Guild Wars 2

Conski Deshan.2057:

@ Chris/ Crystal

Several people have mentioned the Marionette and Battle for LA and they are two pieces of content I really enjoyed (Anything that involves being on coms coordinating several strike teams, getting status reports and an overall ebb and flow of the battlefield type thing is super fun).

I don’t see them being spectacularly suitable for raid content due to part of that fun being the large scale (100+ players) and chaos, but would love that type of thing as a different concept “Battlefields” or “Area Assaults”.

I think it would be a concept worth getting a look over as its own separate CDI.
It could act as an area event ramped up to 11 like scarlet invasions or LA. Perhaps semi instanced as in you choose “Black Citadel” or “Black Citadel under assault” when you attempt to enter a map under attack (Just so a new player doesn’t go “Yay just created my new character, Oh my god a giant death laser has just blasted me and half the map what is going on”.)

PS: Those Airship lasers that fired on you during LA really added to the tension and were awesome.

On the contrary, I think this is the right place to discuss it. Since Anet (hopefully) won’t copy-paste the traditionnal Raid WoW formula, we have to redefine the genre.

Let’s be honest about it, this CDI is not about raids, it’s about designing larger scale endgame content to keep GW2 hardcore crowd busy for the next months. One can see that after reading the first four pages. Look at the TTS proposal. It certainly does not look like a raid, but it has the potential to bring a similar challenge.

The title “CDI Guild Raiding” is kind of a misnomer in this regard.

However you’re right when you say that part of the fun of the marionette was the organised chaos happening there. Though I believe, that in a controlled environment (i.e instanced Marionette) the fight could be very organised and neat picky. If the fight becomes unforgiving and meat picky, I don’t see how this can not be a called a “raid”.

On reward progression:

Vertical progression is the increase of player power through statistical advantages given through higher numbers on gear and weapons. This is the anathema of GW2 design philosophy. I cannot see any way that this would be a benefit to the game.

Any vertical progression would splinter the overall community, splinter any raid group, and bring in typical MMO community tropes that this game has been designed to avoid.

Horizontal progression can be simply skins, weapons and armor, which diminishes some of the more toxic tropes found in other games. Although an unimaginative possibility, it is working well in GW2

Ideally, I would like to see rewards that were highly visible as rewards for those that beat the particular content and also have an effect of providing fun options for those that haven’t. These could be in the shape of publicly useable toys that are similar in function to the bobble head laboratory, zephyr sanctum or Marjorie’s notebook, or something new that would confer some temporary boon or toy to other players. This turns the usual tropes of community upside down by allowing ‘bragging rights’ without the general dissatisfaction related to exclusivity. How about a full armor set that has a switch to allow for this type of toy to be given or a weapon that has an option to play certain music?

Finally, there should be no final rewards locked behind RNG. The desire to play this content should be created by the desire to complete difficult content and the reward should be completely known. I do not receive rewards for effort randomly, I know what my grade is going to be, I know what my pay is going to be, etc. I will not play this content because of hope. It is better to know that you have to complete given content 10 times, 100 times, 10,000 times rather than hide rewards behind dice rolls. RNG is not a reward system, it is a very poor way to create desire to play content within a community.

Roybe.5896:

An here’s my final GW2 based, controversial item (;P):

4. Raid design that, rather than shifts a meta, is done in such a way that a meta cannot be achieved. Since this is the hardest content in the game, knowing your class, race, and profession should trump Ezway meta and should remove any idea of being able to min/max each encounter. ‘Play your way’ should shine in this type of content. That OMG feeling of I have never seen anyone do that before should be the rule, not the exception.

What does this mean? Let me try to parse it a bit…

“meta cannot be acheived.”

Once the mechanics of an encounter are learned, the process of optimizing it begins. Once people practice it repeatedly, things that work well are adopted ideas that work poorly are discarded. soon we have a good concept of what works extremely well for an encounter. This will be the meta. It is the inevitable biproduct of learning.

“remove any idea of min/maxing”

Similar to the last point. Bosses are questions. Open ended questions, but their mechanics are questions nonetheless. How you answer them is up to you. Once the question is answered successfully people will analyze the answer so the next time they answer that question they do it in the easiest way possible. This is min/maxing. You cannot avoid it.

“play your way.”

How can the hardest content in the game simultaneously incredibly challenging but also achievable by players who don’t want understand how to maximize their playskill potential? If your goal is to design a raid boss that is challenging to 15 highly experienced members of a hardcore dungeon guild, but also make it completable by a guy who wants to play a condition damage staff guardian and his equally “play your way” buddies, you will find this an impossible task for the developers.

“knowing your class, race, profession”

You say that people shouldn’t use the meta or min/max but insist they should know their class? You understand that the meta developed because people DO know their class and they found what each class does best and how to use that to complete dungeons, fractals etc in the most efficient way possible. This is the definition of knowing your class. Referencing your previous comment, the condition damage staff guardian or full nomad gear necromancer do not know their class. If they knew their class they would know what trait and gear allocations work best and they would use that.

Case in point, if someone clearly doesn’t know what the most effective builds, gear, skills for a particular enounter are, how well can you say that they “know their class?” Or alternatively, if someone DOES know what is most effective, but chooses not to use it because they don’t find it as fun is that the type of person you want in your raid? No offense to anyone, but wiping over and over again in a raid can be brutally painful. It can strain relationships, bruise egos and kill guilds. It happened before and will happen again. The point to remember is that everyone there cares and is trying their best (hopefully anyway) and that everyone has to persevere to accomplish your goals. This breaks down when its clear that some people “play how they want” and don’t adapt to the needs of the raid and are putting their personal playstyle enjoyment ahead of progressing the raid. Those people need to either not raid, or adapt to the needs to the group.

tl;dr: special snowflakes melt quite quickly in difficult raids.

VodCom.6924:

Let’s be honest about it, this CDI is not about raids, it’s about designing larger scale endgame content to keep GW2 hardcore crowd busy for the next months. One can see that after reading the first four pages. Look at the TTS proposal. It certainly does not look like a raid, but it has the potential to bring a similar challenge.

The title “CDI Guild Raiding” is kind of a misnomer in this regard.

The CDI has the potential to be about all of the above, or none of the above. It’s what the players want, and what Anet sees as viable ideas for prototyping and design.

That said, we know Anet can make world bosses and open-world encounters. In my mind, it’d be hard to not imagine “raid-like” content to exist within instances and be higher tuned than existing world bosses.

The design within said raid instance will hopefully differ greatly compared to the accepted norm for other MMOs, but I find it hard to believe that new “raid” content on a higher difficulty scale could exist outside of an instance.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

2: Foundational raiding mechanics based on the core combat and movement of GW2.

The foundational mechanics need to take advantage of and encourage the use of ALL the various mechanics already in the game. This seems like an obvious statement, but i’ll continue. I can foresee 3 different kinds of ‘enounters’ in a “raid” or what I would rather call “elite missions” to steer away from the familiar box of other games’ “raid” content (aside from the normal “trash mobs” which, for the sake of this type of content, could be used a bit more sparingly unless they become part of some of the mechanics mentioned like dropping bundles/consumables needed later on.

1) Covert encounters – areas MEANT to be bypassed. By this I do not mean walking around some cliff or simply rushing through. I am thinking more like build in safe areas that you must go to by sneaking behind enemies’ backs, costumes that need to be found that “fool” the locals into letting you through etc. This, of course, would be in some area where the groups has, for one reason or another, been split up into smaller groups. 15 people “sneaking” together isnt all that believable haha.

2) mob ambush/surge encounters – large numbers of ORGANIZED mobs attacking in an area. In these, mobs could use various turrets that you can then capture and use against mobs or you must capture in order to beat a boss that might come into the fray after some amount of time. Mobs would be smarter splitting themselves into range and front line melee, using terrain to their advantage, reviving each other (at about the same speed as a a player does). Some mobs that may be especially weak or even strong to poison/bleed/melee whatever. Mobs that are guardians, mesmers, whatever and use their associated skills including reflects, illusions/phantasms etc.

3) boss encounters – more purposeful use of terrain and environment bundles. One boss may have perma defiance except against some bundle against which it has no defiance. As mentioned, boss encounters with turrets, bosses that retreat when players are stacked. Bosses that cause conditions that can be removed using environment objects, such as burning being removed by entering water, or large area fire fields that must be extinguished, poison fields that must be in some way “cleansed”. the boss might place totems that cause fear within a certain range which can then be destroyed by aforementioned turrets. bundles that allow the placement of long term (until triggered) traps, siege/turret/bundles that can be “crafted” at some special station located near/in the battle location during a fight by combining items from the environment or dropped by mobs within that particular elite mission instance (if drops, this would involve the creation of some sort of party inventory for certain items). A bundle/player placed totem that “converts” mobs in an area to friendly npcs which then attack/revive players/collect environment crafting items for your team or other helpful things that do not have the potential to be detrimental like manning turrets, crafting items etc.

Obviously, however, mechanics like those described above would be absolutely pointless if the boss were able to be defeated as quickly as, say the fire elemental world boss or if the boss were as ignorant of its surroundings kittenterer. You also dont want the boss to simply be a giant punching bag. the boss itself should be smart, for example, as mentioned moving around the battle field, dropping fields that must be mitigated, healing itself in some fountain, which then requires some bundle/turret/normal player CC to push/pull it away, spawning some heal/support mobs for itself that might then be convertible to friendly npcs. In otherwords, dropping boss health should be a back and forth fight, not a time consuming hp bag.

There area all kinds of possibilities even simply combining mechanics already available, but the desire is a requirement for coordination and battlefield awareness. Of course, many of these mechanics can be used in any of the above encounters.

Going to tack a link to this post here for reiteration https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/CDI-Guilds-Raiding/page/22#post4533117 . There should be interesting roles, but not necessarily tied to a specific class as that could detract from the GW2 mantra that any composition of classescan complete content ie, all-inclusiveness.

Proposal

Temple of Kormir Construction Raid in Straits of Devastation.

Implementation

The Temple of Kormir is built in the open world and has a Temple Event attached to it that has its own unique mechanics like the other Temple Events except that instead of a Risen Priest of Kormir(for obvious reasons)there is a fight with several smaller dragons.

The Instanced Raid portion is about the construction of the Temple. When players have captured the Temple, the raid is open for anyone to enter. I’m no game designer so I won’t presume to know the structure or pacing of the raid, but it would be an interesting way to have more content built into the world and have a raid tied into it in a believable way.

Getting back to slightly more concrete suggestions…

It might be fun for raids to have meta achievements alond with the basic “beating the boss (or group)” goal. I’m thinking of things similar to the metas possible in the queens guantlet or TA Aetherpath, or in WvW.

Some could be easy, some could be hard. I think that kind of thing is helpful because the easy ones keep your spitit up whil you struggle to figure out the best approach to the raid, and the kittenes give you something work on after you master the best approach.

All of these should give World Exp points and maybe some other rewards here and there.

Crystal Reid.2481:

• Is Legendary armor better than Ascended armor stat wise?
• Can this legendary armor be obtained anywhere else in the game?
• How do we prevent the introduction of Legendary armor from invalidating players who spent a lot of time/money crafting their Ascended armor?
• Is this a drop from raid encounters, or is it obtained through a “raiding reward track”?

I think you can see where I’m going with this. Ascended armor is already a pretty hotly debated topic because it did introduce a very slight vertical progression to the game.

Legendary armor should have the same progression as legendary weapons: selectable stats, same level of stats as the highest tier otherwise. Legendary armor (and legenary weapons but that topic is going on and on elsewhere) should NOT be gated behind incredibly low RNG/mindless gold farm. Those 2 things may be an OPTION in the attainment of a crafting items of which the recipe requires 1 (precursor in the case of the weapon) but should not be the only way.

My discussion of reward skin progression is in this post: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/CDI-Guilds-Raiding/page/10#post4526903 . If there is some way to take the top tier of the armor I described and convert it to a legendary version, that would be great, but one thing I absolutely do not want to see is a pure RNG/mindless cursed shore gold farm/trading post wars method of getting some particular required item. tougher meta achievement rewards, extra side mission rewards within the raid content (still pushing to alter the term to something like “elite missions”), or some other way is fine even along side the current precursor method, but the current precursor method should not be its only way.

As Timmyf mentioned “you can get them as a drop if you’re lucky, but you get a fixed-effort backup option as well.”

Crystal Reid.2481:

Entirely up for debate. I’ll use two extreme examples here with some hypothetical made up assumptions:

• A raid could be as small as a singular dungeon path that takes 4 hours to learn, but can be completed in as little as 30 minutes on farm.
• A raid could be as large as the Eternal Battlegrounds with many different paths/encounters that takes upwards of a month(s) to learn, but can be completed in as little as 4 hours on farm.

And ultimately, and here’s a totally crazy idea (because I love brainstorming)… Why can’t raiding be both?
1) * If we have a singular story to tell, can it just be a one off instance that tells one story and has one final boss at the end (imagine if we rebuilt the Marionette to be a 15 man encounter in a raid instance and that’s the entire instance)?
2) * If we have a much larger story to tell, can it be a full sized map complete with multiple encounters and hidden areas to explore (imagine if Dry Top was a 15 man instance and you progressed through the map learning the story of how a huge sand storm is coming, and the final boss is some sort of magical sand storm giant that summons chickenados as its minions)?

Thanks for your thoughts on this.

going by my numbers inserted:

1) This, in my view, would be a great way for the Living story season 1 content to be brought and completable for those who were not here for it. From what I have heard, there were story type instances as well as world type instances. Personal story instances should be able to be brought back as the same instances, but currently world content would not work, but rebalanced to a 15 man instance could do it. it would be one thing if the story were told and concluded, but there are ALOT of references made in season 2 that depend on season 1 and leave some of use completely lost not knowing the importance of some things or who the characters even are or what they are talking about some of the time.

2) if progress for your group can be saved, I think this could be alot of fun giving multiple areas or meta events for your group to stumble across, allowing many many options to use achievements and meta achievements as reward systems and giving the designers to tell a broader story (which, i’ll say again, would be really great taken from GW lore to tell stories that have been discussed or perhaps simply mentioned up til now)

in the case of 1), this shorter style should be reset more often if not completed such as weekly. in the case of 2) on the other hand, if the map is the size of even a small world map and has multiple event paths, lots of hidden secrets/easter eggs/longer meta achievements, etc, then more time should be allowed and incomplete progress shouldnt be reset for perhaps up to a month.

Perhaps I am misunderstand the concept of a “reset” but I am going with the idea of the timeframe after which a saved uncompleted instance of the content is disposed of.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Serophous.9085:

• How do we prevent the introduction of Legendary armor from invalidating players who spent a lot of time/money crafting their Ascended armor?
• Is this a drop from raid encounters, or is it obtained through a “raiding reward track”?

Just on legendary armor:

• if anything, just make it an unlockable skin. Double click to add to wardrobe
• I’d rather it be some kind of scavenger quest hunt like was just done for the new mystic forge recipe. Except you would need certain items from bosses to throw into the forge, and craft the the parts of the armor piece.

my take on this:

• Ascended Armor is the precursor to Legendary Armor.
• a necessary ingredient for the crafting of the LA will drop in the raid (not necessarily RNG but maybe through achievements, getting skillful group oriented things done —> a perfect team could get the reward in the first try, not the norm for these challenging achievements though; definitely harder than the story mission achievements of season 2)
• mats you need to craft your ascended armor will drop more frequently in raids compared to outside sources (because it’s the hardest content of the game)

i like this post. Ascended being the precursor seems like a good solution to me considering a single piece of ascended armor consumes so many materials.

Elrey.5472:

timmyf.1490:

On the topic of combo fields, what if Raids included combo fields of new types… for example, a Draconic Energy Field which gives new effects for each finisher type? Perhaps these combo fields could be created by environmental weapons, so certain players may choose to carry and use the bundle to create the new fields?

That ties together a few different things: using advanced game mechanics, using bundles and other environmental weapons, and allowing some choice and flexibility in class and role.

I like new fields, but not the bundles part. A new skill that blast draconic fields for every player sounds awesome though.

Perhaps not solely but as an option. Bundles can create new fields and/or, perhaps more interestingly and for the sake of more battlefield awareness, new fields can, for one reason or another appear (and last a little longer to give player a chance to get to them). bundles can also create finishers in these fields in addition to the players own finishers. A powder keg bundle that can be detonated for a blast finisher, a “handful of [something]” that results in a spread of 5 projectile finishers, a pogo-stick bundle for a leap finishers (i kid…….sort of ).

Point is, if these fields appear as part of an encounter, then players can use it, if they wish to use it more, then they can use a bundle so they can control them.

VodCom.6924:

Conski Deshan.2057:

@ Chris/ Crystal

Several people have mentioned the Marionette and Battle for LA and they are two pieces of content I really enjoyed (Anything that involves being on coms coordinating several strike teams, getting status reports and an overall ebb and flow of the battlefield type thing is super fun).

I don’t see them being spectacularly suitable for raid content due to part of that fun being the large scale (100+ players) and chaos, but would love that type of thing as a different concept “Battlefields” or “Area Assaults”.

I think it would be a concept worth getting a look over as its own separate CDI.
It could act as an area event ramped up to 11 like scarlet invasions or LA. Perhaps semi instanced as in you choose “Black Citadel” or “Black Citadel under assault” when you attempt to enter a map under attack (Just so a new player doesn’t go “Yay just created my new character, Oh my god a giant death laser has just blasted me and half the map what is going on”.)

PS: Those Airship lasers that fired on you during LA really added to the tension and were awesome.

On the contrary, I think this is the right place to discuss it. Since Anet (hopefully) won’t copy-paste the traditionnal Raid WoW formula, we have to redefine the genre.

Let’s be honest about it, this CDI is not about raids, it’s about designing larger scale endgame content to keep GW2 hardcore crowd busy for the next months. One can see that after reading the first four pages. Look at the TTS proposal. It certainly does not look like a raid, but it has the potential to bring a similar challenge.

The title “CDI Guild Raiding” is kind of a misnomer in this regard.

However you’re right when you say that part of the fun of the marionette was the organised chaos happening there. Though I believe, that in a controlled environment (i.e instanced Marionette) the fight could be very organised and neat picky. If the fight becomes unforgiving and meat picky, I don’t see how this can not be a called a “raid”.

I mean more, I like 15 man highly organised instanced raids , while i also like the idea 100 man massive “Semi-instanced” battlefields, trying to force both into the same activity designation will negatively impact both. So I suggested that a the larger encounter size be considered as a separate activity. Functionally it could effectively be a raid, just not called that and using different systems. Say off the top of my head no set appearances, Zone conversion and scarring , which are systems I would not like to see/ would not fit with what I see the smaller scale content doing. It could also use more suitable individual reward systems due to the large number of players.

Conski Deshan.2057:

VodCom.6924:

Conski Deshan.2057:

@ Chris/ Crystal

Several people have mentioned the Marionette and Battle for LA and they are two pieces of content I really enjoyed (Anything that involves being on coms coordinating several strike teams, getting status reports and an overall ebb and flow of the battlefield type thing is super fun).

I don’t see them being spectacularly suitable for raid content due to part of that fun being the large scale (100+ players) and chaos, but would love that type of thing as a different concept “Battlefields” or “Area Assaults”.

I think it would be a concept worth getting a look over as its own separate CDI.
It could act as an area event ramped up to 11 like scarlet invasions or LA. Perhaps semi instanced as in you choose “Black Citadel” or “Black Citadel under assault” when you attempt to enter a map under attack (Just so a new player doesn’t go “Yay just created my new character, Oh my god a giant death laser has just blasted me and half the map what is going on”.)

PS: Those Airship lasers that fired on you during LA really added to the tension and were awesome.

On the contrary, I think this is the right place to discuss it. Since Anet (hopefully) won’t copy-paste the traditionnal Raid WoW formula, we have to redefine the genre.

Let’s be honest about it, this CDI is not about raids, it’s about designing larger scale endgame content to keep GW2 hardcore crowd busy for the next months. One can see that after reading the first four pages. Look at the TTS proposal. It certainly does not look like a raid, but it has the potential to bring a similar challenge.

The title “CDI Guild Raiding” is kind of a misnomer in this regard.

However you’re right when you say that part of the fun of the marionette was the organised chaos happening there. Though I believe, that in a controlled environment (i.e instanced Marionette) the fight could be very organised and neat picky. If the fight becomes unforgiving and meat picky, I don’t see how this can not be a called a “raid”.

I mean more, I like 15 man highly organised instanced raids , while i also like the idea 100 man massive “Semi-instanced” battlefields, trying to force both into the same activity designation will negatively impact both. So I suggested that a the larger encounter size be considered as a separate activity. Functionally it could effectively be a raid, just not called that and using different systems. Say off the top of my head no set appearances, Zone conversion and scarring , which are systems I would not like to see/ would not fit with what I see the smaller scale content doing. It could also use more suitable individual reward systems due to the large number of players.

Every time I’ve see one of these posts the last two days, Ive had to bite my fingers off to keep them away from the keyboard (and Im running out of ducttape to put them back on).

I really (REALLY) want to have the raid size/scaling discussion, but agreed, for the sake of focus, that now is not the time.

Now, we need to be focused on mechanics and fundamentals. We can (will ) have a focused conversation regarding scaling, potential raid sizes and the pros and cons of every option later in the process – after we discuss what content we would like to see in terms of GW2 fight designs and mechanics.

KngGilgamesh.3481:

Why stop at bundles? Why not use transformations too? Tonics and the like (can be bought as a gold sink or given by npc during the raid).

snip…

Signing on for transformations as well. However, I dont like the gold sink idea, (though I think the economy could use one but that is a completely different discussion). The reason being, I think that ALL bundles, transformations, etc should be acquired DURING the raid instance in which they will be used by means unique to both that content and that instance of the content. I mentioned earlier about some sort of party inventory. Some items like transformations, bundles, crafting components that a are specially for crafting items within the raid itself, traps, totems, etc etc can be collected laying on the ground or from mob drops and these go into “mission inventory” accessible by anyone within that raid group (or even with permissions if there is some form of hierarchy established).This inventory would be emptied/disposed when the raid is completed or reset. This would cause completion to the self-contained. Some might like the idea of farming for these bundles and transformations and using them all at once as was the case with the person I quoted, but I think it would increase the difficulty level by not allowing them to be spammable if you have them stockpiled if you have to get them within that particular instance. This, of course, as long as it isnt designed in such a way that your group has to go out of their way and farm trash mobs for a single item that is absolutely required to defeat something.

That is not to say his way or my way is necessarily right or wrong, just that there are considerations for both.

hybrid.5027:

Roybe.5896:

An here’s my final GW2 based, controversial item (;P):

4. Raid design that, rather than shifts a meta, is done in such a way that a meta cannot be achieved. Since this is the hardest content in the game, knowing your class, race, and profession should trump Ezway meta and should remove any idea of being able to min/max each encounter. ‘Play your way’ should shine in this type of content. That OMG feeling of I have never seen anyone do that before should be the rule, not the exception.

What does this mean? Let me try to parse it a bit…

“meta cannot be acheived.”

Once the mechanics of an encounter are learned, the process of optimizing it begins. Once people practice it repeatedly, things that work well are adopted ideas that work poorly are discarded. soon we have a good concept of what works extremely well for an encounter. This will be the meta. It is the inevitable biproduct of learning.

“remove any idea of min/maxing”

Similar to the last point. Bosses are questions. Open ended questions, but their mechanics are questions nonetheless. How you answer them is up to you. Once the question is answered successfully people will analyze the answer so the next time they answer that question they do it in the easiest way possible. This is min/maxing. You cannot avoid it.

“play your way.”

How can the hardest content in the game simultaneously incredibly challenging but also achievable by players who don’t want understand how to maximize their playskill potential? If your goal is to design a raid boss that is challenging to 15 highly experienced members of a hardcore dungeon guild, but also make it completable by a guy who wants to play a condition damage staff guardian and his equally “play your way” buddies, you will find this an impossible task for the developers.

“knowing your class, race, profession”

You say that people shouldn’t use the meta or min/max but insist they should know their class? You understand that the meta developed because people DO know their class and they found what each class does best and how to use that to complete dungeons, fractals etc in the most efficient way possible. This is the definition of knowing your class. Referencing your previous comment, the condition damage staff guardian or full nomad gear necromancer do not know their class. If they knew their class they would know what trait and gear allocations work best and they would use that.

Case in point, if someone clearly doesn’t know what the most effective builds, gear, skills for a particular enounter are, how well can you say that they “know their class?” Or alternatively, if someone DOES know what is most effective, but chooses not to use it because they don’t find it as fun is that the type of person you want in your raid? No offense to anyone, but wiping over and over again in a raid can be brutally painful. It can strain relationships, bruise egos and kill guilds. It happened before and will happen again. The point to remember is that everyone there cares and is trying their best (hopefully anyway) and that everyone has to persevere to accomplish your goals. This breaks down when its clear that some people “play how they want” and don’t adapt to the needs of the raid and are putting their personal playstyle enjoyment ahead of progressing the raid. Those people need to either not raid, or adapt to the needs to the group.

tl;dr: special snowflakes melt quite quickly in difficult raids.

meta comes from learning, and is inevitable. I agree mostly, but one thing that would shake things up is if a particular boss/encounter did have some randomized mechanics. There could be a basket of potential mechanics that a given boss could use the specifics of which changes between each specific encounter. No predictable rotation of skills used, no scripted behavior (yes I know the basket would include “scripted” programmed things, but it wouldnt be he does a then b then c then rinse repeat), no “the boss does x at 75% health”. Things that force the group to communicate, coordinate, adapt and alter their strategy on the fly.

I’m late to the party. I read through the summary thread and a few pages in the CDI. Apologies for the sloppy editing, I’m in a rush and already edited the whole thing beautifully and the forum ate it, so here we go…

A quick note on my philosophies when it comes to a MMO’s PvE:

I feel that the two pillars of any profitable MMO are Replayability and Advancement.
Replayability contains: Challenge, Randomization and Uniqueness.
Advancement contains Character Customization, Power Scaling (Horizontally and/or Vertically) and Progression. The ideas I’m about to outline will aim to increase/create/amplify the above.

I. Encounters and Raid Content
This section will describe how to cater to everyone, while challenging everyone and allowing the players to choose how/when/why they overcome the obstacles in the instance (I’m an instanced guy).

Catering to everyone in a (hopefully) unique way:

Raid group enters the instance. Big boss fight at end as per usual. However, there is a timer (insert lore/story reason why here). This timer is relatively easy to meet by all players should the raid decide to fight their way straight through to big boss and his allies. Even if the raid fails to meet the timer it does not mean the raid fails, loot is still rewarded, but it’s less awesome. Casuals unite!

Near the entrance are several paths. Three of these paths fork out in different directions and lead to three different events. These events end with an “orb of power” to be dropped. Description of some potential events:

Triangular area for event. Three bad guys. Raid encounters the “Holy Trinity.” A healer, a tank and a DPS. Attacking the healer enrages the tank, so he gains large AoE crowd control abilities and the DPSer does large AoE damage. Healer gains no special abilities though. Conversely, attacking the DPSer turns the healer into super healer and tank once again has wild cc abilities. Attacking the tank leads to no over the top abilities, but he’s a tank so it takes a long time to tear him down.

Gameplay info for the above: If the raid spreads their damage out to the healer and the DPSer then all 3 would enrage. Spreading the NPC’s out, focus firing, having someone move the DPSer out of the raid to avoid AOE damage etc. This one would require several or all raid members.

Circular area of event. One random raid member is possessed. He receives 5 new weapon abilities. He is “red” to other raid members and becomes an attackable boss. He has a massive AoE damage aura with an instance-wide range. If he does not constantly do a high amount of damage to allied raid members, his high damage, instance-wide aura continues. If he successfully beats his friends senseless with the 5 abilities, the damage aura is minor. All 5 of his abilities are AoE attacks that split their damage equally among all targets hit. So, if he only hits one, odds are, that one player won’t live long. If he hits 8-9, things should be fine, but it’s still challenging damage.

Gameplay info: The raid will need to bring several raid members to this encounter and likely stack on each other to heal through it. If you wanted to be tricky, you could have the damage aura only reduce when a certain amount of damage is done, so tanky builds or damage reduction abilities might backfire. Feel free to give the possessed player some NPC allies to make the encounter more difficult. Maybe the possessed player’s damage heals his NPC allies, so the raid has to burst him down and take all the damage in the face.

Square area of event. The bad guys that spawn are directly related to how many raid members enter the area. No less than two can spawn and no more than however many raid members present in the area. Killing one feeds the remaining bad guys the first bad guy’s abilities and heals the surviving bad guy(s) to full. Raid can bring the whole group or send in a lone ranger/elite squad to take care of them.

Gameplay info: Focus firing the bad guy that has the weakest ability first and following that trend is the proper way to overcome the encounter. Splitting up bad guys is likely needed in case of AoE/CC/healing abilities.

With these examples in mind, the reason for describing the area of the encounter (circle, triangle etc) is because I would suggest having 9 total events that can go into these areas – three potential events for each area and one event is selected when the raid first enters the instance.

(Continued)

Post victory for each above event, one player can pick the orb of power up. Support spells fill the player’s weapon bar. These three orbs must be marched to a different location.

Bad guys spawn and attack the orb holders along the way. Tough bad guys block the altar – another event. Once placed on the altar, the raid receives a MASSIVE magic find boost for each orb placed.

Remember, the original timer that leads to greater rewards is still tickingso splitting up can be an option for the more knowledgeable/skilled groups. Hopefully it leads to build/gear variations. Less skilled groups can still pull it off by staying as one large group. This slows them down and might prevent them from hitting the timer for increased rewards, so, as a stimulant:

For each orb placed on the altar, some, but not much extra time is given to the raid AND numerous, difficult, awesome loot-table mobs spawn throughout the map for each orb placed on the altar. The raid will need targets to use these newfound magic buffs after all!

Now, there were several paths mentioned, not just three. The other paths lead to (insert number of) mini-bosses. They can absolutely be skipped and a raid can go straight to big boss as originally mentioned. One problem though, whichever mini-boss(es) is/are not killed when big boss is engaged, show up to wish our raid group well, with death and destruction. Insert titles or achievements for pulling off the final fight with however many mini-bosses present. Hardcores unite!

The breakdown: By throwing a timer in as a catalyst you force the raid to make choices and you make failure sting, but not catastrophic. Rather than clicking a hard-mode button in the UI for additional loots and monsters doing more damage, I felt players making choices and having to organize just to get to the hard-mode was a little more unique and interactive. Throw in some randomization and you have (I hope) the Replayability element satisfied.

II. Progression

A couple of quick thoughts on this topic, if you wanted, you could make the entire raid instance automatically have an ongoing Agony Aura, especially if this raid is say, against the Mursaat. Fractals would then be needed for agony resist.

I’d personally prefer the raid to have an incredible loot table with the above mentioned magic find buffs amplifying this. To prevent the economy from collapsing, raids being clearable once every (insert random days here) would prevent that while still being very rewarding.

III. Reward Structures

A couple things here…

The first has already been discussed, gold and good loot.

Second, are horizontal progression rewards, some of which have been discussed already (legendary armor for example). I’d like to throw out a sparkly idea. I’d love to see the raid reward “tokens” upon completion or have the mobs/bosses drop them. These tokens could be used to buy a particle effect. There would be several to choose from and they would be affected by player dyes. They would only attach to weapons because I’m assuming your graphics programmers have developed a toolset for your artists to easily slap these on the weapons that you already churn out? Should diminish dev time.

You could have a fiery affect, the misty glow from jotuns greatsword, etc. These would be expensive and would be unlockable (new unlocks and things to sell on the gem store!). None of these would allow players to apply any of the affects that legendary weapons currently provide and no footsteps either, but they’d still get players excited.

Some miscellaneous thoughts:

A boss that only takes damage from critical hits.

A boss that stacks Defiance up to 10 and takes 0 damage while defiance is up, but 10x damage when CCed.

NPC’s are fighting bad guys. The bad guys cannot be harmed by players, but the NPC’s can harm them. The NPC’s have a degen aura on them and are also taking moderate damage from the enemy. Keeping the NPC’s alive through CCing the enemy and healing the NPC’s is the only way to succeed in the event. Perhaps the NPC’s join the raid afterward or become the vendors that sell the raid rewards etc.

It aint a pretty post, but hopefully my ideas were clear enough to understand.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

‘…instanced co-operative group based ‘challenging’ content…’

I am little bit disappointed to hear that. I was always hoping GW2 would have the courage to build on past experiences and to try out new concepts of inclusive, open raid events. It’s sad to learn that we are heading for the same old exclusive type of “you are not welcome here” content.

~MRA

MRA.4758:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

‘…instanced co-operative group based ‘challenging’ content…’

I am little bit disappointed to hear that. I was always hoping GW2 would have the courage to build on past experiences and to try out new concepts of inclusive, open raid events. It’s sad to learn that we are heading for the same old exclusive type of “you are not welcome here” content.

~MRA

Those are the world bosses you talk about, there are plenty of them.

Mechanic idea: supply lines

just had another thought regarding new combo fields. It was mentioned before about bundles that create combo fields. There could also be some mechanic where a placed bundle/totem/generator/whatever create a persistent, indefinite combo field AS LONG AS it was being fed fuel/kept charged through some means whether that be one person running fuel from somewhere, “power line” or fuel pipe being laid/defended, a turret firing at the generator and supplying it with energy/magic (whatever the story dictates) that then must itself be defended.

This “supply line” mechanic could also be applied to some special more powerful turrets and, in regard to a previous post of mine where some items gave the ability to convert boss-spawned mobs into friendly npcs ( https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/CDI-Guilds-Raiding/4534806 ), this could be another role for them.

MRA.4758:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

‘…instanced co-operative group based ‘challenging’ content…’

I am little bit disappointed to hear that. I was always hoping GW2 would have the courage to build on past experiences and to try out new concepts of inclusive, open raid events. It’s sad to learn that we are heading for the same old exclusive type of “you are not welcome here” content.

~MRA

I think “raid” content is meant to be separate from open world. We have open world content, and likely current bosses will be revamped much like Teq/Triple Trouble. Hopefully that content will continue alongside this topic.

But there is a need for larger than 5-man instanced content. Something a guild can do together on their own without the need to involve PUGs. (10-20man is ideal)

Many people who are still playing since beta (myself included) are still around because of their guilds/relationships they’ve created. To many people these relationships are what keep them going and as time goes on there needs to be content that focuses on these established relationships. Mashing a bunch of PUGs together is great and all (sorta), but being able to do challenging content with your guild that benefits all members is the next logical step for GW2.

MRA.4758:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

‘…instanced co-operative group based ‘challenging’ content…’

I am little bit disappointed to hear that. I was always hoping GW2 would have the courage to build on past experiences and to try out new concepts of inclusive, open raid events. It’s sad to learn that we are heading for the same old exclusive type of “you are not welcome here” content.

~MRA

I don’t think that is set in stone; it depends on the mechanics they want for the raid. If it makes sense for it be as big as eternal battlegrounds or eotm with max amount of players then it would probably have to be all inclusive.
Open world has it’s own problems though.
Why would Instances be exclusive? Just because there is a player limit?
The only thing exclusive about the raid should be knowledge of the players. The players need to know the game mechanics and their own class. Some roles inside the raid may be exclusive in terms of skill (only skilled people may be able to fulfill that role).
Anyway this is something that they will discuss later, after we know what we want in a raid.

If you start talking about large groups of players its not really a raid anymore. Its a zerg. And when you start talking about zergs it doesnt matter how challenging you make the content. It will be easy. Zergs trivialise everything.

So can we stick to discussing ideas around 10-20 player limits. Weve already got fully inclusive open world zerging. We dont really need more of that.

Part 1:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/CDI-Guilds-Raiding/page/22#post4532991
My personal thoughts about Crystals Questions:

1___) Legendary Armors should be same as powerful as like Ascended Armors.
Same as like Ascended Weapons are same as powerful as like Legendary Weapons and the same thing should count later for Legendary Accessoires, which should be same as powerful as like Ascended Accessoires

The sole difference between Ascended Equipment and Legendary Equipment should always be only:

• More Convenience in regard of alowing Players more freedom for all kinds of Stat Setups, so that Players receive with Legendary Equipment the most convenient Build Diversity Freedom, whereas Ascended Equipment always comes with static Stats that can’t be changed, therefore that they are alot easier to make/receive.

• Legendary Equipment should always come up with various Special Effects, wherefore each kind of Legendary Equipment should be responsible for different kinds of effects only:

Legendary Weapons = Footprints, Weapon Swing Effects, Skill Effect Changes, Idle Auras
Legendary Equipment = Epic Buff Effects (Buffs looking more impressive), Movement Effects (Dodge Effect Changes, Block Effect Changes), More epic AoE Effects from Skills
Legendary Accessoires = Back Item Effect Upgrades, Color Effect Changes for Skills, Adding of Heroic Movements in regard of the Environmenment, making Jumping and Falling look more awesome, AI Skin Changes changing how your Summons look like, making them look alot more individual, Class Mechanic Effect Changes (Example making Elementalist Attunements more individual looking, making Deathshroud Animations more individual and so on )

Thats all the stuff, where I would begin with in regard of cosmetical improvements for horizontal progression based on more legendary eqipment, where the game lets all players look and act way too much the same since two years, where you have to admit, that the game currently provides absolutely zero individuality options for the players and thats somehow sad, when you look how far GW2 just got alone with the Wardrobe and its very unique Color System so far, which would just miss for total perfection also the ability to dye WEAPONS, like we were able in GW1, if thats even still possible now

Part 2:

2___) Legendary Armor/Accessoires should be receiveable by multi different ways, same as like Legendary Weapons need to become a bit more accessible through finally implementing Precursor Crafting/ Precursor Scavenger Hunts that let players do meaningful challenging thigns that rather make fun and feel like achievements, rathern than to grinf your butts of for a like two years and still have nothing, because you get never a friggin precursor dropped due to the game having ridiculous drop rates like a cheap 101 standard F2P asia/korean grind MMORPG that Anet said, that this game should never be like that and what you exactly turned the game into basically, when it comes down to the alt friendliness of this game. Before the introduction of ascended equipment, the game was much more alt friendly, than it is now, if you ever want to play this game with more than with 1 character effectivwely in fractals.
this crap around Agony Resist needs to become an accountbound feature, then and only then will get this game its alt friendliness back, it has had before the introduction of ascended items/legendary weapons.
The most laughable thing about legendary items in this game which needs to be changed first, is givign all those items a REAL LEGEND. None of those items have a real lore based legend, what makes them for me personally all meaningless trash with just just alot BLING BLING and nothing else.
Remove finally for gods sake please legendary weapon fro mthe trading post.
These weapons should be earned, not bought with gold/credit card real money to bypass the efforts of achieving such a weapon.
Every legendary equipment item needs to become accountbound items, which you should be able also to share with your alt characters within your account (so no soul bound after equipping!!)

Legendary Items of all sorts should be receiveable through:
- Crafting
- Scavenger Hunts
- Epic Raid Loot (which requires high challening successful raids naturally)
- Longer more Complex Special PvP Reward Tracks
- WvW Ranks (Reaching specific WvW Ranks should grant you the items to get you Legendaries, WvW Rewards are so lackluster and too random compared to PvE/P rewards. With pvP Reward tracks you at least exactly know, what you get, with WvW you have always this RNG crap that could net you in somethign awesome, but most likely 99,9% of all times just only junk and a bit silver/a tiny amount of WvW Badges you can only laugh about loud, because you can easily farm those badges in alot lesser time, than it takes to get the 5000 points for another rank.
Reduce the WvW Ranks from 10000 to 1000 and make each WvW rank alot more meaningful, there are alot better ways to improve the Progression Systems for WvW, that to enforce on all of us 10000 ranks. Thats not the only hyperbole around WvW, that needs to get finally fixed – hint hint – WvW Achievements – hint hint . cough

Part 3

3___) Simple and quick answer where I absolutely agree with.
Ascended Armors should be Precursors for Legendary Armors.
Same should be also done with Legendary Weapons. Ascended Weapons should be useable as “Joker Precursors” but those Ascended Weapons would need to get “Infused” first, before they can get used as Joker Precursors to replace any weapon type fitting precursor in the process of crafting a legendary weapon.
Same as Infused Accessoires should be used later as Precursors for legendary Accessoires.
Any Agony Resist that you collect that way over the course of your amount of Characters should give your Account based Agony Resistance % a boost, until you max out at some point, like Magic Find maxes out at 300%

Superior Runes/ Sigils should be required for getting Jeweler 500, which should be the Crafting Job in question for receiving Ascended Runes/Sigils, which is another step in our Progression thats missing in the game, allowing us to unlock accountwide Sigil and Rune Effects that way, which should be “learnable” with Ascended/Legendary Weapons (like a Recipe) to give players the ability to change on the fly any kind of learned Rune/Sigil that you have unlocked for your Account to optimize our Build Diversity Convenience also for the rest of the whole game and not just only for PvP, where you can swap out any rune and sigil out as you want, as long you’ve unlocked it there… this system needs to be done for the whole game, just as a part of character progression for PvE/WvW as the only difference

4___) Obtaining Legendary Equipment as rewards from Raids should come in both ways:

Players should be able to get it luckily as rewards from Raid Reward Chests (with better chances than from the usual bad RNG we have from Champ Bag/mystic Forge Precursors) after ending a challenging Raid, whose challenge is worth that reward.
But players that arent so super elitious skilled, like some other players should also be able to work on those Raid Rewards with more patience through some kind of Raid Reward Tracks/ Token System, that rewards players just for their patience, so that just the more skilled players will get their stuff quicker.
Thats the only way how i see such a reward system ever functionizing well, without lettign it create massive amounts of greed/envy/community toxity/antisocial player elitism/discrimination and so on.

Everyone should be able to earn those rewards with their own level of gameplay skills/time they have to play the game.

The last thing we need is content in “open world-style”. We already have enough of those kind of content.
My whole guild is looking forward to raids, which are instantiated and challanging

more open world content would end up the same as the current, only a few guilds doing it, many smaller guilds just becoming inactive due to lack of meaningful group-based content that is new that doesn’t require 75-100 people.

I like Orpheals ideas, sounds too logical that all legendary gear opens up stat-swap in order to maximise convenience.

I guess we never see the first Legendaries taken out of the Trading Post, but we can hope that the next Legendaries won’t be tradeable (100% earned) and attached to some epic legend.

Adding convenience to the end-goal of progression, not skins only, sounds really exciting.

About Open World vs Instanced Content.
While leading Raids with TTS, I’ve found over time that open world is more trouble than it’s worth most of the time. Probably it was at its best when we guested over to a low-pop server for Teq and a couple locals would come out and thanked us for setting up a run. Post-megaserver update that doesn’t happen anymore and mostly we just keep bumping into other groups trying to organize, PuGs trying to organize, and random players trying to figure out where’s the best map to go on while we’re looking for a semi-clean map to taxi all of our members to. And that’s not even going into how everyone on a Triple Trouble map needs to know what’s going on and listening to the commander calls.

So really the way to go even for a 150 man raid like Triple Trouble is instanced with a strong way to pull in Random players through the LFG tool so everyone can participate regardless of whatever Raid size we pick or if it scales or not or whatever.

Pyriel.4370:

more open world content would end up the same as the current, only a few guilds doing it, many smaller guilds just becoming inactive due to lack of meaningful group-based content that is new that doesn’t require 75-100 people.

I think getting the rewards right is one of the most important things here. Look at the Aeather-Path dungeon. A really good and fun one with the best mechanics in the game (by far imho) and then “nobody” (exaggerated) plays that dungeon.

I don’t want raids to fail because the rewards aren’t incentive enough to play it over and over.

What should raids do?

o Raids should be the pinnacle of difficult game-play within a game
o should leverage all the mechanics, tricks, and gimmicks in the game
o The content pushes the players experiencing it to their skill and knowledge limits.
o Raids should require players to rely on each-other
o have real failure (kick mechanic),
o Also have come-back (second chance) mechanics. (So far the marionette fight is the closest I have experienced to this idea of relying on others and having second chances for success in GW2.)

What are the mechanic limits?

GW 2 combat is not about some arbitrary formula of managing healing, tanking, and damage numbers as separate entities. Look at what every player gets regardless of profession.
o 2 dodges one every 5-10 seconds: complete damage mitigation for .75 seconds
o 1 heal skill on a relatively short cool down 15-30sec (can also provide utility)
o 5 utility skills (counting heal and elite) that can be swapped out of combat that cover a wide variety of situations (blocks, blinds, dodges, projectile reflection/destruction, movement, boon management, etc)
o 5 to 20 weapon skills that can be swapped out of combat (weapon sets)
o A selection from a limited amount of: 15 minor traits, and 65 major traits, that can be combined in various ways any time out of combat that effect how that character interacts with teammates and enemies.

What challenges can be formulated while still allowing for any party composition?

- Managing dodges:
o this would mean one hit skills on a choreographed pattern that force the players to use and their dodges very carefully
o fight mechanics that deal damage only when mob/boss’s attack is dodged successfully
o dodging is the only/primary damage source
o mob’s hits will heal it for a significant amount

-Positioning:
o choreographed attacks and mechanics that can be mitigated or taken advantage
o Smart positioning,
o Forcing the party in and out of stacks and open formations.
o The smaller the room for error the more “difficult” the content will be, (I say choreographed because if it is all just random there is little in the way of “learning/knowing” the encounter and the satisfaction that comes form said learning)

-Control or lock down through aggregate Teamwork: this was the IMO the intended purpose of Defiant. Not everyone likes Defiant, but it can be used very well if balanced correctly for smaller coordinated groups. For example:
o because of defiant bosses cannot be permanently shut down,
o key attacks that must be interrupted or the party will wipe.
o defiant must be removed before that attack is up,
o during a warm up phase,
o Perhaps the attack is a long channel life siphon (champ risen wraiths, or mordrem leeching thrashers are good examples)?

-kill timing: multiple enemies/bosses that need to be taken down in a short window,
o If not, some failure or reset mechanic occurs. (triple wurm/ SE path 2 golems)

- splitting up: 1, 2, 3, or 5 man groups separate to:
o Finish specific objectives simultaneously before everyone comes together for a climactic finish. There are many good examples of this in game already.
o CoF P1,
o parts of AC when well coordinated,
o TA forward and Aetherpath
o dedicated teams from tequatl and triple wurm,
o marionette lanes and platforms,
o Various guild challenges and puzzles
o Drytop
o Boss blitz
o Toypocalypse

- Roles: more specifically mechanics that require people to be doing something other than circle strafe or stack, and auto attack. This includes:
o Any kind of siege that needs maintenance or defending,
o defense groups vs. attack groups,
o some form of managing boss Aggro/attacks and juggling that between players.
o These mechanics also can mean some kind of change to a players skill bar while interacting with an object, or being transformed.

-Phases: to break up the monotony of a fight, essentially making it less repetitive.
o Breaking defense, then burn phase.
o Attunement phase, damage phase, removal of attunement, repeat.
o Critical phase, dodge phase, condition phase, environmental weapon phase, interrupt phase……. Etc

Types of raids:

to me raids fall into 3 potential generalized categories with more specific subcategories

1. Long term
a. Long, linear or semi-linear series of encounters with save points (more traditional style)
b. Zone clears: less linear, could take a long time to complete at first but can be done faster once it is learned and mastered. (save points debatable)

2. Short term, Timed encounters:
a. Single boss Instances
i. Take any large boss encounter already in game
ii. Add a bunch of new and important mechanics
iii. Balance for x number people
b. The “Boss blitz” raid:
i. I would put a “dry top raid” in this category
ii. Multi phase (Build phase/reward phase) timed open areas with multiple objectives/events/bosses
iii. Tower defense content could go here
iv. Reward based on level of completion achieved as in Zepharite favor tiers
(these systems can get very intricate which is nice)
3. Indeterminate: no time limit
a. Dungeon raids
i. All three paths done simultaneously by three parties
ii. Interwoven mechanics and requirements
iii. Places where groups are together and apart
b. Zone clears can also go in this category depending on intricacy
c. Possible GvG or PvP raid instances belong here

I will follow up with a generalized example of a potential raid from each category, remember that it is supposed to be examples of implementation of high level principals drawing from many of the posts on this topic

here is an example of a zone clear raid, remember that it is supposed to be an example of implementation of high level principals drawing from many of the posts on this topic any specific fight mechanics that have been mentioned in previous posts can be applied anywhere, the goal is for each encounter to be a challenge to learn, and complete successfully.

A Zone Clear raid: example using Cursed shore

The group starts at the top northern entrance and pushes toward Caer Shadowfain escorting a supply moss heart/dolyak/charr tanks….etc. Physical obstacles/patrol spawns must be dealt with while defending the escort. Boss encounter: Risen archmage, blocks progress with bone walls, must be defeated to progress. Party splits for Events: take caer shadowfain from the risen / defend caer shadowfain from the risen assault from the plateau to the east / explorer plinx chain. one group goes on to R&D encampment and pushes down to Graveborn’s landing and starts melandru, one group enters the Maze triggers important mechanic for melandru and assaults temple from the water, one group travels south to penitent/ shelters gate/ jofasts camp escorts joins melandru event from the south. Boss encounter: cleanse the temple of melandru. This event should include the Cartesian well area behind the temple of verdance.

From the temple of melandru, group pushes to meddlers summit. Events: champ Giant champ ooze and risen chicken and gorilla events. Once at meddlers group splits to take control of three important objectives, one each to the east (tombs), south (anchorage), and west (harbinger torch). Once anchorage is taken, Arah cannot be assaulted until the protective barrier origionating from Grenth’s temple is disabled. The group Must take control of the remaining beacons/torches in order to assault cathedral of silence. Boss encounter: temple of Grenth.

After temple of Grenth each party is teleported to a different location on the south end of cursed shore: the top end of Buried archives (must do jumping puzzle in reverse, finds a portal back to cathedral of silence, fights out to the north), shipwreck rock (fights the megalodon, and stays in the water fighting north), and the bottom of the ship at deaths anthem( fights rot beard, grubs, escort through caves). each group must fight their way back to anchorage by the event chains that lead north from these locations. Once at anchorage, the assault on Arah begins. Boss encounter: Assault on Arah. Gather support >champ giant >champ Eye > champ wizard.

Each boss in the zone is a significantly difficult fight with failure conditions other than a timer. Each boss in the zone cannot be bypassed and there are walls preventing players from skipping each encounter until they are completed. Each area of the zone has different environmental effects due to god statues that are removed upon successful completion of the areas events, or sometimes events specific to each statue, similar to urgoz’s warren or DOA in GW1.

NOTE the idea is not for the fights to happen as they already do in the open world but to have added mechanics and requirements and failure conditions. I leave specific mechanics of fights and encounters to readers imagination as may many excellent example have been given in this thread

my second example, a short term raid using dry top as an example

A Dry top “boss blitz” raid:

For 45 minutes players in the instance must split up to different areas and complete events to raise the favor of the Zepherites. Each event has bonus objectives that will add extra favor. To reach the maximum favor tier, every event and its bonus must be completed. Each event that is completed ads to a overall reward tally that determines total reward for every player in the instance. Each player will receive thier reward in a number of “daily” chests at the conclusion of the favor phase based on the entire group’s total achievement.

For 15-20 minutes after the favor phase is a sandstorm phase, events that appear are determined by the total tier reached in the favor phase. For each tier of favor earned, a “boss” will spawn in a different part of the zone (sand giant, two inquest golems at their respective bases, a mordrem in the ley-line hub, chicken-ado, dust mite twister, some kind of boss in the mine at prosperity) each boss must be taken down in the time limit to get full rewards. Like in boss blitz, as they die, their mechanics are spread to the other bosses. A number of other minor events or bonuses to the boss fights also occur in the sandstorm.

Finally In the event UI a number of earned “lockpicks” is displayed and every player has access to the pool of “lockpicks”. Players can use these to open the buried locked chests that appear in the sandstorm and every player receives rewards based on the number of chests found. The sandstorm phase concludes with each player receiving loot based upon the number of bosses defeated bonuses achieved and chests opened.

NOTE the map and events therein will be balanced around a specific number of people completing them with little, or no scaling as if too many people are there other events are not completed. some events should only trigger at the completion of other events the amount of interdependence of events should be high, as that will take players longer to learn and unravel the connections and bonuses/secrets availiable.

Blaeys.3102:

Group Roles/Mechanics

xxxxx Melee Damage
xxxxx Range Damage
xxxxx Condition Damage
xxxxx Crowd Control
xxxxx Interrupts
xxxxx Runners

xxxx Group Condition Removal/Support Heals
xxxx Core Boon Sharing (might, regeneration, vigor, etc)
xxxx Damage Reducing Conditions (blind, weakness, Moa morph)
xxxx Reflects and Projectile Protection
xxxx Combo Fields and Blast Finishers

xxx Boon Stripping
xxx Group Stability
xxx Stealth/Invisibility

xx Group Quickness
xx Group Aegis
xx Group Stun Breaks
xx Instant Resurrection (from downed state)

x Mesmer Portal

Two Questions
The point of this is to set the stage for a few questions -

• How much effort should groups be expected to put into raid composition (which professions/builds they bring), as dictated by fight design?

• Where do we draw the line regarding mandatory roles? Given the above, can developers design a fight where reflects are mandatory? What about mesmer portals or stealth? Should anything outside of the core (4 and 5 "x"s) ever be mandatory in an encounter?

My Opinion
I wanted to separate this out so people could provide their own opinions regarding the questions above (and add in other roles and mechanics in a similar fashion, if they wish) – without having to pay attention to my biases.

In my opinion, the primary advantage of raids compared to other content comes from greater access to niche roles. Raids differ from other content primarily because of that access to diversity. Larger groups mean you can assume most roles will/can be filled by someone in the group.

With that said, this is the developers’ opportunity to design fights that do require pretty much every role any player can fill. With players able to switch traits on the fly, there are very few capabilities that most groups with more than 8 players will not have (as seen above).

To expand on this even further here’s the classes that are strongest and can perform each of those roles.

I’ll ignore most of the 5 star ones since that’s pretty much everyone (might edit this post later).

Condition damage
Nercomancer Engineer Mesmer Thief Ranger Warrior Elementalist

Interupts
Thieves have a spammable one, most professions have a number of interupts on one weapon set.

Group Condition Removal
Guardian Warrior Nercomancer Engineer Ranger Thief

Core Boon Sharing
Elementalist Guardian All other professions

Damage Reducing Conditions (blind, weakness, Moa morph)
Thief Nercomancer Engineer All other professions

Reflects and Projectile Protection
Guardian Elementalist Mesmer Engineer Thief Ranger

Combo Fields and Blast Finishers
Pretty much everyone to various degrees

Boon Stripping
Mesmer Nercomancer Thief Engineer Guardian,

Group Stability (honestly I think this is a 2 star, Guardian has a monopoly pratically)
Guardian Mesmer Engineer

Stealth/Invisibility
Thief Engineer Mesmer Ranger*(has only individual stealth)

Group Quickness
Mesmer Guardian

Group Aegis
Guardian Mesmer?

Group Stun Breaks
Guardian…. and there’s like one trait that does it, O ya and one mesmer skill.

Instant Resurrection (from downed state)(should be moved a tier look)
Warrior Ranger Elementalist Nercomancer Guardian Engineer

Mesmer Portal
…… Take a guess

One thing we can learn from this is some roles we rarely use like Boon striping are actually avaiable on most of the professions while a couple others we take for granted are very narrow (group stability is essentially Guardian only).

I’m also noticing a lot of the roles Nerco is king of, tend to be underplayed in most PvE areas of the game.

my final example is of a larger group dungeon raid leveraging AC as the setting

A Dungeon Raid: example using AC

Three parties begin the Ascalon catacombs dungeon and each party is bound to one of the NPC’s.in order to progress to the spider queen, one party may disable traps, and another hold back waves of gravelings while a third confronts spider queen. The trap team can later build or use siege/bundles on platforms above/around queen spider than can cleanse the spiders poison fields and destroy webs and cocoons created to snare other players.

After spider, players join up for Kohler as his essence is holding shut the doors to the north south east and west. The Kohler fight is similar to the barradin statue fight from dragons reach part 1. Menders and buffers approach from the eastern and western bridges and must be stopped. Ghostly reinforcements come from the north and south to overwhelm players. As the reinforcements die they weaken kohler so he can be attacked, menders that get in range heal kohler and buffers along with Kohler’s pull and spin attack regenerates his invulnerability buff and buffs his attacks.

Parties split to work with their respective NPC; Detha to traps at flooded temple, Tzark to lover’s crypt, and hodgins to the south. Hodgins and Tzarks group meet in the hall of champions and work together to destroy graveling burrows and kill 5 graveling lieutenants to find the scepter pieces. Hodgins and Tzarks groups move to graveling tunnels to confront colossus rumbulus and the howling king, Detha’s team must find the parts for traps (new), and moves to the now clear hall of champions to set up traps, for Ghost Eater. Some where along the way each party is beset by a cave troll, the troll stuns the party for a time and blocks the way forward for the party with debris. The trolls must be fought and killed by each party.

Boss encounters: Tzarks team has been turned into Ghosts but needs to become in tune to fight Colossus Rumbulus by getting hit by the howling king’s laser blast attack. The attack does little to no damage as they are transformed. Tzarks team properly attuned can now move into the Puzzle area up the stairs to fight Rumbulus. If a player falls off the platforms their attunement is removed and they must get it again to rejoin the fight. During the fight Tzark will summon ghost allies on a specific platform that use shelter that players must get to, to avoid the ceiling collapse.
Detha’s team sets up traps and must charge all three. The ghost eater once de-buffed by traps regains stacks of ghostly armor by absorbing the spectral oozes that are attracted to the traps, in addition to the ones he spawns in his spectral phase. All in all it is much harder though maybe not completely impossible to kill ghost eater in one trap.
The howling king has his own spectral phase that must be removed by kiting him through hodgins fire, also the fire rings hodgins summons act as attunement rings similar to the watch knight champions from battle for LA; players get a short buff from the fire that allows them to deal damage. The Howling king will regain specral armor by the gravelings he summons dying near him. It will be important to wait to down the howling king so that people fighting rumbulus can still get attuned if they fall.
All three graveling bosses must be downed within 1 or 2 minutes of each other or they will regenerate from the ghostly energy of the one/s that remain alive.

NOTE the encounter mechanics will only be vaguely similar to those of the explorable mode dungeon. Again, I refer to the many brilliantly brainstormed mechanics ideas within this thread to be implemented throughout to create a meaningful challenge for the group experiencing the content.

The problem is Necromancer isn’t even good at condition damage in pve compared to warrior or engineer. They need a significant buff in that department on the pve side at least.

hybrid.5027:

The problem is Necromancer isn’t even good at condition damage in pve compared to warrior or engineer. They need a significant buff in that department on the pve side at least.

Aren’t they the meta Condi-bomb in WvW?

guardian.6489:

hybrid.5027:

The problem is Necromancer isn’t even good at condition damage in pve compared to warrior or engineer. They need a significant buff in that department on the pve side at least.

Aren’t they the meta Condi-bomb in WvW?

It’s completely different to nuke down a player with 10-20k hp than to deal effective DPS on a boss with a few million hp.

Dalanor.5387:

guardian.6489:

hybrid.5027:

The problem is Necromancer isn’t even good at condition damage in pve compared to warrior or engineer. They need a significant buff in that department on the pve side at least.

Aren’t they the meta Condi-bomb in WvW?

It’s completely different to nuke down a player with 10-20k hp than to deal effective DPS on a boss with a few million hp.

True but I thought that killed Condi-damage in PvE in general not just for Nercomancers. Unless I missed something. the only time you use Condi-damage in PvE is at triple trouble and in that case Nercomancers are probably one of the best professions for the role.

Link to first post (to avoid a super long post): https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/CDI-Guilds-Raiding/page/25#post4535254

guardian.6489:

To expand on this even further here’s the classes that are strongest and can perform each of those roles.

I’ll ignore most of the 5 star ones since that’s pretty much everyone (might edit this post later).

Condition damage
Nercomancer Engineer Mesmer Thief Ranger Warrior Elementalist

Interupts
Thieves have a spammable one, most professions have a number of interupts on one weapon set.

Group Condition Removal
Guardian Warrior Nercomancer Engineer Ranger Thief

Core Boon Sharing
Elementalist Guardian All other professions

Damage Reducing Conditions (blind, weakness, Moa morph)
Thief Nercomancer Engineer All other professions

Reflects and Projectile Protection
Guardian Elementalist Mesmer Engineer Thief Ranger

Combo Fields and Blast Finishers
Pretty much everyone to various degrees

Boon Stripping
Mesmer Nercomancer Thief Engineer Guardian,

Group Stability (honestly I think this is a 2 star, Guardian has a monopoly pratically)
Guardian Mesmer Engineer

Stealth/Invisibility
Thief Engineer Mesmer Ranger*(has only individual stealth)

Group Quickness
Mesmer Guardian

Group Aegis
Guardian Mesmer?

Group Stun Breaks
Guardian…. and there’s like one trait that does it

Instant Resurrection (from downed state)(should be moved a tier look)
Warrior Ranger Elementalist Nercomancer Guardian Engineer

Mesmer Portal
…… Take a guess

One thing we can learn from this is some roles we rarely use like Boon striping are actually avaiable on most of the professions while a couple others we take for granted are very narrow (group stability is essentially Guardian only).

I’m also noticing a lot of the roles Nerco is king of, tend to be underplayed in most PvE areas of the game.

This looks good.

I would add Mesmers to the stun break – Mantra of Concentration/Power Break is a solid AOE stun break since it hits 5 targets now – and you are right that enhanced resurrection should be moved up a bit.

I think this shows the tools a party can potentially bring to a raid, and the prevalence of each. I wouldnt mind seeing us, as a community, fleshing this out and adding to/revising it to be more accurate. If people can add to and revise this to be more accurate (based on their personal knowledge of the professions they play), I would be willing to clean it up and generate a list and/or chart in a couple of days.

That can serve as a soft set of “rules of engagement.” Once we (as theorycraft collaborators) understand the toolkit, we can talk about what Anet can throw at us (at the encounter level) to significantly challenge our abilities to use these tools (and common personal abilities, such as dodge and the #6 heal) cooperatively in larger scale fights.

Just a thought on one possible direction for the conversation. If a dev (or anyone else) thinks this would be a waste of time or counterproductive to the conversation, please say so.

NOTE: I agree about the Necromancer (if boonstripping and AOE persistent blinds were needed more in PVE encounters, this might change though). However, I think that is definitely a separate discussion for another thread. The goal here is at a more macro level – identifying the total toolkit (and prevalence of those tools) so we have an idea of the capabilities a typical raid groups should be expected to bring to the content.

Personally, I’d like to see raids that require team work and a variety in your builds to take down, make boons and conditions abundant, enemies should have different “roles” themselves, make it more how GW1 was, every mob pull was a small encounter and were dangerous.

I’d also like to see bosses have a variety of mechanics, maybe have to split the team between fighting off a horde of his minions and fighting him directly, and having to rotate between the 2 (similar to the boss in Arah), maybe a fight Marionette style where everyone needs to split up and complete a similar encounter etc.

As for difficulty it shouldn’t be face roll easy, I would say the OPTIMAL way to do it (in my mind) would make it about Aetherpath difficulty for the easier encounters and Liadri for the hardest, but make it so there are hardmode objectives in each encounter, that if complete give you an achievement, and give better loot, and give unique loot (weapons, armor, minis, titles, etc). The hardmode content should be really hard, like Liadri Hardmode achievement hard for the easier ones.

This way casuals can complete the easier version of the content (which should still be more difficult than current content), and those who are massochists or want to prove themselves can do the hardmode content and show off just how bad kitten they really are.

I would say there shouldn’t be a requirement to actually do the raids besides them being difficult and requiring communication. IE: no atuning, MAYBE make it so a guild needs to have an unlock, but no consumables like with bounties and that, and I’d say make it a raid by raid bases to make up for it.

Also, I’d say under absolutely no situation should raids require more than 10people, anything more than that just waters down the individuals skill requirements and begins to step on the toes of large scale encounters like triple trouble and tequatil and boss gauntlet etc.

Mesmers also have quite a few aoe interupts (focus, mantra, shatter).
Their only way to give aegis is through chaos fields and chaos armor (staff), not very reliable though. They also have Phantasmal Defender which takes 50% of the damage that the party receives (needless to say he doesn’t last long, has more health than Mesmer though).

I think we should really take time to discuss what rewards people want to see from the raid and how they should be obtained, because this was the reason which a lot of other hard content barely see any play (TA Aether, JPs, Arah P4 etc).

Personally, I think the raid shouldn’t just have cosmetic items. Cosmetic items are a bit of an ‘niche’ in the sense that not everyone wants them, and the first challenge with raids is filling up the rooster, cos you can’t raid if you don’t have enough people to raid.
So ideally, I think you need something which everyone would want.

Now, we don’t want a gear treadmill, so I think a good option is to add items which allows more horizontal progression and character costumisation to the game. Items with their own unitue effects, which are good for certain playstyles and builds, but not BiS over everything else.

For example, you can have an amulet (Gaze of Primordius, to make it sound cool) with exotic stats but extra direct damage whenever you inflict burn. It would be good for a build that has alot of burn inflicts (e.g. d/f eles with burning precision), but it won’t be BiS for the majority of cases. People will always want at least one of those drops because unlike clothing, you don’t really ever find yourself with the perfect build for all game modes and you can always try something new, unlike clothing.

guardian.6489:

Dalanor.5387:

guardian.6489:

hybrid.5027:

The problem is Necromancer isn’t even good at condition damage in pve compared to warrior or engineer. They need a significant buff in that department on the pve side at least.

Aren’t they the meta Condi-bomb in WvW?

It’s completely different to nuke down a player with 10-20k hp than to deal effective DPS on a boss with a few million hp.

True but I thought that killed Condi-damage in PvE in general not just for Nercomancers. Unless I missed something. the only time you use Condi-damage in PvE is at triple trouble and in that case Nercomancers are probably one of the best professions for the role.

Thats only because of epidemic.

guardian.6489:

Dalanor.5387:

guardian.6489:

hybrid.5027:

The problem is Necromancer isn’t even good at condition damage in pve compared to warrior or engineer. They need a significant buff in that department on the pve side at least.

Aren’t they the meta Condi-bomb in WvW?

It’s completely different to nuke down a player with 10-20k hp than to deal effective DPS on a boss with a few million hp.

True but I thought that killed Condi-damage in PvE in general not just for Nercomancers. Unless I missed something. the only time you use Condi-damage in PvE is at triple trouble and in that case Nercomancers are probably one of the best professions for the role.

Skill splits would fix this. I am tired of builds not being viable in PvE because of PvP. One of the reasons I hated leveling my Necro that I wanted to play a pure condi spec in PvE was because of all the “yellow” items that don’t take condis. Those hearts that required destroying yellow items took the longest and it was frustrating. I learned quickly that there was really only 1 way to play in PvE and that was just straight DPS.

I am glad that “if” raids make there way into GW2 they will most likely have split mechanics as far as how many players a single player can apply buffs to over the 5 player cap that is in the game now. The reluctance to do skill splits and the exclusion of build templates in this game are two of my biggest gripes. Raids seem like they will just add to that frustration in being a “4th format”.

I just hope that when they do the raids that it allows for casual players to partake in it. I’m not saying go in with substandard gear, but someone with full exotics can be effective and useful in it. Some of us can no longer play for days on end and have real life obligations/jobs and do not want to effectively get excluded from Raid content.

I also hope that they allow for those in small guilds to be able to join in such an endeavor.

The rewards should be skins that are unique to that raid. BiS items should not be in these raids as the RNG in this game is one of the worst I’ve ever had in any game. Some people get everything and others, no matter how many tries, will get shafted. Alot of us are effectively playing for skins anyways.

One thing to make the raid interesting is to shift the dynamic from pure DPS and more towards a balanced party of conditions, healing, reflects, and maybe even pure burning damage to a component of the raid. Mix it up a little. Some parts of the boss phase can only get damaged with fire or poison, necessitating other classes from being excluded. Even one part of the boss requiring boons being turned into conditions or being nullified altogether. No one wants to see a composition of 15 warriors and one guardian. That is not a raid.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

I think getting the rewards right is one of the most important things here. Look at the Aeather-Path dungeon. A really good and fun one with the best mechanics in the game (by far imho) and then “nobody” (exaggerated) plays that dungeon.

Maybe that is because lot of the people disagree with you on the “fun” part. I have heard (many times) people likening running Aether path to pulling out teeth. And the mechanics… well, let’s say i strongly disagree with you about their quality.

Xae Isareth.1364:

I think we should really take time to discuss what rewards people want to see from the raid and how they should be obtained, because this was the reason which a lot of other hard content barely see any play (TA Aether, JPs, Arah P4 etc).

Personally, I think the raid shouldn’t just have cosmetic items. Cosmetic items are a bit of an ‘niche’ in the sense that not everyone wants them, and the first challenge with raids is filling up the rooster, cos you can’t raid if you don’t have enough people to raid.
So ideally, I think you need something which everyone would want.

Now, we don’t want a gear treadmill, so I think a good option is to add items which allows more horizontal progression and character costumisation to the game. Items with their own unitue effects, which are good for certain playstyles and builds, but not BiS over everything else.

For example, you can have an amulet (Gaze of Primordius, to make it sound cool) with exotic stats but extra direct damage whenever you inflict burn. It would be good for a build that has alot of burn inflicts (e.g. d/f eles with burning precision), but it won’t be BiS for the majority of cases. People will always want at least one of those drops because unlike clothing, you don’t really ever find yourself with the perfect build for all game modes and you can always try something new, unlike clothing.

That would still be considered vertical by some if it became a meta build item.
Alternative possibilities that are not traditional skins per say would be:

Cosmetic Infusions
-Weapon infusions change the graphical appearance of your attacks, On a non-legendary item it adds a secondary effect I.E An Orrian infused staff fireball now leaves a trail of flies. On a legendary weapon the effect combines, I.E A bifrost projective is now a corrosive/greeny acid texture with the trail of flies.
Could be split into two component types: Trail and Core with each type effecting their respective part.

-Armor infusions: Add a glow/effect to the armor, would not leave a trail, I.E Necrotic infusion adds flies or miasma around the player. Could effect profession specific effects, elementalist auras, Guardians Aegis , Mesmers clones etc.

Mini’s and tonics
The standard fare, Minis of the bosses, tonics of the mobs and bosses.

Rarity upgrade component
-Bumps the rarity of an item up by one along with its stats (I.e converts an exotic celestial helm to a WupWup helm) maxes out at Ascended tier. (Basically an alternative to Ascended chests that give you slightly more control).

Fun/Unique equips
This could be unique costume brawl weapons /Kites / Interact-able stations.