Guild Wars 2

I think a lot of the discussions so far have been really cookie cutter and not outside the box. I understand wanting to take raiding that you love and just plop it wholesale into GW2. Let’s brainstorm though.

• Make raiding gear uniform—when you start the raid you get to pick gear at a vendor from various stat selections—

• Players can side kick up to 80 in Raids so that anyone can do them at whatever level. The level cap in this game isn’t going anywhere so why do Raids need to be considered only playable by level 80 characters?

• Have Raids where groups of players fight each other at the end. If only one group is playing it defaults to NPCs.

• I’d like to see a Raid where players get to be the boss. If no player is available then it’s an NPC. You could have a gauntlet-style-defense-point-raid where a group of players are 5 different bosses sequentially fighting against another group of players trying to complete the Raid.

• Can we make Control classes mean something more in Raids? Support? Maybe doing DPS to a Raid Boss in a certain situation isn’t even possible. You have to do other things in order to bring the boss down.

Let’s spend a few pages of this CDI getting away from traditional notions of what Raids are and spend some time coming up with things that have never been done.

hybrid.5027:

As Weth said a long time ago, any content so challenging that experienced players have to take off their berserker gear will be so hard that bad players will cry a river of tears.

That’s not necessarily true. There are ways you could do that without increasing difficulty for the less skilled players at all.
(simple example: make some of the boss attacks triggers not by a clock, but by the % hp he loses – so you get the same number regardless if you burst him down in 5 seconds or in 2 minutes. that is of course very general idea, as it would need to account for dodges and invulnerability, but that also can be done)

Conski Deshan.2057:

Untradeable account bound rewards are an important part of raids for me,

The exact opposite is true for me.

If a given raid’s rewards are not appealing to a given player (weapon/armor skin appeal is very subjective) then that raid is not rewarding to anyone who shares his opinion about those skins.

Raid reward exclusivity works better in a game where the rewards are objectively appealing through stat increase than would be the case in a game supposedly focused on horizontal progression. Of course if eight or ten raids completely separate unique rewards were introduced simultaneously it might be at least somewhat more palatable.

Lian Olsam.9541:

my only purpose with a game is have fun, if i wanna reward i go work

this is gw2 for me, i’ve chose this game because you are not forced to do something 24/24 7/7 for dont be a “looser” and imho they done it really good, but it miss some things other games have… you wrote alot of things and i have the answer for ALL of this but i dont wanna push the topic on this way, will be a neverending discussion i have my ideas and u have yours i dont wanna change yours, difference is ever good, that’s why i’d like to promote it also on gameplay, so EVERYONE can play what they really want, now isnt possible, alot of player say that in game and with alot of topics, so isnt only my feelings, maybe this guys played like me also to other mmo and they know how difference and funny is can play really different with a real different purpose

raids have to be developed by 0, lets try to give to all gw2 players what they want, ppl like u already have the entire game with this mechanics could we hope to have something different for the others?

Great! and you can do that -find people that have fun the same way you do and have at it.

For the majority of players in this game as far as I’ve seen fun= rewards fast.
Or better rewards. Or more rewards. That’s what people want in an MMO.

There’s absolutely nothing in this game preventing you from playing exactly how you want except your own vision and ideas.

Because this side hasn’t been voiced yet and I’ve seen the suggestion to make raids use the PvP gear+stat amulets system a few times in this thread: I personally would prefer it if the work I put into obtaining exotic/ascended gear for my characters was actually meaningful in raids too. For PvP the “everyone is on the same level statwise” makes sense to keep it fair and keep the competition skill-based, but raiding isn’t PvP.

GW2 was designed with different tiers of armor and weapons, the equipment exists with levels and rarities, and associated costs. Please don’t make this meaningless by adding content that completely ignores it without a good reason for it. Exotic gear can easily be obtained with almost any play style through gold, dungeons or WvW, and the slight advantage that those who invest the extra time and effort to craft ascended gear with 5% better stats would have won’t make or break a raid.

I woke up this morning and read through these posts and came to a simple revelation that alot of us (including myself to a degree) arent going to be tremendously happy with, and that I will probably get attacked over (hopefully not, though) -

The kind of hardcore ultra structured raids people are advocating will not be possible in Guild Wars 2 without changing the goals and spirit of the game.

Introducing raids in the form they take in other games will also bring the hate and elitism we see in those other games. Unless we can address that core problem by moving away from rigid preconceptions about what a raid should be, as much as I want ultra challenging raids, I think they aren’t feasible.

Most do not want the atmosphere that exclusionary “look at me, im better than the gods” raid content would create in the game. I know that will draw the ire of people in this thread, but it needs to be said and addressed.

In my first post – which was echoed by others throughout the thread – I advocated using raiding to bring back – in scalable instances – past living story steps. Basically, instead of raids being elite content, they are used to keep some of the most fun living story content from season one (and future seasons) alive.

ArenaNet has proven they can design these fights in ways that require a slightly higher level of coordination and teamwork than we usually see in the game (Marionette, Breachmaker, etc). While it isnt the challenge some are advocating for, it is something we dont have now that MANY people would thoroughly enjoy.

I thought I had changed my mind and tried to join the discussion regarding hardcore raiding, but at this point in the conversation, Ive come to the realization that the kind of raiding advocated by the hardcore few would change this game I love in too many negative ways. I have some very fond memories of hardcore progression raiding in other games, but those memories are eclipsed by the negative atmosphere this kind of content would bring to the game.

I know this will cause some reactionary posts and criticisms and that’s fine (as long as it’s done in a civil and adult manner), but I think its time to come to the realization that you can either have ultra structured hardcore raiding for a small percentage to enjoy or large scale semi organized instances (think Marionette or Breachmaker) that everyone can access.

NOTE: I do believe the game would benefit from ultra hard content. However, I think that content belongs in dungeons. Five player content (or single player for that matter) doesnt have as great an impact on the atmosphere/community in the game.

Roybe.5896:

Conski Deshan.2057:

Roybe.5896:

Symph.8407:

Astralporing.1957:

The raids, if they are implemented, would indeed need a reward system that is equivalent to time and effort investment. It should not however be visibly more rewarding than other forms of content (again, relatively to time and effort invested). Running raids should definitely not be less rewarding, that running dungeons. It shouldn’t be more rewarding either – or at least the differences should not be huge. So, rewards from, for example, 2 hours of raiding should not be higher that, say, ~4 hours of any other alternate content. And if raids are to offer unique rewards, then any other alternate content should offer equivalent unique rewards as well (though personally i think that there should be nothing in this game that would be available through less than at least two alternate methods – not including TP).

Other content should reward unique rewards, and most of them do. What we miss are unique rewards acquired through skill. We have unique rewards acquired through every other aspect of the game.
And the unique rewards from raids should in no way be available elsewhere, escpecially not on the TP.

What do you consider a ‘unique reward’? How should you receive it, since you want it based on skill? Availability should be very low on these rewards while demand should be very high, why should you limit the income potential of the ‘leet’ professional raider?

Unique skins for weapons and Armor , Cosmetic infusions , Minis, Tonics, play items, titles there is a lot of potential.
On income potential: Raiding should not be about farming for gold, doing a raid is trying to make a statement of your skills and being rewarded for it, like doing liandri. If it was just about gold a raider would still loose to a farmer (TOT’s are potentially 40g an hour) or a gem buyer (unlimited gold).

On Acquisition: I made a proposal around more unique rewards the further you can progress into a raid as guaranteed rewards from bosses (with a caveat of no skipping/piggybacking allowed. With some of the rewards also being RNG. A token system would be a major no no for this type of content.

Unique skins and cosmetic infusions are problematic. Their worth is subjective. I might think that these skins are the most daring and beautiful thing ever created within a game. If many raiders hate them, there is no reward.

Acquisition: I’m dead set against RNG. RNG is not a reward system for skill. It’s a reward for perseverance, and then there’s no guarantee that you will be able to out persevere a run of bad rolls, particularly on 1:1000 chances or worse 1:10,000 chances (these are very common odds on rare items), on content that takes hours to receive a roll. Please explain why a token system is so bad. If you get one guaranteed token at the end of a run for beating the boss and it takes 1,ooo tokens to get a full set of armor and 1 weapon skin, where’s the harm? Other than having the goal to run the content successfully 1000 times.

The main goal is that they’re unique I’m well aware people find skins and glows subjective but then again the same could be said for any of the specific rewards, some people may hate Liandri as a mini but that’s not her value.

A token system is bad (with the assumption that tokens are dropped throughout the dungeon) as it allows a person who can’t get past the first boss to eventually get the item in question, this is an exercise in your abilities , if you fail to make it past the first boss 1000 times you still get nothing but the first bosses rewards, the items are not a “participation reward” they are a medal for completing the content.

If it’s placed at the end a crafting ingredient usable in the mystic forge or with high level recipes would be a suitable replacement to an additional currency. (which I did suggest in other posts)

Proposal Overview
A Raid-specific stat

Goal of Proposal
I do not want raids to provide anything that people who don’t want to raid would want, but I do want raiders to feel their time has been justified. To that end, I suggest adding a special damage stat to the game that only raiders would ever need. This is similar to Agony resistance in Fractals, only it would be earned through Raiding and only applies to content within raids. This would prevent the need for “raid armor” that offers advantages over existing armor outside of raids, or that have unique skins which would make them desirable to non-raiders.

Proposal Functionality
This would basically be a stat that armor dropped in raids would have some base level of, and could be raised further with a collectible buff, similar to Agony Resist. Increasing this stat gives you a raw damage and defense buff that would ONLY apply to raid enemies. Effectively, a player with say 100 raid stat would deal 10% more damage to enemies in raids, and take 10% less damage from their attacks, or whatever is deemed balance-appropriate.

Low tier raids would only require default armor, but could be made slightly easier with this raiding armor. Higher tier raids would be almost impossible without wearing plenty of this Raid stat due to one-shotting enemy damage and massive enemy lifebars if you lack the raid stat to balance them out (although the more hardcore guilds could certainly attempt it). Perhaps for bragging rights, there would be a way to record your own raid-stat level and the average level of the raid-party when you complete a raid, so that a hardcore guild could get bragging rights completing raids while under the suggested gearing level and prove that they did this.

The most important factor here is that this raid stat should NEVER provide any benefit to any other areas of the game, such as PvE open world, story mode, dungeons, WvW, PvP, etc. The added damage and defense would simply not apply to enemies that are not specifically tagged for it and non-raider players should have no motivation to set foot inside a raid.

Associated Risks
Any sort of armor tiering would lead to some amount of elitism and exclusion in raiding groups, as players would only want to team with other players of equal or greater tier armor

Harper.4173:

Lian Olsam.9541:

my only purpose with a game is have fun, if i wanna reward i go work

this is gw2 for me, i’ve chose this game because you are not forced to do something 24/24 7/7 for dont be a “looser” and imho they done it really good, but it miss some things other games have… you wrote alot of things and i have the answer for ALL of this but i dont wanna push the topic on this way, will be a neverending discussion i have my ideas and u have yours i dont wanna change yours, difference is ever good, that’s why i’d like to promote it also on gameplay, so EVERYONE can play what they really want, now isnt possible, alot of player say that in game and with alot of topics, so isnt only my feelings, maybe this guys played like me also to other mmo and they know how difference and funny is can play really different with a real different purpose

raids have to be developed by 0, lets try to give to all gw2 players what they want, ppl like u already have the entire game with this mechanics could we hope to have something different for the others?

Great! and you can do that -find people that have fun the same way you do and have at it.

For the majority of players in this game as far as I’ve seen fun= rewards fast.
Or better rewards. Or more rewards. That’s what people want in an MMO.

There’s absolutely nothing in this game preventing you from playing exactly how you want except your own vision and ideas.

i dont wanna waste my time using 2x time doing a content with the wrong builds… u dont understant my point of view, i’m not a dumb wanna play something wrong, ofc i wanna use the better stuff for do it properly, but NOW the FULL zerk meta is the faster and i’d like more deeper content than dps everything… btw like someone told (and me in the last post) dont push this topic in the zerker discussion, i just hope devs will take the right decision changing the meta into the raids allowing ppl to play differently as the best choice u can make…

Ashen.2907:

Conski Deshan.2057:

Untradeable account bound rewards are an important part of raids for me,

The exact opposite is true for me.

If a given raid’s rewards are not appealing to a given player (weapon/armor skin appeal is very subjective) then that raid is not rewarding to anyone who shares his opinion about those skins.

It’s easy to create a mid-ground: non-tradeable gear (which shows that THIS specific player has managed to get through the content) which is salvageable into a new crafting-material (which can be used to create new things which are rare but not exclusive). You could also get raid-tokens out of the salvaged gear as well.

Keep the raid challenging and dynamic so players can’t just memorize the boss fight. The core of GW2 is about skill in combat, balancing boons and conditions, and personal health management. No holy trinity. Don’t fall into the trap of traditional MMOs by making boss fights the same every time and predictable. Vary it up with some form of RNG for boss abilities and mechanics, as well as various fun/difficult obstacles that players must overcome during boss fights.

Also, please create boss fights that would make it impossible to "stack and smack. "

Raids should be very difficult and save at certain points along the way so the raid group must coordinate to finish content that is extensively long. The rewards should also justify the difficulty. Certain bosses should have a higher chance at dropping precursors and other exotics, maybe even ascended armor and weapons…not just mats. Gold should also be earned generously for the time and skill put in.

Raid content should NOT become like the dungeons…easily learned, repeatable, and a mind numbing grind for gold and mats.

Let the rewards be plentiful to prevent grinding the same content over and over. This is justified by making the content EXTREMELY hard requiring strategic coordinated group play. Pugs should not be able to do this. If inclusivity must be an aspect, then create two versions: story mode for pugs with rewards similar to dungeons, and hard mode incorporating actual raid mechanics that require coordinated group play to be successful, which increases the level of the rewards appropriately.

Add jumping puzzles and other obstacles that make the game challenging!

All in all, this is ultimately about having fun. Players have fun when content is challenging and appropriate rewards justify the extreme difficulty of completing such content.

Thank you ArenaNet for this discussion. I am looking forward to the high quality content that you all produce. :-)

@Blaeys

It seems to me that you want open world bosses in instances. Whereas the rest of us want actual raids. Open world bosses in instances is kind of just allowing exclusion to content we already have. Having proper raids will obviously create exclusion and it wont be for everyone. But its something the game sorely needs.

I think the game is at the point where anet just needs to ignore the excessive entitlement people feel they deserve and just create something epic in terms of challenge and reward. And to do this they need to forget about problems such as exclusion and elitism. Obviously dont completely forsake them or encourage them but they should be a very minor factor when designing a raid. Those are problems you cant really solve no matter what you do. And if you hold back on development because of those issues you will get nowhere. You cant create something amazing if you are afraid to displease people. Its not possible. If you try to please everyone it will be half baked and wont really satisfy either side of the spectrum.

Ohoni.6057:

Proposal Overview

Associated Risks
Any sort of armor tiering would lead to some amount of elitism and exclusion in raiding groups, as players would only want to team with other players of equal or greater tier armor

It would also lead to exclusion in all other ‘hard’ parts of the game. No MMO needs a gear check for acceptance into a group. ‘LFG For FoW, need 100 Raid level’. I do not disagree with the idea, but it needs to be worked out to prevent conflicts throughout the game.

Iason Evan.3806:

I think a lot of the discussions so far have been really cookie cutter and not outside the box. I understand wanting to take raiding that you love and just plop it wholesale into GW2. Let’s brainstorm though.

• Make raiding gear uniform—when you start the raid you get to pick gear at a vendor from various stat selections—

While everyone being on a level playing field is a nice thought. This would completely devaluate the time and effort alot of people put into making their ascended gear. This would be a very bad thing.

Iason Evan.3806:

• Players can side kick up to 80 in Raids so that anyone can do them at whatever level. The level cap in this game isn’t going anywhere so why do Raids need to be considered only playable by level 80 characters?

While upscaling characters could be a nice feature. Again it creates too many problems. First of all, there’s no way of telling whether someone has all their skills or traits, if they’re running around in blues or greens (as they probably will be sub level 80), or if they even know how to play their class yet.
All these things should be achieved on the way to 80, where you will then be ready to take on the challenging content, when you’re ready for it.
As for alts, those who really want/need another class for their raid party will find a way to get to 80 fast. Most people have lots of tomes stored away, or gold to craft their way there faster. It won’t be a huge problem for them.

Iason Evan.3806:

• Have Raids where groups of players fight each other at the end. If only one group is playing it defaults to NPCs.

If I want to fight other players, I’ll go to sPvP or WvW. Please keep that out of raids.

Iason Evan.3806:

• I’d like to see a Raid where players get to be the boss. If no player is available then it’s an NPC. You could have a gauntlet-style-defense-point-raid where a group of players are 5 different bosses sequentially fighting against another group of players trying to complete the Raid.

This could be exploited way too easy..

Iason Evan.3806:

Let’s spend a few pages of this CDI getting away from traditional notions of what Raids are and spend some time coming up with things that have never been done.

What’s wrong with traditional raid design?
I’m not saying raids in GW2 should be exactly like in other games, but most of the core principles of raiding are pretty universal in my opinion. And combining those universal principles with the unique combat system of GW2 is enough uniqueness and difference to me.

Conski Deshan.2057:

A token system is bad (with the assumption that tokens are dropped throughout the dungeon) as it allows a person who can’t get past the first boss to eventually get the item in question, this is an exercise in your abilities , if you fail to make it past the first boss 1000 times you still get nothing but the first bosses rewards, the items are not a “participation reward” they are a medal for completing the content.

Hmm, I got a way we could solve that.

I’m going to assume they’re going to ship a bunch of achievements out with this Raid. Let’s have a token system in place but if you want to redeem them the NPC won’t talk to you unless you’ve beaten enough achievements to prove that you’ve completed the Raid.

So basically you can earn tokens even if your wiping after the first boss but if you want to redeem you gotta suck it up and finish the Raid.

spoj.9672:

@Blaeys

It seems to me that you want open world bosses in instances. Whereas the rest of us want actual raids. Open world bosses in instances is kind of just allowing exclusion to content we already have. Having proper raids will obviously create exclusion and it wont be for everyone. But its something the game sorely needs.

I think the game is at the point where anet just needs to ignore the excessive entitlement people feel they deserve and just create something epic in terms of challenge and reward. And to do this they need to forget about problems such as exclusion and elitism. Obviously dont completely forsake them or encourage them but they should be a very minor factor when designing a raid. Those are problems you cant really solve no matter what you do. And if you hold back on development because of those issues you will get nowhere. You cant create something amazing if you are afraid to displease people. Its not possible. If you try to please everyone it will be half baked and wont really satisfy either side of the spectrum.

Not much I can say about this that wouldn’t derail this whole thread. So, I strongly disagree with this sentiment.

Astralporing.1957:

That’s not necessarily true. There are ways you could do that without increasing difficulty for the less skilled players at all.
(simple example: make some of the boss attacks triggers not by a clock, but by the % hp he loses – so you get the same number regardless if you burst him down in 5 seconds or in 2 minutes. that is of course very general idea, as it would need to account for dodges and invulnerability, but that also can be done)

Having boss phases triggered by different things (time, hp etc.) from enconter to encounter as you suggest is definitely a thing I’d want to part of the variety between boss encounters in raids.

But what I think he was talking about was not so much the damage the players deal to the bosses, but rather the survivability of the players.
If the best players in the game cannot survive an encounter unless they wear the maximized defensive stat gear, how could we expect the lesser players to be able to survive it? This would just make Nomad gear the obligatory gear stats instead of Berserker gear.
So, to be honest, I think of us would prefer the gear difference lying in the fact, that if you’re a little better than the rest at surviving, then you can take the risk of using Berserker gear, while if you’re not quite as quick on your dodges etc. then you’d want to use something with a little more toughness or vitality and so on.

Harper.4173:

Lian Olsam.9541:

my only purpose with a game is have fun, if i wanna reward i go work

{snip}

raids have to be developed by 0, lets try to give to all gw2 players what they want, ppl like u already have the entire game with this mechanics could we hope to have something different for the others?

Great! and you can do that -find people that have fun the same way you do and have at it.

For the majority of players in this game as far as I’ve seen fun= rewards fast.
Or better rewards. Or more rewards. That’s what people want in an MMO.

There’s absolutely nothing in this game preventing you from playing exactly how you want except your own vision and ideas.

I have to agree with Lian. Any “raid” mechanism should be accessible from low level up, much like the Gauntlet or Labyrinth were/are. It should appeal to all and reward all characters based on level and yet include the possibility to gain that “elite” drop just the same as all others.

That would meet the requirement of “fun” at all levels of play without locking people out of the content.

Peace.

It would also lead to exclusion in all other ‘hard’ parts of the game.

Are you saying that just players would insist on other players having raid armor just as proof that they “know what they’re doing,” even if the armor is worthless for the content they want to be doing? Certainly a possibility. Maybe make it so that it’s impossible to tell whether someone has raid armor or not? Like you already can’t inspect people, make it so that if you chat-link a raid armor it just shows as standard Ascended, so if someone says “100 raid level only!” you can sign up and there’s no way they could prove you aren’t. Maybe you could do gear-checks inside of raid zones though, where it actually would matter. I was thinking for convenience that if you’re in a raid zone, it’d be cool if it projected your raid stat in the boons column under your portrait and in the team UI, so that you’d be able to tell at a glance what everyone’s raid stat is (but ONLY inside raid areas).

Note that if they can manage without any sort of armor tiering, that’d be fine by me, I just see the unique stat proposal as being better than other options like armor that is universally better than Ascended at all content, or armor with unique skins to it that non-raiders might want.

guardian.6489:

Conski Deshan.2057:

A token system is bad (with the assumption that tokens are dropped throughout the dungeon) as it allows a person who can’t get past the first boss to eventually get the item in question, this is an exercise in your abilities , if you fail to make it past the first boss 1000 times you still get nothing but the first bosses rewards, the items are not a “participation reward” they are a medal for completing the content.

Hmm, I got a way we could solve that.

I’m going to assume they’re going to ship a bunch of achievements out with this Raid. Let’s have a token system in place but if you want to redeem them the NPC won’t talk to you unless you’ve beaten enough achievements to prove that you’ve completed the Raid.

So basically you can earn tokens even if your wiping after the first boss but if you want to redeem you gotta suck it up and finish the Raid.

I have no problems with this. However, I think for those that want a truer raid experience you just get 1 guaranteed, account bound , non-time gated, stackable token from the final chest. A number of these are redeemable for rewards.

This is a true reward, not relying upon tickling the desire to gamble, purely based on skillful outcome to doing content.

Ashen.2907:

Conski Deshan.2057:

Untradeable account bound rewards are an important part of raids for me,

The exact opposite is true for me.

If a given raid’s rewards are not appealing to a given player (weapon/armor skin appeal is very subjective) then that raid is not rewarding to anyone who shares his opinion about those skins.

Raid reward exclusivity works better in a game where the rewards are objectively appealing through stat increase than would be the case in a game supposedly focused on horizontal progression. Of course if eight or ten raids completely separate unique rewards were introduced simultaneously it might be at least somewhat more palatable.

I can see your concern. But this goes for many things in this game.
I for one think pretty much every legendary looks like stuff that would be censored if I wrote it. And on top of that, the few I actually like, weren’t weapons I really used alot, or they didn’t fit the character I used that weapon on, so for me the legendaries were not interesting. So I didn’t go for them.
So, what if a part of the playerbase does not like the unique rewards released with the first raid? Does that mean the raid should not be made? Or should not have unique rewards for those who do like the skins? Of course not.
It means that the raids should also have other rewards, stuff that can be traded, titles etc.
But you cannot exclude unique rewards because a minority of the playerbase might not like them.

guardian.6489:

Conski Deshan.2057:

A token system is bad (with the assumption that tokens are dropped throughout the dungeon) as it allows a person who can’t get past the first boss to eventually get the item in question, this is an exercise in your abilities , if you fail to make it past the first boss 1000 times you still get nothing but the first bosses rewards, the items are not a “participation reward” they are a medal for completing the content.

Hmm, I got a way we could solve that.

I’m going to assume they’re going to ship a bunch of achievements out with this Raid. Let’s have a token system in place but if you want to redeem them the NPC won’t talk to you unless you’ve beaten enough achievements to prove that you’ve completed the Raid.

So basically you can earn tokens even if your wiping after the first boss but if you want to redeem you gotta suck it up and finish the Raid.

That’s an acceptable compromise, in the Fractal CDI I did toy with that idea but the discussion moved past it rather quickly.

Ohoni.6057:

It would also lead to exclusion in all other ‘hard’ parts of the game.

Are you saying that just players would insist on other players having raid armor just as proof that they “know what they’re doing,” even if the armor is worthless for the content they want to be doing? Certainly a possibility. Maybe make it so that it’s impossible to tell whether someone has raid armor or not? Like you already can’t inspect people, make it so that if you chat-link a raid armor it just shows as standard Ascended, so if someone says “100 raid level only!” you can sign up and there’s no way they could prove you aren’t. Maybe you could do gear-checks inside of raid zones though, where it actually would matter. I was thinking for convenience that if you’re in a raid zone, it’d be cool if it projected your raid stat in the boons column under your portrait and in the team UI, so that you’d be able to tell at a glance what everyone’s raid stat is (but ONLY inside raid areas).

Note that if they can manage without any sort of armor tiering, that’d be fine by me, I just see the unique stat proposal as being better than other options like armor that is universally better than Ascended at all content, or armor with unique skins to it that non-raiders might want.

My point in the discussion was to limit the problem of exclusivity that would leak over into other parts of the game. This is probably an impossible task, so yeah, there’s that. A point in my book against raids in this game. Any reward is going to cause elitism and possible conflict between players.

spoj.9672:

hybrid.5027:

spoj.9672:

Conski Deshan.2057:

I (like the person in the post a few above this) second the idea that raids should have unique rewards(account bound), I actually believe all content should have unique rewards (account bound) but that’s another story. The rewards for completing a raid are rewards that show you completed the raid, just a direct x time y effort = z gold is unrewarding and still has top players competing against farmers and gem converters.

The problem with account bound rewards is that they are only rewarding the first time you get them. After that they are completely worthless. So no i dont want to see account bound and soulbound rewards.

I somewhat addressed this in my proposal. The “loot” would be a new tier 7 crafting material only available in the raid. This material could be traded and sold. It would be used to craft weapons from a recipes obtainable from bosses and a crafter that only appears at the end of the raid. This way you get the weapon/armor skins as you want them, but once you have all the ones you want you can sell the mats you get on the TP where they would have some decent price, especially since the crafter is locked behind a skill gate so the prestige will remain even if the underlying mats are tradeable.

Thats a good solution to both sides of the arguement. It maintains prestige and provides continuous rewarding loot even when you have already obtained all the end products. I assume this is inspired from gw1’s FoW armour system. But i would also like an increase of quality in trash loot. So increased drops of tier 6 mats and higher chance for random rares and exotics.

And i would still love to see infusion drops in raids. As a very rare drop and with the chance to get infusions which add colour auras as bonus effects. These would definately have to be tradeable or they would have to be very common or purchased with raid mats so you can realistically get a full set of the same colour without completely relying on RNG.

Yeah, very much inspired by FoW. I envisioned trash mobs that drop unrefined “ore” and then bosses who drop refined “ingots” + weapon and armor recipes. So especially early on when people want as much of the crafting mats as possible killing the trash mobs for unrefined mats will be quite profitable.

Blaeys.3102:

NOTE: I do believe the game would benefit from ultra hard content. However, I think that content belongs in dungeons. Five player content (or single player for that matter) doesnt have as great an impact on the atmosphere/community in the game.

I’m still gonna vote for 10-15 man instances, as it just opens up possibilities for more interesting encounters. Not that 5 man encounters can’t be interesting, there’s just more possibilities with 10-15 man instances.

As a note to the rest of your post. I don’t think introducing truly challenging content in the form of 10-15 man raids will cause those problems you speak of.
GW2 is a very different game than the games that currently have raids. And this difference is also why I think raiding in GW2 will be so much different.
Most posts I’ve read in this CDI are asking for challenging content, that is accessible (from a playtime perspective).
And I understand that as challenging content, that won’t require me to sit here for 4-5 hours every night of the week, but rather something where I can truly put my skills to the test, while both allowing for me (and others) to have real lives on the side, and allowing people to play the raids several times a week.

spoj.9672:

@Blaeys

It seems to me that you want open world bosses in instances. Whereas the rest of us want actual raids. Open world bosses in instances is kind of just allowing exclusion to content we already have. Having proper raids will obviously create exclusion and it wont be for everyone. But its something the game sorely needs.

I think the game is at the point where anet just needs to ignore the excessive entitlement people feel they deserve and just create something epic in terms of challenge and reward. And to do this they need to forget about problems such as exclusion and elitism. Obviously dont completely forsake them or encourage them but they should be a very minor factor when designing a raid. Those are problems you cant really solve no matter what you do. And if you hold back on development because of those issues you will get nowhere. You cant create something amazing if you are afraid to displease people. Its not possible. If you try to please everyone it will be half baked and wont really satisfy either side of the spectrum.

I never said move open world bosses into instances. I said keep the living story encounters after they leave the Living Story through instanced raiding.

You talk about excessive entitlement on the part of others and then freely admit exclusion and elitism should be part of the raid model. Im sorry, but that is a little narrowminded. Furthermore, its something GW2 has always strived very hard to avoid – a perspective that has created the amazing community they have in the game today.

I would love to see epic difficult raids, but not at the expense of the game many of us have come to really love. There are specific elements of raiding that, imo, cannot come over from other games without turning GW2 into something many of us left those game to get away from. I think if we cannot come to a compromise on some of those points, raiding would do more harm to the game than good. If they can come up with a way to create challenging raids that avoid those pitfalls, then yes, do it. If not, I would rather they didnt.

But, even if that compromise cannot be reached through more accessible raid type instanced content, I still believe it could be something amazing. It wouldnt be what you would consider a true hardcore raid, but it would be something alot of people would really enjoy.

Finally, just because my opinion differs from yours doesnt make me entitled, any more than your opinion differing from mine makes you so. People need to stop attacking others so much and stay on task.

Why all the talking about armor?
I’ve done FOTM 50 runs both with full zerk Ascended and full zerk Exotic and I honestly feel no major difference.
What makes a difference however is whether the other players in your team are competent.
I’ve been in parties that require gear check (full party of zerkers) who wipe on first Swamp fractal Tree boss / take ages to kill it becuase they don’t know how to play/dodge properly.

Conski Deshan.2057:

A token system is bad (with the assumption that tokens are dropped throughout the dungeon) as it allows a person who can’t get past the first boss to eventually get the item in question, this is an exercise in your abilities , if you fail to make it past the first boss 1000 times you still get nothing but the first bosses rewards, the items are not a “participation reward” they are a medal for completing the content.

If it’s placed at the end a crafting ingredient usable in the mystic forge or with high level recipes would be a suitable replacement to an additional currency. (which I did suggest in other posts)

A token system is not necessarily bad, Conski. It depends on the implementation.
It was implemented with X tokens per boss in the raid, and a vendor outside the raid, that would be bad. Because this would allow be to just endless kill the first boss, if they couldn’t defeat the second (or so) boss and still be able to acquire the unique rewards.

If instead the vendor were to spawn inside the raid after defeating specific bosses in the raid, you would still have to progress a certain amount into the raid before you were able to convert your tokens into a proper reward.
Furthermore, there could be several vendors along the way, offering progressively more desirable pieces of gear (like gloves first, weapons only after the end boss).

This, in my opinion, is one way that tokens could be positively included in the reward system, alongside a few guaranteed and some RNG rewards.

Ohoni.6057:

..
I do not want raids to provide anything that people who don’t want to raid would want, but I do want raiders to feel their time has been justified. To that end, I suggest adding a special damage stat to the game that only raiders would ever need. This is similar to Agony resistance in Fractals, only it would be earned through Raiding and only applies to content within raids. This would prevent the need for “raid armor” that offers advantages over existing armor outside of raids, or that have unique skins which would make them desirable to non-raiders.

Proposal Functionality
This would basically be a stat that armor dropped in raids would have some base level of, and could be raised further with a collectible buff, similar to Agony Resist. Increasing this stat gives you a raw damage and defense buff that would ONLY apply to raid enemies. Effectively, a player with say 100 raid stat would deal 10% more damage to enemies in raids, and take 10% less damage from their attacks, or whatever is deemed balance-appropriate.
..

Please, do not design raids around sparing the feelings of people who do not want to raid.. Make the raids, make them the best they can be, give them unique visual rewards. If some people who don’t want to raid would want these items.. well, then they better start raiding.

To the stat thing. Do not include any kind of flat damage or defense buff ever. This is basically nerfing the raid(s) from the start.
Not only that, it would divide the playerbase even further (as alot of people seem to be afraid of. I’m not) because those players who can get far from the start, are already ahead shortly after the release of the raids, and then they should be given drops that makes it even easier for them, while those that struggle keep struggling?
Seem like a recipe for disaster in my eyes.

Blaeys.3102:

I never said move open world bosses into instances. I said keep the living story encounters after they leave the Living Story through instanced raiding.

You talk about excessive entitlement on the part of others and then freely admit exclusion and elitism should be part of the raid model. Im sorry, but that is a little narrowminded. Furthermore, its something GW2 has always strived very hard to avoid – a perspective that has created the amazing community they have in the game today.

…

Finally, just because my opinion differs from yours doesnt make me entitled, any more than your opinion differing from mine makes you so. People need to stop attacking others so much and stay on task.

Firstly i didnt call you entitled. I was referring to the large group of people that want raids to be available to all people. I think thats just narrowminded. Im also shocked that you think I was attacking you. I was merely expressing my opinion in a very polite manner.

Nor did i mean to say you wanted open world bosses in instances (excuse my poor wording in the previous post). I merely mentioned that it is implied with the way you want scaling and large group encounters in instances. That sounds very much like world bosses in instances. Or at least very similar to them. And if that is the case then they will be very simplistic and easy for the hardcore players. So you will essentially be just giving more stuff to the group of people who already have plenty of content suited to them.

Also as a final note. Its not as if adding hardcore raids to the game will suddenly make the rest of the game change and disappear. I think you are overexaggerating with this comment:

I would love to see epic difficult raids, but not at the expense of the game many of us have come to really love.

Because frankly you cant create epic difficult raids without causing exclusion. Its impossible from a logical standpoint. And with exclusion comes elitism. So I will repeat they are non avoidable issues.

Im not sure what you are trying to achieve by trying so hard to be inclusive to everyone. If you go down that route we wont be getting epic difficult content. We will be getting more bland easy stuff with poor rewards.

Conski Deshan.2057:

guardian.6489:

Conski Deshan.2057:

A token system is bad (with the assumption that tokens are dropped throughout the dungeon) as it allows a person who can’t get past the first boss to eventually get the item in question, this is an exercise in your abilities , if you fail to make it past the first boss 1000 times you still get nothing but the first bosses rewards, the items are not a “participation reward” they are a medal for completing the content.

Hmm, I got a way we could solve that.

I’m going to assume they’re going to ship a bunch of achievements out with this Raid. Let’s have a token system in place but if you want to redeem them the NPC won’t talk to you unless you’ve beaten enough achievements to prove that you’ve completed the Raid.

So basically you can earn tokens even if your wiping after the first boss but if you want to redeem you gotta suck it up and finish the Raid.

That’s an acceptable compromise, in the Fractal CDI I did toy with that idea but the discussion moved past it rather quickly.

I might type it out into a full preposal because it has an interesting side-effect in that it encourages players into pushing themselves to beating the raid if they’re failing over and over again.

Failing a Raid over and over again and getting nothing (or blue and greens) is highly discourging but building up a set of tokens that you know you can finally blow through once you beat that final boss will encourage players to suck it up and keep trying.

Nick.6972:

Why all the talking about armor?

The topic spun out of control a little.:) The concern being expressed comes down to attitude, meta, and what people consider a ‘problem’ within the game currently.

It is arguably fastest/efficient to run any high level content with a group that has maximum DPS output. This meta excludes many players from comfortably playing the content the way they enjoy doing it since their way is less efficient. Both sides have good points, but it does cause player conflict due to exclusion.

Basically, what one side wants from this is to not make it into a DPS race to the end. They want access to groups without having to have specialized gear. They do not want to be called out for not bowing to the meta. The other side feels that efficiency is the hallmark of expertise and is diametrically opposed with the other side.

Roybe.5896:

spoj.9672:

@Blaeys

It seems to me that you want open world bosses in instances. Whereas the rest of us want actual raids. Open world bosses in instances is kind of just allowing exclusion to content we already have. Having proper raids will obviously create exclusion and it wont be for everyone. But its something the game sorely needs.

I think the game is at the point where anet just needs to ignore the excessive entitlement people feel they deserve and just create something epic in terms of challenge and reward. And to do this they need to forget about problems such as exclusion and elitism. Obviously dont completely forsake them or encourage them but they should be a very minor factor when designing a raid. Those are problems you cant really solve no matter what you do. And if you hold back on development because of those issues you will get nowhere. You cant create something amazing if you are afraid to displease people. Its not possible. If you try to please everyone it will be half baked and wont really satisfy either side of the spectrum.

Not much I can say about this that wouldn’t derail this whole thread. So, I strongly disagree with this sentiment.

I’m just gonna support Spoj on this. I’m very much in agreement with this sentiment.

*Because frankly you cant create epic difficult raids without causing exclusion. Its impossible from a logical standpoint. And with exclusion comes elitism. So I will repeat they are non avoidable issues.

Im not sure what you are trying to achieve by trying so hard to be inclusive to everyone. If you go down that route we wont be getting epic difficult content. We will be getting more bland easy stuff with poor rewards.*

THIS needs to be talked about. Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic rewards is another way to look at this. However, keep those emotions in check. THIS is a very important issue and needs to be focused on. This is my next concern past the issue of rewards.

How do we create inclusive raid material? Is it possible? Our reward discussion has been interesting and shows we can do this. Why is exclusivity so important?

RE: Exclusion

Seeing many people talk about excluding people and elitism, let’s make one thing clear, these are not things to be encouraged at any point.
However, logic dictates that some people will not like raids and therefor not do them. If you can’t bring yourself to commit to show up 20 minutes in advance to Tequatl or the Evolved Jungle Wurm, then that content is not for you. Same with dungeons, WvW, sPvP, etc. Not all content has to be for everyone.

That being said, there is no reason not to make raiding as inclusive as possible. Options for upscaling players to lvl 80 with standard sPvP-like exotic gear can be included without removing the possibility for lvl 80 players to show up in their full Ascended kit.
As echoed before, raids could have two modes:
1) Moderate difficulty for people who want the experience/story, without the need of voice communication or knowing the tactics inside out.
2) Hardcore mode for the people who want that extra challenge, bash their heads against that invisible wall called learning the fight, and finally overcoming it.

As for rewards, there is no need to worry. There are unique skins for almost every part of the game already, and there is no reason to think this won’t be true for raiding.

On the topic of elitism. Don’t kid yourselves. These elitists are already playing the game and you can tell who they are quite easily just by listening to them. Look at this thread alone.
That doesn’t mean they are wrong, it is only human to think like that.
However, there are many others as well, again, look only at this thread and you’ll see them too.
Will there be groups that gearcheck, AP check, guild check, etc? Of course there will be.
Will there be groups that don’t?
I can wholeheartedly say: Yes, there will be.

GW2Community and DV have stood for being an open community from the start, and will remain so. We do Tequatl, Evolved Jungle Wurm, and we will complete the raids as well. We are always willing to explain things to new people, our door is always open.
GW2 has given rise to these kinds of communities, and there is no denying that we are succeeding in our mission.
All you need to do is seek out these people and play with them instead. We won’t ask you to ping gear, AP, or whatever. We do ask that you listen and learn. That is all. We’re all human, we’re enjoying the game together. Is that not what MMO games should be about?

spoj.9672:

Firstly i didnt call you entitled. I was referring to the large group of people that want raids to be available to all people. I think thats just narrowminded. Im also shocked that you think I was attacking you. I was merely expressing my opinion in a very polite manner.

Nor did i say you wanted open world bosses in instances. I merely mentioned that it is implied with they way you want scaling and large group encounters in instances. That sounds very much like world bosses in instances.

Also as a final note. Its not as if adding hardcore raids to the game will suddenly make the rest of the game change and disappear. I think you are overexaggerating with this comment:

I would love to see epic difficult raids, but not at the expense of the game many of us have come to really love.

Because frankly you cant create epic difficult raids without causing exclusion. Its impossible from a logical standpoint. And with exclusion comes elitism. So I will repeat they are non avoidable issues.

Sorry for the confusion. Thanks for clarifying the “entitled” comment and I apologize if I came across harsh to you with my reply.

If they are truly non-avoidable issues, then I repeat that raiding would cause more damage than good to the game.

I still believe, however, that if people would just be willing to think outside the box a little more (most importantly, forget what raiding looks like in other games), they could create large scale instanced challenges that don’t bring the exclusion (at least on the front end) and elitism those other games do.

In my opinion, exclusion via difficulty is fine. Exclusion due to poor processes (hard to form/find groups, unnecessary attunements, etc) is definitely not. Elitism in any form should be stamped out and killed, but that is really another discussion entirely.

The biggest issue is, the second anyone starts talking potential solutions, such as alternative scaling methods, they are flooded with negativity and brick walls from a very small group of people who have a preconceived notion of what raiding should be (based usually on what they have seen in other games).

If raiding is meant to be a carbon copy of what we see in Wildstar or the glory days of WoW (my raiding days), then there really is no need for further conversation.

Imo, though, this is GW2 and they can do better.

Just bare in mind my MMO raid experience is pretty much non existant. So i dont have a preconceived notion of what raiding should be. I use logic when deciding on what i think it should be.

So i would suggest re-reading my posts and think about why i have those opinions from a logical standpoint. Its certainly not because of other games. Its what i think the game needs and whats realistic from a game design perspective.

My problem with this is the built in bias that something cannot be changed because that’s the way it is. If we look at what rewards are, then we can understand why they are important maybe understand a way to come to a compromise.

Intrinsic rewards are those that are internal and self motivating. Beating hard content and walking away with a sense of pride is an intrinsic reward. An extrinsic reward is one based on what you show, armor, weapons etc. These are problematic in that they create separation between people. This becomes a larger problem when these items can be utilized to judge peoples worth over their personal character. These type of judgements are what creates toxicity within a game.

Many pro raid people claim they are all about the intrinsic value of the play, they love to play challenging and hard content. If that’s the case then why do you want an extrinsic reward? Aren’t the ‘feels’ of beating content important enough? Shouldn’t that trump extrinsic rewards in a game where you’re really only playing to show yourself how good you are?

That’s why I say the following, their belief in ‘proper rewards’ plays much stronger to their playing this content than knowing how well they did against the content. If the content was provided that was the most awesome hardcore, elite only can win, content, that made your eyes blur, you fingers bleed, and your brain explode in myriad shades of OMG, knowing there would be NO drops, would you play it at all?

I am not asking these questions rhetorically. Pro raid people need to provide honest answers to why these things are important to them.

If extrinsic rewards are so important then you, as a player, have to understand why they are problematic, and help alleviate these problems, otherwise these issues will create the same problems within this game that others suffer from.

If they aren’t as important as it appears you need to get your opinion out also. This is about balancing the needs of one group with those of another. We cannot accept ‘they can’t be fixed because they are exclusionary’. We have to find a way to make pro raiders happy while satisfying all the other players who have been promised inclusion since the game was designed.

Iason Evan.3806:

Let’s spend a few pages of this CDI getting away from traditional notions of what Raids are and spend some time coming up with things that have never been done.

What’s wrong with traditional raid design?
I’m not saying raids in GW2 should be exactly like in other games, but most of the core principles of raiding are pretty universal in my opinion. And combining those universal principles with the unique combat system of GW2 is enough uniqueness and difference to me.
[/quote]

And they won’t be simply by virtue of no trinity in this game. That’s why I want to see something different for raids in this game. If I wanted to do a traditional 2005-2009 designed raid I would never have left those other games for this one. Raids in those games make sense being “endgame” because the level cap always gets raised and the new gear becomes the new BiS. We have our BiS cap. It’s Ascended. Ascended will always be BiS at level 80 because level 80 will always be the cap.

There are myriad ways to earn Ascended Gear already. Raids don’t have to include Ascended gear as a gate to entry because any subsequent raid added after the initial raid or wave of raids will both have Ascended as their BiS.

My point is that you should be able to level on any content in this game that you want. That doesn’t mean I don’t think there shouldn’t be tiered raid scaling. There should be. If I want to make a 4th Ranger or 3rd Necro and I want to level in the new Raid content, I should be able to and I shouldn’t be a detriment to my team by having gear matter. Raiding at the highest level should be about skill, not gear. Raiding for leveling should be about skill as well, not gear.

So many of us have these set in stone notions of what a raid is and seem to not want to diverge from those ideas. I think that is a silly road to wander down. We have a chance here to make raiding in GW2 be something special and unique and not a cookie cutter thing that has been done in dozens of MMOs in the exact same fashion.

Why should hard content mean you need the best gear? It shouldn’t. Hard content should be about the skill needed to complete it. Why should hard content have a barrier for entry? It shouldn’t. I would argue that PvP is the hardest content int he game and you are able to do that at level 1. I think Raids should follow the same path.

I think that it is important to look at raids from other games so we aren’t wasting time discussing issues that have been solved years ago.

1. Lockout timers:
a. Important to prevent boss farming for repeated rewards
b. Casual players don’t like them due to not having enough time to complete raid:
——Solved in previous MMO’s by having a raid lock that extends your raid timer an additional week but prevents redoing the bosses you have already beaten. Prevents farming, allows casuals to progress at their own pace.

Please copy other MMO’s in this design aspect. Weekly lockout timer with lockout extension has been proven over multiple years to be the best and most elegant solution, no need to reinvent the wheel here.

2. Casual vs Hardcore
a. Want to include as many players as possible but still have a challenge
b. normal (easy) mode and Hard mode
—-Solved in previous MMOs by having a toned down, lfg version of the raid that allows all players to see the content with only a slight learning curve. Shows them the basic mechanics and allows them to improve their skills and gear to a point where they can try the real version of the raid. Hardmode, challenges players skill and competence in a variety of ways and allows them to achieve better rewards. I think in the terms of GW2 there should be a very easy version and a normal version of the raid, comparable to lfr and normal raids in WoW. Hardmode can come at a later time, but there is nothing even close to the difficulty of hardmode raids in WoW in GW2 right now, so that can come later if normal raids are successful.
—-Raid exclusive rewards should only be obtained in the normal, not the toned down version of the raid. If you can obtain the same rewards in both then people will just speed clear the easy raids and avoid the harder ones. Rewards should be entirely unique to the normal version of the raids.

3. Rewards
a. UNIQUE and EXCLUSIVE rewards. No one does raids just for the fun of it, regardless of what they tell you. If you can get the rewards somewhere else easier then they WILL get them in that other place. This is why Aetherblade dungeon path was such a failure. It was more challenging content that had only a very small % chance to dropping a different item. No one wants to run a raid 100 times for the possible chance that 1 item will be unique. Every boss should drop at least 1 piece of raid unique reward. Every player should come out of the raid feeling they have progressed in some way each week. This doesn’t have to be through higher quality gear, it can be through earning tokens, having an array of mini pets, unique skins, titles, special effects, etc. There are plenty of things you can give players to make them feel like they are progressing each week they complete a raid, don’t make it an all or nothing deal or people will simply ignore it.

Blaeys.3102:

In my opinion, exclusion via difficulty is fine. Exclusion due to poor processes (hard to form/find groups, unnecessary attunements, etc) is definitely not.

The bolded part is the core for me. That’s the only true exclusion I want in the raids.

Blaeys.3102:

The biggest issue is, the second anyone starts talking potential solutions, such as alternative scaling methods, they are flooded with negativity and brick walls from a very small group of people who have a preconceived notion of what raiding should be (based usually on what they have seen in other games).

If raiding is meant to be a carbon copy of what we see in Wildstar or the glory days of WoW (my raiding days), then there really is no need for further conversation.

Imo, though, this is GW2 and they can do better.

The raids in GW2 should not WoW raids, they should be GW2 raids. This doesn’t mean we can’t reuse some of the great mechanics and ideas from WoW raids, but it means that the raids in GW2 should be something that fits in GW2.
In my opinion, this will be partially achieved simply by the way GW2 is designed, and the rest is what some of these 14 pages have been discussing. That is, how to take those great mechanics and ideas and use them in GW2.

The reason I changed my mind from scaling raids to fixed size raids, was because of the statement Chris made on one of the first pages. Something that made me think about what was most important to me: the quality of the raid(s) (ie. how difficult would they truly be?) or that I would always be able to include everyone in my guild?
And to be honest, the answer was quite simple: the quality of course.
Because without the quality, the raids would not be worth it at all.

Blaeys.3102:

I woke up this morning and read through these posts and came to a simple revelation that alot of us (including myself to a degree) arent going to be tremendously happy with, and that I will probably get attacked over (hopefully not, though) -

The kind of hardcore ultra structured raids people are advocating will not be possible in Guild Wars 2 without changing the goals and spirit of the game.

Introducing raids in the form they take in other games will also bring the hate and elitism we see in those other games. Unless we can address that core problem by moving away from rigid preconceptions about what a raid should be, as much as I want ultra challenging raids, I think they aren’t feasible.

Most do not want the atmosphere that exclusionary “look at me, im better than the gods” raid content would create in the game. I know that will draw the ire of people in this thread, but it needs to be said and addressed.

In my first post – which was echoed by others throughout the thread – I advocated using raiding to bring back – in scalable instances – past living story steps. Basically, instead of raids being elite content, they are used to keep some of the most fun living story content from season one (and future seasons) alive.

ArenaNet has proven they can design these fights in ways that require a slightly higher level of coordination and teamwork than we usually see in the game (Marionette, Breachmaker, etc). While it isnt the challenge some are advocating for, it is something we dont have now that MANY people would thoroughly enjoy.

I thought I had changed my mind and tried to join the discussion regarding hardcore raiding, but at this point in the conversation, Ive come to the realization that the kind of raiding advocated by the hardcore few would change this game I love in too many negative ways. I have some very fond memories of hardcore progression raiding in other games, but those memories are eclipsed by the negative atmosphere this kind of content would bring to the game.

I know this will cause some reactionary posts and criticisms and that’s fine (as long as it’s done in a civil and adult manner), but I think its time to come to the realization that you can either have ultra structured hardcore raiding for a small percentage to enjoy or large scale semi organized instances (think Marionette or Breachmaker) that everyone can access.

NOTE: I do believe the game would benefit from ultra hard content. However, I think that content belongs in dungeons. Five player content (or single player for that matter) doesnt have as great an impact on the atmosphere/community in the game.

First and foremost I don’t see how 5 man dungeons have more or less to do with the game’s atmosphere than 10-15 man raids. They’re the same.
And the game desperately needs hardcore content.

Apart from that the whole idea that they should make the raids replay the LS story from season 1 is in my opinion terrible. It’s happened – it’s done. I don’t really want to have anything to do with it again. And I’m sure I’m not the only one.

For new players that weren’t here? I’m sure they’ll release it in the story journal at one time or another.

The only games I have enjoyed raids in have been games that do not limit the number of people who may participate. I have been a member of rather large guilds from EQ1 on and it has not been fun letting someone know that they cannot come on the raid because we are full up.

The limit on players seems to be the major cause of the exclusion of people and the elitism of prove you did it before or gear checks.

If “hardcore” people want to do the raid with fewer people they would still be able to “challenge” themselves. While the less than hardcore people would be able to bring more to enjoy the same content their way. A perfect example of this was doing the dragon raid in DAoC, for hte life of me I cannot remember his name, an open world mob so you can bring as many as you like, but a lot of people would only bring 24 people because then everyone got one of both seal types that dropped.

TLDR; create raids so that you can bring as many or as few people as you want.

Lian Olsam.9541:

Harper.4173:

Lian Olsam.9541:

my only purpose with a game is have fun, if i wanna reward i go work

this is gw2 for me, i’ve chose this game because you are not forced to do something 24/24 7/7 for dont be a “looser” and imho they done it really good, but it miss some things other games have… you wrote alot of things and i have the answer for ALL of this but i dont wanna push the topic on this way, will be a neverending discussion i have my ideas and u have yours i dont wanna change yours, difference is ever good, that’s why i’d like to promote it also on gameplay, so EVERYONE can play what they really want, now isnt possible, alot of player say that in game and with alot of topics, so isnt only my feelings, maybe this guys played like me also to other mmo and they know how difference and funny is can play really different with a real different purpose

raids have to be developed by 0, lets try to give to all gw2 players what they want, ppl like u already have the entire game with this mechanics could we hope to have something different for the others?

Great! and you can do that -find people that have fun the same way you do and have at it.

For the majority of players in this game as far as I’ve seen fun= rewards fast.
Or better rewards. Or more rewards. That’s what people want in an MMO.

There’s absolutely nothing in this game preventing you from playing exactly how you want except your own vision and ideas.

i dont wanna waste my time using 2x time doing a content with the wrong builds… u dont understant my point of view, i’m not a dumb wanna play something wrong, ofc i wanna use the better stuff for do it properly, but NOW the FULL zerk meta is the faster and i’d like more deeper content than dps everything… btw like someone told (and me in the last post) dont push this topic in the zerker discussion, i just hope devs will take the right decision changing the meta into the raids allowing ppl to play differently as the best choice u can make…

The problem is – as you’ve nicely put it – you want to have your cake and eat it.

You want to play the gear and build that you like even though it’s not what is best for the encounter but still clear the encounter just as fast or nearly as fast as those who are specifically playing in order to do it as fast as possible.

If you play for the “challenge” then taking longer shouldn’t be considered a “waste of time” since it’s what you like and want.

Ultimately you just proved you want the same rewards speed clear people get with less work while roleplaying your favorite set-up.

There’s no right or wrong way to play the game- it’s the way you enjoy it more.

You can’t really expect the game to change and make what you like to play the meta now can you?

Just please top with all this Casual vs Hardcore.
Just because I’m able to play few hours in a week doesn’t mean I like hand holding and hate challenging and punishing content.
Likewise, I could be playing 12 hours/day for 2 years straight role playing and exploring without even touching dugeons, fractals, spvp or wvw.

spoj.9672:

Just bare in mind my MMO raid experience is pretty much non existant. So i dont have a preconceived notion of what raiding should be. I use logic when deciding on what i think it should be.

So i would suggest re-reading my posts and think about why i have those opinions from a logical standpoint. Its certainly not because of other games. Its what i think the game needs and whats realistic from a game design perspective.

That is a fair request, so I did go back and look at your past posts. Most of them I agree with completely.

Raiding should be for lvl 80s only. Encounters should be designed with the expectation that all participants have access to every possible tool (traits and stats).

While we do differ in opinion on scaling, you posted about making 10 and 15 man raids I could get behind multiple raid tiers, even though, as Ive noted before, I think their should be three tiers – 8, 12 and 16 person raids. These numbers mean, regardless of how many people you have (as long as you have at least eight), you are never more than 3 people away from viable raid groups. This is the compromise I think they should make. Again, the exclusion should come in the difficulty of the fight, not in the difficulty of finding enough people to fill out organized groups.

Most of your other posts involve rewards. I dont feel strongly about this (I dont really play for the pixelated rewards). My first thought would be that skins unique to raids would be fine, but that is true of every aspect of the game. If you do dungeons, you get dungeon skins, if you do LS, you get living story skins, if you do pvp, you get PvP skins, etc. It isnt about prestige – its about the fun of unique skins.

Hope this helps clarify. Seems like there is only one area we really differ in opinion on – and I think that compromise is still possible there.

RE: Gear equals player skill

I see a lot of:
‘I run zerker because I’m a good player, don’t punish me for being good’
‘If you’re not good enough to go full zerker, use other gear’
‘Stats don’t matter in this game, skill does’
‘Making other stats viable will lower the skill required to beat an encounter’

If you honestly, truly believe this is true, then ask yourself this:
Is that not a design flaw by default?
Why is it that your choice of stats is determined by player skill?
In that design, stats are obsolete. They are not required. Hence, we may as well remove them altogether.
There is no such thing as a player who cannot become a good player. If there is, it is because of restrictions they’ve placed upon themselves. With that in mind, there is no room for gear sets at all.
Furthermore, there is no reason to believe making condition damage, for example, more viable will lower skill level required at all.
Don’t kid yourselves when you refer to a full berzerker player running all support skills as a support player. That’s a DPS player who happens to have awesome support abilities.
In World of Warcraft, I’ve played a Rogue. The Rogue class was all about DPS. Yet, they also had an array of stuns that allowed them to excert an enormous amount of control over mobs. Yet, they were never cited as a control class. They could not gear for control, their main job was DPS.

Having support skills will not make you a support character any more than running 3 DPS skills in cleric gear make you a DPS character.

The only reason you can be a super DPS, control, and support character rolled into one in this game is the disparity between the effectiveness of skills when they are modified by stats. So please, inform yourselves before trying to drag any of that into this discussion.

So, what if a part of the playerbase does not like the unique rewards released with the first raid? Does that mean the raid should not be made? Or should not have unique rewards for those who do like the skins? Of course not.

No to the first, yes to the second, raids should NOT have unique rewards to them. Problem solved.

Please, do not design raids around sparing the feelings of people who do not want to raid.. Make the raids, make them the best they can be, give them unique visual rewards. If some people who don’t want to raid would want these items.. well, then they better start raiding.

No. Sorry, but you have to share this game with the rest of us, and we’ve gotten along quite well without raids for two years now. If the choice is between having raids, but everyone needs to do them if they want the “cool new raid lewt,” or not having raids at all, then I vote no raids at all. If you want to have raids you have to get along with those players that don’t, this is NOT a raidista game and never should be. I’m fine with there being raids, so long as non-raider players have no reason to go there. If they put in mechanisms to “encourage” non-raiders to participate then they can burn in the pits.

To the stat thing. Do not include any kind of flat damage or defense buff ever. This is basically nerfing the raid(s) from the start.

Ok, fair enough. It was intended as a compromise to having an entirely new tier of gearing above ascended that would be superior in all content and therefore necessary for all players to pick up. If they can get away with not offering superior gear of any sort of raiders then so much the better.

Not only that, it would divide the playerbase even further (as alot of people seem to be afraid of. I’m not) because those players who can get far from the start, are already ahead shortly after the release of the raids, and then they should be given drops that makes it even easier for them, while those that struggle keep struggling?

Well, the idea would be the standard raid progression in other games, that players are meant to be able to do the early raids without the bonus stats, and that the point of the bonus stats is to make the next tier of raids possible when it’s tuned to be pretty much impossible without them. An alternate way of doing that would be to like have Raid 1 drop “Frost Infused Armor” or something that you could collect, and then Raid 2 is all fire-themed, with enemies that deal massive damage unless you’re wearing the frost infused armor which mitigates that bonus damage. Then Raid 3 could be poison-themed or something, and your “flame infused armor” burns it off. Stuff like that.

Firstly i didnt call you entitled. I was referring to the large group of people that want raids to be available to all people. I think thats just narrowminded. Im also shocked that you think I was attacking you. I was merely expressing my opinion in a very polite manner.

I think it’s fair to say that they can make raids not be “available to all people,” but if so it’s vital that they also be “ignorable by all people,” in that there will be nothing to them that anyone would want, if they don’t naturally enjoy raiding. If you put some awesome carrots behind raiding, then I’m sorry, but you’ll have to let the kiddies play.

Castrin.8972:

Harper.4173:

Lian Olsam.9541:

my only purpose with a game is have fun, if i wanna reward i go work

{snip}

raids have to be developed by 0, lets try to give to all gw2 players what they want, ppl like u already have the entire game with this mechanics could we hope to have something different for the others?

Great! and you can do that -find people that have fun the same way you do and have at it.

For the majority of players in this game as far as I’ve seen fun= rewards fast.
Or better rewards. Or more rewards. That’s what people want in an MMO.

There’s absolutely nothing in this game preventing you from playing exactly how you want except your own vision and ideas.

I have to agree with Lian. Any “raid” mechanism should be accessible from low level up, much like the Gauntlet or Labyrinth were/are. It should appeal to all and reward all characters based on level and yet include the possibility to gain that “elite” drop just the same as all others.

That would meet the requirement of “fun” at all levels of play without locking people out of the content.

Peace.

Except I doubt I or anyone else taking raids seriously would want to raid with people that are under level 80.

While you can do all content in this game without being level 80 it’s not really optimal and honestly I wouldn’t want to be the one carrying non-80s around.

Crystal Reid.2481:

Baltzenger.2467:

I have a question for you.
When designing our proposals, should we think of raiding as an endgame type of content, or a more horizontal type of content (available for all kinds of players)?

This is a good question. This is really more of a personal question and the answer is going to differ quite a bit between individuals.

If you want my personal take on this… Raiding for me is a type of end game content I like to partake in with a group of like minded individuals that requires us to master both our classes and the mechanics in the encounter. Nothing in an MMO is more exciting to me than killing a boss we have spent weeks and dozens (if not hundreds) of attempts mastering.

Remember this is just my personal opinion. There are going to be differing opinions in this thread. We want to hear all of them, and not discourage anyone from posting if they think we are going in a direction that is not for them.

So to get back to your question… Let’s assume that because raiding would be a very new type of content for the game that it’s possible for us to re-write the principles of the game that we have seen so far. So having said that where do you feel raiding falls (end game VS horizontal)?

Sorry I didn’t answer before…I had some medical problems (swallowed a piece of wire, very scary week for me)

In my opinion, after what has been said, raiding falls into what end game content is, against the idea of horizontal, and not because horizontal is bad, or that we should change the overall approach of the game, but because in order to make it interesting enough it should require certain experience, and also because the playerbase sometimes feel like there is not really that next level after you get to the point where you have already completed most PvE content.

And by the way, I very much agree with your personal take on what raiding should be, that’s what I expect out of this too.

(thanks for your attention!)