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It serves the same purpose as the "lottery pop", as Azherae called it. It adds more chances to drop your preferred loot and eases you into the peak content (especially if the changing nature of the world is considered, and these preliminary mobs can indicate what abilities the boss will have this time).
And also the pvxness of this part of the content, cause your road there might not have any pvp, but then the room itself might have people in it (or you might be the "people" to other players).
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I don't really get this point. What exactly are you trying to stop here? Other people from accessing the room at all? Then this would either require a ton of bodyblocking or the exploiting means you mentioned, at which point Intrepid should do smth about it.
But even then, you'd only be stopping them from the preliminary mobs, because the final boss is caged. So I still don't really get the point of this blockade.
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You can still block someone's access to the instance entrance. That's kinda the whole point of "pvp before pve" in my previous examples of what I'd like as a representation of pvx for Ashes.
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Again, I don't think I understand what you're trying to say here.
Are you implying that the instanced version would not have a timer on it? Then where's the difficulty, if you can simply farm the boss for however long.
Or are you talking about a respawn timer? But then how does it even matter if the boss is so damn hard that you can't even kill it. It wouldn't even go on respawn. Well, maybe the preliminary mobs could be considered a respawn timer for it, but, as I pointed out above, those mobs could show what the boss setup is today, so if you're attempting it on a different day - you might have change your build (the thing you wanted iirc).
As for the overall time required to beat the encounter - yes, it would take a lot. And only the guilds with highly skilled pvxers (or pvp and pve groups) would be able to accomplish that. You gotta defend your attempts, otherwise someone else might beat it before you.
This does bring up another question though. If this was an instance, do you expect a wipe inside of the instance to bring you right outside the room with full HP/MP, so that you can reattempt it all again instantly? Cause that's what you make it sound like.
And if that is what you want, then the 75min travel doesn't matter at all and everyone would simply sit at the boss all day, attempting the farm. Like, hundreds of people in one place. One could argue that there might be some wars for it or whatever, but as several people in the past have pointed out - people like to cooperate when it's way more beneficial to them. And when the award simply comes from finishing an instance - there's 0 point in fighting over an instance that's available to all.
I think I've given this example before, but just to explain my point better here. There was an instance in L2 that gave out best gear at that point in the game (for other L2 players, this will be in the context of a new server). It had "twice a week" respawn timer and a limit on the amounts of kills per "cycle" (let's say 20 for this example). When cycle ended, the instance would change to an open world enhancement stone farming location for 12h.
And so guilds would at first rarely fight around this instance, because there'd only be so many guilds that could even clear the instance, so spending time trying to prevent other farms wasn't as viable. But with time, there'd not only be more guilds clearing it per cycle, but even repeat alt groups from the same guilds. And at that point, as soon as news of "another group is gathering to fight the instance" got to a guild - they'd immediately go to the entrance and try to stop their competitors.
In other words, pvp was only present when there was scarcity (or at least a perceived one). Your suggestion seems to imply no such scarcity, so I see no reason for people to fight over these instances. At which point the entire game just becomes "we sit at an instance, trying to clear it; day in day out".
I don't want that in Ashes, exactly because I've already experienced that in L2 and the game only got worse because of that. And to me it seems that Steven has a similar mindset on the topic.
I do agree that we should have at least a few instances with super hardcore raid content (and probs a few with SH party content), but those things should be the aspirational content that people work towards. In other words, the bosses that we're talking about right now would not be the pinnacle of difficulty in the game, so they wouldn't require hundreds and hundreds of attempts.
The bosses I'm talking about would be the base lvl supplier of mats for gear crafting. You'll still have a chance to drop a few mats from mobs, but once you "crack the code" of farming the bosses - they're the main source. And this is why I keep saying that even plain dungeon mobs should be at the complexity of Named ones. Dungeons should be the day-to-day goal of anyone who's in the stage of mats acquisition, and that stage should take a long while and have pvp in it. And in order to justify the pvx name, this pvp gotta be counterbalanced with good pve in the form of hard mobs that lead to an even harder boss. All of which then culminates with a raid on a truly hardcore boss that gives best mats (and rarely full things).
To me, this is the "L2 but better" approach to pvx, which seems to at least somewhat align with Steven's desires for the game (at least right now, with the limited amount of knowledge on the far plans for pve).
oh right, they can work with others to protect their farm, but that's apparently not a thing people do these days, so, yeah, nothing yall can do to help pvers.
