Time to ditch 6 world bosses per new chapter?

Arato · June 2022

For well over a month after deadlands launched, the 2 world bosses had double digit numbers of people waiting on the spawns for a solid hour after reset every night, and during primetime they were popping too.
But Blackwood and High Isle, with people spread out between needing 6 different world bosses, it could be hard to find help and the world bosses were basically ghost towns, even right after reset and during prime time.. and this was even during their launch weeks when they should have been most populated.
Calling out for help usually results in crickets and tumbleweed being your answer, with maybe 1 person coming to get the shared quest, maybe if you start soloing the boss another person will come in midway through, you can't rely on it though.
More often than not I'm finding myself soloing world boss dailies on high isle, luckily Isobel can handle it with some healing, and I'm only doing it on 1 character.

I see clusters of people at the active volcanic vents, so it's not like the zone is totally dead... it's just those that need world boss dailies are split between 6 different ones, and with companions they are more soloable so most people don't wait around for a group, I certainly don't. Even though having multiple people at a boss makes it far more enjoyable.

so I can't believe I'm asking for less content... but perhaps 2-3 world bosses in a new zone rather than 6 is the ticket. just to bring the people who need the dailies together instead of splitting them apart.

MaraxusTheOrc · June 2022

2 is too few. If 6 is too many, then…4?

Jpk0012 · June 2022

I don't think the problem is the number of bosses. The problem is the bosses aren't worth the rewards. That is why I gave up almost immediately. Plenty of others agree with me, because High Isle is already a ghost town on Xbox.

And very few people are at the vents. Is a ring really worth it? Not to me.

phaneub17_ESO · June 2022

Difficulty needs to scale with players with the minimum being 4 players and maximum difficulty aimed at 12 players.

Hapexamendios · June 2022

Not really a problem imo. I play at off peak hours because of where I live. I generally don't have any problems finding help by asking in zone chat and sharing the quest.

SeaGtGruff · June 2022

I love having 6 world bosses per zone, and feel a bit cheated by DLC zones that have only 2.

That said, I admit that when a zone's bosses are too difficult for me to solo, I cringe at the thought of having to do them, but I'll keep trying off and on over time until I figure out how to survive long enough to kill them, or they get nerfed, or whatever, at which point cringing will turn to anticipation. For instance, I've gone from dreading the world boss dailies in Vvardenfell and Northern Elsweyr to looking forward to them.

And if a particular boss is still beyond me even when I can solo the others, I'll either just skip it or hope that someone else will be around to help. Skipping it is more palatable when there are 5 other bosses in the zone, but if there is only 1 other boss it means I'm going to probably be skipping the WB daily 50% of the time-- or maybe even 100% of the time if both bosses are beyond my ability to solo.

MasterSpatula · June 2022

Might help if they didn't release all the rewards for the previous content's dailies at essentially the same dang time. Seriously, what are they thinking there?

Arato · June 2022

Jpk0012 wrote: »

I don't think the problem is the number of bosses. The problem is the bosses aren't worth the rewards. That is why I gave up almost immediately. Plenty of others agree with me, because High Isle is already a ghost town on Xbox.

And very few people are at the vents. Is a ring really worth it? Not to me.

the boss quests are the only way to get the new motif released with the expansion, and leads and tribute fragments drop from some.. what would you have in mind?

Arato · June 2022

Hapexamendios wrote: »

Not really a problem imo. I play at off peak hours because of where I live. I generally don't have any problems finding help by asking in zone chat and sharing the quest.

how long do you wait? Cause if I ask and it's more than 5 or so minutes.. I figure it'll take longer waiting than to just solo it.

but I've tried multiple times in the day and most of the time end up having to solo, or again, at most, 1 other player joins in midway through the fight or so.
and I mean I've tried in US primetime, like right after login reward reset, and also later on after endeavor/daily reset, and the bosses are just dead, I've offered to share quests.. and only the crickets answer.

NeuroticPixels · June 2022

phaneub17_ESO wrote: »

Difficulty needs to scale with players with the minimum being 4 players and maximum difficulty aimed at 12 players.

I love this idea.

Arato · June 2022

MaraxusTheOrc wrote: »

2 is too few. If 6 is too many, then…4?

I can see your point, while deadlands bosses were packed for awhile after launch every day right after daily reset, because the bosses died so quickly, people were left waiting twiddling their thumbs for respawn a lot. That's not very fun but neither is twiddling your thumbs waiting for more people to show up while you spam looking to share the quest to get help.
Maybe 3-4 would be a sweet spot? I dunno
The vents/harrowstorms/dragons/geysers/dolmens seem to be far better overland group content than world bosses all in all.
I have fun riding into an active dolmen/etc event and being able to play cooperatively with a lot of people on the fly. It's the sole thing GW2 does well, and those dolmen like events are as close as ESO gets to that.

maybe world bosses should be more like the vent style, with 1 active at a time on rotation?

Just ways of trying to concentrate player populations for this kind of overland group content would be nice.
Because while I can solo them it's not very fun that way.

Hapexamendios · June 2022

Arato wrote: »

Hapexamendios wrote: »

Not really a problem imo. I play at off peak hours because of where I live. I generally don't have any problems finding help by asking in zone chat and sharing the quest.

how long do you wait? Cause if I ask and it's more than 5 or so minutes.. I figure it'll take longer waiting than to just solo it.

but I've tried multiple times in the day and most of the time end up having to solo, or again, at most, 1 other player joins in midway through the fight or so.
and I mean I've tried in US primetime, like right after login reward reset, and also later on after endeavor/daily reset, and the bosses are just dead, I've offered to share quests.. and only the crickets answer.

Average time is probably about 10 minutes. It's after work so I'm not in a big rush. If it takes longer than 15 minutes, I just do something else.

DarcyMardin · June 2022

I’ve been the only player at several High Isle world bosses lots of times, too. Odd, so soon after release.

Edit: But that doesn't mean I agree that the number of WBs should be lowered. I think it's fine as it is.

Aardappelboom · June 2022

Jpk0012 wrote: »

I don't think the problem is the number of bosses. The problem is the bosses aren't worth the rewards. That is why I gave up almost immediately. Plenty of others agree with me, because High Isle is already a ghost town on Xbox.

And very few people are at the vents. Is a ring really worth it? Not to me.

This is it, the rewards are lackluster and more of the same, I do the bosses once, because I like doing them solo, and that's it. Unless they have a lead I need to farm.

And sadly, while I love some of the new mythics, they have nerf written all over them that even grinding for those right now isn' t all that motivating.

Changing the numbers probably won't fix any of that.

Also don't forget that a lot of people are playing tales of tribute. The main quest for the card game is pretty long and plays out in all of Tamriel so a part of the playerbase is playing cards.

Zodiarkslayer · June 2022

I would rather have more Bosses. Soloing them is the only challenge in Overland Content. And they are all Soloable, all but one....

Do not get me wrong, I enjoy questing very much. But I wager that I am the exception. Most players will just blast through time consuming content.
What I'd like to see is a better reward structure in those world Boss quests and drops.

EF321 · June 2022

Problem is not with number of bosses, but with number of instances of zones. Chapter zones have LOTS of instances. Q4 DLC have little, maybe even just one.

Tra_Lalan · June 2022

6 bosses per zone is just fine. If you strugle to solo a WB ask someone in zone chat to help, or take a guildie with you. Someone will always help.
WB is supposed to be a group content and ESO is supposed to be a multiplayer game.

Vaoh · June 2022

There’s too many other things to be doing than caring about world bosses. I also hear about world boss quest bugs? The zone daily motifs aren’t dropping yet either, as per usual. If I do the dailies at all, I’d rather wait until when all the motifs drop.

Bad design imo to punish players for not waiting though and this is the result.

Arato · June 2022

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

I would rather have more Bosses. Soloing them is the only challenge in Overland Content. And they are all Soloable, all but one....
Do not get me wrong, I enjoy questing very much. But I wager that I am the exception. Most players will just blast through time consuming content.
What I'd like to see is a better reward structure in those world Boss quests and drops.

I find soloing them unfun since you have to play so defensively to deal with the constant adds
but in general I prefer the kind of random pug play with other people around you gameplay over just solo'ing.

Arato · June 2022

Vaoh wrote: »

There’s too many other things to be doing than caring about world bosses. I also hear about world boss quest bugs? The zone daily motifs aren’t dropping yet either, as per usual. If I do the dailies at all, I’d rather wait until when all the motifs drop.

Bad design imo to punish players for not waiting though and this is the result.

I have been getting the motifs it is kind of a bad drop rate though.
I guess low enough to discourage people it looks like.

AcadianPaladin · June 2022

I'd recommend learning from the basic alliance zones. WBs there have plenty of activity because if you are the only one there, you can still probably solo it. DLC WBs? I generally cannot solo them so I totally ignore them.

DigiAngel · June 2022

I've been soloing WB's with a high dps DK and a healing Mirri. Has worked well for a bit now.

EmEm_Oh · June 2022

Jpk0012 wrote: »

I don't think the problem is the number of bosses. The problem is the bosses aren't worth the rewards. That is why I gave up almost immediately. Plenty of others agree with me, because High Isle is already a ghost town on Xbox.

And very few people are at the vents. Is a ring really worth it? Not to me.

Not to mention if the mythic is going to be nerfed in 2-4wks. People have caught on to the regularity/predictability and don't want to go through all the time-consuming hassle.

So, my suggestion would be to stop putting stats on mythics that will just be nerfed in less than a month after a major release and stop using those stats to sell chapters and DLCs.

mekops_ESO · June 2022

i blame the low high isle population on a couple of things.
1.)there are simply too many instances of high isle. the place is huge. i constantly see multiple dozens of people in high isle on beam-me-up. i can clearly see the town is populated. sometimes it will be dead, and i will flip the instance with a house preview or something, and find myself in one that has considerable player activity.
2.) the new draws of the chapter take you literally everywhere but high isle.

Dreadsail? You are probably in Craglorn
ToT? Global activity
Sales funnel mythic? lol IDK but apparently Murkmire then PvP

the problem with high isle is that outside the zone story and dailies, it doesnt take place in high isle.

hounddawg1953_ESO · June 2022

It is the risk vs reward factor. Fighting a world boss for vendor trash and a blue ring from the daily quest giver is not worth the time or effort it. If The devs would increase the rewards people will come. I still do the Fargrave and Reach bosses for chancers for furniture plans and motifs and geysers in Summerset for crafting supplies. But the High Isle rewards are on par with overland solo mobs

xgoku1 · June 2022

I don't want them to reduce content. IMO the problem is down to game design.

ZOS need to design this sort of side content keeping in mind that this is eventually going to be dead content as time goes on. Making the world bosses and World events extra hard and have non-solo friendly mechanics is cute for the first two weeks, but then it's a real hassle.

They should be challenging but not impossible to complete for a single player of average skill, and easy to do by at least 2 players. You want to make these approachable so that a new player who buys the game 2-3 years after launch can still do the content without having to wrangle together a group for low reward content.

The worst example of this was Harrowstorms, they are obnoxious to do and give absolute trash rewards. Why is it designed this way?

vivisectvib16_ESO · June 2022

Nah, 6 is fine. Most people will come to help you if you put out a call in ZC.

Jaraal · June 2022

phaneub17_ESO wrote: »

Difficulty needs to scale with players with the minimum being 4 players and maximum difficulty aimed at 12 players.

Yeah they hit the sweet spot with adjustable geysers. Not sure why they abandoned that concept.

mekops_ESO · June 2022

Jaraal wrote: »

phaneub17_ESO wrote: »

Difficulty needs to scale with players with the minimum being 4 players and maximum difficulty aimed at 12 players.

Yeah they hit the sweet spot with adjustable geysers. Not sure why they abandoned that concept.

yea that was awesome. if your dps was super low it would just spawn you a beefy yaghra instead of a full blown boss. i thought this scaling was pretty clever

Vrienda · June 2022

Probably because killing a world boss only grants the exp the once thanks to account wide achievements. No real point in doing them beyond that as buying the motifs is gonna be the faster grind.

kringled_1 · June 2022

Vrienda wrote: »

Probably because killing a world boss only grants the exp the once thanks to account wide achievements. No real point in doing them beyond that as buying the motifs is gonna be the faster grind.

Even for the first kill of particular wb on the account, when zos rolled out awa the xp tied to getting the achievement was removed.