I remember fondly the first time I saw the Shatterer. The giant dragon looked incredible against the gloomy skyline of Blazeridge Steppes and there was a genuine sense of dread when it flew overhead, before finally landing in front of me. It’s one of those gaming moments that sticks out as visually spectacular and although it’s fun to fight the first time, it quickly lost its charm once you realised how many restrictions it had.

The revised Shatterer, due to make its appearance in Guild Wars 2 later today, sees a variety of changes on the back of Colin Johanson’s blog post. Has it transformed the encounter for the better? Yes. Is it perfect? Not quite.

ArenaNet have already covered the basics of the encounter here and large parts of it are familiar, the changes to its various stages, though, are key to it feeling different. The addition of a break bar and crystals that heal the Shatterer, combined with gliding, make the encounter much more frantic. While these things add a greater level of depth - something that’s always welcome - they don’t really change the difficulty or the reality of how I predict the fight will play out when on a live server.

Part of the fundamental problem with World Bosses is that they aren’t instanced and as a result, ArenaNet are limited in what they can and can’t achieve. Unsurprisingly, they also can’t guarantee how many players will regularly participate and how that then affects things such as break bar’s or crystals you need to destroy (though they can have a good guess). Even in our small press group of between 10 and 15 players, we had little trouble killing the Shatterer and did so on our second attempt. Considering some who participated stated they had never done PvE, it doesn’t bode well when hundreds of experienced players will eventually participate.

Where the phases are concerned, it’s fairly simple and despite everything new that the shatterer throws at you, I’d still argue it’s sensible to ignore most of the enemies and “flash” and instead simply attack the shatterer at all times. On my first run of the encounter I stood still for lengthy periods of time, just to see if I’d die from the oncoming AOE effects or the new creatures: I quite comfortably avoided and survived the vast majority of what was thrown my way.

I suspect the main difficulty players will have is ensuring that the crystals that spawn, which heal the Shatterer, are killed quickly. They have their own break bar but once broken and spawn in locations that are spaced widely apart. Fortunately once their break bar is broken, they die in seconds. Leaving them unattended however or failing to kill them will result in the Shatterer being healed a considerable amount.

Interestingly, the break bar on the shatterer was the trickiest part but I suspect largely because our motley crew was uncoordinated and I suspect many who participated failed to use their skills accordingly or equip them in the first place. Each time we needed to disrupt the Shatterer, we failed miserably and he soon took flight. I’m unsure at this point as to what the disadvantage is to him taking to the skies as there was no real risk to life when he did so - I suspect it’s primarily time lost, when you could be dealing high damage to him in a weakened state.

Before I finish this impressions, I just wanted to talk about gliding and the use of siege equipment. Firstly, gliding is undoubtedly fun and a welcome addition to the encounter. Soaring into the skies to drop bombs or health packs is a neat idea but it also feels time consuming and a damage loss (whilst you’re flying, you’re not dealing damage). I suspect in the weeks and months to come there’s the potential for teams to abandon the need to fly - or only do so when you want to break his bar - so that you can continue to deal damage on the ground. As for siege equipment, it definitely packs a punch but still feels rather dull to jump onto a cannon and fire one round every few seconds.

My initial thought after killing the Shatterer was that it might have been more fun to have players who want to glide to jump off the nearby bridge, south of Lowland Burns Waypoint, for them to then make their way to the Shatterer on updrafts. The route could be challenging, but reward players with huge damage against the dragon and a series of unique achievements.

Overall I’m impressed with the revision to the Shatterer. It’s still a brilliant spectacle, it’s still fun but it’s also bound by the restrictions of open world gameplay - notably player numbers and the ease at which they cut down content. ArenaNet have shown just how good raids can be and I still look forward to fighting the likes of the Shatterer in an instanced environment (here's hoping!). My gut instinct tells me however that this event will be on farm within the day and the rewards, only marginally better than what I’ve received previously, aren’t necessarily a lucrative draw but the achievement's should be.