Guild Wars 2

Should raid caliber content like Tequatl be limited to a raid system?

I feel that open world content should be designed around the casual player. You can call it “easy mode” or whatever you want, but it really exists to support the causal play base. There’s no organization required to head out into the virtual landscape and have fun.

Tequatl content is really raid caliber requiring organization and… dare I say it?… a raid system. In other words instanced content for large groups of 25, 40, whatever (insert big number here).

This is my opinion — what’s yours?

Pretty much agree with everything you said in your post.

Next time they redesign a World Boss, leave the current incarnation as is, and add a Raid Portal where the boss spawns that groups of 10-25 can enter and work as a group without things like a 2 hour re spawn timer, or interference from the outside world.

Difficult raid content needs to be instanced, plain and simple.

Yes, it should be instanced. As it stands this event brings out way too many random kittenkittens.

That said, I don’t think open world content should be easymode. It should provide a fair bit of challenge but it needs to be designed with the chaotic nature of the open world in mind. Organized raiding if done at all should be done elsewhere. This is not the platform for it.

yup, yup, yup. It should be in an instance.

It should be in an instance but it wont be.
Expect no changes but do expect the event to go the way of the Karka Queen.

Strongly disagree. Putting Tequatl in an instanced raid would deny a lot of people the opportunity to attempt the fight.

There are some disadvantages for making the fight available to “all comers” (e.g. turret griefing, afkers, etc.), but personally I prefer that to making the fight only available to large guilds and shutting out a large portion of the playerbase.

Well attempting a fight ain’t the same as killing tequatl i fought him so many times and each time we failed because of afkers and those who didn’t want to rez on wp, where’s the logic behind it?

I’m fine with it being open world. I’m fine with it being hard. What I’m not fine with is communities being totally split because of the overflow system. If I could actually get in with my home server, WHOSE TS INFORMATION IS FAMILIAR TO ME, this would not be such a problem. It’s the fact that random people from random servers are randomly thrown together that makes this so impossible; if you’re going to make something so hard that it requires coordination and voice chat, it is simply incompatible with the overflow system.

I think it would sit quite well as a guild activity, along the lines of the guild challenge, with good rewards awarded once per week per account. Whether it is open world or instanced there should be an easy way for non-guild players to join for full reward once it is started, even if they are not allowed to use the turrets!

Here is the thing, I totally agreed with you until I actually did a few Tequatal runs. The open world experience, good and bad, is something else. The biggest challenge for Tequatal is not the event difficulty but the mass about of coordination requriemt with totally random people.

You need to organize with HC guilds, noobs, small groups of people, people who may be AFK on turrets etc. It is downright stressful. But it makes the reward so much more meaningful. Yes there are a million issues with this encounter, but I have NEVER shouted and cheered with a bunch of random people in team chat for completing a PvE event like I did when we first took down Tequatal.

When you go into a raid with an organized group or guild, you expect victory and are disappointed/angry when you lose. This event you go into expecting to lose and if you win come out cheering and happy.

Just my 2 cents.

I think there are pros and cons to either direction.

In an instance or a guild version, it would be another reason to join a guild, the principles behind the story basically say that a guild fought a dragon before and it it also tore them apart (Destiny’s Edge). So it makes sense, however, the idea of tequatl was to make it more challenging, less of a mindless zerg, which honestly, other then the turrets and phasing, its still a mindless zerg. Stand here at his toes and zerg it, stand here with your 10 man squad and zerg hypnos, zerg that finger, spam turrets number 2, rinse and repeat, zerg the batteries, rinse and repeat.

The challenge is AFKers and Overflows. The timer also punishes your moral, as it make it feel like his health isnt going down.

Honestly, on failure, he shouldnt fly away, he should reset until we defeat him. Once he finally does die, thats when he should be on cooldown.

Or do away with his timer altogether.

There are so many ways to ressolve this in a compromising fashion its not funny.

Make rewards time gated, 15 minutes = 100% chance at something special, deduct 10% for every minute used thereafter until reaching loots current state.

Personally I disagree. I’ve done several fights, mostly in overflow, including two that were actually organized and had a TS server set up (most I’ve gotten it is just below 50%)…. and LOVED it so far.

Adding a proper raid system also brings some uglyness that I’m happy aren’t part of GW2, IMHO (we need 40 people, don’t mind if you’re not experienced/this class/this build, and so on), and goes against the general idea that “anyone can participate”, in my personal experience it ends up dividing the population on raiders and not raiders. It’s much better in the open world, at least in the context of GW2 (wouldn’t work in other raid centric games, though). It’s much easier to jump in when you hear “guild X or team Y are coordinating to kill tequatl” than it is to try a PUG in a regular raid system (at least in my experience).

Also, maybe I am lucky, but I’ve had mostly positive experiences of the fight so far. Granted, there are always negative comments (wouldn’t be the internet without them) but so far on every attempt I’ve made the ones with a positive attitude outweights them by far, thinking of strategies for the next time, joking around and things like that. Lots of people keep talking about how it’s fracturing the community… personally I feel quite the oposite. Thanks to it I’ve met and added to friends list commanders that were good at what they were doing, people from other servers I had fun playing with, friendly guilds and things like that I wouldn’t have met otherwise, and positively would have never met if it was a traditional instanced raid content.

Is it perfect?.. of course, not… far from it… waaay far. There are lots of issues with the fight as it is, problems with overflows, getting people together, getting good people on turret control (actually I made a thread elsewere suggesting a system to allow you to build 6 more turrets like you do sieges on WvW, with blueprints obtained in other events around the area like the krait attack to the lab), some (turrets, for example) I hope will be fixed, others (overflows) I do believe will tend to fix themselves over time as people move on to other things… but it’s the first attempt at very hard group content, I expect (and hope) for it to get refined in the future, and see more hard content added with the lessons learnt from this one, both good and bad ones.

I’d like to suggest a different method of success. I think the timer should remain but not set up for failure. It should be if Teq can be downed in under the allowed time then your rare loot rate is much higher than lets say it taking twice the time. But this constant fail is terrible for the community at large. Terrible blow to your casual gamer. If you allow for the timer idea than yes the hardcore gamer can still get a major incentive to do it. But the way it is..Well..Me and a lot of others have quit even trying. At least until we can afford all ascended gear. Come to think of it maybe that’s the point but I still don’t like it. Please consider your wide player base.

If the casual gamer community cannot take down tequatl then maybe it shouldn’t be in the open world which is the casual gamer paradise in GW2.

If it requires raid coordinate, then it’s a raid — doesn’t matter if it’s in the open world or not (a raid by any other name is still a raid). Requiring voice comms is another data point that this is indeed a raid caliber encounter.

If you need organization, then require organization in the form of an instance. If players are not willing to sign up for a raid instance, then they probably shouldn’t be attempting the raid instance in the first place — it requires that level of involvement.

To be perfectly honest, beyond the coordination of the turrets, this is no different than open world raids in other MMO’s. The problem here is zone overflows whereas in othergames there weren’t many zone caps and the entire world may be pretty much seemless. The world bosses weren’t guild only. Raid only maybe(tag it it’s yours), but raids were made up by pugs all the time.

Each zone here is basically an instance. So I think you have to treat these fights as such. You want to make raid content type things…give them their own instance or tune them to where the group doesn’t have to account for afk’s, especially an afk on a needed and crucial aspect of the fight like the turrets are. That one person can cause 80-90ppl to fail.

As far as the “If it were an instanced raid, many would never be able to exp this content” statements/arguments people make…well they still aren’t completing it now. The people who are downing him are the ones who take over zones, organize and use voice comms.

But those groups are multiguilds and pugs soooooo. I personally have 7kills with the SOR community. Many are players I know, many are players I’ve never seen before. Pugs can organize too.