You're Not The Boss Of Me! : GW2

On paper, my take on Tequatl Rising, the latest of GW2's inexorable biweekly updates, ought to be diametrically opposed to Jeromai's. That was certainly the case for the preceding two week's worth of 8-bit hell that he both completed and chronicled so exhaustively but which I scrupulously avoided to the point not just of skipping The Box itself but of not logging in to the game at all for the entire two week period during which it was the starring attraction.

The current offering eschews casio tonalities and kindergarten color schemes, offering instead a whopping great "evolved" dragon and a difficulty pass for all his Bossy pals; not just his dragon buddies Shatner and The Claw but all the rest of the Pinata Gang from the Fire Elemental to Megadestroyer. These bosses have been favored content of mine since the first of the various loot passes turned them from sideshows to main events, so having a whole update complete with Achievements and Dailies based around them would appear to be right up my street.

Well, you'd think so, but there's a catch. The one carry-over from Super Adventure Box seems to be the idea that if players like to do something they'll like to do it even more if they have to do it while someone sprays them with a fire hose and throws stones at their head.

Being in no particular way unhappy or discontent with the difficulty level we've had for the last few months, I was not clamoring for the Tequatl fight, nor any of these fights, to be made harder. I was not bored with them. I found them relaxing and fun. Believe it or not, I didn't do a few of them every day because I wanted the loot but because I knew if I went to The Frozen Maw or Jungle Wurm I'd be guaranteed a good time.

Last night I logged into GW2 for the first time since I got seriously stuck into FFXIV. My Necromancer virtually lives either in Sparkfly Fen or Mount Maelstrom so she got the call. She found herself in a vile green mist. Taking stock of her somewhat unfamiliar surroundings she noticed the inelegant addition of dozens of four-foot tall rotting fish-heads sticking out of the sand and being an Asura she began immediately to investigate.

After a kind bystander revived her, then revived her once more after the fish-head respawned and one-shotted her again just as she was thanking him for reviving her the first time, she took up a judicious observing role on a nearby podium until the traditional Hylek call of "Therrre's somethning in the waterrr!" announced the arrival of the star of the show.

A lengthy and quite enjoyable battle ensued, during which she adopted the traditional Necromancer role of area denial, keeping wave after wave of Krait and sundry undead from overwhelming the cannons, so long ignored but which now perform a vital, nay essential task. Lose the canons and you've had it, basically.

That went well enough, although it was already beginning to wear out its welcome by the time a clangorous sound announced the charging of no fewer than four Asuran megalasers. The Dynamic Event teleprompter warned that to lose even a single laser would spell disaster, which was exactly what happened not much more than a minute or two later when the first one fell to the mindless hordes of undead that had appeared out of nowhere (or possibly the sea).

Tequatl kicked up a vast tsunami and sent it rolling across the beach, leaving every player quite literally dead in the water, along with the event itself. Someone must have hung back because the revives began, along with the post-mortem. Guests from other servers said we'd done well to get the dragon to somewhere around two-thirds health, or maybe it was eighty percent. Hard to count when you're fighting for your life in two feet of filthy water, especially when you're only four feet tall. It was deemed "a good try", anyway. Apparently the best any server had managed at the time was half-way.

On a single exposure my feeling was "that was quite amusing but once is probably enough". From the comments in map chat that was an opinion shared by many, although sometimes without the "that was quite amusing" part. I'm not sure if this version of Tequatl is a one-week only performance, after which he will revert to something closer to his former punchbag persona, but if by any chance it does turn out to stay this way then I'd say the chances of gathering the required 80+ people to give him anything like a run for his money will be slim.

Next I checked the timer at Dragon Temple and saw that Claw of Jormag was due soon so I moved one of my rangers over to meet him. Most of the server seemed to have had the same idea and Jormag, as we know he isn't but everyone calls him anyway, flew in to face probably the greatest force ever raised against him, at least on Yak's Bend.

As well as giving all the Bosses (I hate that term with a passion but this is officially Boss Week so let's go with it) extra hit points and a fix for all the various bugs that have pretty much neutered some of them since launch (Hi, Golem!) a timer has been added to all of the events. A pretty generous timer in most cases, it has to be said, although I'd back Gamarien any day to ponder and muse his way through the full fifteen minutes he's been given to finish his hunt the for Great Jungle Wurm before he ever even gets to see the thing.

Claw of Jormag gets half an hour, which is not far off what it often takes. Or took. To my immense surprise, this fight seemed to have been made much easier. Firstly most of the leftover mobs now despawn when the ice wall goes down. Secondly the walls themselves seem to melt like, well like ice in a fire. Lastly, and most importantly, the golems no longer collapse into scrap metal at the slightest brush against an ice pillar. Oh, and his wings no longer fall off, which is nice, for him at least. Whether it was these changes or the sheer number of players present, far from needing thirty minutes we were done in less than half of that.

My last Boss of the evening was the Inquest Golem MkII. As Jeromai points out, this "World Boss" used to be soloable. My necro soloed him once, or would have had some johnny-come-lately not turned up when she had him at 5%, reducing her Great Achievement to a mere duo kill. Won't be doing that again. All the various AEs he always did but which everyone used to ignore now hit like freight trains. We still killed him, though, even though half the zerg jumped ship when someone popped into the zone and yelled that Teq was back.

My feelings on the whole affair are largely this: making these events harder does not make them any more entertaining. Ninety-nine percent of the people doing them are only doing them to get the loot and if the loot is deemed good enough they will jump through as many hoops as you care to put up, but that does not mean they like jumping through hoops, it just means they like loot.

While there are also achievements and it's flavor-of-the-fortnight it won't be hard to hold a critical mass to get results but I'll be interested to see how many people are bothering to do these Bosses by October, especially if Champions still dole out the same or better rewards for a fraction of the effort.

I'm very curious to try out all of my other old favorites to see how they've fared. Teq wasn't terrible although he's clearly not going to be handing out his miniatures any time soon unless and until the nerf everyone seems to be expecting arrives. Jormag was, arguably, improved. Golem I preferred when he just span round and round and let us dis-assemble him at our leisure but maybe that's just me.

In general, though, no matter how much players complain that bosses are too easy, I remain to be convinced that a majority of the players likely actually to go and do that content on anything like a regular basis really want things to be hard enough for the outcome to be in any way in doubt. Zergs like to swarm over things and tear them apart at no risk. That's what zergs do. And, for better or for worse, GW2 has built much of its positive reputation on providing that sort of gameplay to the large crowd that wants it.

Which talk of zergs brings me neatly to the changes to WvW. Seen 'em. Gimmicky. Don't like 'em. I think that's probably as much discussion as they require.