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High-end Raiders in Verra, World bosses vs Instanced bosses
rikardp98
Member
After the thread about world bosses it got me thinking about high end raiding and where a hardcore PvE raider will fit in in AoC.
From my experience playing MMOs, world bosses have always been about numbers and not mechanics (mostly). The guild with the most players will win the pvp encounter and in the end will kill the boss. Not the guild with the best player, but the guild with most players. I remember back in world of warcraft classic vanilla, guilds or an alliance of guilds had 2-3 raiding groups of 40 players to get the kill. 1 grupp focused on the boss, the second focused on the pvp and the third backed up second and the first to either "tag" the boss or wipe out the competition. Yes this is an epic fight and a fun thing to do a few times but I'm not sure the standard PvE guild based on a friend group will ever be able to get the kill and obtain high end materials. It doesn't matter if that friend group is one of the best raiders, but since they probably won't have the numbers to overwhelm the competition it will never happen. AoC will be a very social game so alliances between guild will probably happen but I'm still sceptical how semi-hardcore to hardcore PvE players will feel at home in the world of Verra.
I would like to see world bosses with with basic to difficult mechanics with awesome loot/materials, and instanced bosses with difficult to very advanced mechanics with similar loot/materials.
What are your experience with world bosses and what would you like to see?
From my experience playing MMOs, world bosses have always been about numbers and not mechanics (mostly). The guild with the most players will win the pvp encounter and in the end will kill the boss. Not the guild with the best player, but the guild with most players. I remember back in world of warcraft classic vanilla, guilds or an alliance of guilds had 2-3 raiding groups of 40 players to get the kill. 1 grupp focused on the boss, the second focused on the pvp and the third backed up second and the first to either "tag" the boss or wipe out the competition. Yes this is an epic fight and a fun thing to do a few times but I'm not sure the standard PvE guild based on a friend group will ever be able to get the kill and obtain high end materials. It doesn't matter if that friend group is one of the best raiders, but since they probably won't have the numbers to overwhelm the competition it will never happen. AoC will be a very social game so alliances between guild will probably happen but I'm still sceptical how semi-hardcore to hardcore PvE players will feel at home in the world of Verra.
I would like to see world bosses with with basic to difficult mechanics with awesome loot/materials, and instanced bosses with difficult to very advanced mechanics with similar loot/materials.
What are your experience with world bosses and what would you like to see?
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Yes it's a lot of fun but only the first few times, then it gets boring an repetitive. People will grief and make everyones life hell, and not only do you need 80+ players on your side but you need to dived that loot somehow, either the group that killed the boss gets everything and you shift the next time, or it gets ninja looted xD. It's mostly fun for PvPers and not people that wants to be the best PvE players in AoC.
For example, my current wow tbc guild has around 25-30 players, if i take that guild to ashes we will have a very very small chance of killing a world boss. Not because we are bad or not hardcore enough, we are a group of very good players knowing game mechanics and take the game quite seriously, but we will never have the numbers to take down a world boss regularly. So how should we itch that need for challenge and getting loot? Instanced bosses with advanced mechanics. I'm not saying through pvp out the window, I'm saying that have a open world dungeon with a final instanced boss room (not capped to one group).
Yes we will probably once in a while group up with other guilds to kill a world boss, but that won't be for the loot, it will be for fun and experience something cool.
I also want to say that I have mostly experienced world bosses in wow and black desert, and little in GW2, so maybe my experience with world bosses is completely different from others.
Because lager guilds, in my experience, is very impersonal and you never talk or get to know 90% of the guild. Small guilds, ~20-50 players, are much more like a family and personal.
If this hypothetical group isn't bothering to make outside connections they're already treating the rest of the community as if they were part of a larger, faceless entity.
I think a lot of people are hyperbolizing how many players would be involved in boss fights in the overworld. The servers might be able to support 10k congruent players but the world itself is huge, alliances will have different regions they call home, and not everyone will be interested in the same bosses at the same time. These very large groups dominating the overworld that people are afraid of will have almost no organization to speak of; try getting eighty people into a discord call at once effectively communicating and following orders in battle, it's not going to be easy.
It's not like we are excluding us from the rest of the community, for example in wow we have 2 sister guilds that we do alts raid with and more. But that's still only around 80-100 players. Meaning every single person in all three guilds would need to be only at the same time to have a chance, and that won't happen if it's a randomized spawn and spawn timer on world bosses.
It's true, maybe the world bosses won't be that contested because of the large map, BUT i know from own experience that large hardcore guilds will do everything in their power go get every single kill on a world boss, even if that boss spawns on the other side of the map.
Yes it is very difficult. But still those groups are still killing bosses because coordination and communication and skills isn't a factor (to some degree). It's all about numbers and overwhelming the competition.
I know some large guilds that manager to keep 80+ players in check and communicate via sub leaders, and that's very impressive in it self.
This is actually why a ton of the larger guilds splinter and die. You get little friend groups that latch onto each other and all have different wants/needs, in most cases culminating in drama and destroying the guild.
This is not to say that it doesn't happen in smaller guilds too, it's just a direct result of having more people.
Yes, and the players from those dead guilds go on to form other guilds that consolidate into big guilds again. Nightmare's Asylum wouldn't exist without the guilds that blew apart before them.
It's just one of those circle of life things. Hold on... I think there's a song I can queue up for you.
But, if that is the case... leave and return at a time when it's not so contested.
All your fabulous mechanics get boring right after the first completion. The same will not be said about open world raiding.
100% agree.
MMOs should not be about instanced content, it should be about the open-world. Instanced PvE is ok the first time you do it, but then the next week it's exactly the same thing, and the same every time after that. Gets boring after the first time.
Sometimes it's fun to gather some friends, run into a raid, put on some music and kill some bosses that drop some nice gear/materials. I can play the same raid for weeks, just to get better at that specific raid and get better gear. To me progression is the best feeling in a game, and from the MMOs i have played that progression have mostly been in PvE. But maybe that will change in ashes, but I will still look for high end PvE content in slem shape or form.
Do you want the good news or the bad news first, @rikardp98?
Ashes will have instanced dungeons. That's confirmed in the Wiki.
It's about an 80%/20% split between open world dungeons and instanced dungeons (mainly catering to group questlines). We don't know what kind of loot will be in the instanced dungeons when the game launches ... stay tuned on that.
That said, end game instanced PvE raiding just isn't going to be a focus in Ashes. If that's the only reason why you'd play, you should mull over whether it's going to be the right game for you.
There will definitely be high end loot drops in other Ashes content types.
But, if you're not interested in risking PvP or doing open world activities (e.g. contributing to the node economy, crafting/gathering, dungeons, world bosses, sieges, caravans, housing), then it might not be a game you're compatible with.
Raid Bosses are guild content. I was in a guild. I raided. Simple as that.
People should not expect to get the best drops and XP if they are unorganized. And organization means contribution, which is the opposite of the Group Finder mentality which people are used to.
If people cant raid they should join a guild.
As for the mechanics of open world raid bosses, I would like to see nice designs.
However, this can be difficult to achieve, due to the PvP factor.
I still prefer this REALITY than playing yet another eso/ff14/wow/tera mmo.
I can agree to this especially since it will reduce bots farming instances for gold. Yes I understand that this isn't the most impactful way to reduce it, but it helps.
Yes.
Maybe some instanced gear should be good for Lv 20-30, but no safety for end game.
There should be alternative ways for progress. Only open world.
have them grant keys or some other item that unlock chests, bosses, etc. in the open world that players can contest?
Something akin to that.
The idea that I had a while ago was that killing an instanced raid boss would trigger a server wide message with details of who was killed, what player from which guild looted the McGuffin in question, and what node their guild hall is in.
The McGuffin has a timer on it, and needs to be bought to a guild hall before that runs out. The McGuffin is also considered a crafting object, and so is subject to preventing the player in question being able to use the family summons, and can also be dropped if the player is killed. Should someone else pick it up, they are then able to take it to their guild hall to get the rewards - however, the timer is still ticking.
Since everyone on the server knows where the guild is in the world, and where they need to get to within that time limit, good times will ensue.
Arguably, this puts getting the reward for that instanced piece of content at even greater PvP risk than an open world boss.
I am of the opinion that there should be several different mechanics of this type in the game, as that same mechanic would get boring if repeated over and over again. However, I am also of the opinion that there should be lesser rewards for killing top end instanced raid bosses as well (crafting materials that are obtained from lower tier raid mobs would be appropriate, imo, so that the above is the only reason to go after this top end mob).
To me, this whole thing seems far more enjoyable than the kinds of open world raid mobs in games like L2 and Archeage.
I'm not sure what your first paragraph is referring to? My friends and I have a high end raiding guild, not groups finder. We kill the top end bosses in games, not the easy mode group finder. Yes we may not be the best but it's fun to at least try.
Yeah the difficulty of designing a nice world boss is that you will have to take a large about of people into account. I never got to play alpha 1, how was the dragon bosses they showed of?
I know about the 80/20 split, and I hope that my friends and I will find a nice place in ashes. And I'm sure we will contribute quite a lot to the node economy and the rest. I'm just saying that being dependent on a large guild 80+ players Everytime you want to kill a high end boss to get high end materials doesn't sound like a good experience (based on my precious world boss encounters which may not be true for ashes).
And I'm little concerned that ashes won't have a high end raiding scene like the top two MMOs today.