to fight against.

We realize there are a number of bosses in the game, from the open world to instances that all can be more fun to fight than they are now. We’ll be tackling that this year in part of our goal to make our core game as strong as possible.