Watching streams of New World has raised some concerns regarding the Open World nature of bosses

Not sure how many of you have been watching Asmongold play NW the past few days (I'd assume a fair amount since many of us discovered this game in part to him) but during the preview event for NW, they are running around doing end game level 65 content with people in the 40s and low 50s, because they are just out numbering stuff and zerging it down.

Since AoC is 80%(?) open world I'm a little concerned about this evolving as the meta as well.

Other than the ability to just have it devolve into a PvP Gank Fest, what measures is AoC implementing to prevent this type of mentality and gameplay from emerging?

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Bricktop

Chances are there will be strong boss mechanics that will wipe an unorganized zerg.

Beekeeper

For one, zerging a boss down fast is meant to be countered by the next boss scaling off of how quickly you did the last one. Rushing a boss down with simps will probably mean you'll crash hard at the second boss who will be ready and expecting your damage spike. You'd need to deliberately slow down the zerg, dragging out the fight as long as possible without losing your minions to boss damage to prevent this. Not to mention that the death penalty will weaken your underleveled mooks even more. I expect we'll just have to wait and see just how effective those measures are.

As far as world bosses, I'm pretty sure IS does expect us to zerg them already. Though, then again, only one 40 man raid group can get the looting priviliges, so what happens when the other raid groups realize the boss is going down? PvP, I'd expect. Or just a bunch of people not getting anything at all, which is fine in the greater scheme of things.

bigepeen

I don't know, but I hope that IS implements some kind of plague mechanic for a lot of the bosses that spreads between players if they are standing close together. Or a lot of aoe. Basically they need to make it so coordination matters more than pure numbers, because getting everyone in a zerg to listen is almost impossible. Usually, asmongold will tell his minions to go inside an area, and there will always be people outside who aren't listening and attacking the boss from outside of that area.

Amazon makes poor game design decisions. Even if IS spends 5 minutes considering this type of stuff, they should be able to implement a more balanced system against zergs than Amazon. It's sad that so many companies fail so hard at game design, like they spend millions of dollars developing the engine, combat, backend, etc.. just to rush to release the game without even thinking out the game design.

Varkun

I would hope IS has already thought about this and will have some solutions to prevent it. Having said that it is good to bring up such concerns and when testing starts provide constructive feedback on how such fights could be improved to prevent such zerging.

Good thoughts though.

Just as a ps to this Steven did say not long ago that there would be no artificial gating with damage numbers as such against higher level mobs. He wanted to reward skilful play against higher level mobs but the risk of being one shot and taking that death penalty is the risk verses the potential reward.

Noaani

Varkun wrote: »

I would hope IS has already thought about this and will have some solutions to prevent it. Having said that it is good to bring up such concerns and when testing starts provide constructive feedback on how such fights could be improved to prevent such zerging.

I've been bringing up this concern for a year now, just in the form of combat trackers.

In terms of raiding, "old school" is not something we want to go back to, because old school raids were exactly this.

This kind of thing is fine (desireable, even) for event bosses, but not for bosses of raid content.

Volgaire

Just making a boss stronger if a certain player threshold is passed where lower-leveled people would be obliterated quickly would do. I do hope IS comes up with a smarter way to work around the issue like where dungeon bosses are supposed to get stronger based on player performance on the previous boss.

Noaani

miaomiao wrote: »

Just making a boss stronger if a certain player threshold is passed where lower-leveled people would be obliterated quickly would do. I do hope IS comes up with a smarter way to work around the issue like where dungeon bosses are supposed to get stronger based on player performance on the previous boss.

Steven doesn't want scaled content - neither do I, to be fair.

Warth

Noaani wrote: »

miaomiao wrote: »

Just making a boss stronger if a certain player threshold is passed where lower-leveled people would be obliterated quickly would do. I do hope IS comes up with a smarter way to work around the issue like where dungeon bosses are supposed to get stronger based on player performance on the previous boss.

Steven doesn't want scaled content - neither do I, to be fair.

Agreed, this type of scaling usually is just a chore. Create boss mechanics that punish you for zerging.

Damokles

Warth wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

miaomiao wrote: »

Just making a boss stronger if a certain player threshold is passed where lower-leveled people would be obliterated quickly would do. I do hope IS comes up with a smarter way to work around the issue like where dungeon bosses are supposed to get stronger based on player performance on the previous boss.

Steven doesn't want scaled content - neither do I, to be fair.

Agreed, this type of scaling usually is just a chore. Create boss mechanics that punish you for zerging.

They did that i believe xD

I could imagine a dot on someone which will explode and instantly kill those in the blastradius if you dont carry it away (Will only deal slight damage to the wielder himself)

Khronus

Zerging world bosses will definitely be a problem. My guild will not participate in any form of zerging and instead will have organized roaming teams that plan to counter world boss fights and the elimination of zergs. We won't be able to control the server but we will have peace within our slice of the pie haha.

I don't like the scaling idea at all. If a zerg is able to kill the first boss and the second boss adapts to the number, that is pretty broken and can be easily taken advantage of.....normal mode everything and zerg the final boss for the best loot? dumb. Plenty of raid mechanics can help with this but ultimately I am having a hard time understanding how world pve will be while still making sure loot is dispersed where it needs to go.

Ridik

I have also given thought to this. Hopefully they have something figured out because zerging is going to be horrible the first couple of months.

Hopefully people really spread out after teleporting out of their gates.

Grievousness

I don't really get why the scaling of the second boss would be a solution.
It changes numbers and combat ai, but you still need a mechanic that punishes 41 players but not 40.
How would that work without feeling like an artificial barrier that's about the same as gating it off?

Even if they manage to punish really big zergs like 100+ people, you still would have a massive boost if you can bring just 5 more people.
That's still a 12,5% performance increase.

Also loot barriers are not really relevant if they make most of the loot tradeable.
I don't see why you cannot just have two 40 man raids which communicate the drops and roll on it together.
Back in Archeage we also shared world bosses and took weekly turns with allied guilds.

I can totally imagine them adding mechanics to prevent really big zergs, but not how they want to prevent people from cheesing bosses by going slightly over the intended number of players.

Warth

Damokles wrote: »

Warth wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

miaomiao wrote: »

Just making a boss stronger if a certain player threshold is passed where lower-leveled people would be obliterated quickly would do. I do hope IS comes up with a smarter way to work around the issue like where dungeon bosses are supposed to get stronger based on player performance on the previous boss.

Steven doesn't want scaled content - neither do I, to be fair.

Agreed, this type of scaling usually is just a chore. Create boss mechanics that punish you for zerging.

They did that i believe xD

I could imagine a dot on someone which will explode and instantly kill those in the blastradius if you dont carry it away (Will only deal slight damage to the wielder himself)

@Damokles I like the dot idea.

To build on that, how about an AoE Pull Ability along the lines of https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Black_hole . The damage scales exponentially with the amount of people being build towards the boss.

An Ability, that spawns a powerful undead of any player that dies to the boss or other undead.

A wall of fire around the boss fight, which radius decreases with the amount of players in combat with the boss.

A boss that shoots out pulses of energy hitting everybody in a 50m radius. The damage of the following puls depends on the amount of players that were hit with the previous one.

It's not like there is too few ideas for boss mechanics, that would stop/reduce the amount of zerging.

Azeem

What is IS? i am so confused. Edit: I am **** its Intrepid Studios

Valento92

Azeem wrote: »

What is IS? i am so confused

Intrepid Studios, the makers of this game.

BaSkA_9x2

Most of the discussions here are thinking there will be a second boss. I believe that will only happen in open world dungeons, not open world bosses, i.e. a dragon on top of a mountain.

With that said, I don't think zerging PvE content will be a constant problem. First off, hopefully Intrepid will change bosses locations before launch so that whoever tested the game doesn't have that level of knowledge. Secondly, in case a zerg made of mostly level 10s gets together to kill a level 30 boss, I don't think they'd get too much out of it. At most one raid (40 people) will have the looting rights of the items dropped by that boss, the experience gained will hopefully be negligible and the punishment for death might outweigh the chances of successfully killing said boss.

In case everything I said is false and it is be extremely rewarding for zergs to kill higher level bosses, we don't know how power scales in the game. If power scales exponentially, i.e. the power difference between levels is extremely high on lower levels, but on higher levels the difference is extremely small, there's no way a low level zerg will be able to kill a boss that is intended to be killed by a raid of players on that boss' level.

$graph1.gif$

Image for reference to try and illustrate how power can be scaled in a way that zerging might only be viable in the late game - which could also be a problem, but we all know zerging is cancer and it's hard to deal with in the first place, so boss mechanics that hurt big groups of people might be the only option then.

Marcet

I don't like at all open world dungeons... I hope the game changes my mind but I prefer the idea of having an instance for me and my group/raid.

If you have to deal with PvP meanwhile doing a boss, the boss difficulty will be dumbed down.

Make 90% dungeons instanced, thats my opinion.

Half Tilt Gamer

Zerging won't be entirely preventable but I think with the lack of fast travel options it will be harder to do unless the boss is near a largely populated node/hub.

I would love to see mechanics that involve the boss placing debuffs on all nearby and a specific number of players from each group having to coordinate moving between two+ 'crystals' that have a maximum occupancy to cleanse the debuff for their group. Something along these lines could also incorporate boss invulnerability states as well until certain tasks are executed, potentially only dropping the shield for raid groups that completed the tasks.

Thoughts?

Abominatus

The lack of instanced dungeons and raids is the reason I hesitated to buy into Alpha, and I'm still not convinced I made the right decision. Making all PvE content uninstanced creates a fundamental imbalance in the game, in that it becomes impossible to tune for difficulty.

While I get, and support, the idea of having some world bosses and broadening player engagement in the open world, I also think that if you want to attract a stable raiding community, you need to provide an environment in which they can be challenged by the PvE content and also one in which they can control to some degree their raiding time.

Most raiding guilds want, and need, to be able to schedule their raids. If a guild finds that it cannot do the content it wants to do, when it wants to do it, then this will lead to frustration. If raids are facing challenging content, and are disrupted while doing it (either by being griefed, or by others joining in and making the content easier than it is "supposed" to be), the value that players assign to the achievement of completing that content is diminished.

If you make all PvE content non-instanced, then effectively all content becomes PvP content. The balance does not swing the other way. I enjoy a bit of PvP, and I don't see any reason why open-world PvP should be discouraged. Getting involved in contested areas while trying to farm or gather materials or do quests is fine. But there needs to be a point at which I'm entitled to engage challenging PvE content for it's own sake without that content being either trivialized or gated by it being in the open world.

Ultimately, I see enough value in this project that I'm willing to spend money to support it in pre-alpha because giving this vision an opportunity could result in something great. But if we get to a point where there's no meaningful PvE progression because everything is open world, then that will alienate a lot of potential long-term players (myself included), and an opportunity will have been missed.

Those who think that instanced content eliminate the open world aspect of the game are overstating the problem. From the perspective of a veteran WoW player, I can say with absolute certainty that instances didn't hurt the open world in classic or TBC. What started to diminish the open world experience was the addition of features like being able to teleport into dungeons from the city, and being able to engage in that kind of instanced content without ever having to interact with the world inbetween. It became possible at some point to level to about 10, and then just sit in a city and spam dungeons to maximum level from then onwards. Obviously that's a terrible deterrent to having a great world environment, but there's no automatic slippery slope that takes you from "everything is open world" to dungeon-finder without the ability to find a middle-ground along the way.

Noaani

Damokles wrote: »

I could imagine a dot on someone which will explode and instantly kill those in the blastradius if you dont carry it away (Will only deal slight damage to the wielder himself)

A number of EQ2 raids had this mechanic.

It could stop completely unorganized raiders, but it won't stop a guild of 200 players that are organized going in and cheesing an encounter.

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