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Enrage Timers Need to Go


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I remember before this game came out, they were talking about how ops would be these epic battles or whatever. Having an encounter with a 5 or 6 minute enrage timer doesn't make it feel very epic. It would be one thing if 1 or 2 encounters had this, but every single boss in both ops and heroic flashpoints have some sort of enrage time.

 

The last encounter in EV has an enrage time of about 5:30 or 6 minutes. That's just silly to me. Thinking back to other MMO's, the final boss in a raid would be this long encounter which lasts 10-20 minutes.

 

Enrage timers seem like a easy way to make something difficult, without really spending the time to make the actual encounter hard. For example, if they would make SoA spawn more balls in phase 3 (every minute he adds 1 more ball to deal with) that's better then this hard enrage timer.

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Enrage timers are a good way to force the DPS to perform and few things makes a victory as sweet as knowing that you made it just before the boss wiped you all. I haven't played the Hardmode Operations, only some of the FP's, but I would hope that the Hardmode Operations have longer enrage timers and longer fights then 3-5 mins. If they don't then I would encourage a proposal to lengthen them, but I don't think that removing them completely is a good idea.
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The whole concept of enrage timers is lame. Maybe 1 or 2 bosses that gate a new wing of an operation or something.. fine

 

Its just another aspect of new MMO's BW copied that should never be in the game.

 

But on every single boss and even in heroic FPs? cmon thats just weak design. If your group or raid demonstrates the ability to overcome the mechanics of a fight then they should be rewarded.

 

 

If they must have them then slowly start to ramp up the bosses damage over a couple minutes. This instant Death Touch on the group is stupid.

 

 

OR.. just put them on Nightmare modes raids if you have to.

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Without enrage timers, no one would need to bring dps.

 

 

 

This is not really true, you simply tweak the regeneration rate of the boss. If hes not being damaged at a certain rate his regen increases by a certain %.

 

EX.

If your DPS is above 6000 DPS the boss does not regen or regens very slow ( 500 hps/s )

 

If the combined DPS falls below 6000 DPS the boss regens 2k /s. This means the boss is still "doable" but will take longer and have more chances for screw ups for raid members standing in fire...etc.

 

If the DPS falls below 4000 DPS the regen increases to 4k/s which would basically become a stalemate. Even less would result in the boss out regenerating your damage output.

 

 

 

This type of mechanic is much more player friendly then a hard enrage that instakills everyone. This type of mechanic also allows for the raids combined dps to "slack off slightly".. sure the boss will maybe go from 40%---- 42% ------ 46% and people will scream "Pick up the DPS , hes regenerating!" The raid then has a chance to turn things around and step it up a notch and turn a loss into a kill. Bosses can still be a challenge.

 

 

You could argue its the same thing as an enrage timer but I dont think so. Sure a raid could stack 4 healers but they would never be able to overcome the regen of the boss to kill it. The raid never gets insta-jibbed by a DT enrage. Instead they decide to lose a couple healers and bring more dps. Let the playerbase decide.

Edited by Grader
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I prefer the enrage timers. They make fights short and vicious, just the way I like it.

 

What you are proposing sounds like a 20 minute snooze fest that I would hate after a first runthrough.

 

After all, the idea is for raids to be quick and profitable, not slow and cumbersome.

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I agree with OP.

 

DPS is a glorified role that doesn't really need to exist. Tanks and healers are the only classes that really matter for operations anyway. Removing the enrage timers will remove the arbitrary DPS requirement and allow groups to focus exclusively on the roles that really matter.

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There's soft enrage timers, then there are hard ones. I'm fine with soft enrage timers, where the encounter continues to get more difficult as time goes by. I'm not ok with EVERY boss having a 5 / 6 minute enrage timer, it doesn't make them feel epic at all.

 

Look at WoW, hardly any of their encounters have 5 or 6 minute enrage timers. A DPS fight here or there is one thing, but every boss is stupid.

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Only boss that needs fixing regarding enrage timers is the last one on Taral V. You just get face rolled instantly unless you're 5 levels higher than him.

 

honestly i thought that fight was awesome,i had a group of 2 32's(tank/healer) me at lvl 35 and another dps at 34, we wiped 3 times before we figured out the right strategy. imo this was one of the funnest/most engaging boss fight in any mid level instance i have ever done. the challenge was there and it needed a strategy to beat besides the wow method of face rolling until loot drops.

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This is not really true, you simply tweak the regeneration rate of the boss. If hes not being damaged at a certain rate his regen increases by a certain %.

 

EX.

If your DPS is above 6000 DPS the boss does not regen or regens very slow ( 500 hps/s )

 

If the combined DPS falls below 6000 DPS the boss regens 2k /s. This means the boss is still "doable" but will take longer and have more chances for screw ups for raid members standing in fire...etc.

 

If the DPS falls below 4000 DPS the regen increases to 4k/s which would basically become a stalemate. Even less would result in the boss out regenerating your damage output.

 

 

 

This type of mechanic is much more player friendly then a hard enrage that instakills everyone. This type of mechanic also allows for the raids combined dps to "slack off slightly".. sure the boss will maybe go from 40%---- 42% ------ 46% and people will scream "Pick up the DPS , hes regenerating!" The raid then has a chance to turn things around and step it up a notch and turn a loss into a kill. Bosses can still be a challenge.

 

 

You could argue its the same thing as an enrage timer but I dont think so. Sure a raid could stack 4 healers but they would never be able to overcome the regen of the boss to kill it. The raid never gets insta-jibbed by a DT enrage. Instead they decide to lose a couple healers and bring more dps. Let the playerbase decide.

 

 

So you're promoting near-endless fights with a lot of room for DPS errors over shorter and more demanding fights?

 

No, really.

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Enrage timers are lazy dev tools for enforcing specific dps numbers which limits ppl into only speccing the way devs want, which in turn eliminates any freedom that spec trees actually provide. It's a lazy way of doing things instead of making fights engaging, difficult and interesting.

 

Now i am fine with a boss as a mechanic that gets slowly stronger as a fight goes on but after 5 minutes a boss switches to godmode is just lazy

Edited by kainsec
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I felt that the enrage timers make the fights great, they feel very intense. I felt pressured as a DPS to not make a mistake doing damage on top of not getting hit or else we would wipe. While some of them could probably use a little tweaking to make them a bit less RNG dependent or add a little room for error the idea of them is right because it enforces the 2 dps, 1 tank, 1 healer combo and it makes sure that you're not bringing in bad or undergeared people.

 

The enrage timers let them throw in some tightly tuned mechanics without having to worry about a group doubling up their healers or tanks which could easily trivialize many encounters if the timers were gone.

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As someone said, without enrage timers DPS classes wouldn't be needed. You could just bring tanks and healers, it would take a long time to kill something but it would be stupidly easy.

 

Having the bosses regen health a bad idea. It means once a certain number of people are dead it becomes impossible, so your forced to wipe anyway otherwise the fight would go on forever. That's poor design.

Edited by NasherUK
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All the suggestions sound boring to me.... no offense, but hard enrage timers are there to make you perform flawlessly while dealing with mechanics. There shouldn't be room for error. You should have to really work for a boss kill, not just jerk around for 20 minutes.

 

Now if the OP is suggesting he wants longer fights tuned to longer hard enrages, that I could get behind. But having a fight that you just zerg for 40 minutes with no worry concerning failure? Balls to that. SO boring.

 

And while it might be different in ops (not enough guildies to 50 with the holidays, though I'll know soon enough) HM flashpoint "enrages" are kind of a joke. I heal through them for a good long while if we hit them. It is by no means a "BOOM dead" moment. The boss just does more damage (go figure). You have cooldowns for a reason, plan to use them at enrage if you're hitting it. >.>

 

 

Also just for the record "soft enrages" are still, by design, impossible to manage once you get so far into them. It's a hard enrage with challenge leading up to it. /shrug. I don't mind them either, but to me they aren't any different, or any more forgiving.

 

tl;dr: I like my enrages, use your cooldowns and HIT IT LIEK U MEAN IT.

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seriously, get out.

 

 

Enrage timers are good. They are a way to determine if your group/raid has the dps or not. Simple. For example, there's only a handful of people i do Directive 7 Hardmode cause of Bulwark's enrage. (Is it too tight? yes, but that's another issue).

 

If there are no enrage timers you can just bring 4 healers and noone dies (doesnt matter that it takes forever to kill a boss, there's no enrage). Its people like you that ruined other games for some of us.

 

 

 

Bottomline: if you think enrage is silly, go get better gear, do it again and then talk about it.

(some enrage timers are too tight atm tough :p, maybe adding like 5secs on each)

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1, good dps beats enrage timer. learn to play your class or you don't deserve purple loot.

 

2, you already beat the mechanic first time around, hardmode is there for a reason... so it feels hard.

 

3. encounter lasts more than 6 min is a waste of time. We only live once, let's do more in less time.

 

4. You might argue point 3 and say wipe = more waste of time, well do better and one shot it everytime afterward.

 

5. I personally thought the game is easy until I tank my hardmode flash. I finally see potentiall end game. Nothing is hard unless it's bugged. Try harder please instead of making the game easier. Then you gonna have bunch of people complaining the game is too easy and blahblah gw2, arrow to the knee.

 

6. stop being lazy, figure stuf out, like dps rotation, stun rotation, tank position, healing priority, itemization in accordin to talent spec etc etc. It's the fun part of mmo.

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This is not really true, you simply tweak the regeneration rate of the boss. If hes not being damaged at a certain rate his regen increases by a certain %.

 

EX.

If your DPS is above 6000 DPS the boss does not regen or regens very slow ( 500 hps/s )

 

If the combined DPS falls below 6000 DPS the boss regens 2k /s. This means the boss is still "doable" but will take longer and have more chances for screw ups for raid members standing in fire...etc.

 

If the DPS falls below 4000 DPS the regen increases to 4k/s which would basically become a stalemate. Even less would result in the boss out regenerating your damage output.

 

 

 

This type of mechanic is much more player friendly then a hard enrage that instakills everyone. This type of mechanic also allows for the raids combined dps to "slack off slightly".. sure the boss will maybe go from 40%---- 42% ------ 46% and people will scream "Pick up the DPS , hes regenerating!" The raid then has a chance to turn things around and step it up a notch and turn a loss into a kill. Bosses can still be a challenge.

 

 

You could argue its the same thing as an enrage timer but I dont think so. Sure a raid could stack 4 healers but they would never be able to overcome the regen of the boss to kill it. The raid never gets insta-jibbed by a DT enrage. Instead they decide to lose a couple healers and bring more dps. Let the playerbase decide.

 

Dude, all you're proposing is a soft enrage timer. What's the difference, if you dont dps enough you die. Sure, enrage timers might be "lazy encounter design" but it's a lot less lazy than wow until 9 months after it released.

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1, good dps beats enrage timer. learn to play your class or you don't deserve purple loot.

 

2, you already beat the mechanic first time around, hardmode is there for a reason... so it feels hard.

 

3. encounter lasts more than 6 min is a waste of time. We only live once, let's do more in less time.

 

4. You might argue point 3 and say wipe = more waste of time, well do better and one shot it everytime afterward.

 

5. I personally thought the game is easy until I tank my hardmode flash. I finally see potentiall end game. Nothing is hard unless it's bugged. Try harder please instead of making the game easier. Then you gonna have bunch of people complaining the game is too easy and blahblah gw2, arrow to the knee.

 

6. stop being lazy, figure stuf out, like dps rotation, stun rotation, tank position, healing priority, itemization in accordin to talent spec etc etc. It's the fun part of mmo.

 

Up, This

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Yes, I think enrage timers are silly if they aren't supported by any kind of fluff relevant to the encounter. It just feels way too much like you're not heroic but getting through an encounter on luck alone - if there's no relevant plot/fluff reason for the boss to just take stuff and _not_ unload on your *** with everything he has right off the bat it's cheap.

 

In all, cheap, tedius, annoying and distinctly un-epic. Just shift it from a ridiculous self-buff to summoning masses of adds or something similar. It would certainly be less of a strain on suspension of disbelief.

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My visceral reaction was the same as yours: Enrage timers in this game's content so far are artificial difficulty and gating. After thinking about it though, enrage timers aren't inherently bad; They're not mutually exclusive with good encounter design.

 

There are far more resource management tools in this game than in its competitors, meaning if you have enough healers that you have excess global cooldowns, you'll never run out of mana. Again this isn't inherently bad design, since it's balanced by making damage high enough that excess global cooldowns are uncommon. In this system, enrage timers are needed to ensure that it's actually worthwhile to bring DPS rather than stack healers for longer but trivial kills.

 

Your complaint at the core really is, and I agree with wholeheartedly, that the content just isn't difficult enough. Instead of using hard modes as a way to implement more challenging mechanics, all they did was recycle the exact same fight but with increased damage output and health.

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