Guild Wars 2

I doubt anyone will read this, but I’ll put my input in anyway because I love this game and love watching it grow. This is what I believe we need in regards to raids.

Incentives

There needs to be rewards, because as of right now there isn’t much in terms of rewards for putting in all the effort and completing this super difficult content. I’m thinking create a currency as well as make the bosses drop awesome but rare loot (new armor and new weapons as well as other things).

The currency will be something you get every time you complete a raid, and no matter what raid you do the currency is the same type. This allows players to work towards obtaining new armor, weapons and all sorts of other things even when they aren’t receiving one of the rare unique rewards from the particular raid.

Raids should absolutely not be guild content. This forces the idea that to successfully complete an event, you HAVE NO CHOICE but to join a huge guild.

There’s already some element of this with tequatl/triple trouble, in that it’s very difficult to get credit/even get on a map without joining a specific guild that only does these two events..

Should raiding guilds be viable? Absolutely. Should they be mandatory? No.

I knew people couldn’t resist mentioning stacking.

Because, you know, it’s not like you stack and LoS mobs in tons of other games or anything.

Proposal Overview
Guild Raiding – For guilds that want to go further

Goal of Proposal
To enable guild based events for guild members.
Opens a new category of a speciality guild

Dungeons – 5 Man
World bosses – Map Size restrictions and open to public
PvP – Once again 5 man
WvW – ugh lets not go there

Proposal Functionality

Guild Raiding

1) World Boss Raid

Privately Instanced
Guild research open world boss (As it is currently)
Guild members assemble in guild hall
Guild member(officer) with permission click on Activate and select a World bosses
After world boss have been selected, asuran portal activates and guild members travel through to instance.

Reward – Boss Kill (everyone wins)

Extra Reward Tier (Timed and ladder board) – Bronze, Silver, Gold (for the hardcore guilds)

2) Dungeon Instance Raid

Privately Instanced
Guild research required
Guild members assemble in guild hall
Guild member with permission click on activate and select a dungeon
Dungeons can be selected based on member availability, through this a predefined list can be generated and suggested to player to select.

Reward tiered based dungeon
Beginner – short and easy
Intermediatte – medium difficulty and longer
Expert – Forgiving but hard to do and much longer – Think Urgoz Warren, All the mechanics required to get through each section. Multi boss and checkpoints
Elite(for the specialised guild) – Well essentially if you mess up, you wipe the group. Rewarding and challenging with a higher chance of a special item

3) Raid Management

Commander Tag Required
Commander Can Organise Party and see the entire raid group
(Insert list of commander tag functionality wants)

Risk Associated
None – If no risk is taken, nothing is ventured forth.

2 more cents. I hate stacking. We need a boss that hates it more. I can see a boss that runs up to the stack and does a running, jumping super stomp, sends all stackers flying to their death if they are under 50% health (far please, like 1200) laughs maniacally while waving his finger like Dikembe Mutombo NO NO NO! That would be awesome.

maha.7902:

I knew people couldn’t resist mentioning stacking.

Because, you know, it’s not like you stack and LoS mobs in tons of other games or anything.

Just because it may happen in other games doesn’t mean nothing should be done about it. Fact is, stacking dulls down the combat, and with the combat in this game, the difference is pretty apparent. Full player & enemy collisions is not a feasible solution in this game, so the best that can be done is to adjust enemies in a way that discourages stacking or makes it impossible.

I think it’s important for any future raid content to keep it challenging despite the Zerk meta.

As mentioned in Light Guardian Jack’s proposal, i think there were a few good examples of raids in Season 1.
I’m going to take the Prime Hologram for an example here. I think this is a good representation of what a raid could look like in Guild Wars 2, and i think is a good example to point out what i think are great parts of a raid.
It wasn’t exactly instanced, but it was close enough.

First of all, its not just a tough boss. It really takes into account fun parts of the Guild Wars 2 combat system, and even though i only played engineer, i really felt like my profession came out well. I had different skills to balance, more offense, more defence, where can i get vigor/dodge for the AOE’s, do i want immunity from the Green holograms explosions, etc.

It also requires organisation and teamwork. You’re depending on your team, on multiple different minds working on this as a group. To get the holograms down to the right level required people to actually think, and it made the event much easier if you had competent leaders at the top.

These two points, i.m.o., work together marvelously. On a micro level, you have every person’s individual skill – doging, dealing damage, situational awarenes are all very useful in the event. There’s multiple different roles you can fill as any profession, and the choices in weapons and utility come out nicely. As engineer, i had to choose between might and blast finishers, projectile negation, heavy DPS and support – all these roles had a necessity for them. You can see yourself matter in the fight.
On a macro level, everyone coordinates, and the fact you’re doing a joint group effort is really obvious. The event would go horribly wrong if everyone just DPS-ed the first person they saw, and it requires a certain amount of strategy, which i think is ideal for guilds.

That leaves the point of accessibility. A serious potential problem with this is the amount of people you’d need for this kind of raid, and the organisation required might reduce accessibility. People should be able to organise and play this content when they feel like it. I think adding the raids to LFG still sounds like a good idea. Another problem i was thinking of is that some people might not want to be an active member of a guild, and this would cater to these people too. The raids could maybe be startable by guilds only (i’m not sure if the intent is to focus raids on being a mostly guild-thing, but i’m getting this impression), with the ability to “top it off” with LFG players.
Even without this limitation though, i think it would still be something that’s much easier to do as a guild – as i mentioned above, i think a good raid should have teamwork and organisation as an integral part (much like the Crown Pavilion and the Hologram took coordinated effort to get the most out of it) – and with a guild starting it, that’s the way it’d be.

I’ve got another idea brewing, but i need a bit more time to think it out.
In any case, still loving the CDI’s and happy to get back into them ^-^

maha.7902:

I knew people couldn’t resist mentioning stacking.

Because, you know, it’s not like you stack and LoS mobs in tons of other games or anything.

There is tanks and healers in other mmo. Guild Wars 2 should have them. -logic.

High amounts of potent aoe could be one way to cure the stacking problem.

I was reading the thread title, since this CDI is called Guilds-Raiding can we say that Raids will be part of Guild Missions? Like a new Mission type called “Raid”?

Guild raids are not the best idea. Little guilds cant do it or if it have a small player cap bug guilds cant enjoy the raid.
Or maybe they could be scaling dungeons

WARNING
This will be long winded but hopefully worth the read.

Hi everyone! My name is Chad aka Killchain, I am the leader and founder of Attuned. A guild theorized after the World First Tequatl kill and implemented after Blackgates collective NA first Triple Trouble wurm kill. I also have a vast amount of MMO experience and have at the very least tried every single MMO since World of Warcrafts inception except Guild Wars 1 and The Secret World. In World of Warcraft I had experienced the game from a PvP’er to casual raider and as I grew up out of highschool performed in high end raiding including various raid leader, officer and guild leader roles. I just wanted to highlight as a frame of reference my experience in various mechanics and implementations of “ raiding “.

Now to the fun part! Man I’d never thought I’d see the day where we were discussing raiding like this to be honest. <3. I believe the best approach that I can convey is breaking up the whole concept of raiding into various sections and then providing the pro’s and con’s from there.
__________________________________________________________________
Concept (1) – Format: “Open World or Instanced”

As I read some of the replies thus far it seems as if the general consensus is that this is specifically refering to instanced raiding however I still want to touch on this.

Open World Pros

• Builds community
• All inclusive
• Encourages scaling of events therefore LOSELY determined by minimum or maximum amount of players ( aka not rigid 10 man only ).

Open World Cons

• Hard for guild to get 100% of their players in.
• Although not required promotes capped maps aka the full 150+ people.
• 150+ people difficult to manage
• High turnover of players who manage to get in limiting improvement.

Instanced Pros

• Guaranteed to determine who gets into the raid
• Will emphasis more squad features thereby helping WvW in the process
• Controlled enviroment so the mobs, encounters and players in there are 100% determined
• Clearer sense of progress ( 2/5 bosses down etc that mentality is good to be able to quantify like that ).
• Easier to fine tune encounters, no taking down a whole map cause triple trouble bugged etc.
• Promotes vastly superior sense of competition in a PvE environment ( the players themselves determine whether its hostile or not don’t fall for that fallacy that you are at fault for causing elitism )

Instanced Cons

• Lose broader sense of community
• Less likely likeminded players will " find " each other
• Open World " may " begin to feel smaller as players segregate around the instances or cities ONLY.

I genuinely think instanced raids are vastly superior to anything open world can offer personally but I’m willing to admit a bias there. Perhaps a compromise that could be worked out is providing an easier open world alternative to raid bosses as well. My example would be something like keeping Tequatl as is but also providing a harder instanced version of Tequatl with different rewards to reward prestige etc. ( Please note prestige is not something to shy away from, people shouldnt complain if something aesthetic like a title or a unique skin is availiable from something that is hard. )

Concept (2) – Size of raid. " How many people can enter one raid at one time? Should it scale? "

This is an interesting topic but again lets break it down as best we can.
Having a set raid number for instanced encounters makes balancing said encounter 100 frickin billion times easier to promote real competition among guilds and communities. Likewise it helps players form clearer and more concise plans and strategies around encounters. While on its surface it sounds like it would cripple guilds by saying “Sorry champ this raid is only for x people, you miss out” this does have an inverse effect that is positive it will promote and help grow MORE guilds. 10-20 man raids will help promote smaller guilds and make it far easier to manage for them. While larger guilds have the opportunity to create multiple raids, help other guildies on alts, things of that nature.

Though I am willing to admit it isn’t all sunshine and rainbows as some larger guilds would experience more " cliques " and segregation among members. I would argue though that this more so comes down to how the management of that guild handles it. My vote here would be 100% be behind 10-20 man raids ideally 10-15 man.

Concept (3) – Encounter Design.

This is the part I really feel most passionate about, the encounters really need to be next level. Don’t be afraid to make difficult content layered with multiple phases and things that seem next to impossible. Definitely don’t under-estimate your playerbase either. Tequatl showed us what seemed impossible is actually easily achievable. Play into seldom used traits and utilities. Give true purpose to your unique soft trinity roles like CC / Tanky / Support / Healing players.

An example could be 2 very simple mechanics, every 20 seconds x boss puts a damage over time effect on people that deals 200% of their maximum health can’t be cleansed. This forces people to group up and aoe heal, then every other 20 seconds ( aka 10 second intervals of each mechanic rotating etc ) have a mechanic that puts an AoE around every player x diameter and after 2 seconds if anyone is in each others AoE they both die.

This straight away creates a simple stack and spread out mechanic in an encounter now imagine if we throw in other phases with other mechanics and say in the final phase you’re dealing with lots of things suddenly that seemingly easy mechanic of stack and spread out gets layered in with everything else and it becomes far more tricky. This is intrinsically where the difficulty comes from within most raid encounters.

Likewise as I mentioned giving more purpose to alternative roles like CC and Support.
An example for CC could be the following. X boss stands in the middle and never moves. Every 30 seconds a mob spawns on the outer ring of the encounter and takes 10 seconds to run to the boss suiciding the mob and making the boss AoE everyone for 90% of their maximum health. However after 15 seconds whether the mob is at the boss or not he explodes regardless leaving an AoE on the floor that ticks some damage for the rest of the fight.

This example provides so many things.

• CC required to stop mob from making the boss one shot you all
• If in the event you know you can’t cc it you still have a window of opportunity to group up mass heal and hope you’re all above 90% health aka there is small windows of counterplay should you screw up
• Creates a soft enrage timer that means if you dont kill the boss by the time the entire room is filled with these aoe circles slowly ticking damage you’ll wipe regardless.

These are the kind of mechanics that should be played into with GW2’s combat system and this doesnt even REMOTELY touch on what can be explored by way of jumping puzzle platforming, pressure plates as someone else mentioned, splitting up raids temporarily, environmental weapons. So many reasons GW2 would kick butt with raids.

Concept (4) – Progress and Gating. " How should progress be gated? If at all "

Now we come to yet another interesting discussion to be had, do you literally not gate any of this content? So anyone from any guild or guildless without spending gold karma or influence or merits, no currency spent on unlocking these raids, can waltz into a raid and then in turn go to any boss in any order to attempt to defeat it. Well…..no that sounds insane. There definitely has to be some form of gating behind the progress you make.

I saw people mentioning the idea of influence and various things like that but because we are talking instanced content I don’t feel like it needs a gating by the way of currency in any fashion. A smaller guild shouldnt feel punished because they can’t meet the unlock demands and likewise there will be guilds out there that form solely for the purpose of briefly repping and coming together at a set time and doing raids then they go back to their own social guilds.

I don’t think the shear entering of the instance to begin with should be gated by anything. Now lets take a look at actual encounters within a raid. ASSUMING we have raids with more than one boss in it, each subsequent boss stereotypically needs to be defeated before doing the next, this alone can be played into from time to time, what about bosses that upon being defeated effect the remaining bosses in some fashion.

Super brief example. 4 elemental bosses and final super mega god boss. You CAN attempt any boss at any time but killing the god boss with all elemental bosses up is like nigh impossible…..literally ( but perhaps there is a title if you can pull it off thus providing longevity )

• Killing fire boss takes away fire aura mechanic from god boss
• Killing ice boss stops random player getting frozen for 5 seconds every 20 seconds
• Killing earth boss stops random aoe rocks falling down that instantly down state you
• Killing air boss stops the boss from auto attacking with lightning arcs to everyone aka only auto attacks one person.

Something like this is amazing gating taken to a different area. While other raids could have your typical beat x boss to goto y beat y boss to goto z etc etc. Also again tapping into the various mechanics like pressure plates jp’s all that craziness you could even say heres unique boss someone in your raid has to have completed every jumping puzzle in the game to be able to open this hidden pathway and complete THAT jumping puzzle to unlock x unique boss….that kind of gating, at least in my opinion would be friggin epic.

Another typical gating method in traditional MMO’s was always gear, GW2 is amazing in that assuming no additional vertical tiers of gear come, every raid ever made will still remain relevant in difficulty for new players etc. If you take a look at what WoW is now 80% of its raid content is outdated and any new player coming to the game misses out on the experience of beating lich king or illidan etc. The lack of gear treadmill is a massive massive positive for GW2’s raiding if it were to be implemented.

Also another thing to consider is the following…..You implement 3 raids, does raid z require all of raid y to be completed before entering? Does raid y require all of x prior to entering? Is it completely free of one another? or is there a PSEUDO gating of raids? Say raid instance owner must have 2/5 of raid x to open raid y? This is where I personally don’t have too much opinion because I plan to smash it all out anyway =P But definitely something to consider.

Concept (5) – Reward Structure.

Man I’m almost done, this will be the last thing I want to touch on….whew…..okay.
There are a few questions within this one idea that you sort of want to ask yourselves.

• Do we reward per day? Per Attempt? Per week? Per kill? Per account? Per Character?
• Is there any room for overlap?
• Will it be RNG or Guaranteed? or Both?
• Token system = god?

Traditional MMO’s did the whole reward over the week as raids reset weekly likewise it was all RNG based. I don’t think weekly based rewards should ever be touched. Daily is certainly good I like that. But in tandem with normal rewards as is.

Assuming you have a raids with little trash, just enough to give a hint at the upcoming bosses mechanics. I’d assume said trash would have loot tables for things like tier 5 and tier 6 materials, lodestones, usual stuff like that. Ensure they aren’t exploitable aka no respawn and farm situation ensure it doesnt SCALE to give more champions etc.

As for bosses there should be 2 catergories imo.
Everytime you kill a boss rewards and….
Once a day you kill a boss rewards.

Everytime
Should mimic the ward of doing equivalent content else where lets say average boss takes 10-15 minutes including trash and setup? Average path of dungeon gives 1-2 gold? Some champ boxes and loot, karma. Therefore as an example, everytime you kill a boss give 2gold, 5 champ boxes and like….5k karma or something like that.

Once a Day
This is where you get a chance at your RNG shenanigans, if you want a full set of gear to come from x raid, a piece of gear per boss would mean minimum 6 bosses per raid, something like that personally, with all due respect, is something I don’t see ANET maintaining quality content in a decide time frame between raids being added to get 6 bosses per raid.

So a better system might be a multiple token system. Lets say the first raid has 3 bosses in it and its called " Firey Mc Fire Raid Place ". Each boss has the chance to drop each individual one of 6 boxes. 6 Boxes of 6 pieces of gear then YOU choose the stats. The RNG comes from whether you get it AS WELL as whether its the piece you need, You could even say perhaps the last boss gives a higher chance, or even ONLY the helmet and shoulder come from the last boss, things like that. Furthermore….
Each boss you defeat gives you x " Firey Mc Fire Raid Place " tokens to spend on those same boxes that give that gear, so if you don’t get it by RNG you can still work towards the pieces over time. Likewise there should be something there that is ONLY pure RNG, something like a unique tonic, mount ( if only ) something liek that, that is pure RNG. Also give an option to spend " Firey Mc Fire Raid Place " tokens on an item that increases the chance of that unique tonic / mount by X%. Something like 5000% increase for the next 24 hours. This will take it from say a 0.2% chance to drop to a 10% drop chance. Obviously the disparity doesn’t have to be that extreme but lets take a look at what that would achieve.

It gives maintains the excitement of getting lucky drop and having unique piece of gear before others without ruining the unlucky and giving them NO chance to obtain that same gear, ( those poor souls still farming for tequatls hoard ). Likewise having 1 item be still PURE rng based gives additional purpose to tokens after all the gear has been obtained. Perhaps even throw in a tokens -> karma option too. Or make the pieces of gear you get through tokens account bound but salvageable to ensure tokens are never redundant

Jesus christ…..Sorry everyone didn’t realise how kitten big that entire thing came out to be =S……brb writing PHD on raiding…..

Just my 2 cents about this.

I would like to see scalable content for 10-x players. Fully enabled from guild upgrades.
But make content that require diversity in the players, or at least their build. If the optimal situation requires 90% zerks (or pvt if you can’t crit the boss) you are not thinking out of the box.
I believe the introduction of the husk-gameplay with the wurm was a very good addition, and I’d like to see more of that out of the box thinking.

Take it as a dungeoncrawler:
- once you fully clear (or a certain percentage) of the room/a part of the dungeon a boss will spawn
- once you kill the boss, you are allowed to the next part.
- don’t allow skipping, bring in mechanics that require you to do all the content.

As for diversity, you might bring something like every new level/room/area you unlock after killing one of the bosses might be different themed.
- some rooms with a high condicasters —> require condi removal
- rooms with fire immunity —> work around fire dmg
- rooms with corruptors —> don’t use boons
- rooms with mobs with a high amount of boons (like most of the dredge bosses actually) —> bring corruptors

as in every part requires you to prepare and rethink how you will do this.
(might even be a bank, merchant and repairpost after every boos you kill)

And as for rewards:
- since it’s a guild raid, make sure it rewards the guild aswell. (like some statue, picture or anything inthe guildhalls, that can work like a guild achievementlist)
- make sure it is rewarding for every person joining. (for both people in as out the guild)
- make sure you get certain rewards, don’t make everything RNG based, but skill/investment based.

Downsides
- zerkers don’t like not being zerkers
- zergers don’t like not being zergers

Instead of proposing specific functionality or implementation, I have some thoughts on what a “gw2 raid” should look like. Some of these suggestions enter the realm of game design, so I apologize if that is not desired for this CDI.

To encourage accessability, the leadup to any final raid encounter should be tutorial-like. I think this goes really far in terms of welcoming players and shouldn’t be glossed over. We’ve already seen this design philosophy, most notably in newer dungeons such as Molten Weapons Facility and TA Aetherpath. Consider, for example, what the triple trouble escort events could have been. Imagine if the Cobalt escort required even 1 keg to be picked up and dropped in front of a mini-Cobalt. That would teach much more than any NPC dialogue. To restate, if a raid can’t be “figured out” by most players after repeated attempts, there’s probably an accessability gap in the mechanics somewhere.

One of gw2’s greatest strengths is its dynamic scaling system. This should most definitely be utilized for group-based cooperative content! A gw2 raid should be able to accomodate groups of different sizes. As others have already mentioned, there are negative consequences when players are forced to exclude other players from group content. If a raid can be finished with n players, make sure it also works for at least 2n players. In theory, this means no one ever needs to be left out.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Is it possible, then, to just scale objectives along with the player counts? Perhaps. But it seems that would equate to just making many tiers of the content which, to me, sounds like a good way to diminish the total amount of content we could build. What do you guys think?

I understand this route will require a lot of dev time, fine tuning, and testing, but considering how much raid content is expected to be replayed, the extra effort to create quality content at multiple tiers seems worth it.

For example, imagine teq where the number of usable turrets can change. Or wurm, where the event timer depends on the number of players present. Wouldn’t these world bosses be more accessable if these parameters were always reasonble for the given number of players?

Another core strength of gw2 is its malleable world. Allow epic raids to affect Tyria’s landscape! Currently, “cyclic” events only affect Tyria on the scale of minutes (dynamic events), hours (world bosses), and years (seasonal events). There’s a lot of design space between hours and years in terms of changing the state of Tyria.

Lastly, raids probably don’t belong on the open world (This is not a vote for private controlled instances! Bear with me, this is about focused design, not exclusivity). There’s two issues with the open world that make it unsuitable for raids.

First, it’s too “polluted” with consumables. The raid designer should be focused on creating solid and challenging gameplay mechanics. She should never have to ask questions like “What if all the players bring fire ele powders/ogre pet whistles? Will someone with experimental teleportation rifles completely bypass this awesome mechanic? Will I have to account for road markers planted everywhere?”

Secondly, designing a raid on the open world automatically means it needs to scale for a map at capacity. As others have alluded to, there are so many variables to account for, that any reasonable design will have a diluted experience.

Of course, creating raids with all these characteristics (if they are considered good ideas) is going to be pretty hard, but I think anet is willing to tackle these challenges! =)

I’d say a mix of ‘guild’ raids and open-world raids would be nice. I see that people wouldn’t mind both. Open-world raids are then the World bosses and mega-events, except with a better logistical functionality than we have now. Guild raids would then be entirely new content (not found in the open world).

I’ve seen many great ideas again! Exciting!

leviN.4390:

Proposal Overview
Guild Raiding – For guilds that want to go further

Goal of Proposal
To enable guild based events for guild members.
Opens a new category of a speciality guild

Dungeons – 5 Man
World bosses – Map Size restrictions and open to public
PvP – Once again 5 man
WvW – ugh lets not go there

Proposal Functionality

Guild Raiding

1) World Boss Raid

Privately Instanced
Guild research open world boss (As it is currently)
Guild members assemble in guild hall
Guild member(officer) with permission click on Activate and select a World bosses
After world boss have been selected, asuran portal activates and guild members travel through to instance.

Reward – Boss Kill (everyone wins)

Extra Reward Tier (Timed and ladder board) – Bronze, Silver, Gold (for the hardcore guilds)

2) Dungeon Instance Raid

Privately Instanced
Guild research required
Guild members assemble in guild hall
Guild member with permission click on activate and select a dungeon
Dungeons can be selected based on member availability, through this a predefined list can be generated and suggested to player to select.

Reward tiered based dungeon
Beginner – short and easy
Intermediatte – medium difficulty and longer
Expert – Forgiving but hard to do and much longer – Think Urgoz Warren, All the mechanics required to get through each section. Multi boss and checkpoints
Elite(for the specialised guild) – Well essentially if you mess up, you wipe the group. Rewarding and challenging with a higher chance of a special item

3) Raid Management

Commander Tag Required
Commander Can Organise Party and see the entire raid group
(Insert list of commander tag functionality wants)

Risk Associated
None – If no risk is taken, nothing is ventured forth.

Agreed I feel like we already have raid like events in gw2 for instance the tripple trouble and teq. The only thing they should do is introduce more world bosses like this and allow guilds or communities to spawn their own instance of the map so they can get the organised players into the map to do the event.

I’m just going to toss this in this post, hope you guys notice me.
Please don’t do the error you did in fractals…

Increasing HPs isn’t more Challenging / Fun…it’s just boring and frustrating, try to make mobs challenging without just increasing ridiculously the hp ratio.

Thanks, hope the discussion will expand from this Love <3

Retro.6831:

Not everyone wants them to be instanced, so do not treat this as a foregone conclusion.* Organizational tools for large-scale events should not be built around the notion that they are private or exclusive and that players can be kicked out.

Yes …

Retro.6831:

Keep the community AS A WHOLE in mind, with special attention to how player habits change over time.* While you may have thoroughly enjoyed staying up until 3am trying to beat that raid boss when you were in middle school, please consider how incompatible that type of gameplay is with a lifestyle in which employment, families and non-gaming hobbies figure prominently. Many players automatically assume they want “hardcore raiding like in the old days” without realizing that a decade or more has passed and that despite wanting to indulge in that experience again, it may not be realistic to do so (and it can have dire consequences for developers who work under such assumptions; see Wildstar).

• Raids should probably take longer than a dungeon, but not excessively so (remember, not everyone has hours to spend gaming!)
• Raids should not require an excessive amount of preparation (Attunements, buffs, etc.)
• Raids should occur when it is convenient for the individual; time locks and such should not dictate when a player can raid. (Not everyone has a regular work schedule!)

… and yes again.

I think these are very important issues from my point of view and the above describes very good some of the reasons why I switched from an other game (in which I was raiding a lot) to GW2. At some point (because of work und family) I could not and wanted no to spend 2-4 hours an evening/night with a raiding anymore and without being on the “raid team” in my guild there I could not access that content any more.

Greetings.

Ok I’m late to the party it seems. Since we were asked to think outside the box and the sky’s the limit, here you go : feel free to insult/oppose/screm in pain when you read this :P

Proposition 1 :

Proposal overview
New type of guild mission : Fractal Raid. A mix between fractal speed clearing and a guild rush.

Goal of the proposal:
Reuse already existing content to provide a new and very challenging experience, along with an entire new set of rewards.
Split the mistlock instabilities and the agony level.

Proposal Functionality
Fractal raid is a guild mission that is awailable at 3 tiers of difficulty. The higher tiers require more guild members to be completed.

Fractal raids are:

• instanced content
• requiring at least 5 players up to 20 (each extra 5 generate a new cluster of fractals)
• unlocked with a guild upgrade and then purchased like any other guild mission
• the group(s) can include non representing members. These group members will not recieve commendations and items at the end of the run. Just a sum of gold.
• grants reward once per week per account

How does it work ?
Once the mission has started, players can interect with a consortium executive near the fractal gate.
They will be thrown in a random instance containing a set of 3 pre-defined fractals and no boss fractal. (swamp, uncat, thaumanova or ascalon, cliff, grawl etc…)

The instances:

• contain all 3 fractals (no loadscreen between fractals)
• works like a personnal story instance (i.e : if you get out of the instance for any reason, there is no way to get back in unless the entire group restarts).
• are set at level 20 agony for the tier 1 raid, 35 agony in tier 2 (no standard instability though) and level 50 in tier 3.

When you are teleported in the 3 fractals cluster, you start in a “safe zone”. In this zone, you are out of combat and no mob can attack you.
As soon as one member steps out of the “safe zone”, a timer starts and all party members are put permanently in combat. The skill “portal” cease to function.

The objective of the group(s) is to complete the cluster of fractals as fast as possible. If the rush includes more than one group, the groups have to complete the instances at the same time.
There is a commandation+gold+exotic reward for completing the raid and a bonus gold for completing it faster.

The catch is…
A new set of instabilities applies to the cluster.
e.g : in the uncategorised fractal, skill that destroy or reflect projectiles cease to destroy or reflect said projectiles. Instead, these skills increase the damage done by your skills that have a range over 800.
e.g : in the dredge fractal, each second spent in stealth removes 20% of your max health (mitigated by armour) [Bomb room does not count ofc]
Each instability is designed to neutralise the classic way of completing the fractal and incentivise players to find new strategies.
Anet, get crazy when you create these new instabilities

Associated Risks
Extremely elitist content. Can fail to be challenging very quickly if a weakness in the AI or a glitch is found. Stacking will probably not disappear soon.

Proposition 2 :

As the leaders of TTS proposed earlier : allow the guild the options to generate a private instance of the megabosses.

Additionnal suggestion :
Public megaboss hosting (the way it exists actually) should reward on average MORE the players while the instance should reward only influence, merits and non-tradable items.
In other words, the instanced and open-world versions of the same megaboss should not have the same loot table (one mode should not overshadow the other one).

Goal of the proposition:
Give large guilds the possibility to experience content without interference of pugs while not removing the incentive to publicly host megabosses.

Associated risks :
If the rewards are not carefully balanced, large guilds might only do private versions of megabosses, killing the spirit of megabosses in the first place.

Zanthrax.6538:

Concept (1) – Format: “Open World or Instanced”
-snip-

First of all, im going to say – brilliant composition. definitely worth the read, and im going to reply to it per point of yours. I think thatll be most orderly.

1. Format

I agree that instanced raiding sounds way better.
One thing that you havent touched on is the often debilitating problem of AFK-ers/people who clog “map instance” space, but dont partake in the event. Often these people will even scale the event, making it much harder to complete because they dont contribute anything. With instanced content, not only is player amount easier to regulate, but AFK-ers will also be much less of a problem. Instanced raids also allow people to raid with only people they know if they so wish to, making raiding with your guild alot easier. So in the end, i think instanced is vastly superior to open world bosses, and the pro-s heavily outweigh the cons.
That being said, i think it would be a very nice feature to have to be able to get random members of the community with similar interests to join the instance – even if they aren’t in your guild. This would also provide the added benefit of allowing people to invite friends who aren’t part of the guild to join them.

Zanthrax.6538:

*Concept (2) – Size of raid. "

-snip-

Concept (3) – Encounter Design.

These are the kind of mechanics that should be played into with GW2’s combat system and this doesnt even REMOTELY touch on what can be explored by way of jumping puzzle platforming, pressure plates as someone else mentioned, splitting up raids temporarily, environmental weapons. So many reasons GW2 would kick butt with raids.

2. Size of raid
I agree that a set amount of people would make it easier to balance, although i think 10-15 people would be slightly too few for raids. The way i think of raids, theyre really big things, co-ordinated group efforts – there should be a serious distinction from the “group of friends” parties we have in dungeons, and the way dungeon bosses work. Dungeons seem like more something that would fit the “helping guildies level alts” idea.
If a suitable “LFG/topping up” system could be found, i think raids of around 30-50 people seem like a better size. Theres also the possibility of just adding different difficulties, upping the levels, amount of damage bosses do etc when you choose to enter with more people. A tuned version of the scaling system, you could say.
“Raids” definitely isnt a fixed concept though, and if there are multiple different raids, they could be designed for different amounts of people. The LFG system could help smaller guilds top up the higher man raids, or perhaps smaller guilds can cooperate to join together for the larger raids. Especially cooperation of smaller guilds seems like a nice idea to me. The larger a raid is designed for, the more cooperation.

3. Encounter design
I agree that we could really use some new mechanics here. This is a big part of why i was referring to the prime hologram earlier – it really had quite alot of fun mechanics that needed to be taken into account.
I love the spirit of the ideas you’ve put forth here. Rather than just a boss that needs killing with a few special attacks that need dodging, the encounters could really be made very fun. Jumping puzzles to get further, and especially the parties teporarily splitting up and taking care of different things is a concept i love, because youd still need coordination, but for a small while, youre suddenly in a smaller group and need to change your decisions because youre suddenly in a whole new strategic situations. GW2’s system has so many brilliant things that i think could really be used to make raids awesome.

-more coming-

Proposition 3 :

I am among those who think that megabosses are the raids in GW2. Thus I am putting forward this:

Expand the pool of megabosses by bringing back old LS season 1 large scale encounter and tequatl-ise the other two dragons.

Proposal Overview
Guidelines on how to turn the shatterer and the claw of jormag into megabosses. There are old topics about this buried deep in this forum, I am just bringing back some suggestions posted here.

Goal of Proposal
To turn the shatterer and the claw of jormag into megabosses. What’s more to add ?

Proposal Functionality
Shatterer :
Ideas for shatterer revamp:

1. Remove mortars. Make sure the large charr turrets can only be manned and repaired by NPCs.
2. The charr turrets should spawn one minute before the start of the shatterer (THEY are the so called “vigil siege weapons”). These turrets remove invulnerability buff (same as tequatl except that players aren’t manning turrets).
3. Have bigger waves of mobs attacking the charr turrets and the NPC that repair them => this forces us to have defence teams.
4. During the current “crital phase”, have cristals heal the shatterer quickly, forcing the players to rapidly destroy them (timer related challenge). Each destroyed cristal gives the remaining ones a 25% damage reduction buff (i.e, you have to kill the cristals at the same time).
5. Add a breath attack to the dragon to eliminate the safe spots.

And that’s it. These 5 changes are enough to make this dragon more interesting. You teach players to :

• coordinate kills (cristals)
• split up (defending turrets)
• protect and revive key NPCs (defence teams)

Claw of Jormag
Ideas for a revamp of the claw of JoJo:
The fight is still divided in 2 parts : part 1 w/ ice shield, part 2 w/ golems

1. Remove the Bazooka and improve grenades functionnalitites. The fight is much more intense and involving if you have to run to the ice shield to drop a grenade than if you just stack and spam #1
2. Rework the fire shield skill for all pact weapons : instead of being a 3 sec invuln, it purges the stacks of ice degen. Reduce Cd.
3. Include a defense phase between P1 and P2 à la tequatl. Failing this phase allows the Claw to bombard the zone with ice spikes that insta kill on hit.
4. Pact anti-air canons are manned by npc. The NPCs must be protected and healed (they do not regain health even out of combat), losing npcs in P1 makes the ice shield more resilient. Losing NPCs in defense phase is an automatic fail.
5. Turn icebrood colossi in condition vulnerable monsters like the husks from TT
6. Icebrod trolls are now suicide monsters with very high HP and armour. Vulnerable to CC. Used in defense phase and P2 vs the pact golems. => Niche use for tank builds and use of crowd control.
7. For an instanced version of the Claw only: The golems in P2 lose health over time and are regularly inflicted by chill => Niche use for heal builds and condi clear builds.

Associated Risks

You weaken the classic world boss rotation by doing this. A way to solve this problem is to integrate the fire shaman and the eye of zaithan in the rotation to replace the two dragons.
Lots of qq incoming because the claw requires more than just pressing one, yet is not really interesting in terms of design right now.

Proposal Overview
Make Raid-mechanics-tutorial (one tutorial or a series of small tutorials) for players

Proposal Functionality
Like the small “dodging tutorial” in some starter zones shows the benefit of dodging there should be other small tutorials that each show some mechanics of raids and bosses and how a player should respond to them (with his class specific functions)

Goal of Proposal
Help players to learn how to play better in some easy, nice way, so they do not have to learn this the hard way (or never). Example: I have friends that have never “dodged” because they thought there was no need to in the game and the new “mini dodge tutorial” helped them to understand dodging and why it is a good thing. In a Raid situation it could be more important that players work together and understand mechanics. So it would be more important to teach players also the Raid-mechanics for successful and fun Raids.

Associated Risks
– players that do not want to use proper mechanics, still dont use them
– players could feel forced or patronized to do the tutorial and could be against it

Greetings.

out of interest why do alot of you want 20+ man raiding? as someone who has never done raiding before on any game more 20 people just seems a bit of a cluttered mess 10-15 man would by my man number

runeblade.7514:

Proposal Overview
No stacking

Goal of Proposal
Dungeons content suffers from stacking. I am worried that raiding will simply be 20 people stacking together in a corner to dps.

Proposal Functionality
If players become stronger when together, so do mobs. Design the game around countering stacking and LoSing.

• +10000 toughness when reviving + near 10 allies.
• All mobs can revive each other just like mobs.
• All mobs do 10,000 damage while near 10 of their allies.
• Tons of AoE damage.

Stackfest should be a wipefest.

Associated Risks
Casuals won’t be able to enjoy raiding.

I think you should watch your pejoratives in this thread. You seem to have no clue what stacking is, why it’s done or how it works so the only person revealing himself to be a casual is you.

Hello everyone this is my first post in the gw2 forum and i’m sorry for my bad english (not my main language)

Raid would be a nice addition to the endgame content of gw2 and i would love to participate to it with my post.

Raids in Guild Wars 2
Aimed at who ?
Raids are an endgame instantiated contents for the lvl 80 player (exotic stuff minimum) who want more coordinate challenge in PvE.

Contents’s type
Raids are instantiated to have a better management of the player and use all the fonctionnalities below.

Unlocking
For have an acces to the raid you have to use a dungeon entrance like portal somewhere on the Tyria’s map. Then you will be tp to a little instantiated area (like the central transfer chamber in gw1) who is a preparation room for the raid. You can find seller, trading post, bank, armor repair, etc… . All the player who enter in this raid are grouped here and can make a party of the raid’s size (who are automatically left when a player goes out). In this area you can open the lfg and launch a raid’s searching with a description of what you want, of course the lfg tool has an adapted section for raid and their size.

When your party is ready and all it’s member here you can enter in the raid with a portal (like the portal between 2 area), but everybody will have to pay (automatically) an admission charge (1g or more) and when the raid have skitten, it’s impossible to go out or take more member or switch character.

Finally if all the party die, the player are ejected to the preparation room and have to pay the admission charge if they want to enter again.

Contents
if we look with a technical point of view, it would be more simple that each raid have is own size (10/15/20 player). But I think that it would be preferable to have several versions of the same raid (10/15/20 player) for not exclude the lesser. If we look at the gw2 fight’s system, 20 seem to be the maximal limit for keeping a good visibility on the boss and support the teamplay.. 10 is the minimal limit for me.

Duration
Raid should last 1h with a average group and don’t go under the 35-45min with an optimized group.

Difficulty
The difficulty should be present in each raid but not as a dps check, hp bag or massive OS. It would be more interesting to ask for some coordination between the player and do some action in an short-medium interval or to use the right skill at the right time (like bump, fear, cc, etc..) and have an excellent position. A good boss’es defiance management should be a key point too.

Encounter
The mobs in the raid are all lvl 80 or more and silver for the little pack or a lot and “trash”. They have unique and interesting skills (like mord minions) in order to restrict corner stacking. Furthermore they have an optimized composition with different role and combo.

Boss
Raid’s boss are evil and want to kill us, they can be giant or smaller but still be visible during the fight to keep a good visibility of their skills. Boss are the final opponent and are unique and epic. They also have each their appropriate and unique skills in the game to give them a real identity.

Mechanics
During the fight it can be asked to the players to do one or several action to counter a boss’s mechanism (throw object at him or stuff like that).

Some bosses are so malefic and deceitful that they can call on their servant ( adds ) during the fight to weaken the players. It would be then obligatory to form a group responsible for the management of the add which, if they are not managed, can kill all the group.

More The bosses will all have moments when they will try to strengthen themself or to throw a big devastating aoe on the players. Then it will be necessary at this moment to kill the servant who strengthens him (like the statue of baradin and the healer), to use an object to interrupt the aoe (the mouth of zaithan) either then to look for a refuge in the map behind a rock or something else. The players who do not succeed in using one of these methods will be heavily penalized by an enormous series of damages (OS to be discussed).

Finally every boss will be separated in many phases according to his life or to a rotation of attack as the lupicus or the puppet for example.
During these titanic fights it will be essential to work in team and to have an irreproachable positioning to not undergo too heavy loss.

Reward
There will be no vertical progress because it is not what gw2 wants to promote . All the rewards will be account bound since the acquisition to keep highly-rated “prestige” of these. They will not be obtained somewhere else whether it is tp, pvp or pve. The rewards are connected to the raid and obtained in the following way :

Every end’s chest guaranteed the drop of 2-4 gold or exo, 1 raid’s token and some gold (5 or more) + usual green-blue. It is also possible to loot :

*Ascended weapon/armor box
*Ascended raid weapon/armor box
*Raid minipet
*Ascended trinket
*Raid’s crafting material (40-45% drop rate)
*Raid’s recipe

Raid’s token is a currency which allows to buy various objects from a specialized merchant. We can take raid’s exotic weapons/armors for 30 token or a gift of the raid against 50 tocken, recipes, consumable or raid’s crafting material.

With the raid’s gifts and raid’s craft materials + full of other things, it is possible to craft a precursor defined in advance bound to the account to offer an alternative way to have a legendary which is really legendary.

More every raid will have a shutter of success with titles + a title to have completed all the raids.

To finish there will be a leaderbord with the ranking of the fastest run and the name of the players who completed it. It will be available on the gw2 site and on a statue in the entrance of the raids and the city.

On Scaling
I think you should avoid implementing scaling to raids. Its not present in dungeons or fractals and that works. If you attempt something with fewer players it should be more challenging. That makes sense from an instanced perspective. And it adds some extra fun for the experienced players.

But when designing puzzles and encounters you should avoid adding events which require a set number of players. For example currently there are puzzles in game which require 3-4 players to hit a switch at the same time. I think in future if you want to do something like this you should keep the required player count very low. Or you should give some leeway to players so one player can hit 2 switches with clever use of portals for example. But in terms of scaling. The strength and amount of mobs should remain the same. And they should be tailored for the max player count able to enter the raid regardless of how many people enter the raid.

I dont like being forced to have a certain number of players. And if you give players freedom to do the puzzles with less assuming they can handle the higher mobs per player ratio then you allow for interesting strategies. Such as group splits to complete different parts of the raid at the same time.

In summary. Dont scale bosses, mobs or enemy numbers. And keep puzzle player requirements to a minimum.

Zanthrax.6538:

Perhaps a compromise that could be worked out is providing an easier open world alternative to raid bosses as well. My example would be something like keeping Tequatl as is but also providing a harder instanced version of Tequatl with different rewards to reward prestige etc.

I support this compromise. As long as we make sure that instanced and open-world versions of bosses reward different things, I don’t see any problem.

Zanthrax.6538:

*Concept (4) – Progress and Gating. "

-sniop-

Another typical gating method in traditional MMO’s was always gear, GW2 is amazing in that assuming no additional vertical tiers of gear come, every raid ever made will still remain relevant in difficulty for new players etc. If you take a look at what WoW is now 80% of its raid content is outdated and any new player coming to the game misses out on the experience of beating lich king or illidan etc. The lack of gear treadmill is a massive massive positive for GW2’s raiding if it were to be implemented.

While ill agree there needs to be some sort of gating, i really dont think it should be done in the form of timegating. If you timegate this kind of thing to only be doable once a day, you’re limiting players who only have access to alot of game time at specific times of the week. Also, very importantly, youre forcing parties to disband after every single completion. Unless raids are made to take an hour or more to finish, it’d be incredibly disappointing if we just had a fun raid, only to have to immediately split up again because the game wont allow us to be rewarded for it again.

Now you mention it though, currency doesnt seem like a good idea either – people and guilds with less currency available shouldnt be blocked from accessing enjoyable content.

I like the other idea you put forth though. Some form of… pre-required activity that needs to be finished, maybe a pre-boss you need to defeat, before you can enter the raid. Either inside the raid or from around Tyria, like maybe a key acquired at the end of each dungeon or at the end of a jumping puzzle being required to fight the final boss?

I’ve let part of your quote in specifically cause i feel pretty strongly about this. It also ties in a bit with point 5.
Guild Wars 2 has a horizontal rather than a vertical progression system, which is a big part of the charm. The raids remain relevant to new players and veterans alike. It prevents raids from getting outdated.
I still think the raid needs a unique reward though. There should be a reward you can work for when going from this instance. Not something thats stronger than the gear we currently have, but something thats different on a horizontal level. Currently, almost anywhere i go, the reward is always nearly the same generic reward chest that might have something good for me, and this is a mechanic i dont really like.
I propose raids have a specific set of weapons and/or armour, perhaps sigils, that are unique to each of them. Items, preferably account bound (preferred by me, at least) that have unique effects only obtainable within these raids. This would add actual rewards, benefit, to doing this raids. The effects wouldnt have to make the armour or weapons superior to what we currently have, to maintain the horizontal progression and keep the raids relevant, but should still be unique to the raid, and not something i can just buy or that id be much better off farming Tequatl for.
Continued in point 5..

Conski Deshan.2057:

Proposal Overview
A small gate before a person can enter a raid.

Goal of Proposal
I know gating base access to content is unpopular here but hear me out:
In a raid your team is only as strong as your weakest link, to ensure that the player has displayed some basic competence and familiarity with boss mechanics. I believe a gate should be introduced.

Yes, I fully agree with that.

Conski Deshan.2057:

Proposal Functionality

I see the gate acting as a tutorial of sorts forcing the player into situations where you’ll gain some of the required experience, some potential examples are:

1. Requires Dungeon Master, simple, ensures boss mechanic knowledge, effective and a fairly short gate.
2. AR/Fractal level gate, Requiring level 20 fractals or 40AR would ensure mechanic knowledge, but would likely be a less popular method as people flip out over being “forced” to do fractals.
3. Hybrid gate, A mix of the two methods above or an either/or choice for it.
4. Something else appropriate that forces contact with advanced bosses.

I do not think that (1),(2) or (3) should be required for doing Raids because people should not be forced to do that content if they want to raid because that would drastically decrease the number of people that probably look into doing raids. I think it should be a gate solely based on a “real, nice but effective tutorial” to help people to play better and to include more of this skilled players into raiding.

I think the goal should not be to make raids only for players that are already good players but to include and help more players (that could learn to become better players) to have fun with this kind of content.

Greetings.

Group Sizes
In terms of group sizes. I think its best to keep the max sized raid as a multiple of 5. So id say raids should be 10 or 15 player raids. This is because our current party system is designed for 5 and buff sharing and the aoe cap is limited to 5. Keeping it like this will allow you to just create a raid group by combining 2-3 parties and each party would be responsible for their own boon sharing for the most part.

This way you can avoid worring about changing boon aoe limit for raids. Which I would also be against simply because if you keep it kitten then it forces groups to organise themselves to get around that limitation. Each party would essentially have to cover their own might and buff stacking. Which i think is an important party of forcing the raid group to coordinate and organise themselves.

A mix between open/scaleable and closed/fixed number:

• 2 groups enter a raid-instance:
• one of them – the core group – consists of 5-8 players and these do damage to bosses
• the other group is open for 5-20 players. They can’t damage bosses but they can have multiple roles in the battle as well (e.g. manning siege to kill adds, kite enemies, pressure plates behind a moving jumping puzzle while the core group fights the boss beneath,…)

Having the supporting group doing essential tasks (pressure plates behind a jumping puzzle might be the only way to make a boss vulnerable to attacks) could be really interesting. Sometimes only one player (the guy who finishes the jp fast enough) could make the difference.

This way the raid has numbers from 10 to 28 players while the core-content is still designed for 5-8 players (so no scaling issues). The rest is supporting the core group with other important tasks. The supporting group is open to new players as well, so people can enter the raid as supporting member at any time while a raid is active (as long as there are less than 20 supporters in the raid)

First I enjoy the large organised content of wurm and teq.
Second the specific rewards need to get out of RNG, I have a couple of hundred teq with no specific ascended drop and got my first wurm chest after 160. Others have nine, go to tokens like the dungeons.
Third is tricky, guilds and guild associations need to be able to get in together without the mess it is now. The tricky bit is assuring it does not close the door to non guild players.
Lastly raids should I think be a range of player numbers rather than scaling. That is recommended/capped at 20, 50, etc.

Zanthrax.6538:

Concept (5) – Reward Structure.
-snip-

5. Reward system

I love the ideas you put out here. First of all, having the reward pieces distributed over the entirety of the new content sounds like a nice idea, and gives an incentive to visit it all.

What i’m mostly worried about with the reward system is it actually being fun rewarding to do. Currently, whatever boss i do, i will always be greeted with the same generic golden chest which may contain a good reward but usually contain very little rewards, most of which are even almost useless to me.

I like the idea of the combined token-RNG system. Each time you defeat one of the bosses, you could have an RNG chance at the special reward piece, maybe only once daily. But aside from that, i think it should have a specific drop table with other nice things in it. The raid should remain rewarding, even if you dont happen to get a special piece or something. This is why i love the idea of having crafting materials on the drop table. This would keep the raid rewarding even if you dont get a suit piece, and also important, keep it rewarding for those who already have a full set of the gear.
This could work in tandem with the token system – perhaps every first time daily you do it, you get extra tokens and a RNG chance at the special thing, and from then on you get tokens? This would keep the first-time-of-the-day bonus in, while also keeping it fun afterwards and doesnt make your party disband immediately. Also, this would make that you could work towards one of the suit pieces if RNGesus isn’t in your favor this month.
But, to be honest, its not even particularly necessary for me, the token system. If everytime i do the raid, i get a fun reward i can use like crafting materials even if i dont get a special piece, i wont really mind having to do it many times to get my gear piece. But itd still be a fun addition.
Perhaps this reward system could be a source of lower level materials like linen and cotton, which we currently kinda lack?

(Also, i will never learn.. lost my entire section 5 of this and had to rewrite it compactly -.-. Hope its useful feedback though :-) )

Yargesh.4965:

First I enjoy the large organised content of wurm and teq.
Second the specific rewards need to get out of RNG, I have a couple of hundred teq with no specific ascended drop and got my first wurm chest after 160. Others have nine, go to tokens like the dungeons.
Third is tricky, guilds and guild associations need to be able to get in together without the mess it is now. The tricky bit is assuring it does not close the door to non guild players.
Lastly raids should I think be a range of player numbers rather than scaling. That is recommended/capped at 20, 50, etc.

Tokens as main way of rewarding is boring. Maybe make the drop-rate a little more doable.

That everything in this game already works using currencies is the biggest problem GW2 has with rewards.

I just have 2 things to say :
1 Make RAIDS style DG Elites in GW1 : Urgoz , DoA , FOW , UW etc.
2 FOR MORE STACKING AND PLEASE NEVER RUN FAST , JUMP , HIDE ETC. Anet in need of a intelligent thing or need group collaboration please no solo raid for sellers of paths as we are seeing in arah .

PLEASE AN INTELLIGENT THING

Proposal Overview:
Instanced 10-15 man raids which use puzzles, positioning, roles, and skill checks in a varied way to make VERY challenging content. The Rewards should be limited to unique skins, unique titles, unique mini’s, etc. No gear grind should be used. Progression should be based solely on having beat the previous content.

Proposal Functionality:
Raids would require vast knowledge of game mechanics and skillful execution. Completion of the raid should require varied builds, changing of utilities to fit each encounter, and multiple roles to be filled. These roles should be able to be filled by multiple classes.
Additionally rewards should be based on both drops AND tokens. A player should expect to get most items from drops over time, but a player with bad luck should be able to purchase those rewards over time even if he has bad luck. (A raid lockout will be needed to prevent farming of the easiest part of the raid for tokens)

Associated Risks
-Raid size should be limited to ONE size only. Having scalable content is a 100% sure way to make the content unbalanced and force everyone to do the easiest least balanced raid size, wasting valuable developer time
-Rewards need to be good enough to make the raid worth doing but not so good that people who don’t raid are left behind.
-Balancing the content to be hard based on skill instead of hard based on coordination. Currently the only thing that makes Wurm the hardest thing in the game is the need to have 120 players organized an hour in advance to complete it. It doesn’t matter if those 120 people are all new players in blues or veterans in ascended gear. This should not be the case for raids.

Hello “Developpers”, hello fellow players.

Introduction
First allow me to speak out loud how happy I am to see raids coming on the table. I have been a long time raider in many games and every time I speak of GW2, I say it is a very interesting game but sadly it lacks raids. I hopefully soon will be able to finally bring in my old friends from WoW.

Without much surprise, I see raids are already the subject of some heated debate. I already had prepared many points I wanted to discuss here but seeing how many messages have already been posted, I will first make a summary of all the ideas in this thread up to now then offer my own opinion.

Next is my RPG “résumé”, added to help in understanding where I come from and where my ideas are going. Please skip the end of this post if you are not interested in it.

Résumé
Please allow me to present myself first. The aim is not to brag about what I did before, but to show where I come from, as in my opinion this is in part what makes us decide where we want to go. Understanding eachother backgrounds can help us to better understand our respective suggestions.

I am Benjamin, avid (MMO)RPG player (both P&P and video games). I have taken part into many MMORPG for the past 20 years, starting with Ultima Online (R.I.P.).

I am currently member of “Le Bus Magique”, an large and open community in GW2 aimed at gathering players around social events and bringing restricted content (e.g. guild missions) to people than could not access it otherwise (e.g. member of too small guilds). This gives me the chance to see GW2 from a casual point of view, the point of view of many people how are not that good at doing dungeons, WBosses and so on, yet achieve it through long and meticulous preparation.
In GW2, I am also part of a cross-server HL dungeon running group. Before that, I played WoW for many years as a raiding member and strategist of several french guilds within the raid top 5 bracket, myself achieving many world best DPS as a hunter on select raid encounters. Playing Aion, I also wrote a large part of the PvE strategy (whoever took part in this encounter knows that it required both a PvE and RvR strategy at once) which allowed the french server of Suthran to achieve the first western (NA and EU) kill of the Divine Fortress, a two hour long encounter which was attended by around 800 people at once (people organizing the event prepared it for three months…).
I also keep on (beta)testing other MMORPG as they are released, although none was able to beat GW2 in my heart up to now.

All this to say that I have had the chance to enjoy a rather encompassing experience. Taking part in the very high end of the raid bracket was a very rewarding experience, but at the same time it showed me several hiddeous sides of the human nature, which is the reason why I settled down and decided to take on a more casual approach since I joinded GW2 at launch.

Seeing how Anet strives to design GW2 following a different set of rules in mind with a strong accent on friendly cooperative gameplay, I hope we will all be able to discuss here GW2 raids that will shine by introducing very challenging content while retaining the friendly GW2 touch.

See you in a few posts for the CDI summary

I think the general consensus to the accesibility of raiding is in its flexibility. A lot of good ideas were proposed and all (more or less) revolve around dividing raid instance into “paths” or “shards” that will require 2-5 man teams. Multiply team numbers by number of shards and you got your max raid size. This flexibility allows small raid parties complete only portion of all paths and receive reward scaled to number of shards completed.

So I raided in WoW during Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, and I don’t know if anyone’s topped Ulduar as a raid dungeon. Wasn’t ever top-tier on the server, but we progressed fine.

I think these are the design principles that are relevant to me:

• As others have mentioned, the end-game starts at level 1. Allowing players to join a guild and go to a raid while levelling is a huge boost to player retention – they won’t necessarily be useful, but they’ll be able to experience it, and they’ll able to play with their friends.

• Variable scaling has to work in raids. Players in difficult x player content will always try and have x players, because that’s what the content is designed for and it improves their chance of success. Because people are people, they’ll be late, or unable to come, so usually a proper raiding guild will have a few substitutes or else you have 9 people standing outside the entrance to the instance waiting for one person to turn up instead of playing with 9. This means that some people will log on to raid and then never get to go because there’s no room. This wasn’t a good system, and even WoW has abandoned it for variable scaling.

• What is fun about raiding, to me, is figuring out and executing a strategy with a relatively stable team. It takes a little while to understand all the moving parts (and sometimes even to notice them), and it can be frustrating when all but one person’s worked out the tactics. Then again, this exists now – there have been several fights where players have to notice the fight’s changed and switch target. (This also means that raid fights shouldn’t be able to scale mid-fight – they get their scaling information from the instance, which only scales when everyone is out of combat.)

• For this reason, I think it’s fine to make it specifically a guild activity. I think it’s probably fine players not in a guild or in a small guild have to join maybe a small raid-group guild – except this is a problem if you can’t hear your guildmates because you’re repping your raid-group guild.

• I think there’s a lot of merit in concerns that raid content excludes certain players; indeed, I think that’s why raiders want instancing, and one of the reasons why TTS spend so much time bouncing from map to map trying to get a map that’s under their control. While there’s a part of me that strongly objects to having to kiss kitten to be allowed to hit the loot pinata, I also understand it’s frustrating when there’s someone who’s not on voice comms and doesn’t switch to the godkitten healing turret when they’re supposed to, or people who get on Tequatl turrets and waste everyone else’s time because they’re firing their abilities with no particular goal in mind. I think there’d be a lot less frustration for PvE commanders if they could cull the poor performers, or even if the game would specifically target and eliminate poor performers. (A Dishonourable Discharge!)

• To address Chris’ concern about scaling objectives: I kept an eye on how WoW scaling was going, and they had a big problem at first with scaling objectives and targets. What they ended up doing was this: anything that was balanced for whole numbers was put on a weighted random roll. So in a 10 player environment, a boss ability would always hit two targets; in a 14 player environment, that boss ability would roll for how many targets it hits, so it would have a 40% chance to hit 3 instead of 2. This also works for objectives: you can do a weighted random roll for how many objectives spawn.

• Alternatively, you can have 2.3 objectives spawn, and ‘carry’ the .3 to a later objective spawn.

• I don’t really expect progression to be much of a problem, because usually you need more than about three raids for that, but progression should be tied to the guild, instead of players. If it’s tied to the players, what happens is that raiding guilds can’t recruit new players except for those who’ve made it through a previous raid and had their guild collapse, and players interested in raiding can’t find anyone decent to join because all the good players have already made it through. Two-dimensional progression is a great idea – you have your bosses in a dungeon, in a specific order, but each fight also has several tiers of complexity which unlock once players do something specific – but also more rewarding, if they survive.

On Scaling:
I know it would be nice but I consider it too risky and likely to break to be used in raids. I think the dungeon and fractal fixed party size format is the best way to go.

The worst thing that could happen with scaling is day one Raids come out it turns out scaling breaks at 70 and 100 players can enter, thousands of players run through completing the content with little to no effort and the raids now have all the value of a potato. Or scaling works in blocks so it turns out having exactly 17 people makings the content far easier because it is just below the next scale point.

Plus in a 50 man case, how can you be sure everyone is for lack of a better word pulling their weight? At those large sizes it becomes far too possible that a guild could carry players through.

On Instanced/open world
Instanced is already decided:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Here you go:
‘…instanced co-operative group based ‘challenging’ content…’

Chris

On it being Guild linked
It shouldn’t be I know my own group and several others groups don’t belong to the same guild and it just makes things messy. The title just has guild in it because its a follow on from the guild discussion.

On "Difficulty Levels*
I see some people suggestion an easy medium hard mode sort of thing. I would be against that. Raids are a set challenge you can or you can’t having difficulty modes with all the same rewards devalues the rewards to the lowest difficulty “Oh sure you got it from hard mode you probobly just kitten ed around on easy till you got it”. A story mode is ok , easy and you get to see the content but none of the unique rewards.

Instanced Flexible-Size Challenging Group Content with Feasible, Unique Rewards
I’m sorry that it’s abit long, tried making it as easy to read as possible. Hope you like the idea

Proposal Overview
To have challenging content that can be completed (attempted) with more than just 5 players, while giving feasible gold rewards upon completion and occasionally a unique (to this instance) skin for your efforts.

Goal of Proposal
Challenging instanced content
Rewards feasible compared to time spent in the instance
Skins unique to the raid (instance)

Proposal Functionality
Encounter Scaling

• By using the system used for scaling events in the open world, the boss ecounters (and trash encounters) could be scaled depending on the number of players in the instance. Chris said this could be a problem.

Group Size

• From 10-25 man (flexible, not 10 OR 25!)
• Instead maybe a few sizes (10, 15, 20?) – just give guilds a few options, so people don’t get left out
• Possibly also available for groups of non-guildies (not sure how it would work in the LFG at the moment)

Layout

• Resembling Fractals, continuos string of short levels
  • With the huge difference, that the levels are focused on the boss encounters, and on making these very challenging (and requiring team cooperation), while the trash on the way to the boss should be a very minor thing of every level
• Room for control and support (we know you want to)
• Preferable with several objectives around the boss, that needs to be taken care of during the boss encounter (adds, levers, environment etc.)
• Difficult is the key word
  • Should be hard enough to make people have to try several times to beat it (maybe except the first few levels)
• The boss encounters could be tweaked boss encounters from existing dungeons, modified with
  • More abilities (or other ones)
  • Adds that cannot be ignored
  • Additional objectives that cannot be ignored etc.
• To ease development, the same few bosses could be reused in different ”tiers” (linked to the reward tiers perhaps), by simply tuning up the additional objectives and adds, and maybe adding more abilities to the bosses with each tier.

Rewards

• Every level gives a set reward (read: several gold, this is supposed to be hard stuff)
• Every few levels (3, 5, whatever the devs choose) gives a (real!) chance at the unique skins
  • Several options here:
    • First X levels with unique rewards instead give tokens (guaranteed) – this gives a broader (slow) accessiblity to the skins
    • ”Tiered” progression
      • Specific skin pieces tied to specific levels (in order of Gloves, Boots, Helm, Shoulder, Legs, Chest). Weapons as the very highest reward tier
• The skin rewards should either be skin items or boxes with a choice of stats
• Gold rewards could be on a daily basis (as current dungeon rewards)
• Skin rewards on weekly basis (like guild commendations)
  • This way, people can practice on the bosses several times a week (if they want), and still be rewarded gold, but only get a chance at the unique skins once a week
• Skin rewards should of course be account bound
  • The only way to get them, is by beating the challenge

Associated Risks
Some players might not like the fact that unique skins are locked behind (too) challenging content.
This problem could be solved like it was done with the PvP Tournament armor skins, by simply having a ”lesser” version, that is more easily accessible.
I do, however, think it’s very important to have unique rewards for very challenging content, so that people can actually show off that they mastered that challenging content.
So the true skins should be locked behind mastering the challenge, and not be accessible through simple grind – that’s what the legendaries are for

Conski Deshan.2057:

Proposal Overview:
Raid length and save/resurrection points.

Goal of Proposal
To outline the amount of time the raid should take and a concept for saving/maintaining progress.

Proposal Functionality
On time I see raids being the same length as elite areas in gw1 were so 3-6 hours. That should be even for the top team, so no skipping/rushing should be possible.

Resurrection Shires:
Similar to GW1 this becomes your resurrection point once you run past it, with the addition that each shire you run past allows you to leave and return to the raid ONCE (disconnects do not remove you from the dungeon) at the same point you left.
This gives you a 24 hour buff say “x Raid boss 3” that will allow you to enter at that point, EVERY PARTY MEMBER MUST HAVE THE BUFF TO ENTER AT THAT POINT and additional members can’t join an in progress raid unless they have the buff to the same point, the buff is removed once you enter and cannot be regained from the same shire.

E.G: A party stuck at boss 2 cannot piggy back into a raid that has made it to boss 3 skipping the fight.

This is mainly to address meal times/ needing to sleep /take a break without losing your progress.

Associated Risks
There is a great potential for loopholes that allow skipping, any such occurrence would have to be dealt with swiftly and heavily (rewards taken away from offenders and the raid shutdown until the loophole is fixed).

I do like the idea of a 3-6 hour raid, but the save points should last longer than 24h. To take into account us with family and lives.

I do like the idea to remove the buff once you enter again, and that you NEED to reach the next one, in order to “save” again. But make it a weekly reset like the guild missions, and not a 24h thing.

Just a quick remark here :

While it is interesting to see people presenting themselves in this thread so we know your background, please do not turn this in chest pounding.

I will probably start a summary thread soon, and reading pages of presentation about yourself makes my job more difficult and is time consuming.

I assure you, if I include a post in a summary thread, it’s because the suggestion/proposition is well presented/understandable and has an element of novelty.

I will NOT include a post simply because the author claims he has played MMOs for 150 years or more and knows everything that’s worth knowing or whatever.

While we all have different background, the validity of an opinion is determined by its logical strength and not by the reputation of the one formulating it.

Edgar Doiron.2804:

I do like the idea of a 3-6 hour raid, but the save points should last longer than 24h. To take into account us with family and lives.

I do like the idea to remove the buff once you enter again, and that you NEED to reach the next one, in order to “save” again. But make it a weekly reset like the guild missions, and not a 24h thing.

Would you rather have fun with raid that takes max 2 hours of intensive play or 3-6 hours of boring running between checkpoints? Look at the GW2 community as a whole. Not everyone can dedicate 6 hours to complete one instance.