Tequatl Rising Highlights

[zallis]

The new patch "Tequatl Rising" Has been up for a couple days, and if anyone hasn't gotten a chance to do the new Tequatl encounter, find time to do so. There are two main points to this update: The bosses, and the LFG system.

The Bosses
For months now, the developers have been saying that they would like to start slowly working on improving the world bosses and dungeons in the game. Well, they have begun. This patch focused on Tequatl, the world boss in Sparkfly Fen. Previously, this boss as well as every other world boss was easily killable, and if you didn't get to the area of the fight within a minute of it starting, chances are you missed it. This was mainly due to the bosses having so little health and posing such a little threat to the massive zerg that the enemies died very quickly.

What the patch did to every world boss was they added a timer onto the event, and if you didn't kill the boss within fifteen minutes, you would fail, as opposed to before where you could not fail the event and the boss would just wait for you to kill it. The timer was added to every encounter, but each individual encounter also got a significant increase to HP, as well as their abilities being more dangerous, forcing you to pay attention and not just AFK while you auto attacked the boss.
Each boss already has interesting mechanics, but you never noticed them because they died before you saw the Shatterer's invulnerability for instance, or you if you did see that, it didn't matter because you weren't on a time limit.

Now, on to Tequatl. This fight was once just like the others. Trivial to the massive zerg, never failing, never dangerous. But this patch made Tequatl the most difficult fight in the game to date. On the battlefield, there are 6 cannons, a megalaser with 3 batteries, and then the boss himself. He is split into phases

-Phase 1
Tequatl appears. One person needs to control a cannon, for a total of 6 people. Those cannoneers must use the skills on the cannon to make sure Tequatl's "Hardened Scales" buff doesn't reach 20, and if it does, a bone wall appears and you must waste your precious time breaking it before you can damage him again. They must also cure the poison circles that are damaging the zerg. Around 40 people need to defend those cannons and repair them if they break. All 6 cannons need to be up in order for you to keep his hardened scales stacks down. The rest of the massive zerg must stand in a really compact stack, attacking the boss while dodging waves and killing adds. Do this until he gets to 75% HP

-Phase 2
Now, Tequatl cannot be damaged. The zerg now uses the jump pads to get to the laser batteries. The zerg has to defend each battery for a certain time until the laser is charged. If you cannot succeed at defending the batteries, you might as well give up because you will not be able to do enough damage to kill him in the time limit. Once the batteries are charged, Tequatl is weakened. The zerg as a whole needs to take this time of him being stunned and weakened to do as much damage as possible. The rest of the fight is repeating both these steps.

Now, I have not been able to get tequatl past 70% hp in all three times I have tried it. Blackgate was the first server to kill him. This fight is really hard and I love every minute of it. I have been asking for raids in this game since pre release and this fills that wish. This isn't like the other content they have released over the last months where its not really much more than a zergfest. This takes true strategy and planning and it is very much a step in the right direction.

LFG System
Arenanet was a little bit late with this feature. An in game looking for Group system is seen as a basic thing for a game to have at release, but in GW2s case, it just now got implemented a year later. Until this point, players were forced to either spam in map chat or use a third party tool Gw2LFG.com to find their parties. But it is here, better late than never, and I think it is really well done. They were careful with its release, giving it to people in waves, much like they did with the Trading Post on release. They did this because they didn't want the thing to break because of the mass usage. By now, close to everyone has it. To see if you do, press Y and go to the looking for group tab. They have a section for just about everything. Dungeons, Personal Story, Fractals of the Mists (separated into sections for each difficulty window), Living Worlds (Tequatl right now, mainly), and PvP. You can see current people LFM on the right hand side, and you can easily see what proffessions make up that group already and what paths or fractal level they are looking for in the description. If the part is full, it is grayed out and refresh it to make it go away. There is a join party button on the window, and you join the group immediatly.

This tool works really well. I can make a post for AC P1 and have it be filled in 10 seconds. The thing that separates this game's system from say, WoWs, is that in WoW, you have to wait around before you even get put into the party, and you can't talk to the people before you get automatically teleported into the dungeon. Having to walk to the zone that the dungeon is located in isn't that much of a burden, and this gives you time to prepare. Also, there is no "random dungeon" option. This makes it so you know that everyone in your party wants to do the dungeon you are entering, and in the random dugeon groups, people might get the one dungeon they don't like and then bail immediatly, screwing over the whole party. In GW2, this won't happen.

Overview

This patch didn't bring much in the way of story or lore, but it did fix two of the biggest complaints people have about this game. The extremely boring and easy world bosses, and the lack of a LFG tool. They improved each boss, but greatly improved one specific one, though I bet as time goes on, they improve the others, probably starting with the other two dragon bosses in the world, quenching people's thirst for raid like epic content. Arenanet has been making great improvements to the game with each patch, destroying peoples complaints that came with the release one by one. I can't think of any major things people can still say they don't like about this game. The game is slowly becoming harder and harder, making the people who don't want to blow through all the content have something to do, while at the same time having content for people who are more on the casual side. They are also seeming to add more and more permanant things to the world, finding a peaceful balance between their temporary content and their permanant additions, whereas when the living story first came out, nothing was permanant. If they could update Claw of Jormag and the Shatterer to the same extent as Tequatl by the end of this year, on top of adding the new Thaumanova Reactor fractal and possibly the Molten Facility and Aetherblade Hideout fractals, AAAAAND there is rumor to be a whole new dungeon in this next patch, then I would say that Arenanet has done some great things this year. They seem to know what they want now, and since they have a few goals to work towards, what can we expect in 2014?

-Baron Zallis, GW2

[Tundrra]

Looking good Zallis:)