So I ran my first Fractal dungeon...

[zilliman]

No see that's all scripted. Fights are designed to be that chaotic. If a boss had progressive AI then every time you encounter that boss the fight would be different. You wouldn't be able to follow a sequence or a specific strategy to down it.

The encounter you describe requires improvisation when something goes wrong, but if nothing goes wrong and your group does everything perfect you just follow the same sequence every time. The boss doesn't adapt to your group and do things specifically to counter you. It does the same thing vs every group. It's scripted.

Yes it is scripted and things do go wrong quite often and that's what makes the difficulty. If you give the boss/mobs very good AI (eg kill the healers first) then it becomes almost like PvP ? There were two fights off the top of my head which were similar to that, one in magister's terrace and another in the argent tournament raid.

[Fey]

Yes it is scripted and things do go wrong quite often and that's what makes the difficulty. If you give the boss/mobs very good AI (eg kill the healers first) then it becomes almost like PvP ? There were two fights off the top of my head which were similar to that, one in magister's terrace and another in the argent tournament raid.

Well no, it's not that developers don't want to give bosses and enemies amazing AI, it's that it's too expensive, especially on a mass scale. It's a coding nightmare and it just doesn't work with how MMO's are designed.

As technology advances and those types of design choices become more accessible I'm sure we'll see it a lot in MMO's. But my original response was to Jim, who wanted smarter bosses so we could use CC on them to make encounters more interesting. It's just way too expensive and difficult to pull off. Single player games have it because it's just you and it's easy to design around one solo player going through your game. But when you've got a game with millions of players, the quality always decreases to compensate for the sheer number of things you have to add in to make people happy so that they keep playing.

MMO's have always been quantity over quality. Even GW2.

[zilliman]

If GW2 does not have tanks (in terms of taunts and guaranteed aggro), actually if GW2 does not even have a threat table, then I can understand you do not need a dedicated tank. I'd prefer such a system to WoW's rigid tank-healer-DPS system.

[Fey]

If GW2 does not have tanks (in terms of taunts and guaranteed aggro), actually if GW2 does not even have a threat table, then I can understand you do not need a dedicated tank. I'd prefer such a system to WoW's rigid tank-healer-DPS system.

Then go play WoW? Seriously lol. If you don't like GW2 don't play it.

[Tervet]

I think he is saying he prefers the GW2 system over the traditional Holy Trinity of WoW et al.

"I'd PREFER such a system to Wow's..."