Recently ArenaNet talked about how one of the ways they are planning on keeping things feeling fresh is by doing more events between content updates. One example of these events is the no downstate in WvW event they did previously and has recently come back. Now we get our first look at the newest event World Boss Beat Down!
World Bosses have existed since the launch of Guild Wars 2, some of them have received updates, and there are even some new ones which have been added over the years. However, over time the World Bosses have lost a bit of their draw, and it is quite possible players who didn’t play before Heart of Thorns might not even know what the World bosses are. Although, they might have encountered them randomly in their wanderings. For example, my first encounter with one was The Claw of Jormag in Frostgorge Sound, just wandering around the zone and oh look there’s an event. I’ll go check it out… and OMG GIANT DRAGON OF DEATH! It was pretty cool.
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A world boss is a creature which regularly spawns out in the world and requires more than a few players to kill. They range from reasonably simple fights like Golem Mark II which is easy; to the Evolved Jungle Wurm which requires three separate groups, in different areas of the map, to work together and defeat the boss. For most of these bosses, you would want to be max level; however, a few of them spawn in lower level areas so even lower level characters can participate. Though, it might be a bit rough due to lower gear quality.
These bosses used to be popular to fight, and there were often multiple groups running between all of the bosses for hours on end, though individual players can only obtain loot from each boss once in a day. These groups would often keep perpetually going, and players joined and left as their schedules allowed. There were even guilds dedicated to fighting the hardest of these bosses as their primary focus. Honestly, as much as I have always enjoyed the world bosses, I couldn’t even begin to say when the last time I fought one was. As newer content has been released my focus has always switched to what’s new. For many players I know the world bosses lost some of their appeal due to new “better” sources of loot being added to the game.
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Enter the newest World Boss Week Event. Starting May 6th and ending May 13th all world boss kills in core Tyria will reward a Bonus Box of Goods as a bonus to the other rewards received from killing world bosses. This is an exciting idea, but I have two questions. The first one is, will the new Bonus Box of Goods be exempt from the limit on loot received from world bosses. From the wording of “from all world boss kills” my guess is this box will ignore the normal loot limit. They could have said “for first kills each day” if it was going to be subject to the standard loot limit. If this box does ignore the normal limit, then it could give players some reason to fight these bosses more often than once. Of course, this depends entirely on what kind of loot is in the box, which is my second question.
You might be wondering why being able to kill a boss more than once in a day and get something for it matters, but it’s a simple answer. Not all of the bosses have the same timer. In other words, the cycle doesn’t go through every boss before it repeats. For example, between Claw of Jormag spawns there are two Shadow Behemoth spawns. Between Taidha Covington spawns there are two Frozen Maw spawns. As a result, it’s hard to keep going around to all the bosses in any real flow because you’d have to stop when you get a repeat or do it again for no reward. If these bonus loot boxes drop particularly appealing loot (i.e., not two blues and a green), it might make repeating bosses worthwhile. Loot obviously can’t be too good though since there is pretty much always at least one world boss up, it’d unbalance the economy if what dropped was too valuable.
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Regardless, I am looking forward to jumping back into killing the world bosses and revisiting some of the old fights. I’m mostly curious how much easier they might feel with the power gains we’ve gotten with the elite specs, even bosses who had overhauls might feel trivial… but I hope that’s not the case. It will be awesome if at least some of the tactics are still required. For anyone who does not know how to tell when a world boss will be spawning Dulfy has a handy timer on her site which helps with planning a bit. Additionally, during the event, there will be in game announcements when one spawns in a zone near you.
There was also a forum post this week which not only talked about future event ideas but the next event they have planned currently. The next event will take place a few weeks after World Boss Week and is called Meta-Event Rush. For this event, they’ll remove the cap on rewards for all meta events and will reward bonus loot for meta events in Path of Fire maps. This event coincides with some improvements they have planned for PoF meta events. There are very few details right now, but I’m pretty interested in how it will work out. While the focus is clearly on getting more people involved in PoF map metas it also might get some more people interested in some of the older content as well.
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Either way, I’m looking forward to stepping back into some content I haven’t touched in a while and spending time with some old favorites. I’m a big fan of small events like these which change things up in various ways and adds a bit of interest and variety to the game. It is a great way to fill the gaps between content and keep things a bit more interesting.
