Guild Wars 2

Just thought I’d link and leave this here since I know not everyone frequents reddit.

The premise is simple:

The guild [KING] went on a challenge to clear the current raid wing with following rules and limitations:

- full exotic gear on every member (no new stat combinations allowed. so no viper, zealots, etc.)
- dungeon token gear allowed
- budget runes and sigils
- absolute price limit of 100g per person per gearset
- no cheese tactics
- no transmutation of any gear (I guess this is just as a fun aside).

I’ll leave the reddit link and the direct link to the youtube video of their run (which can be found in the reddit discussion as well).

reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3wicqj/is_budget_raiding_possible_exotic_vs_ascended/

youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DFPFQCc47Q

For anyone interested in rading in GW2 it’s a good watch.

Enjoy.

Anet could remove viper gear from game.

Junkpile.7439:

Anet could remove viper gear from game.

wow good solution. After removal of vipers, they would then need to remove sinister, rampager, dire, and rabid.

And then they would have to remove anything that increases power, precision and ferocity. So glad you’re not part of a balance team

TheFamster.7806:

Junkpile.7439:

Anet could remove viper gear from game.

wow good solution. After removal of vipers, they would then need to remove sinister, rampager, dire, and rabid.

And then they would have to remove anything that increases power, precision and ferocity. So glad you’re not part of a balance team

Yes good balance team add stat combo that makes every other condi stat combo useless in newest end game content.

Budget food too?

Junkpile.7439:

TheFamster.7806:

Junkpile.7439:

Anet could remove viper gear from game.

wow good solution. After removal of vipers, they would then need to remove sinister, rampager, dire, and rabid.

And then they would have to remove anything that increases power, precision and ferocity. So glad you’re not part of a balance team

Yes good balance team add stat combo that makes every other condi stat combo useless in newest end game content.

Because you go full viper in a meta build…

As someone not thrilled about the idea of crafting ascended armor for 9 characters, the idea is nice.

However, how much of this is also in part due to the guild’s coordination and experience? When PUGs clear the raid in exotics, it may make a stronger case.
edit: full disclosure: not in a raiding guild, haven’t done the raid yet, not even keeping track of LFR successes, but I’m assuming PUGs are still requesting full ascended

“I will not, in general, recommend anyone doing the raid in exotic gear as a group going in on their first run, regardless of what I’m about to show you, as even we were surprised by the tuning of some of the enrage timers”.

The video is of no comfort. It asserts you can do this raid in full exotic gear, but only after having done the raid countless times with ascended gear in the first place.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DFPFQCc47Q#t=4m08s

“I will not, in general, recommend anyone doing the raid in exotic gear as a group going in on their first run, regardless of what I’m about to show you, as even we were surprised by the tuning of some of the enrage timers”.

The video is of no comfort. It asserts you can do this raid in full exotic gear, but only after having done the raid countless times with ascended gear in the first place.

just from watching the PoV of the revenant, his gameplay is flawed, he autoattacks only, runs out of energy in glint, doesnt use sword 2 inside boss hitbox when surrounded by adds, makes super hero dodge jump moves which put him further away from the boss which is a dps loss because he has to run back and cant AA while doing so (even on vale guard and vale guard doesnt require any dodging at all), swaps to staff for breakbar when its completely overkill and not needed for any breakbar in the first raid wing. he would be able to deal a good amount of dps more than he does if he fixed the things i listed above.

what im trying to say, the timers in their current state arent tight or a problem at all if you are playing correctly and execution still matters more than the dps gain from ascended gear over exotics.

Congratulations, you can nitpick his performance. Doesn’t mean that I or anyone else will necessarily do better, or that his advice to start with ascended in the first place and ignore the whole video is now wrong.

i dont nitpick his performance. i am just poiting out that there is a lot that players could do better outside of gear/builds and gameplay/execution is still the biggest factor when it comes to enrage timers.

also i agree with his advice.
what i dont agree with is leading people to believe ascended gear is absolutely must-have before they step into raids, because its bad for the community and the raids as a whole and could turn players away from raiding especially with the huge grind this game has turned into since HoT release.
and if you call my post nitpicky, i am just as nitpicky about my own gameplay and if people in the community were more nitpicky about their own gameplay there would be a lot less QQ threads about enrage timers and stuff like that.

NoTrigger is completely right here.

And besides that you have to keep in mind, that you can boost your damage via ascended trinkets that are available easily for every player in this game.
Additionally, after beating VG you will have the opportunity to collect shards and buy ascended stuff from the vendor.
In the end, an easy VG kill with exotics and ascended trinkets will lead you to at least one relatively fast ascended weapon which ist the main boost for the encounters. You still don’t need the armor.

NoTrigger.8396:

i dont nitpick his performance. i am just poiting out that there is a lot that players could do better outside of gear/builds and gameplay/execution is still the biggest factor when it comes to enrage timers.

also i agree with his advice.
what i dont agree with is leading people to believe ascended gear is absolutely must-have before they step into raids, because its bad for the community and the raids as a whole and could turn players away from raiding especially with the huge grind this game has turned into since HoT release.
and if you call my post nitpicky, i am just as nitpicky about my own gameplay and if people in the community were more nitpicky about their own gameplay there would be a lot less QQ threads about enrage timers and stuff like that.

His advice is that you must have ascended gear before you step into the raid… This post is a big rambly tangent. I don’t care how much you criticize your own gameplay. The fact is that you are asserting a phantom (and heavily debatable) quality that will suddenly make it all better. “Skill” can’t be quantified, and since performance is variable you are basically saying “hey, if you get lucky, you won’t need ascended”. People are spending 10 hours on the first boss, and not getting “lucky”. “Skill” is of no comfort.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

NoTrigger.8396:

i dont nitpick his performance. i am just poiting out that there is a lot that players could do better outside of gear/builds and gameplay/execution is still the biggest factor when it comes to enrage timers.

also i agree with his advice.
what i dont agree with is leading people to believe ascended gear is absolutely must-have before they step into raids, because its bad for the community and the raids as a whole and could turn players away from raiding especially with the huge grind this game has turned into since HoT release.
and if you call my post nitpicky, i am just as nitpicky about my own gameplay and if people in the community were more nitpicky about their own gameplay there would be a lot less QQ threads about enrage timers and stuff like that.

His advice is that you must have ascended gear before you step into the raid… This post is a big rambly tangent. I don’t care how much you criticize your own gameplay. The fact is that you are asserting a phantom (and heavily debatable) quality that will suddenly make it all better. “Skill” can’t be quantified, and since performance is variable you are basically saying “hey, if you get lucky, you won’t need ascended”. People are spending 10 hours on the first boss, and not getting “lucky”. “Skill” is of no comfort.

before players go like “yo need ascended gear before i can beat this boss” they should work on improving their skills. that is all i am saying. you could be a terrible player and ascended gear wont magically kill the boss for you. or you could improve as a player and beat the boss in exotic gear. ascended gear helps a bit but it will not turn a bad player or group into a good one.

https://youtu.be/0NBbAZwKXC4?t=1m36s
take this advice and think a bit about it because it is pretty much true no matter which game you play.
and every player who believes he is playing perfectly is a bad player, and if you believe exotic gear is holding you back then i dont really know how to help you.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

His advice is that you must have ascended gear before you step into the raid…

No, his advice is: Ascended armor is recommended and if you can achieve that, it’ll be fine. But the whole video prove that you don’t need to have any asc item at all to be successful.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

People are spending 10 hours on the first boss, and not getting “lucky”. “Skill” is of no comfort.

The fact you are missing here is: People are spending 10 hours on the first boss without improving because they are playing their classes wrong or they are lacking skill. It has 0.0% to do with asc gear.

Besides that, many if not almost all unsuccessful groups don’t die due to the enrage mode after the time was running out. They are dying way earlier due to several mistakes like never ever dodging teleport circles, there’s insufficient cc, being too slow with cc (a.k.a. mouse klicking spells), being unable to avoid seeker damage (also being too slow due to klicking spells with the mouse), not 4-manning the green circle or if anyone of the circle group is down, there is a lack of an emergency team.

I’ve ever been a pugging player in dungeons, I also did this from time to time in raids now. And all the things I listed above were the reasons for PUGs not moving forward.
In his video, Deroir is so right with the statement that GW2 had brought so much casual gameplay over the years it’s hard to step away from it if you don’t want to improve your gameplay.

NoTrigger.8396:

just from watching the PoV of the revenant, his gameplay is flawed, he autoattacks only, runs out of energy in glint, doesnt use sword 2 inside boss hitbox when surrounded by adds, makes super hero dodge jump moves which put him further away from the boss which is a dps loss because he has to run back and cant AA while doing so (even on vale guard and vale guard doesnt require any dodging at all), swaps to staff for breakbar when its completely overkill and not needed for any breakbar in the first raid wing. he would be able to deal a good amount of dps more than he does if he fixed the things i listed above.

what im trying to say, the timers in their current state arent tight or a problem at all if you are playing correctly and execution still matters more than the dps gain from ascended gear over exotics.

Super hero dodge jumps don’t move your character farther, it makes your jump farther, that’s the point of using it beside looking kewl. Jump distance depends on your moving speed and dodge always moves you the same distance. Combining jump and dodge you get a jump that will always move you as far as possible.

NoTrigger.8396:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

NoTrigger.8396:

i dont nitpick his performance. i am just poiting out that there is a lot that players could do better outside of gear/builds and gameplay/execution is still the biggest factor when it comes to enrage timers.

also i agree with his advice.
what i dont agree with is leading people to believe ascended gear is absolutely must-have before they step into raids, because its bad for the community and the raids as a whole and could turn players away from raiding especially with the huge grind this game has turned into since HoT release.
and if you call my post nitpicky, i am just as nitpicky about my own gameplay and if people in the community were more nitpicky about their own gameplay there would be a lot less QQ threads about enrage timers and stuff like that.

His advice is that you must have ascended gear before you step into the raid… This post is a big rambly tangent. I don’t care how much you criticize your own gameplay. The fact is that you are asserting a phantom (and heavily debatable) quality that will suddenly make it all better. “Skill” can’t be quantified, and since performance is variable you are basically saying “hey, if you get lucky, you won’t need ascended”. People are spending 10 hours on the first boss, and not getting “lucky”. “Skill” is of no comfort.

before players go like “yo need ascended gear before i can beat this boss” they should work on improving their skills. that is all i am saying. you could be a terrible player and ascended gear wont magically kill the boss for you. or you could improve as a player and beat the boss in exotic gear. ascended gear helps a bit but it will not turn a bad player or group into a good one.

https://youtu.be/0NBbAZwKXC4?t=1m36s
take this advice and think a bit about it because it is pretty much true no matter which game you play.
and every player who believes he is playing perfectly is a bad player, and if you believe exotic gear is holding you back then i dont really know how to help you.

The difference between exotic and ascended is quantifiable and makes for a significant difference in performance. Take any success in exotic gear, shave 12% off of the time it took them to complete the event, and then you have the time it would’ve taken in full ascended. I.E. in the original video Gorseval was killed in 6: 51. With ascended, that kill would’ve been in 6:02. That is 49 seconds of extra time to be less skilled, to be downed and rezzed, to press the wrong button, to not have an optimized DPS rotation, etc.

“Skills” is not quantifiable. There’s no way to measure how well you are doing, or how theoretically good you could be in a given circumstance. There is no threshold where magically you’ll be able to do the raid reliably. You are asserting something that cannot be disproved and requires no evidence to assert. The fact is that ascended will allow you to magically kill the boss.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

His advice is that you must have ascended gear before you step into the raid…

No, his advice is: Ascended armor is recommended and if you can achieve that, it’ll be fine. But the whole video prove that you don’t need to have any asc item at all to be successful.

No, it is not.

“I will not, in general, recommend anyone doing the raid in exotic gear as a group going in on their first run, regardless of what I’m about to show you, as even we were surprised by the tuning of some of the enrage timers”.

Emphasis mine.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

People are spending 10 hours on the first boss, and not getting “lucky”. “Skill” is of no comfort.

The fact you are missing here is: People are spending 10 hours on the first boss without improving because they are playing their classes wrong or they are lacking skill. It has 0.0% to do with asc gear.

Except that it does have to do with ascended gear. You just dismiss everything as “you’re not doing it right”. There is no right. There isn’t some magic force that will guide you to an optimized DPS rotation and a perfect build for the encounter. You can’t even measure your DPS. Your statement is made on the absurd notion that, after running the raid for 10 hours unsuccessfully, that the players aren’t trying harder the whole time.

Vinceman.4572:

Besides that, many if not almost all unsuccessful groups don’t die due to the enrage mode after the time was running out. They are dying way earlier due to several mistakes like never ever dodging teleport circles, there’s insufficient cc, being too slow with cc (a.k.a. mouse klicking spells), being unable to avoid seeker damage (also being too slow due to klicking spells with the mouse), not 4-manning the green circle or if anyone of the circle group is down, there is a lack of an emergency team.

They have to try harder to maximize DPS because of the enrage timer. This leads them to play risky and die early. Not everyone has a gaming mouse that lets them activate skills without clicking, and all of the recommended keybinds to get past this are a load, since many require you to completely stop moving to press a key.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

NoTrigger.8396:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

NoTrigger.8396:

i dont nitpick his performance. i am just poiting out that there is a lot that players could do better outside of gear/builds and gameplay/execution is still the biggest factor when it comes to enrage timers.

also i agree with his advice.
what i dont agree with is leading people to believe ascended gear is absolutely must-have before they step into raids, because its bad for the community and the raids as a whole and could turn players away from raiding especially with the huge grind this game has turned into since HoT release.
and if you call my post nitpicky, i am just as nitpicky about my own gameplay and if people in the community were more nitpicky about their own gameplay there would be a lot less QQ threads about enrage timers and stuff like that.

His advice is that you must have ascended gear before you step into the raid… This post is a big rambly tangent. I don’t care how much you criticize your own gameplay. The fact is that you are asserting a phantom (and heavily debatable) quality that will suddenly make it all better. “Skill” can’t be quantified, and since performance is variable you are basically saying “hey, if you get lucky, you won’t need ascended”. People are spending 10 hours on the first boss, and not getting “lucky”. “Skill” is of no comfort.

before players go like “yo need ascended gear before i can beat this boss” they should work on improving their skills. that is all i am saying. you could be a terrible player and ascended gear wont magically kill the boss for you. or you could improve as a player and beat the boss in exotic gear. ascended gear helps a bit but it will not turn a bad player or group into a good one.

https://youtu.be/0NBbAZwKXC4?t=1m36s
take this advice and think a bit about it because it is pretty much true no matter which game you play.
and every player who believes he is playing perfectly is a bad player, and if you believe exotic gear is holding you back then i dont really know how to help you.

The difference between exotic and ascended is quantifiable and makes for a significant difference in performance. Take any success in exotic gear, shave 12% off of the time it took them to complete the event, and then you have the time it would’ve taken in full ascended. I.E. in the original video Gorseval was killed in 6: 51. With ascended, that kill would’ve been in 6:02. That is 49 seconds of extra time to be less skilled, to be downed and rezzed, to press the wrong button, to not have an optimized DPS rotation, etc.

“Skills” is not quantifiable. There’s no way to measure how well you are doing, or how theoretically good you could be in a given circumstance. There is no threshold where magically you’ll be able to do the raid reliably. You are asserting something that cannot be disproved and requires no evidence to assert. The fact is that ascended will allow you to magically kill the boss.

bad/wrong attitude and approach is also a bigger factor than exotic gear. just saying.

It always amazes me how people try to spin and argue things into their favor no matter what is shown.

The reason for posting this video (which some people didn’t even watch, or watched maybe 2 minutes of) was to put an end to people arguing that ascended is mandatory (from a pure balance perspective) and to show what a great job arenanet has done at balancing their first raid content.

Let’s look at the fact first before deconstructing into rambling and theorycrafting:

- the raid is doable and balanced around being completed in full exotic – FACT
→ the damage is managable (no 1-hit kills mechanics except for the ones that are ment to be)

- the raid timers are very well designed for a group of full exotic – FACT
→ does no one even appreciate the fine tuning that the dps check (Goreseval) was so perfect that there were about 8-10 seconds left on the timer? Both other bosses had 1-2 minutes left

- no expoits or use of massive damage combos are required to beat the bosses. Bursting down Goreseval with 6 condi berserkers is not required to finish the fight. It’s just an alternative that makes it easier.

- obviously, if groups with full ascended are wiping for over x-amount of attempts without progress, it’s a matter of player skill (or lack theirof). Now we know for a fact that this is the case.

With all this being said:

- yes, the skillcap is high for running in exotic. No one said you get to run in with the bare minimum requirement and get a freeride. Important is, that it is possible
- yes, ascended will allow for more mistakes and leeway as far as damage goes. we knew this beforhand simply because of how far good groups could push the endtimer limit. Now we have more precise numbers
- remember, getting part ascended (trinkets first, weapons second, armor last) will cover a HUGE amount of the stat spread between full ascended and exotic. This being said, getting full ascended trinkets is VERY cheap. We can deduce that ascended armor, with the current state of the market, might be a bad investment for raiding.

and finally the most important aspect:

- skill is more important than gear!

Wasn’t this the major aspect people were fretting over? Sure, to maximise your chances of success you’ll want players with ascended gear (that’s simple math). But in the end, the player behind the keyboard decides how successful the raid will be.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

“I will not, in general, recommend anyone doing the raid in exotic gear as a group going in on their first run, regardless of what I’m about to show you, as even we were surprised by the tuning of some of the enrage timers”.

Your interpretation of what Deroir said is very faulty. The reason for him stating this was due to so many factors which are subjective and not part of the game that to bring it up in this context is missleading. Ofcorse he will recommend players run with ideal gear to begin with due to:

- faster success and better tries to keep motivation up. If you are already struggling on Vale Guardian, it’s very likely you are not a seasoned raider with a seasoned raiding party. Perfecting your play and mechanics is always easier when you have room for msitakes.

- Natural skillcap of players. Unfortunately a reality, not everyone will be able to reach the ideal/perfect skillcap required for the encounters. Having better gear means this person doesn’t have to be cut from the raid and/or replaced

- he is being honest to the viewer in that they have mastered the encounters with perfect setups and gear and tells us that, if given the choice, he would recommend players to go for that. It’s simply not mandatory

- the fights (except for the first one) were pretty spot on with some very minor msitakes here and there. After the VG kill Deroir even states that they were goofing around in the beginning, but decided not to wipe and restart since they had confidence they could finish the fight. He even mentions that the same fight 1 day earlier in full exotic left them with 1.5 minutes on the timer. Again, a lot of room for mistakes from less experienced groups.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

No, it is not.

“I will not, in general, recommend anyone doing the raid in exotic gear as a group going in on their first run, regardless of what I’m about to show you, as even we were surprised by the tuning of some of the enrage timers”.

Emphasis mine.

Cyninja has already said what has to be said but I will go into detail to answer your bullkitten as well.

He does not recommend exotic gear, yes. He is recommending ascended one, ofc. I would also do this but his point clearly is: The raid wing is doable in exotics but if you can, acquire ascended gear.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Except that it does have to do with ascended gear.

BS again. They have proven that the raid wing is doable with exotics.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You just dismiss everything as “you’re not doing it right”. There is no right.

Yes, there is right and wrong for raids. For example using Dolyaks Signet on warrior is wrong bc it won’t help you any second longer to survive. And so on. I have seen so many hardcorely wrong builds inside the raid, it was no wonder people were failing over and over again. This is not open world content where you can play how you want.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

There isn’t some magic force that will guide you to an optimized DPS rotation and a perfect build for the encounter. You can’t even measure your DPS.

You can measure your DPS. PvP-Golem anyone + Dmg-numbers in the chat panel?

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Your statement is made on the absurd notion that, after running the raid for 10 hours unsuccessfully, that the players aren’t trying harder the whole time.

Ofc, they are trying harder but as I said, the most unsuccessful groups don’t die to the enrage timer what equals it to the fact they are not performing well.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

They have to try harder to maximize DPS because of the enrage timer. This leads them to play risky and die early. Not everyone has a gaming mouse that lets them activate skills without clicking, and all of the recommended keybinds to get past this are a load, since many require you to completely stop moving to press a key.

I have a gaming mouse but i didn’t bind any ability on it, I am over 30 years old so my reaction time is slower than the average gamer and I am also clicking some abilities with the mouse. The thing is: I’ve beaten the encounters. Your argument is invalid!

You also don’t need to play “risky”. My recommendation here is to try the bosses without looking on the timer at first.
I’m 100% sure, you and your group won’t wipe the first 20 times due to not having enough time. Trust me, I have done the raid from the release day on and when we got to the point when we had no time left, dozens of corpses were laying on the ground the tries before. With some experience in learning the mechanics, you can improve your group skill and change things to achieve a better damage output.
The timer is needed so that there won’t be a facetanking group of 8 Nomad-Hammer-Guards + Nomad-Boon-Strip + Condi-Tank which easily wiggle around and making a ridiculous thing out of a challenging content.

At last, if you are convinced that it is ok to stop moving for pressing a key, I tell you, that this is what I call lack of skill. It’s a shame for you and others but this challenging content is not made for players like these. It is no problem because you can enjoy 99% of the rest in GW2.

If you could just use nomad guardians and face tank that just tells that devs have failed. DPS races and timers are huge fail too. Other fail is that you can do these raid bosses without any kind of knowledge of your class. Usually when you go play hard content you take class that you have played thousand of hours, but here you can can take revenant that you have played 2 hours and you know that sword auto attack does lot’s of dmg and staff 5 remove breakbar. Stop talking about hard content when soloing some open world champ takes more personal skill than these raids.

Cyninja.2954:

It always amazes me how people try to spin and argue things into their favor no matter what is shown

You are utterly full of it. Your beliefs on this subject are not automatically correct and superior just because you hold them. What proof do you have that you aren’t the deluded one, spinning things into his own favor no matter what they are shown? And here you stand, talking down to people who disagree with you. It is insulting, and you should feel bad.

The biggest problem I have here is that I have not been given one piece of information that isn’t internally contradictory or utter nonsense. It is like this in every single thread I’ve heard. Why can’t you people just admit that, as the devs intended, raids are not casual in any sense? No, you always have to go on with hate speech about anyone who can’t do the raids because they’re stupid or something.

Cyninja.2954:

- the raid is doable and balanced around being completed in full exotic – FACT

This is not true at all. The devs recommended having full ascended for the raids, ergo the raids were balanced around full ascended.

Cyninja.2954:

-> the damage is managable (no 1-hit kills mechanics except for the ones that are ment to be)

No body complains about the damage. They’re complaining about enrage timers.

Cyninja.2954:

- the raid timers are very well designed for a group of full exotic – FACT

This is nonsense. “Well designed” is a quality judgement. It can’t be a fact, because “well” is strictly an opinion. As is “very”. If I say they are not well designed, how do you prove me wrong, or prove yourself right?

Cyninja.2954:

-> does no one even appreciate the fine tuning that the dps check (Goreseval) was so perfect that there were about 8-10 seconds left on the timer? Both other bosses had 1-2 minutes left

“Fine tuning” here essentially means “high probably to be a waste of time and food”. The more “fine tuned” something is, the less it appeals to budget players or casual players.

Cyninja.2954:

I- no expoits or use of massive damage combos are required to beat the bosses. Bursting down Goreseval with 6 condi berserkers is not required to finish the fight. It’s just an alternative that makes it easier

I’m sorry, but last I checked basic design is that something should be done without "exploits’. Its like congratulating the game for merely existing.

Cyninja.2954:

- obviously, if groups with full ascended are wiping for over x-amount of attempts without progress, it’s a matter of player skill (or lack theirof). Now we know for a fact that this is the case.

Or it is a matter of group composition or particular builds. Of course, the problem isn’t that people in ascended are wiping. it is that the system is “fine tuned” so that without ascended you’re chances of success, even on experienced runs, is gutted so drastically as to be a waste of time.

Cyninja.2954:

With all this being said:

- yes, the skillcap is high for running in exotic. No one said you get to run in with the bare minimum requirement and get a freeride. Important is, that it is possible
- yes, ascended will allow for more mistakes and leeway as far as damage goes. we knew this beforhand simply because of how far good groups could push the endtimer limit. Now we have more precise numbers
- remember, getting part ascended (trinkets first, weapons second, armor last) will cover a HUGE amount of the stat spread between full ascended and exotic. This being said, getting full ascended trinkets is VERY cheap. We can deduce that ascended armor, with the current state of the market, might be a bad investment for raiding.

Something I find interesting are nude runs. These are runs of dungeons where a group of players have taken off their armor, and fight the boss handicapped. They are capable of succeeding, of course. Does this mean that the bosses were designed for nudists? Does that mean that if a player can’t complete a nude run of a dungeon, that they are incompetent and should demeaned?

Absolutely not. I’ll break it down simply: just because something is doable in exotic gear, doesn’t mean it is meant to be done in exotic gear. The raids aren’t “finely tuned” for exotic. They’re tuned for ascended. It just happens that, much like how dungeons can be done in the buff, Raids can be done in Exotic Gear still. Raids are tuned more lightly for ascended than some people would like. So if a person can’t do it in exotic gear, the first and foremost thing they “aren’t doing right” is that they don’t have ascended.

Another thing to note is that only ascended rings are cheap. Ascended Weapons and Backpacks cost 150 gold each, and the amulet/trinkets run 35/40 laurels + 50 ectoplasm, meaning that you can only buy them after a long period of time. That or hope your guild is big enough, so instead of waiting a month you wait 3 weeks.

Currently, I am making ascended weapons for all my toons. I already have 2 toons with full weapons, so given my remaining characters I only need 3,900 more gold to kit them out. Then 850 more gold for the backpacks.

Cyninja.2954:

and finally the most important aspect:

- skill is more important than gear!

Wasn’t this the major aspect people were fretting over? Sure, to maximise your chances of success you’ll want players with ascended gear (that’s simple math). But in the end, the player behind the keyboard decides how successful the raid will be.

You’re forgetting luck. Luck is a factor, always. Skill itself is heavily weighted toward one side: you can theoretically have no contribution by assuming an utterly incompetent player, but a hyper-competent player can only achieve a bit more. You aren’t suddenly going to do more DPS than the max damage rotation just because you want it enough. There’s a hard limit there, to what your class is capable of and how much of an impact you can have.

It is a perceptual mistake that people have, where they assume that an average player only does half the damage of a “skilled” player, because “half” is the middle of maximum and zero. It doesn’t work like that. If you have the competence to stand- in melee range and spam high DPS skills when off cooldown, then you’re already doing 90% of what a “skilled” player is. The “skilled” player is the one who’s most adept at dealing with random BS that comes their way.

Cyninja.2954:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

“I will not, in general, recommend anyone doing the raid in exotic gear as a group going in on their first run, regardless of what I’m about to show you, as even we were surprised by the tuning of some of the enrage timers”.

Your interpretation of what Deroir said is very faulty. The reason for him stating this was due to so many factors which are subjective and not part of the game that to bring it up in this context is missleading. Ofcorse he will recommend players run with ideal gear to begin with due to:

Nothing you have listed gives and indication of that statement being misleading. At all. It is saying exactly what the issue is: Doing this in Exotic is impractical and hard. To get the experience to do the raid comfortably in exotic, you need to do it in ascended first. But why would you need to be comfortable in exotics then?

At the end of the raid, he says that it is doable, but everybody has to bring their A+ game. Everybody died on Gorseval and Sabetha, so unless there was some secret strategy change that went down between takes that he never talked about, then the raid’s are so hard that you shouldn’t be doing them in exotic gear.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Why can’t you people just admit that, as the devs intended, raids are not casual in any sense?

It’s because a not very small playerbase has shown that they can beat the encounters.
If you are not able to do so, you are not a very skilled player. Sorry to say that. It’s no insult to be bad, you are just not bringing the level of succeeding in this part of the game. Nothing to blame about. Not everyone is a good cook, mathematician or athlete.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

No, you always have to go on with hate speech about anyone who can’t do the raids because they’re stupid or something.

I don’t see any hate speech here. Just complaints from your side and many many helpful comments in this forum from successful peeps how to beat or fight against VG, Gorseval and Sabetha.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

This is not true at all. The devs recommended having full ascended for the raids, ergo the raids were balanced around full ascended.

The devs also described dungeons as a place where only the best souls of Tyria will persist. After some time passed by CoF was on farm. Same with fractals.
The devs are there for development but maybe you have recognized that they invited guilds to test their stuff because almost never will a dev ever be as good as a player.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

No body complains about the damage. They’re complaining about enrage timers.

Who is complaining? Some few people that put one post into the forums and never came back? Any serious player around me who was willing to beat the VG, has beaten it. And it has never been a question of asc vs. exotic but training, time and build/trait changes.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

This is nonsense. “Well designed” is a quality judgement. It can’t be a fact, because “well” is strictly an opinion. As is “very”. If I say they are not well designed, how do you prove me wrong, or prove yourself right?

They are well designed to beat the encounters in a huge amount of diverse team compositions and build orders. Wrong designed would be if no one could ever beat the timer at all so it has to be nerfed in the 2nd place.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Or it is a matter of group composition or particular builds.

Yes, but it isn’t a big problem while looking at Youtube to notice reams of successful kills with different team comps and builds.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Of course, the problem isn’t that people in ascended are wiping. it is that the system is “fine tuned” so that without ascended you’re chances of success, even on experienced runs, is gutted so drastically as to be a waste of time.

And that, dear writer, is bs. It’s not gutted drastically as to be a waste of time. Have you seen the VG kill? They had 3-4 people down several times. Even in PUGs that doesn’t happen at all on this encounter. They could have restarted the run like he said and having 1:30 min time left on a proper kill.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Absolutely not. I’ll break it down simply: just because something is doable in exotic gear, doesn’t mean it is meant to be done in exotic gear.

Nobody said that. The guild just has shown that it is possible to do in exotics so nobody should complain about getting asc for the raid because it is not necessary!

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The raids aren’t “finely tuned” for exotic. They’re tuned for ascended. It just happens that, much like how dungeons can be done in the buff, Raids can be done in Exotic Gear still. Raids are tuned more lightly for ascended than some people would like. So if a person can’t do it in exotic gear, the first and foremost thing they “aren’t doing right” is that they don’t have ascended.

No, the devs wanted to have the content to be designed for just ascended. That doesn’t mean it is only for ascended and that ppl can improve to show us such video like Deroir did.
Like I said before: There is a huge difference betweed the work of the devs and how well it is attuned with player skill.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Another thing to note is that only ascended rings are cheap.
Ascended Weapons and Backpacks cost 150 gold each, and the amulet/trinkets run 35/40 laurels + 50 ectoplasm, meaning that you can only buy them after a long period of time. That or hope your guild is big enough, so instead of waiting a month you wait 3 weeks.

The usual casual isn’t even lvl 80 in 3 weeks. And nowadays there are many ways to get asc trinkets. You’ll even get them in the story mode, via collections, gold. So it’s very easy if you have the goal to do raids.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Currently, I am making ascended weapons for all my toons. I already have 2 toons with full weapons, so given my remaining characters I only need 3,900 more gold to kit them out. Then 850 more gold for the backpacks.

Asc weapons are accountbound. With a little bit of intelligence you can reduce that sum if you swap weapons between your characters.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You’re forgetting luck. Luck is a factor, always. Skill itself is heavily weighted toward one side: you can theoretically have no contribution by assuming an utterly incompetent player, but a hyper-competent player can only achieve a bit more. You aren’t suddenly going to do more DPS than the max damage rotation just because you want it enough. There’s a hard limit there, to what your class is capable of and how much of an impact you can have.

Speaking about luck reminds me of the League of Legends Bronze players that were complaining about their team and that all higher ranked people just had luck in some games and therefore are in higher tiers. This is the biggest bs ever! There is no luck involved, only bad rng. But rng won’t stop you from defeating the bosses in a raid all the time.
Luck is NEVER EVER a factor.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

It is a perceptual mistake that people have, where they assume that an average player only does half the damage of a “skilled” player, because “half” is the middle of maximum and zero. It doesn’t work like that. If you have the competence to stand- in melee range and spam high DPS skills when off cooldown, then you’re already doing 90% of what a “skilled” player is. The “skilled” player is the one who’s most adept at dealing with random BS that comes their way.

I recommend you to play with a group of very good players. Just a short Ascalonian Catacombs run. As long as you are no top player you will struggle to keep the pace and if we would record your damage logs it would result in a dramatically decreased amount of dps on your side.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Nothing you have listed gives and indication of that statement being misleading. At all. It is saying exactly what the issue is: Doing this in Exotic is impractical and hard. To get the experience to do the raid comfortably in exotic, you need to do it in ascended first. But why would you need to be comfortable in exotics then?

No, VG is fine in practicing with exotics. 1:30 min time left for a good organized guild group like KING is bringing enough time for mistakes on an organized group with non-speedrunners.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

At the end of the raid, he says that it is doable, but everybody has to bring their A+ game. Everybody died on Gorseval and Sabetha, so unless there was some secret strategy change that went down between takes that he never talked about, then the raid’s are so hard that you shouldn’t be doing them in exotic gear.

LOL!
Thats bullkitten again. A raid should be hard and you should be forced to bring your A+ game. Of course you wipe several times. This is how to raid. You practice, you fail, you still practice and someday you will hopefully succeed. It depends on you and the group but not on the difference between exotics and ascended gear.
NoTrigger has also shown you that the Revenant wasn’t even playing an A+ game. They still beat it.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Cyninja.2954:

It always amazes me how people try to spin and argue things into their favor no matter what is shown

You are utterly full of it. Your beliefs on this subject are not automatically correct and superior just because you hold them. What proof do you have that you aren’t the deluded one, spinning things into his own favor no matter what they are shown? And here you stand, talking down to people who disagree with you. It is insulting, and you should feel bad.

The biggest problem I have here is that I have not been given one piece of information that isn’t internally contradictory or utter nonsense. It is like this in every single thread I’ve heard. Why can’t you people just admit that, as the devs intended, raids are not casual in any sense? No, you always have to go on with hate speech about anyone who can’t do the raids because they’re stupid or something.

I’m not full of anything. I provided a link, everyone can watch the video and read the thread and make their own conclusions. You have provided 0 material on this subject except for your subjective view.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

. Why can’t you people just admit that, as the devs intended, raids are not casual in any sense? No, you always have to go on with hate speech about anyone who can’t do the raids because they’re stupid or something.

No one said raids are casual friendly. Wth are you talking about? This entire thread is about players and for players who are interested in raiding. The fact that raid content is not casual friendly AND difficult is a GIVEN.

The only question was and always has been, is it doable in exotics or are arenanet forcing people to gear up.

Oh and on the hate speach part, I’m not going to comment your aggressive post. People reading this thread get to make their own judgments.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

This is not true at all. The devs recommended having full ascended for the raids, ergo the raids were balanced around full ascended.

Recommended =/= required =/= balanced around.

Also we are not at the endboss of the raid which essentially is where ascended will supposedly be required. Stop making stuff up.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

This is nonsense. “Well designed” is a quality judgement. It can’t be a fact, because “well” is strictly an opinion. As is “very”. If I say they are not well designed, how do you prove me wrong, or prove yourself right?

Correct, and my quality judgement is based on the given material to be viewed. The only way to prove this to be or not be the case would require a look at the exact numbers used in the code. Since we have no access to those and I don’t expect arenanet to give us access, I’m using the next best thing. You have not provided anything resembling a counter argument even to this subjective opinion in form of player data.

I’d get into all the nitpicking seperately, but to be honest I simply don’t care what you think. You mix my statements with other facts in order to delude and twist their meaning (see my comment on trinkets. I never mentioned weapons to be cheap, yet you use them as a counter argument).

Trinkets are easy to come by IF you use the appropriate content (yes, they are more expensive if you revert to backup content. this has been pointed out multiple times).

Also last time I checked, even the backpack number you gave is way off (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Quiver_of_a_Thousand_Arrows) at current market price comes out at about 90g (way less than 150g, and evene cheaper with buy orders. that’s not even considering the cheapest alternative which is via the intended way of crafting a fractal backpiece). Hyberbole much?

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

No, it is not.

“I will not, in general, recommend anyone doing the raid in exotic gear as a group going in on their first run, regardless of what I’m about to show you, as even we were surprised by the tuning of some of the enrage timers”.

Emphasis mine.

Cyninja has already said what has to be said but I will go into detail to answer your bullkitten as well.

He does not recommend exotic gear, yes. He is recommending ascended one, ofc. I would also do this but his point clearly is: The raid wing is doable in exotics but if you can, acquire ascended gear.

“Regardless of what I am about to show you”. Anything in that video you submit as evidence is immediately contradicted by what the video itself says. If the guy making the video literally says not to use Exotic Gear, then what is the arguing point for exotic gear being adequate? How badly you can ignore what the author himself says?

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Except that it does have to do with ascended gear.

BS again. They have proven that the raid wing is doable with exotics.

You are purposefully ignoring everything I’ve demonstrated mathematically just to be contradictory. My numbers won’t go away because you can ignore the author of the video.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You just dismiss everything as “you’re not doing it right”. There is no right.

Yes, there is right and wrong for raids. For example using Dolyaks Signet on warrior is wrong bc it won’t help you any second longer to survive. And so on. I have seen so many hardcorely wrong builds inside the raid, it was no wonder people were failing over and over again. This is not open world content where you can play how you want.

The funny thing about DPS rotations and build compositions is that, every time they are improved, it immediately proves the previous set as inferior. Thus, anything you say about a meta comp is more likely than not, wrong as a necessity. Due to the complexity of how you can arrange the builds of a 10 man group, there isn’t a “set way” that anything can be done. Let alone, any sort of guiding hand that would leave people there.

Again, you’ve cut out an extremely important part of my post: there is no “guiding hand” or indicator of what a player is doing wrong. Sure, if they don’t meet the DPS requirements they can change their gear to do more damage (assuming that they can still survive), but even when that happens and you still lose, what then? I’ll give an example: Phantasmal Swordsman is the highest damaging Illusion for Mesmers. However, unless you sit there with a stop watch and time the hits and how much damage they do, you wouldn’t have access to that information. So if a raid comes down to something like which phantasm you use (or any other class equivalent), what indication is there that phantasmal duelist is the wrong one?

This applies for more than just damage. If players die, is the healer not healing well enough? What is the maximum healing? Is boon application not enough? What constitutes the threshold for useful boon application in a 10 man group? How would a player acquire this information in-game? I’ve seen plenty of guides myself, many of them suggesting different things for the same game mode. How do you tell which one is true when they all seem to fail equally?

Your perspective is skewed. The people who sit down with a stop watch and time things to get maximum DPS rotations are the vast minority. 99% of gamers are not like us. But, because you are surrounded by people who do the same, you can’t fathom that a person wouldn’t know this information, and would lack the ability to even conceptualize DPS.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

There isn’t some magic force that will guide you to an optimized DPS rotation and a perfect build for the encounter. You can’t even measure your DPS.

You can measure your DPS. PvP-Golem anyone + Dmg-numbers in the chat panel?

Now this is hilarious. Your damage numbers aren’t your DPS. That’s just how big a number you can get. Your DPS is your damage divided by time, which is a unit that isn’t provided in this game. I’ve taught enough people physics to know that “rate” is a concept not everyone understands easily. Hell, you yourself just got it wrong.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Your statement is made on the absurd notion that, after running the raid for 10 hours unsuccessfully, that the players aren’t trying harder the whole time.

Ofc, they are trying harder but as I said, the most unsuccessful groups don’t die to the enrage timer what equals it to the fact they are not performing well.

That doesn’t change the erroneous nature of your statement. You are defending the assertion that the only reason why it is people fail is because they aren’t doing it right, that gear tiers aren’t important. What do you think happens if, after a full work day of grinding on a raid boss? That the player never realizes that you need to stand in the green circle? That the red guardian needs conditions to be killed? In order to assert that gear tiers aren’t important, you have to assert a measure of incompetence onto people so severe that they would lack the basic skills to… be.

It is crazy. The difference between ascended and exotic is quickly calculated, and easily noticeable. Buying an extra 50 seconds in a fight is a big deal.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

They have to try harder to maximize DPS because of the enrage timer. This leads them to play risky and die early. Not everyone has a gaming mouse that lets them activate skills without clicking, and all of the recommended keybinds to get past this are a load, since many require you to completely stop moving to press a key.

I have a gaming mouse but i didn’t bind any ability on it, I am over 30 years old so my reaction time is slower than the average gamer and I am also clicking some abilities with the mouse. The thing is: I’ve beaten the encounters. Your argument is invalid!

You just contradicted yourself. You said people play poorly and lose because they mouse click their skills. Then you assert that mouseclicking skills doesn’t cause you to lose. So which is it?

Vinceman.4572:

You also don’t need to play “risky”. My recommendation here is to try the bosses without looking on the timer at first.
I’m 100% sure, you and your group won’t wipe the first 20 times due to not having enough time. Trust me, I have done the raid from the release day on and when we got to the point when we had no time left, dozens of corpses were laying on the ground the tries before. With some experience in learning the mechanics, you can improve your group skill and change things to achieve a better damage output.

This is another thing that is contradictory. You assert that people are losing because they aren’t playing well enough, but then say don’t worry about it and play it safe. When a player plays it safe, they attack with ranged weapons to avoid all of the mechanics, and end up doing terrible DPS because of it. So, they have to play risky in order to do enough deeps to win.

Are you saying that practicing failing tactics will somehow get you to succeed? Regardless, the first wipes you’ll get on a raid will always be because of learning the mechanics. That is a given, and isn’t actually relevant to the whole “Enrage Timer encourages riskier behavior” issue.

Vinceman.4572:

The timer is needed so that there won’t be a facetanking group of 8 Nomad-Hammer-Guards + Nomad-Boon-Strip + Condi-Tank which easily wiggle around and making a ridiculous thing out of a challenging content.

I’m not sure 8 nomad-hammer-guards would ever make it past gorseval or sabetha, timer or not. Either way, I’m not sure it is a problem. Having an entire tank group like that would mean that the players would have to contend with the OHKO mechanics of the raid for 45 mintues straight, per boss. You yourself are saying that most players die because of the raid mechanics themselves. Wearing tankier gear won’t solve that problem.

There’s many ways to build a boss to not be doable in full tank gear. Sabetha’s platform, for example. Enrage timers are a copy/paste from other MMOs, and are based on counteracting the extremely simplistic design of their content.

Vinceman.4572:

At last, if you are convinced that it is ok to stop moving for pressing a key, I tell you, that this is what I call lack of skill. It’s a shame for you and others but this challenging content is not made for players like these. It is no problem because you can enjoy 99% of the rest in GW2.

The whole point is that it isn’t O.K. to stop moving to press a key. But, the problem with having all of your keybinds allocated to the left hand is that, in the fight, you’ll be using 2-3 fingers to move and dodge, which makes activating some skills difficult.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

There isn’t some magic force that will guide you to an optimized DPS rotation and a perfect build for the encounter. You can’t even measure your DPS.

You can measure your DPS. PvP-Golem anyone + Dmg-numbers in the chat panel?

Now this is hilarious. Your damage numbers aren’t your DPS. That’s just how big a number you can get. Your DPS is your damage divided by time, which is a unit that isn’t provided in this game. I’ve taught enough people physics to know that “rate” is a concept not everyone understands easily. Hell, you yourself just got it wrong.

Maybe use a damage meter? Might help…. oh and those available use the chat panel currently. Where there is a will, there is a way.

Junkpile.7439:

TheFamster.7806:

Junkpile.7439:

Anet could remove viper gear from game.

wow good solution. After removal of vipers, they would then need to remove sinister, rampager, dire, and rabid.

And then they would have to remove anything that increases power, precision and ferocity. So glad you’re not part of a balance team

Yes good balance team add stat combo that makes every other condi stat combo useless in newest end game content.

sounds like berserker to every power set for the past 3 years

to be fair, the problem isnt viper the problem is sinister. They should reduce either the precision or power on sinister and increase its condi damage even more. It would make it much more competitive

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

“Regardless of what I am about to show you”. Anything in that video you submit as evidence is immediately contradicted by what the video itself says. If the guy making the video literally says not to use Exotic Gear, then what is the arguing point for exotic gear being adequate? How badly you can ignore what the author himself says?

What? So much lol!

Ofc he is recommending to do the content in asc gear because it is easier and he is not recommending to do it in exotics because it is harder. That changes nothing on the fact that the content can be cleared in exotics. And there is also another point why he is telling this: He is a better player than many others will ever be. And he knows that, otherwise he would just say: I recommend doing the raid in exotics but maybe it’s possible with rare gear.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You are purposefully ignoring everything I’ve demonstrated mathematically just to be contradictory. My numbers won’t go away because you can ignore the author of the video.

And his numbers are going away or what? He stated that they have 1.5 minutes left on their timer during their proper VG-kill. 90 seconds left in full exotics. These seconds are 18.75% of the full timer! You cannot ignore that.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The funny thing about DPS rotations and build compositions is that, every time they are improved, it immediately proves the previous set as inferior. Thus, anything you say about a meta comp is more likely than not, wrong as a necessity. Due to the complexity of how you can arrange the builds of a 10 man group, there isn’t a “set way” that anything can be done. Let alone, any sort of guiding hand that would leave people there.

I have never ever said anything against that. The fact that you can have different team compositions AND still defeat the bosses is an argument for exotic gear not against. It shows that teamplay and playerskill is responsible for a success but not the gear.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Again, you’ve cut out an extremely important part of my post: there is no “guiding hand” or indicator of what a player is doing wrong. Sure, if they don’t meet the DPS requirements they can change their gear to do more damage (assuming that they can still survive), but even when that happens and you still lose, what then? I’ll give an example: Phantasmal Swordsman is the highest damaging Illusion for Mesmers. However, unless you sit there with a stop watch and time the hits and how much damage they do, you wouldn’t have access to that information. So if a raid comes down to something like which phantasm you use (or any other class equivalent), what indication is there that phantasmal duelist is the wrong one?

That is what I meant with “You can’t play how you want”. At least you have to read your traits, skills and the best choice is to discuss with your other 9 players to find gaps or doublings that can be deleted for an increase of dps or sustain. Still has nothing to do with exotics.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

This applies for more than just damage. If players die, is the healer not healing well enough? What is the maximum healing? Is boon application not enough? What constitutes the threshold for useful boon application in a 10 man group? How would a player acquire this information in-game? I’ve seen plenty of guides myself, many of them suggesting different things for the same game mode. How do you tell which one is true when they all seem to fail equally?

This is why you test it. You talk to other players that are playing your class. You read guides and you gain more and more informations. The game is played by thousands of players so you are not the single man on Mars. Be communicative and you will get help if you stuck.
And you try, try, try. Sometimes little changes will bring you closer to the goal line and then you will keep them.
Still has nothing to do with exotics.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Your perspective is skewed. The people who sit down with a stop watch and time things to get maximum DPS rotations are the vast minority. 99% of gamers are not like us. But, because you are surrounded by people who do the same, you can’t fathom that a person wouldn’t know this information, and would lack the ability to even conceptualize DPS.

You don’t even need to. It is an example. But before I say “I use this and that weapon on a char for raids cuz it’s cool.” I will keep an eye if it makes sense. Like before, there are enough youtube videos that will explain to me why I shouldn’t playing rifle warrior.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Now this is hilarious. Your damage numbers aren’t your DPS. That’s just how big a number you can get. Your DPS is your damage divided by time, which is a unit that isn’t provided in this game. I’ve taught enough people physics to know that “rate” is a concept not everyone understands easily. Hell, you yourself just got it wrong.

I don’t know what to say, sigh. Ofc you need a timer for getting dps results. So you record your rotations on video and you can timeshift properly with a software of your choice.
I don’t know why you are hanging on this, lol. NoTrigger already told you that you don’t even need the best dps rotations, you will still succeed.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

That doesn’t change the erroneous nature of your statement. You are defending the assertion that the only reason why it is people fail is because they aren’t doing it right, that gear tiers aren’t important. What do you think happens if, after a full work day of grinding on a raid boss? That the player never realizes that you need to stand in the green circle? That the red guardian needs conditions to be killed? In order to assert that gear tiers aren’t important, you have to assert a measure of incompetence onto people so severe that they would lack the basic skills to… be.

Oh yes, there are many incompetent players out there. I wasted 2 hours on VG due to my buddy not knowing how to use alacrity on mesmer because he played a selfish build. That was what I meant with you have to communicate with your team. He also didn’t use sword for boon strip although we told him and relied on it!
The next example was a tank that always pulled the VG near the green circle so that some of the other dumb players in our group were teleported away. I told it several times in TS and after 30 minutes of not adapting, I just quit.
One or two groups later, people listened, did their job, some in exotics, some in ascended and we had over 50 seconds left because it was well executed.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

It is crazy. The difference between ascended and exotic is quickly calculated, and easily noticeable. Buying an extra 50 seconds in a fight is a big deal.

Yes, there is a difference, ofc you are faster. Nobody was denying that. But the 1.5 minutes of Deroir are a simple sign that it is more than possible for a pug to be successful in just exotics.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You just contradicted yourself. You said people play poorly and lose because they mouse click their skills. Then you assert that mouseclicking skills doesn’t cause you to lose. So which is it?

Nope, I didn’t. At first, I just showed you that a gaming mouse doesn’t make the difference between defeating or losing. Secondly, if you can klick fast, you are also in time and fine but another buddy of mine is clicking everything. He cannot beat the VG because he is just too slow to get the actions done. This is why he admitted that this content is not his thing and it won’t be in the future.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

This is another thing that is contradictory. You assert that people are losing because they aren’t playing well enough, but then say don’t worry about it and play it safe. When a player plays it safe, they attack with ranged weapons to avoid all of the mechanics, and end up doing terrible DPS because of it. So, they have to play risky in order to do enough deeps to win.

Well, you have everything achieved asap in life you had to do? I doubt that. You had to practice, practice and practice. The higher you get the barriers become bigger and bigger and you have to take step by step to get across them.
Put that to the raid. You start and you will try to do as less mistakes as possible. If you can do that properly with your whole group, which is hard, you will perhaps die to the enrage timer. Maybe, but I am certain you will not. Or maybe you will 2-3 times. Then your next goal will be what? Yes, looking for an increase of dps.
You will come to conclusions: Are we having the right classes? How are the builds, is there anything we can adjust? And so on.
In the end, the thing is: It’s not the exotic gear that will make you struggle.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Are you saying that practicing failing tactics will somehow get you to succeed? Regardless, the first wipes you’ll get on a raid will always be because of learning the mechanics. That is a given, and isn’t actually relevant to the whole “Enrage Timer encourages riskier behavior” issue.

Try and error will lead you to success if you are able to learn. That is what I pointed out.
And sure learning the mechanics is a given, I didn’t even deny that. But again: pugs are wiping most frequently due to mechanical mistakes, not the enrage timer!

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I’m not sure 8 nomad-hammer-guards would ever make it past gorseval or sabetha, timer or not. Either way, I’m not sure it is a problem. Having an entire tank group like that would mean that the players would have to contend with the OHKO mechanics of the raid for 45 mintues straight, per boss. You yourself are saying that most players die because of the raid mechanics themselves. Wearing tankier gear won’t solve that problem.

Why aren’t you sure? I haven’t seen a try till now. And wearing tankier gear is solving the problem of incoming damage. At VG I can run around circles with my full soldier guard (not even nomads!) and I only die when there aren’t enough people for the green circles. 8 (2 groups of 4+4) nomad hammer guards won’t die there if we have no timer. Ah, i have to admit, they can die there – if they are stupid/have no skill at all.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

There’s many ways to build a boss to not be doable in full tank gear. Sabetha’s platform, for example. Enrage timers are a copy/paste from other MMOs, and are based on counteracting the extremely simplistic design of their content.

And? I don’t know what you are trying to say with that. Are you blaming the devs for installing a timer? A timer that plays no role if you are familiar with the mechanics?
You were taught that the timer is no argument against exotics and for ascended, that is the key in this discussion, not the timer itself.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The whole point is that it isn’t O.K. to stop moving to press a key. But, the problem with having all of your keybinds allocated to the left hand is that, in the fight, you’ll be using 2-3 fingers to move and dodge, which makes activating some skills difficult.

I don’t get your point here. Just play like you can do best with your mouse, keyboard, wheel or whatsoever. I have a gaming mouse with no bindings, a gaming keyboard with no bindings, I am older than the average, I have to work from monday to friday and even on weekend to prepare lessons for school or to phone with colleagues/parents. I am still able to beat the content. Your statement is, that it’s due to ascended and magic. I’d say it’s due to practice, improvement, fun and a big portion of ambition!

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Why can’t you people just admit that, as the devs intended, raids are not casual in any sense?

It’s because a not very small playerbase has shown that they can beat the encounters.
If you are not able to do so, you are not a very skilled player. Sorry to say that. It’s no insult to be bad, you are just not bringing the level of succeeding in this part of the game. Nothing to blame about. Not everyone is a good cook, mathematician or athlete.

You’re trying to turn this to be about my skill. Stop distracting from the point. Also, there is quite a large amount of the playerbase that can’t beat the encounters. Therefore, just admit that the devs were right and this is “hardcore content”.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

No, you always have to go on with hate speech about anyone who can’t do the raids because they’re stupid or something.

I don’t see any hate speech here. Just complaints from your side and many many helpful comments in this forum from successful peeps how to beat or fight against VG, Gorseval and Sabetha.

I’ve seen plenty on the forums and in the game. Raids are a highly toxic environment, so much so that people are making videos just to debate that subject, which is why this very thread was started. Or have you forgotten that already?

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

This is not true at all. The devs recommended having full ascended for the raids, ergo the raids were balanced around full ascended.

The devs also described dungeons as a place where only the best souls of Tyria will persist. After some time passed by CoF was on farm. Same with fractals.
The devs are there for development but maybe you have recognized that they invited guilds to test their stuff because almost never will a dev ever be as good as a player.

Raids aren’t dungeons. What applies to dungeons doesn’t apply to raids. The big difference here is that, when dungeons were made, they were designed with relative ignorance of the combat systems for the game. When raids were designed, they were designed with an extremely well informed experience over the combat systems of the game.

Likewise, dungeons were nerfed purposefully and powercreeped. Fractals were also powercreeped, and then most recently nerfed again. The state that we see dungeons in now is nothing like how they were during beta, or launch. I still remember people making guides on how to get past the burrows in the lover’s crypt for Ascalon Catacombs. Funny thing, doing that dungeon at launch in level 35 masterwork gear was actually difficult.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

No body complains about the damage. They’re complaining about enrage timers.

Who is complaining? Some few people that put one post into the forums and never came back? Any serious player around me who was willing to beat the VG, has beaten it. And it has never been a question of asc vs. exotic but training, time and build/trait changes.

Emphasis mine. Your personal clique is not representative of what people think about raids. And it doesn’t matter what what your clique thinks about the asc. vs. exotic debate. The benefits are ascended are a fact. You can measure them and everything.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

This is nonsense. “Well designed” is a quality judgement. It can’t be a fact, because “well” is strictly an opinion. As is “very”. If I say they are not well designed, how do you prove me wrong, or prove yourself right?

They are well designed to beat the encounters in a huge amount of diverse team compositions and build orders. Wrong designed would be if no one could ever beat the timer at all so it has to be nerfed in the 2nd place.

You have no point here. “Well” is still an opinion. You are just being irritating.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Or it is a matter of group composition or particular builds.

Yes, but it isn’t a big problem while looking at Youtube to notice reams of successful kills with different team comps and builds.

If you frequent the thief forum, you’d notice that a chief complaint is that the daredevil is never taken into raids, that you can’t get into raids as a daredevil, and that the daredevil is the least used class in successful runs. Likewise, something that doesn’t get displayed is that these different team comps are all built around each other. They’re frequent groups of friends with enough spare gold to tailor-make their gear specifically to work well with other tailor-made gear. If you just build solo or PVP-style your team will have a lot of redundancy that has to be worked around, and these build choices can have a substantial impact. I.E. using scholar runes instead of strength in max might situations, using sigil of night/accuracy instead of strength in max might situations, building for direct bonuses instead of self-buffing, etc. and so on. Sigil of Night is 10% by itself, so the product of building for the group can have quite the substantial difference in performance.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Of course, the problem isn’t that people in ascended are wiping. it is that the system is “fine tuned” so that without ascended you’re chances of success, even on experienced runs, is gutted so drastically as to be a waste of time.

And that, dear writer, is bs. It’s not gutted drastically as to be a waste of time. Have you seen the VG kill? They had 3-4 people down several times. Even in PUGs that doesn’t happen at all on this encounter. They could have restarted the run like he said and having 1:30 min time left on a proper kill.

Have you seen the Gorseval kill? They failed the first time then had 9 seconds remaining the second time. Quit cherry picking.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Absolutely not. I’ll break it down simply: just because something is doable in exotic gear, doesn’t mean it is meant to be done in exotic gear.

Nobody said that. The guild just has shown that it is possible to do in exotics so nobody should complain about getting asc for the raid because it is not necessary!

Yes, they did. “- the raid is doable and balanced around being completed in full exotic – FACT” — Cyninja. Earlier in the thread.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The raids aren’t “finely tuned” for exotic. They’re tuned for ascended. It just happens that, much like how dungeons can be done in the buff, Raids can be done in Exotic Gear still. Raids are tuned more lightly for ascended than some people would like. So if a person can’t do it in exotic gear, the first and foremost thing they “aren’t doing right” is that they don’t have ascended.

No, the devs wanted to have the content to be designed for just ascended. That doesn’t mean it is only for ascended and that ppl can improve to show us such video like Deroir did.
Like I said before: There is a huge difference betweed the work of the devs and how well it is attuned with player skill.

Um.. yes, it does mean that it is only for ascended. That’s the whole point of designing things for ascended. If the system happens to be designed poorly or not tuned properly, that doesn’t change intent.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Another thing to note is that only ascended rings are cheap.
Ascended Weapons and Backpacks cost 150 gold each, and the amulet/trinkets run 35/40 laurels + 50 ectoplasm, meaning that you can only buy them after a long period of time. That or hope your guild is big enough, so instead of waiting a month you wait 3 weeks.

The usual casual isn’t even lvl 80 in 3 weeks. And nowadays there are many ways to get asc trinkets. You’ll even get them in the story mode, via collections, gold. So it’s very easy if you have the goal to do raids.

You can get particular stat sets of ascended trinkets that way. Personally, I’ve found the ascended nomad trinkets from LWS2 to only be good for salvaging.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Currently, I am making ascended weapons for all my toons. I already have 2 toons with full weapons, so given my remaining characters I only need 3,900 more gold to kit them out. Then 850 more gold for the backpacks.

Asc weapons are accountbound. With a little bit of intelligence you can reduce that sum if you swap weapons between your characters.

And change the runes and sigils every time I swap them, as the build that they are tailor made for may not necessarily be the same between classes, or even the same between any particular group. DnT guides themselves usually recommending having multiple copies of the same weapon with different sigils for this exact purpose: if you have to replace your rune set every time you alt, the prices get out of hand very quickly.

I suppose that, instead of giving my characters their own ascended weapons, I can just make 3-4 copies of every weapon and then have each one of them with different sigils, and allocate them to different classes. But that isn’t cheaper than just making ascended weapons for all my toons in the first place.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You’re forgetting luck. Luck is a factor, always. Skill itself is heavily weighted toward one side: you can theoretically have no contribution by assuming an utterly incompetent player, but a hyper-competent player can only achieve a bit more. You aren’t suddenly going to do more DPS than the max damage rotation just because you want it enough. There’s a hard limit there, to what your class is capable of and how much of an impact you can have.

Speaking about luck reminds me of the League of Legends Bronze players that were complaining about their team and that all higher ranked people just had luck in some games and therefore are in higher tiers. This is the biggest bs ever! There is no luck involved, only bad rng. But rng won’t stop you from defeating the bosses in a raid all the time.
Luck is NEVER EVER a factor.

You just contradicted yourself. “bad rng” IS LUCK.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

It is a perceptual mistake that people have, where they assume that an average player only does half the damage of a “skilled” player, because “half” is the middle of maximum and zero. It doesn’t work like that. If you have the competence to stand- in melee range and spam high DPS skills when off cooldown, then you’re already doing 90% of what a “skilled” player is. The “skilled” player is the one who’s most adept at dealing with random BS that comes their way.

I recommend you to play with a group of very good players. Just a short Ascalonian Catacombs run. As long as you are no top player you will struggle to keep the pace and if we would record your damage logs it would result in a dramatically decreased amount of dps on your side.

So basically you have no evidence and no bit of logic to assert the contrary, but just rest assured that you’re right somehow. Yeah, no. I don’t buy it for a second. I’ve joined guild run dungeons before. Several dozen times over the years. It is actually easier to maintain damage in them, as enemies are more likely to be disabled and pulled to a single location, and dangerous targets get focused so it is easier to stay alive.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Nothing you have listed gives and indication of that statement being misleading. At all. It is saying exactly what the issue is: Doing this in Exotic is impractical and hard. To get the experience to do the raid comfortably in exotic, you need to do it in ascended first. But why would you need to be comfortable in exotics then?

No, VG is fine in practicing with exotics. 1:30 min time left for a good organized guild group like KING is bringing enough time for mistakes on an organized group with non-speedrunners.

You’ve made this mistake about a dozen times now, so I’m going to stop you here. VG is not the raid.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

At the end of the raid, he says that it is doable, but everybody has to bring their A+ game. Everybody died on Gorseval and Sabetha, so unless there was some secret strategy change that went down between takes that he never talked about, then the raid’s are so hard that you shouldn’t be doing them in exotic gear.

LOL!
Thats bullkitten again. A raid should be hard and you should be forced to bring your A+ game. Of course you wipe several times. This is how to raid. You practice, you fail, you still practice and someday you will hopefully succeed. It depends on you and the group but not on the difference between exotics and ascended gear.
NoTrigger has also shown you that the Revenant wasn’t even playing an A+ game. They still beat it.

At what point exactly did I say that a raid should be easy? How far did you get into the paragraph before you closed your mind and opened our mouth? This paragraph doesn’t have to do with anything, and it is utter BS. If you want to say that the difference between exotic and ascended doesn’t play a part, then prove the math wrong somehow. This whole “i’m too cool for statistically significant differences to matter” thing is a big steaming pile of cow kitten .

Cyninja.2954:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Cyninja.2954:

It always amazes me how people try to spin and argue things into their favor no matter what is shown

You are utterly full of it. Your beliefs on this subject are not automatically correct and superior just because you hold them. What proof do you have that you aren’t the deluded one, spinning things into his own favor no matter what they are shown? And here you stand, talking down to people who disagree with you. It is insulting, and you should feel bad.

The biggest problem I have here is that I have not been given one piece of information that isn’t internally contradictory or utter nonsense. It is like this in every single thread I’ve heard. Why can’t you people just admit that, as the devs intended, raids are not casual in any sense? No, you always have to go on with hate speech about anyone who can’t do the raids because they’re stupid or something.

I’m not full of anything. I provided a link, everyone can watch the video and read the thread and make their own conclusions. You have provided 0 material on this subject except for your subjective view.

I have provided quotations, links, mathematics, and logic, and I have explained multiple times in detail how your assertions are faulty. You are being a hypocrite here: You made this thread so people can make their own conclusions, then spew a superiority complex when someone makes a conclusion you don’t agree with.

Cyninja.2954:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

. Why can’t you people just admit that, as the devs intended, raids are not casual in any sense? No, you always have to go on with hate speech about anyone who can’t do the raids because they’re stupid or something.

No one said raids are casual friendly. Wth are you talking about? This entire thread is about players and for players who are interested in raiding. The fact that raid content is not casual friendly AND difficult is a GIVEN.

The only question was and always has been, is it doable in exotics or are arenanet forcing people to gear up.

Oh and on the hate speach part, I’m not going to comment your aggressive post. People reading this thread get to make their own judgments.

Just because something is doable in exotics doesn’t mean that Anet isn’t trying to get people to gear up. You can do high level fractals in the nude, too, but that doesn’t stop Agony Resistance from being an unyielding pressure to get you into ascended. I’m also not going to pretend that the consistent debate on the nature of raids and casuals that has permeated this game suddenly doesn’t exist.

Cyninja.2954:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

This is not true at all. The devs recommended having full ascended for the raids, ergo the raids were balanced around full ascended.

Recommended =/= required =/= balanced around.

Also we are not at the endboss of the raid which essentially is where ascended will supposedly be required. Stop making stuff up.

You’ve made up an intermediary step that wasn’t there. The real line is this: Recommended = Balanced Around. And it holds. Riddle me this: if the raids weren’t balanced around ascended gear, then why would the devs recommend it in the first place? Wouldn’t they say “don’t worry, you can stick to exotic gear?”.

Your end point is also nonsensical. You’re basically just saying that I will be right in the future, and therefore I’ve made a mistake somehow. I fail to see how that follows. And also, this contradicts your first point, because you are saying that yes, ascended will be required for raids, in spite of everything you’ve done to assert the contrary.

Cyninja.2954:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

This is nonsense. “Well designed” is a quality judgement. It can’t be a fact, because “well” is strictly an opinion. As is “very”. If I say they are not well designed, how do you prove me wrong, or prove yourself right?

Correct, and my quality judgement is based on the given material to be viewed. The only way to prove this to be or not be the case would require a look at the exact numbers used in the code. Since we have no access to those and I don’t expect arenanet to give us access, I’m using the next best thing. You have not provided anything resembling a counter argument even to this subjective opinion in form of player data.

Yeah, sorry, having an opinion doesn’t make you superior. You are not the next best thing to a word of god. I have demonstrated, time and again, that what you are saying doesn’t make sense, and have provided countless counter-arguments. You are just so full of it that anything you don’t agree with or don’t believe doesn’t count in your own mind.

I do wonder exactly how your brain functions. You first consider yourself absolute authority, then say you are open to opinion and let people say whatever they want, then have a problem with people saying whatever they want because they don’t agree with your beliefs, and that nothing anyone says that disagrees with you can mean anything. There’s a term for this: doublethink

Cyninja.2954:

I’d get into all the nitpicking seperately, but to be honest I simply don’t care what you think. You mix my statements with other facts in order to delude and twist their meaning (see my comment on trinkets. I never mentioned weapons to be cheap, yet you use them as a counter argument).

Trinkets are easy to come by IF you use the appropriate content (yes, they are more expensive if you revert to backup content. this has been pointed out multiple times).

Also last time I checked, even the backpack number you gave is way off (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Quiver_of_a_Thousand_Arrows) at current market price comes out at about 90g (way less than 150g, and evene cheaper with buy orders. that’s not even considering the cheapest alternative which is via the intended way of crafting a fractal backpiece). Hyberbole much?

If you didn’t care what I thought, then you wouldn’t have spent several posts dedicated to talking about it.

Likewise, you are being a hypocrite again. You accuse me of being deceptive, while deliberately omitting everything I have said about trinkets. I have to repeat that, out of trinkets, only rings were cheap. Everything else is not. Likewise, I calculated the ascended back item using the Quiver of Swift Flight, which costs 159.2 gold to make. Going by that cost, I underestimated it. Your original statement is omitting something very important: the most statistically significant difference in terms of performance in ascended gear is weapons. Not only because of the additional stats they provide, but because their modifier on weapon strength applies to everything, magnifying the bonuses of every other ascended item. I am not "deceptive’, I am more inclusive.

Also, the trinkets via alternative methods use specific stat sets. It only matters if you can use alternative means to acquire a useful trinket, not a useless one.

Cyninja.2954:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

There isn’t some magic force that will guide you to an optimized DPS rotation and a perfect build for the encounter. You can’t even measure your DPS.

You can measure your DPS. PvP-Golem anyone + Dmg-numbers in the chat panel?

Now this is hilarious. Your damage numbers aren’t your DPS. That’s just how big a number you can get. Your DPS is your damage divided by time, which is a unit that isn’t provided in this game. I’ve taught enough people physics to know that “rate” is a concept not everyone understands easily. Hell, you yourself just got it wrong.

Maybe use a damage meter? Might help…. oh and those available use the chat panel currently. Where there is a will, there is a way.

Yeah, they’ve been tested out before and are frequently incorrect. Sometimes they’re even illegal. Even then, they’re not necessarily applicable.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You’re trying to turn this to be about my skill. Stop distracting from the point. Also, there is quite a large amount of the playerbase that can’t beat the encounters. Therefore, just admit that the devs were right and this is “hardcore content”.

I can beat the content, so my friends and all the dudes I have played with for longer than 1 day can say that I am the living proof this raid wing is not hardcore content.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I’ve seen plenty on the forums and in the game. Raids are a highly toxic environment, so much so that people are making videos just to debate that subject, which is why this very thread was started. Or have you forgotten that already?

Maybe these people should focus on training and not making stupid videos where they argue dozens of hours like politicians. DO IT and THEN talk about it.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Raids aren’t dungeons. What applies to dungeons doesn’t apply to raids. The big difference here is that, when dungeons were made, they were designed with relative ignorance of the combat systems for the game. When raids were designed, they were designed with an extremely well informed experience over the combat systems of the game.

“Well informed experience over the combat systems”? Rly? According to you, highest toughness for being the tank, Boon strip, condition damage, applying cc (although we had icebow to stop dmg from mobs for over a year) and some pew-pew-gliding is well informed experience over the combat system? I can barely laugh about that.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Likewise, dungeons were nerfed purposefully and powercreeped. Fractals were also powercreeped, and then most recently nerfed again. The state that we see dungeons in now is nothing like how they were during beta, or launch. I still remember people making guides on how to get past the burrows in the lover’s crypt for Ascalon Catacombs. Funny thing, doing that dungeon at launch in level 35 masterwork gear was actually difficult.

And? Like you are implying: Dungeons are 3 years old, fractals 2 years. Let’s wait a bit with raids. Maybe they won’t even survive this lifespan. But I am sure they will be easy for everyone if they still exist in 2017. Ppl making guides for raids now and they will continue till it won’t give any more value.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Emphasis mine. Your personal clique is not representative of what people think about raids. And it doesn’t matter what what your clique thinks about the asc. vs. exotic debate. The benefits are ascended are a fact. You can measure them and everything.

And? I never denied that. We all know that and we all wrote that down here many times.
Beyond that I know my limits but I also know the limit of players that are only doing content like world bosses or SW. You need to press “1” for this content and another key to loot. This is not how raids are working. Hard to accept that for that kind of players. But it is like it is.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You have no point here. “Well” is still an opinion. You are just being irritating.

And where is your point? So you think it is not well designed. Why? The enrage timers just ensures that you cannot facetank the content. Maybe it’s my opinion and I think with this result it is a good designed (= correct timespan) timer.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

If you frequent the thief forum, you’d notice that a chief complaint is that the daredevil is never taken into raids, that you can’t get into raids as a daredevil, and that the daredevil is the least used class in successful runs. Likewise, something that doesn’t get displayed is that these different team comps are all built around each other. They’re frequent groups of friends with enough spare gold to tailor-make their gear specifically to work well with other tailor-made gear. If you just build solo or PVP-style your team will have a lot of redundancy that has to be worked around, and these build choices can have a substantial impact. I.E. using scholar runes instead of strength in max might situations, using sigil of night/accuracy instead of strength in max might situations, building for direct bonuses instead of self-buffing, etc. and so on. Sigil of Night is 10% by itself, so the product of building for the group can have quite the substantial difference in performance.

Sigil of Night is deactivated in raids. It was printed several weeks before release so everybody can adapt. Strength vs. Scholar has no relevant impact on pugs. If you are min/maxing, yes there is a difference but that has nothing to do with exotics vs. asc.

There are several videos of successful kills with a daredevil. I will not disclaim that thiefs are not the thing to use atm. But we had the same issue with necromancers and engineers over a long time. This is a balance thing and there will always be a class that will fall behind. These days it is the thief.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Have you seen the Gorseval kill? They failed the first time then had 9 seconds remaining the second time. Quit cherry picking.

Ofc they failed. EVERY FRICKING raid group was and is failing. Even with asc items. This is like “Mordor”: You just don’t walk simply into raids and beat them. Look at some of older speed run attempt video takeouts of the speedclear guilds. They are messing up on three year old faceroll content from time to time.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Yes, they did. “- the raid is doable and balanced around being completed in full exotic – FACT” — Cyninja. Earlier in the thread.

Yes, that is their statement but like Cyninja already pointed out: “recommended” ist not equal “balanced around” to “100% required”.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Um.. yes, it does mean that it is only for ascended. That’s the whole point of designing things for ascended. If the system happens to be designed poorly or not tuned properly, that doesn’t change intent.

What? Ok, so it is for ascended and I am not allowed to play in exotics now or how should I understand that?
What is your point here? What are you trying to say?
And again, Cyninja mentioned it: The last boss of the raid is not even released and that was their statement. “Maybe you will be able to kill some bosses in exotics if you are organized, but the last boss is meant to be fought in ascended gear only.”

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You can get particular stat sets of ascended trinkets that way. Personally, I’ve found the ascended nomad trinkets from LWS2 to only be good for salvaging.

This is cherrypicking at it’s best. We have already shown you some alternatives. The Wiki and Google will also help players to acquire their trinkets. Communication and guilds are also a good point.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

And change the runes and sigils every time I swap them, as the build that they are tailor made for may not necessarily be the same between classes, or even the same between any particular group. DnT guides themselves usually recommending having multiple copies of the same weapon with different sigils for this exact purpose: if you have to replace your rune set every time you alt, the prices get out of hand very quickly.

I have said “some” not all. An example: I can use the same sword and axe of my warrior on my revenant. Same with mace between guard and warrior.
And if DnT is telling me that I need different weapon sigils or armor runes on VG, Gorse and Sabe, only to be able to beat these three, I would laugh at them very hard. (I know they won’t do it)

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I suppose that, instead of giving my characters their own ascended weapons, I can just make 3-4 copies of every weapon and then have each one of them with different sigils, and allocate them to different classes. But that isn’t cheaper than just making ascended weapons for all my toons in the first place.

Just use your brain and some mathematics and you will find out that you don’t need to invest that much gold. What a bullkitten!

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You just contradicted yourself. “bad rng” IS LUCK.

Look, this is why we cannot take your whole arguments and the discussion seriously any longer. You are whining like a little child. I dissociate myself now from this hairsplitting and just state the fact that the seekers and green circles aren’t against you all the time. You can also see to it that seekers are pushed away and you can take influence on the spawning field of the green circle. Maybe you will get a bad rng once or twice, as long as you execute your thing properly you will succeed. Rng won’t stop you from the goal line if you are attempting more than 1-3 times.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

So basically you have no evidence and no bit of logic to assert the contrary, but just rest assured that you’re right somehow. Yeah, no. I don’t buy it for a second. I’ve joined guild run dungeons before. Several dozen times over the years. It is actually easier to maintain damage in them, as enemies are more likely to be disabled and pulled to a single location, and dangerous targets get focused so it is easier to stay alive.

What? The only thing I am saying is, that better players are executing stuff better than worse players. You don’t believe that? It is no miracle that if you are in a group with a thief blinding the trash you can drive max dps without caring. But there is this player required who knows how to. That’s the same thing in raids. Every single out of 10 players need to know his class or at least 9 people since we are actually able to carry one bad apple in the raid. But if there are 2 or more people that have no clue about what they are doing, you won’t succeed in raids. And now I want to know where is the transition to exotics and asc here? A player that dumb will have no impact and won’t succeed at all, not with exotics, not with asc.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You’ve made this mistake about a dozen times now, so I’m going to stop you here. VG is not the raid.

What is the most complaint then? About what are we arguing? The people that saying VG is not doable with exotics and this is bs. Proven as hardcore bs. And I didn’t make any mistake. They beat all encounters in exotics. I am right here, the arguments are on my side.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

At what point exactly did I say that a raid should be easy? How far did you get into the paragraph before you closed your mind and opened our mouth? This paragraph doesn’t have to do with anything, and it is utter BS. If you want to say that the difference between exotic and ascended doesn’t play a part, then prove the math wrong somehow. This whole “i’m too cool for statistically significant differences to matter” thing is a big steaming pile of cow kitten .

And again, you are trying to put something in my mouth I have never ever said.
One last time:

Is there is a difference of ascended gear compared to exotics? Yes!

Does it matter in being successful in the raid. Not at all KING has proven it.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

“Regardless of what I am about to show you”. Anything in that video you submit as evidence is immediately contradicted by what the video itself says. If the guy making the video literally says not to use Exotic Gear, then what is the arguing point for exotic gear being adequate? How badly you can ignore what the author himself says?

What? So much lol!

Ofc he is recommending to do the content in asc gear because it is easier and he is not recommending to do it in exotics because it is harder. That changes nothing on the fact that the content can be cleared in exotics. And there is also another point why he is telling this: He is a better player than many others will ever be. And he knows that, otherwise he would just say: I recommend doing the raid in exotics but maybe it’s possible with rare gear.

So if he is a better player than many others will ever be, that implies that many others wouldn’t be able to clear the content in exotics. Dude, logic isn’t just some verbal trickery invented by old guys. It is actually a useful tool to for the betterment of society.

Maybe you’ve missed it, but “can” does not mean practical, worthwhile, accessible, or reliable. It means that leet players can beat content with a handicap. See: nude runs. Hell, even fractals only require ascended for agony resistance. “Can” is the most worthless of qualifiers, and is of no comfort to the casual crowd.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You are purposefully ignoring everything I’ve demonstrated mathematically just to be contradictory. My numbers won’t go away because you can ignore the author of the video.

And his numbers are going away or what? He stated that they have 1.5 minutes left on their timer during their proper VG-kill. 90 seconds left in full exotics. These seconds are 18.75% of the full timer! You cannot ignore that.

Cherry picking again.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The funny thing about DPS rotations and build compositions is that, every time they are improved, it immediately proves the previous set as inferior. Thus, anything you say about a meta comp is more likely than not, wrong as a necessity. Due to the complexity of how you can arrange the builds of a 10 man group, there isn’t a “set way” that anything can be done. Let alone, any sort of guiding hand that would leave people there.

I have never ever said anything against that. The fact that you can have different team compositions AND still defeat the bosses is an argument for exotic gear not against. It shows that teamplay and playerskill is responsible for a success but not the gear.

Yes, you did. You said that for raids, there is a right way to do things, and a wrong way to do things. You also said that the only reason why people can ram their head against the raid wall and not progress is that they aren’t doing it right. Now you’re going off on some random tangent about how the thing you disagreed with somehow argues for exotic gear (which it doesn’t. Ascended gear would mean more leeway and more build diversity, so yay ascended!), and are forgetting that for many raids are an insurmountable wall that leaves them perplexed and with no idea how to improve or get better. The whole “10 hours not succeeding” thing is disproof of skill being a sole deciding factor, as after that much practice and experience a person would have all the skill they needed.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Again, you’ve cut out an extremely important part of my post: there is no “guiding hand” or indicator of what a player is doing wrong. Sure, if they don’t meet the DPS requirements they can change their gear to do more damage (assuming that they can still survive), but even when that happens and you still lose, what then? I’ll give an example: Phantasmal Swordsman is the highest damaging Illusion for Mesmers. However, unless you sit there with a stop watch and time the hits and how much damage they do, you wouldn’t have access to that information. So if a raid comes down to something like which phantasm you use (or any other class equivalent), what indication is there that phantasmal duelist is the wrong one?

That is what I meant with “You can’t play how you want”. At least you have to read your traits, skills and the best choice is to discuss with your other 9 players to find gaps or doublings that can be deleted for an increase of dps or sustain. Still has nothing to do with exotics.

You’ve completely missed the point: there is no guiding hand that will suddenly give you this knowledge. This will leave you on a localized maximum performance hill that is insubstantial to complete the content. Ascended gear increases the height of this hill, allowing you to complete content that you couldn’t complete previously.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

This applies for more than just damage. If players die, is the healer not healing well enough? What is the maximum healing? Is boon application not enough? What constitutes the threshold for useful boon application in a 10 man group? How would a player acquire this information in-game? I’ve seen plenty of guides myself, many of them suggesting different things for the same game mode. How do you tell which one is true when they all seem to fail equally?

This is why you test it. You talk to other players that are playing your class. You read guides and you gain more and more informations. The game is played by thousands of players so you are not the single man on Mars. Be communicative and you will get help if you stuck.
And you try, try, try. Sometimes little changes will bring you closer to the goal line and then you will keep them.
Still has nothing to do with exotics.

And your teammates, who are equally failing, are supposed to know this how? If you test multiple things and still fail, how are you sure that you’ve even done better? It also has a lot to deal with exotics. See local maximum above.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Your perspective is skewed. The people who sit down with a stop watch and time things to get maximum DPS rotations are the vast minority. 99% of gamers are not like us. But, because you are surrounded by people who do the same, you can’t fathom that a person wouldn’t know this information, and would lack the ability to even conceptualize DPS.

You don’t even need to. It is an example. But before I say “I use this and that weapon on a char for raids cuz it’s cool.” I will keep an eye if it makes sense. Like before, there are enough youtube videos that will explain to me why I shouldn’t playing rifle warrior.

So… you spend the previous two quotes talking about how you should inch incrementally toward getting higher DPS (in spite of having no capability of testing that), then say you don’t need to do the things that would allow you to inch forward.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Now this is hilarious. Your damage numbers aren’t your DPS. That’s just how big a number you can get. Your DPS is your damage divided by time, which is a unit that isn’t provided in this game. I’ve taught enough people physics to know that “rate” is a concept not everyone understands easily. Hell, you yourself just got it wrong.

I don’t know what to say, sigh. Ofc you need a timer for getting dps results. So you record your rotations on video and you can timeshift properly with a software of your choice.
I don’t know why you are hanging on this, lol. NoTrigger already told you that you don’t even need the best dps rotations, you will still succeed.

So you are supposed to incrementally step forward, but not use the tools to do that, but then you don’t need to? Anyway, the point is that, since you yourself failed to conceptualize DPS in a debate related to DPS, that other people will also fail to conceptualize DPS properly, and thus will not improve in a meaningful way, as that information is not obvious. Thus, the advantages that Ascended gives become more and more necessary the less leet you are.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

That doesn’t change the erroneous nature of your statement. You are defending the assertion that the only reason why it is people fail is because they aren’t doing it right, that gear tiers aren’t important. What do you think happens if, after a full work day of grinding on a raid boss? That the player never realizes that you need to stand in the green circle? That the red guardian needs conditions to be killed? In order to assert that gear tiers aren’t important, you have to assert a measure of incompetence onto people so severe that they would lack the basic skills to… be.

Oh yes, there are many incompetent players out there. I wasted 2 hours on VG due to my buddy not knowing how to use alacrity on mesmer because he played a selfish build. That was what I meant with you have to communicate with your team. He also didn’t use sword for boon strip although we told him and relied on it!
The next example was a tank that always pulled the VG near the green circle so that some of the other dumb players in our group were teleported away. I told it several times in TS and after 30 minutes of not adapting, I just quit.
One or two groups later, people listened, did their job, some in exotics, some in ascended and we had over 50 seconds left because it was well executed.

To be fair, the benefits of alacrity on teammates are even less obvious than outright DPS calculations. I’ve been on teams in dungeons countless times where the self-appointed elitist of the group would complain about the wrong things. Heck, every time I try to organize King of the Jungle I have to deal with at least one know-it-all who will fight tooth and nail against the accepted and time tested methods that work. After all, it isn’t like the correct choice is obvious or something that you can come across after several hours of practice.

The whole point being that, with builds requiring custom tailoring and specific sigils/runes depending on team composition, Ascended is even more of a requirement, as it gives that necessary leeway to allow for more diversity and more mistakes in practice. This is enforced, because “skill” is not going to suddenly fill the gaps in the minds of players who are playing this content. Ascended gear will.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

It is crazy. The difference between ascended and exotic is quickly calculated, and easily noticeable. Buying an extra 50 seconds in a fight is a big deal.

Yes, there is a difference, ofc you are faster. Nobody was denying that. But the 1.5 minutes of Deroir are a simple sign that it is more than possible for a pug to be successful in just exotics.

Cherry Picking.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You just contradicted yourself. You said people play poorly and lose because they mouse click their skills. Then you assert that mouseclicking skills doesn’t cause you to lose. So which is it?

Nope, I didn’t. At first, I just showed you that a gaming mouse doesn’t make the difference between defeating or losing. Secondly, if you can klick fast, you are also in time and fine but another buddy of mine is clicking everything. He cannot beat the VG because he is just too slow to get the actions done. This is why he admitted that this content is not his thing and it won’t be in the future.

Yes, you did.

" They are dying way earlier due to several mistakes like … being too slow with cc (a.k.a. mouse klicking spells)"

Then

“… and I am also clicking some abilities with the mouse. The thing is: I’ve beaten the encounters. Your argument is invalid!”

And now you are saying that it only counts when you say it counts. Mouse clicking doesn’t lead to failure, except in the cases where it does lead to failure. Sounds to me like the problem isn’t actually mouse clicking at all.

And after all that, it has nothing to deal with an enrage timer encouraging risky behavior.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

This is another thing that is contradictory. You assert that people are losing because they aren’t playing well enough, but then say don’t worry about it and play it safe. When a player plays it safe, they attack with ranged weapons to avoid all of the mechanics, and end up doing terrible DPS because of it. So, they have to play risky in order to do enough deeps to win.

Well, you have everything achieved asap in life you had to do? I doubt that. You had to practice, practice and practice. The higher you get the barriers become bigger and bigger and you have to take step by step to get across them.
Put that to the raid. You start and you will try to do as less mistakes as possible. If you can do that properly with your whole group, which is hard, you will perhaps die to the enrage timer. Maybe, but I am certain you will not. Or maybe you will 2-3 times. Then your next goal will be what? Yes, looking for an increase of dps.
You will come to conclusions: Are we having the right classes? How are the builds, is there anything we can adjust? And so on.
In the end, the thing is: It’s not the exotic gear that will make you struggle.

“Practice” doesn’t change the issue. You still have to play risky to maximize DPS. Having exotic gear will kitten your performance.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Are you saying that practicing failing tactics will somehow get you to succeed? Regardless, the first wipes you’ll get on a raid will always be because of learning the mechanics. That is a given, and isn’t actually relevant to the whole “Enrage Timer encourages riskier behavior” issue.

Try and error will lead you to success if you are able to learn. That is what I pointed out.
And sure learning the mechanics is a given, I didn’t even deny that. But again: pugs are wiping most frequently due to mechanical mistakes, not the enrage timer!

They are making mechanical mistakes because the enrage timer forces them to play riskier. We’ve officially come full circle now.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I’m not sure 8 nomad-hammer-guards would ever make it past gorseval or sabetha, timer or not. Either way, I’m not sure it is a problem. Having an entire tank group like that would mean that the players would have to contend with the OHKO mechanics of the raid for 45 mintues straight, per boss. You yourself are saying that most players die because of the raid mechanics themselves. Wearing tankier gear won’t solve that problem.

Why aren’t you sure? I haven’t seen a try till now. And wearing tankier gear is solving the problem of incoming damage. At VG I can run around circles with my full soldier guard (not even nomads!) and I only die when there aren’t enough people for the green circles. 8 (2 groups of 4+4) nomad hammer guards won’t die there if we have no timer. Ah, i have to admit, they can die there – if they are stupid/have no skill at all.

If you are constantly dying to mechanical problems and raid mechanics (many of which are OHKOs), then prolonging how much you are exposed to these problems prolongs how likely it is you will die. I.E. the likelyhood that 4 players will miss the circle grows exponentially the longer the fight becomes.

Vale Guardian is the worst example here. Let me elaborate on the better example: as you fight Sabetha, the platform you are on will take damage. Slowly, but it will accumulate. If you decide that DPS means nothing and go full tank, you won’t be able to kill the minions that cause damage to the platform, and thus it will cause you to fail.

I’ve played other games with raids, and the failure mechanic isn’t always a hard timer. Back in City of Heroes, there was practically a different failure mechanic for each boss in their raids. Sometimes adds could accumulate too quickly, sometimes boss regen would grow too high and you couldn’t out-damage it anymore… one of my favorites was a boss that would create damage patches that did high piercing damage (that is, damage that ignored toughness), and as the fight went on, more and more of these patches of start appearing. If that mechanic was adapted to a raid, after awhile the patches would consume the world and you’d all die.

I’m fine with there being a soft timer like that, because it gives you multiple means of managing the difficulties of the boss. But a hard enrage timer is the worst way to do things. It removes flexibility instead of encouraging it.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

There’s many ways to build a boss to not be doable in full tank gear. Sabetha’s platform, for example. Enrage timers are a copy/paste from other MMOs, and are based on counteracting the extremely simplistic design of their content.

And? I don’t know what you are trying to say with that. Are you blaming the devs for installing a timer? A timer that plays no role if you are familiar with the mechanics?
You were taught that the timer is no argument against exotics and for ascended, that is the key in this discussion, not the timer itself.

The timer does play a role. It forces particular builds and strategies to maximize DPS, because otherwise the timer will force a failure. Ascended gear directly affects DPS, and since DPS is pertinent to the timer, ergo the timer is an argument against exotics.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The whole point is that it isn’t O.K. to stop moving to press a key. But, the problem with having all of your keybinds allocated to the left hand is that, in the fight, you’ll be using 2-3 fingers to move and dodge, which makes activating some skills difficult.

I don’t get your point here. Just play like you can do best with your mouse, keyboard, wheel or whatsoever. I have a gaming mouse with no bindings, a gaming keyboard with no bindings, I am older than the average, I have to work from monday to friday and even on weekend to prepare lessons for school or to phone with colleagues/parents. I am still able to beat the content. Your statement is, that it’s due to ascended and magic. I’d say it’s due to practice, improvement, fun and a big portion of ambition!

My point here is that you completely misunderstood what I said. You still aren’t understanding what I am saying. I’ve said countless times that there is no “magic”.

Look, I’m not going to lie: this discussion isn’t productive. Right now, all you are doing is taking each individual quote, then posting whatever retort that comes to mind regardless if it is relevant (or even rational). When I say things, I’m not even sure you understand them.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I have provided quotations, links, mathematics, and logic, and I have explained multiple times in detail how your assertions are faulty. You are being a hypocrite here: You made this thread so people can make their own conclusions, then spew a superiority complex when someone makes a conclusion you don’t agree with.

None of these were made in this thread or in any thread you linked in this threads discussion.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Just because something is doable in exotics doesn’t mean that Anet isn’t trying to get people to gear up. You can do high level fractals in the nude, too, but that doesn’t stop Agony Resistance from being an unyielding pressure to get you into ascended. I’m also not going to pretend that the consistent debate on the nature of raids and casuals that has permeated this game suddenly doesn’t exist.

Great, so take your bs into those other threads and stop derailing this one. Or did I just misunderstand you basically stating that “since everyone is talking about raids being for casuals, I’m going to blame every topic about raids for doing this?”.
Show me where this was at any point part of this debate.

Also your point on fractals being doable naked if off. That used to be the case but certainly is not with guaranteed agony damage ever since the fractured patch.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You’ve made up an intermediary step that wasn’t there. The real line is this: Recommended = Balanced Around. And it holds. Riddle me this: if the raids weren’t balanced around ascended gear, then why would the devs recommend it in the first place? Wouldn’t they say “don’t worry, you can stick to exotic gear?”.
Your end point is also nonsensical. You’re basically just saying that I will be right in the future, and therefore I’ve made a mistake somehow. I fail to see how that follows. And also, this contradicts your first point, because you are saying that yes, ascended will be required for raids, in spite of everything you’ve done to assert the contrary.

Yes, and we might see a level cap increase in the future, or the introduction of a new tier of gear, or the moon might fall onto the earth and end all life as we know it. Doesn’t matter we should worry about any of that now because, you know, it might not happen too.

Plans change, and even if arenanet sticks to their original plan, it’s not in game yet.
Also on why arenanet would encourage ascended: I don’t know, maybe to have people slowly gear up and prevent this current made up issue before it becomes an actual issue.

To simply assume this to be due to balance is assuming much.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Yeah, sorry, having an opinion doesn’t make you superior. You are not the next best thing to a word of god. I have demonstrated, time and again, that what you are saying doesn’t make sense, and have provided countless counter-arguments. You are just so full of it that anything you don’t agree with or don’t believe doesn’t count in your own mind.

I do wonder exactly how your brain functions. You first consider yourself absolute authority, then say you are open to opinion and let people say whatever they want, then have a problem with people saying whatever they want because they don’t agree with your beliefs, and that nothing anyone says that disagrees with you can mean anything. There’s a term for this: doublethink

I consider myself above nothing no matter how many times you state this. Do the following, reread this thread or better yet, have someone who’s opinion you value read the thread and ask them: what do you think?

You strolling in here and smokbombing a thread with predjudices and preconceptions from other threads certainly is not a simple opinion. Also no matter how many faulty examples you give, none of them stick unless they make sense.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

When I say things, I’m not even sure you understand them.

Wait, what was that about feeling superior and above others? O yeah right, it was me supposedly.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Likewise, you are being a hypocrite again. You accuse me of being deceptive, while deliberately omitting everything I have said about trinkets. I have to repeat that, out of trinkets, only rings were cheap. Everything else is not. Likewise, I calculated the ascended back item using the Quiver of Swift Flight, which costs 159.2 gold to make. Going by that cost, I underestimated it. Your original statement is omitting something very important: the most statistically significant difference in terms of performance in ascended gear is weapons. Not only because of the additional stats they provide, but because their modifier on weapon strength applies to everything, magnifying the bonuses of every other ascended item. I am not "deceptive’, I am more inclusive.

Also, the trinkets via alternative methods use specific stat sets. It only matters if you can use alternative means to acquire a useful trinket, not a useless one.

So you pick a more expensive backpiece to prove a point? Great, there goes your credibility. I thought we were talking about cheapest possible way.

Mentioning alternative stat combinations for trinkets too is not in favor of your “trinkets are not cheap” credo since most new stat combinations are based on achievements (if available at all). Again, not a major goldsink. Let’s keep throwing those smokebombs and confusing people.
If your “inclusion” of ascended weapons had been simply inclusive, you would have made a clear distinction of this instead of lumping it with the value of trinkets.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You’re trying to turn this to be about my skill. Stop distracting from the point. Also, there is quite a large amount of the playerbase that can’t beat the encounters. Therefore, just admit that the devs were right and this is “hardcore content”.

I can beat the content, so my friends and all the dudes I have played with for longer than 1 day can say that I am the living proof this raid wing is not hardcore content.

It just means you’re hardcore.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I’ve seen plenty on the forums and in the game. Raids are a highly toxic environment, so much so that people are making videos just to debate that subject, which is why this very thread was started. Or have you forgotten that already?

Maybe these people should focus on training and not making stupid videos where they argue dozens of hours like politicians. DO IT and THEN talk about it.

This is irrelevant.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Raids aren’t dungeons. What applies to dungeons doesn’t apply to raids. The big difference here is that, when dungeons were made, they were designed with relative ignorance of the combat systems for the game. When raids were designed, they were designed with an extremely well informed experience over the combat systems of the game.

“Well informed experience over the combat systems”? Rly? According to you, highest toughness for being the tank, Boon strip, condition damage, applying cc (although we had icebow to stop dmg from mobs for over a year) and some pew-pew-gliding is well informed experience over the combat system? I can barely laugh about that.

Never have I said any of those. You’re also being difficult here on purpose. You know what I mean, and are refusing to cooperate.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Likewise, dungeons were nerfed purposefully and powercreeped. Fractals were also powercreeped, and then most recently nerfed again. The state that we see dungeons in now is nothing like how they were during beta, or launch. I still remember people making guides on how to get past the burrows in the lover’s crypt for Ascalon Catacombs. Funny thing, doing that dungeon at launch in level 35 masterwork gear was actually difficult.

And? Like you are implying: Dungeons are 3 years old, fractals 2 years. Let’s wait a bit with raids. Maybe they won’t even survive this lifespan. But I am sure they will be easy for everyone if they still exist in 2017. Ppl making guides for raids now and they will continue till it won’t give any more value.

And dungeons =/= raids. It is simply that. What you’re saying here is irrelevant.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Emphasis mine. Your personal clique is not representative of what people think about raids. And it doesn’t matter what what your clique thinks about the asc. vs. exotic debate. The benefits are ascended are a fact. You can measure them and everything.

And? I never denied that. We all know that and we all wrote that down here many times.
Beyond that I know my limits but I also know the limit of players that are only doing content like world bosses or SW. You need to press “1” for this content and another key to loot. This is not how raids are working. Hard to accept that for that kind of players. But it is like it is.

If you are willing to accept that ascended has a meaningful impact, then the discussion is over.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You have no point here. “Well” is still an opinion. You are just being irritating.

And where is your point? So you think it is not well designed. Why? The enrage timers just ensures that you cannot facetank the content. Maybe it’s my opinion and I think with this result it is a good designed (= correct timespan) timer.

Since you are responding to my response to someone else, I’ll have to explain it. Cyninja threw out the typical highly opinionated value judgements that mean nothing and proclaimed them as “fact” that proved his case. He had no case. Your entire line is “ya huh!” + another debatable tidbit. You have nothing here.

My point is that the raid is well designed… for ascended. My evidence of this is that the devs recommend ascended, and that successes on bosses are often well within the threshold of the exotic-ascended differences.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

If you frequent the thief forum, you’d notice that a chief complaint is that the daredevil is never taken into raids, that you can’t get into raids as a daredevil, and that the daredevil is the least used class in successful runs. Likewise, something that doesn’t get displayed is that these different team comps are all built around each other. They’re frequent groups of friends with enough spare gold to tailor-make their gear specifically to work well with other tailor-made gear. If you just build solo or PVP-style your team will have a lot of redundancy that has to be worked around, and these build choices can have a substantial impact. I.E. using scholar runes instead of strength in max might situations, using sigil of night/accuracy instead of strength in max might situations, building for direct bonuses instead of self-buffing, etc. and so on. Sigil of Night is 10% by itself, so the product of building for the group can have quite the substantial difference in performance.

Sigil of Night is deactivated in raids. It was printed several weeks before release so everybody can adapt. Strength vs. Scholar has no relevant impact on pugs. If you are min/maxing, yes there is a difference but that has nothing to do with exotics vs. asc.

It was a particular example taken from dungeons. Likewise, min/maxing has everything to do with exotics vs. ascended. Ascended is maxed. Exotics are not. And as you are intruding upon a different conversation, so I will recap what is happening… again. The whole point is that what Cyninja attributed as proof of skill differences isn’t proof of skill differences. And that point holds. I gave a rough example in another thread once to demonstrate that, even with conservative numbers, that build can have a large effect on overall performance. The number I ended up with is roughly 50%, if you aren’t built specifically for raid circumstances.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Have you seen the Gorseval kill? They failed the first time then had 9 seconds remaining the second time. Quit cherry picking.

Ofc they failed. EVERY FRICKING raid group was and is failing. Even with asc items. This is like “Mordor”: You just don’t walk simply into raids and beat them. Look at some of older speed run attempt video takeouts of the speedclear guilds. They are messing up on three year old faceroll content from time to time.

You’re distracting from the point: you are cherry picking examples where the time remaining was long, and ignoring the parts where the time remaining was short. Short time intervals argue for ascended.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Yes, they did. “- the raid is doable and balanced around being completed in full exotic – FACT” — Cyninja. Earlier in the thread.

Yes, that is their statement but like Cyninja already pointed out: “recommended” ist not equal “balanced around” to “100% required”.

So then you are admitting that someone said that if something is doable in exotic gear, then it is meant to be doable in exotic gear. Good to know. Regardless, I’ve already responded to this earlier.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Um.. yes, it does mean that it is only for ascended. That’s the whole point of designing things for ascended. If the system happens to be designed poorly or not tuned properly, that doesn’t change intent.

What? Ok, so it is for ascended and I am not allowed to play in exotics now or how should I understand that?
What is your point here? What are you trying to say?
And again, Cyninja mentioned it: The last boss of the raid is not even released and that was their statement. “Maybe you will be able to kill some bosses in exotics if you are organized, but the last boss is meant to be fought in ascended gear only.”

I’ve already responded to cyninja. Now if you are accepting that I am correct (although your constant “What?” makes me think you don’t understand me at all), then I want you to admit that raids are not casual friendly. They are hardcore content, made to be exclusive, and a dedicated guild running group beating the guild in exotic doesn’t somehow make the gear tier irrelevant.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You can get particular stat sets of ascended trinkets that way. Personally, I’ve found the ascended nomad trinkets from LWS2 to only be good for salvaging.

This is cherrypicking at it’s best. We have already shown you some alternatives. The Wiki and Google will also help players to acquire their trinkets. Communication and guilds are also a good point.

You have shown nothing. At all.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

And change the runes and sigils every time I swap them, as the build that they are tailor made for may not necessarily be the same between classes, or even the same between any particular group. DnT guides themselves usually recommending having multiple copies of the same weapon with different sigils for this exact purpose: if you have to replace your rune set every time you alt, the prices get out of hand very quickly.

I have said “some” not all. An example: I can use the same sword and axe of my warrior on my revenant. Same with mace between guard and warrior.
And if DnT is telling me that I need different weapon sigils or armor runes on VG, Gorse and Sabe, only to be able to beat these three, I would laugh at them very hard. (I know they won’t do it)

You still have to make multiple ascended items, and passing between toons is not a productive solution.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I suppose that, instead of giving my characters their own ascended weapons, I can just make 3-4 copies of every weapon and then have each one of them with different sigils, and allocate them to different classes. But that isn’t cheaper than just making ascended weapons for all my toons in the first place.

Just use your brain and some mathematics and you will find out that you don’t need to invest that much gold. What a bullkitten!

You’re not a native English speaker, are you? Anyway, yeah it isn’t cheaper. I’d have to make multiples of weapons, with different stat sets and different sigils. I’m already ending up having 4-5 copies of some weapons, which is basically just making the weapons for the toons themselves anyhow.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You just contradicted yourself. “bad rng” IS LUCK.

Look, this is why we cannot take your whole arguments and the discussion seriously any longer. You are whining like a little child. I dissociate myself now from this hairsplitting and just state the fact that the seekers and green circles aren’t against you all the time. You can also see to it that seekers are pushed away and you can take influence on the spawning field of the green circle. Maybe you will get a bad rng once or twice, as long as you execute your thing properly you will succeed. Rng won’t stop you from the goal line if you are attempting more than 1-3 times.

If they aren’t against you all the time, then that means they are against you some of the time. Ergo, bad luck. It isn’t hairsplitting, it is a contradiction: what you have said is the rhetorical equivalent to a cat walking across the keyboard: utter nonsense. You are flailing like an impotent parent when their kids won’t listen to what they say, never questioning whether you make sense in the first place.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

So basically you have no evidence and no bit of logic to assert the contrary, but just rest assured that you’re right somehow. Yeah, no. I don’t buy it for a second. I’ve joined guild run dungeons before. Several dozen times over the years. It is actually easier to maintain damage in them, as enemies are more likely to be disabled and pulled to a single location, and dangerous targets get focused so it is easier to stay alive.

What? The only thing I am saying is, that better players are executing stuff better than worse players. You don’t believe that? It is no miracle that if you are in a group with a thief blinding the trash you can drive max dps without caring. But there is this player required who knows how to. That’s the same thing in raids. Every single out of 10 players need to know his class or at least 9 people since we are actually able to carry one bad apple in the raid. But if there are 2 or more people that have no clue about what they are doing, you won’t succeed in raids. And now I want to know where is the transition to exotics and asc here? A player that dumb will have no impact and won’t succeed at all, not with exotics, not with asc.

Lol no. What you are saying is that I personally suck and if I had good teammates I would have to be carried. You have no proof that my the assertion in performance between the median player and a player of phantom skill level isn’t close together, so you just devolved into vague condescending statement about how I would somehow see that I was wrong if I just played with good people.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You’ve made this mistake about a dozen times now, so I’m going to stop you here. VG is not the raid.

What is the most complaint then? About what are we arguing? The people that saying VG is not doable with exotics and this is bs. Proven as hardcore bs. And I didn’t make any mistake. They beat all encounters in exotics. I am right here, the arguments are on my side.

Well, the complaints about the raid are, generally, about the raid in its entirety. You’ve spent the whole time only talking about the Vale Guardian, which is the only part where the vid maker said the time was lenient, and instead completely ignore the other two thirds of the raid, where the vid maker said that the time was strict, incredibly difficult, and required peak performance of the whole team. So, when the guy says something along the lines of “ignore what this video shows, and do it in ascended”, this is what he is talking about.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

At what point exactly did I say that a raid should be easy? How far did you get into the paragraph before you closed your mind and opened our mouth? This paragraph doesn’t have to do with anything, and it is utter BS. If you want to say that the difference between exotic and ascended doesn’t play a part, then prove the math wrong somehow. This whole “i’m too cool for statistically significant differences to matter” thing is a big steaming pile of cow kitten .

And again, you are trying to put something in my mouth I have never ever said.
One last time:

Is there is a difference of ascended gear compared to exotics? Yes!

Does it matter in being successful in the raid. Not at all KING has proven it.

KING has not proven that ascended doesn’t matter. KING has proven that if you are good enough, the raid can barely be done in exotics. KING has also said that you shouldn’t do it in Exotics until after you have the experience of doing it in Ascended. In order for this to be true, Ascended must have a meaningful impact in the raid.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

So if he is a better player than many others will ever be, that implies that many others wouldn’t be able to clear the content in exotics. Dude, logic isn’t just some verbal trickery invented by old guys. It is actually a useful tool to for the betterment of society.

First of all, we are not in a university science course, this is an international gaming forum. I will come to that later again.
To the exotics: Maybe some won’t and you know why? Because they are bad players. I bet, unfortunately I cannot prove this, the players that cannot beat the raid in exotics cannot beat the raid in ascended as well. This conclusion is made by the simple fact I gave earlier: They don’t die to the timer, they die to random kitten they aren’t capable of denying.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Maybe you’ve missed it, but “can” does not mean practical, worthwhile, accessible, or reliable. It means that leet players can beat content with a handicap. See: nude runs. Hell, even fractals only require ascended for agony resistance. “Can” is the most worthless of qualifiers, and is of no comfort to the casual crowd.

No university science course, gaming forum! Can simply means possible. You, me, he, she, it can do et. Nothing more.
That’s it. Mike can do it in exotics. Perry cannot. Why is that so? Cuz Mike is the better gamer, Perry is a loser. End of story.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Cherry picking again.

Ha ha ha! You came with numbers. So I reflected it and now it is cherry picking? Well, this is how to argue, I understand.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Yes, you did. You said that for raids, there is a right way to do things, and a wrong way to do things.

Nope, I just said, that there are things that are obviously wrong, like rifle warrior and stuff like this where every intelligent player who is able to read traits and abilities must know that he is doing crap. Away from that there are many builds and abilities that will lead to success.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You also said that the only reason why people can ram their head against the raid wall and not progress is that they aren’t doing it right.

And? Isn’t that right? People are weekly clearing these raids with ease. So the others who aren’t able must do something wrong or they are bad.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Now you’re going off on some random tangent about how the thing you disagreed with somehow argues for exotic gear (which it doesn’t. Ascended gear would mean more leeway and more build diversity, so yay ascended!), and are forgetting that for many raids are an insurmountable wall that leaves them perplexed and with no idea how to improve or get better. The whole “10 hours not succeeding” thing is disproof of skill being a sole deciding factor, as after that much practice and experience a person would have all the skill they needed.

No, not at all. You are really believing that? There are so many players out there for being best examples. I’ve seen so many players that were taught to do so or so and till today they are not able to improve their gameplay. Not everyone on this planet is intelligent. We are not equal.
Otherwise people that are playing 20 years of soccer or doing any other sports should be able to achieve the gold medal. This is truely not the case for an obvious reason: They are lacking skill or if they aren’t lacking skill they are missing the (emotional) intelligence bring it on the table.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You’ve completely missed the point: there is no guiding hand that will suddenly give you this knowledge. This will leave you on a localized maximum performance hill that is insubstantial to complete the content. Ascended gear increases the height of this hill, allowing you to complete content that you couldn’t complete previously.

Nope, ascended gear doesn’t allow you to complete content thant you couldn’t complete previously. You can even see this in lower content: I’ve guided so many peeps through the city. With legendaries and ascended stuff. When it came to Lupicus they constantly wiped and the place was covered with their bodies while I was soloing it. And don’t forget: This content is easier as raids. So, no. Ascended just make it a bit easier but if there is content you cannot complete in exotics, you won’t be able to do so in asc. (The agony of fractals not mentioned here because it is a mechanic that has nothing to do with.)

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

And your teammates, who are equally failing, are supposed to know this how? If you test multiple things and still fail, how are you sure that you’ve even done better? It also has a lot to deal with exotics. See local maximum above.

You know it via communication and you know it via the health bar of the boss. If you are good at troubleshooting, you can minimize mistakes and maximize dps. It has nothing to do with exotics in first place because ppl wiping due to mistakes not to gear.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

So… you spend the previous two quotes talking about how you should inch incrementally toward getting higher DPS (in spite of having no capability of testing that), then say you don’t need to do the things that would allow you to inch forward.

You completely misread my words. I said you don’t need to do rotation test yourself. You can already watch them on YT. While you are struggling with raids and others not, it means that some have beaten the encounters. You can gain a lot out of that or you don’t. It’s a personal thing but if you don’t succeed and you haven’t tried sources that are accessible don’t expect people to be nice in the forums or being on your side of the argument.
And yes, my point is still standing. Try everything you can to maximize your dps. If you need proper rotation management, do so. If you think you need ascended armor, get it. But that is your personal need and in this case certainly not the one of others.

So you are supposed to incrementally step forward, but not use the tools to do that, but then you don’t need to? Anyway, the point is that, since you yourself failed to conceptualize DPS in a debate related to DPS, that other people will also fail to conceptualize DPS properly, and thus will not improve in a meaningful way, as that information is not obvious. Thus, the advantages that Ascended gives become more and more necessary the less leet you are.

I don’t need the tools to do by myself because I am not in the elite range. So I don’t need the PvP-Golem, I don’t need the dmg numbers of the chat and I don’t need a timer. The good thing is, that if I am not on the front, there are players that were doin it for me, so I can be happy and watch some perfect/proper rotations like this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2_S4ubeX7s
If I am not dumb I just need such a video of a player who has beaten the content and I will be able to adapt many things if mines aren’t better (which I would highly doubt here because I am no speedrunner, but NoTrigger is). If DnT is not your optimal choice, take an SC revenant or vC. Or better: Compare their playstyles.
Are you able to adapt the rotations, traits and build to100%? I doubt it, but if you can, you can talk about the difference between exotics and ascended.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

To be fair, the benefits of alacrity on teammates are even less obvious than outright DPS calculations. I’ve been on teams in dungeons countless times where the self-appointed elitist of the group would complain about the wrong things. Heck, every time I try to organize King of the Jungle I have to deal with at least one know-it-all who will fight tooth and nail against the accepted and time tested methods that work. After all, it isn’t like the correct choice is obvious or something that you can come across after several hours of practice.

Sry, but the dps increase with a chronomancer with continuum split compared to a mesmer without is huge. This is one of the main reasons why you are bringing a mesmer within the raid.
And now you are shifting to dungeons which makes no sense at all. I must not do it but you are allowed to argue like this? Come on, be fair and in this case you are absolutely wrong.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The whole point being that, with builds requiring custom tailoring and specific sigils/runes depending on team composition, Ascended is even more of a requirement, as it gives that necessary leeway to allow for more diversity and more mistakes in practice. This is enforced, because “skill” is not going to suddenly fill the gaps in the minds of players who are playing this content. Ascended gear will.

Nope, as I stated with the mesmer. It’s a way bigger difference having a skilled chronomancer and a team in exotics than not having a chrono but all peeps are in ascended.

The argument of ascended gives a bigger leeway is not debatable, yes. But I still haven’t denied it.

Cyninja.2954:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I have provided quotations, links, mathematics, and logic, and I have explained multiple times in detail how your assertions are faulty. You are being a hypocrite here: You made this thread so people can make their own conclusions, then spew a superiority complex when someone makes a conclusion you don’t agree with.

None of these were made in this thread or in any thread you linked in this threads discussion.

They were made all over this thread. Pay attention now. Your entire arguing point is to pretend this thread didn’t happen.

Cyninja.2954:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Just because something is doable in exotics doesn’t mean that Anet isn’t trying to get people to gear up. You can do high level fractals in the nude, too, but that doesn’t stop Agony Resistance from being an unyielding pressure to get you into ascended. I’m also not going to pretend that the consistent debate on the nature of raids and casuals that has permeated this game suddenly doesn’t exist.

Great, so take your bs into those other threads and stop derailing this one. Or did I just misunderstand you basically stating that “since everyone is talking about raids being for casuals, I’m going to blame every topic about raids for doing this?”.
Show me where this was at any point part of this debate.

Also your point on fractals being doable naked if off. That used to be the case but certainly is not with guaranteed agony damage ever since the fractured patch.

Um, no, that’s now how it works. When there is an ever-present topic about something, especially something controversial like raids, then every thread made about that topic is just a more specific line in the entire grand discussion. So yes, everything I’ve said is pertinent to this thread, especially when it has been in response to the small paragraph that I originally posted.

Likewise, your complaint here is that I am right about fractals, but not in the particular exact way that you would like. It is called nitpicking.

Cyninja.2954:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You’ve made up an intermediary step that wasn’t there. The real line is this: Recommended = Balanced Around. And it holds. Riddle me this: if the raids weren’t balanced around ascended gear, then why would the devs recommend it in the first place? Wouldn’t they say “don’t worry, you can stick to exotic gear?”.
Your end point is also nonsensical. You’re basically just saying that I will be right in the future, and therefore I’ve made a mistake somehow. I fail to see how that follows. And also, this contradicts your first point, because you are saying that yes, ascended will be required for raids, in spite of everything you’ve done to assert the contrary.

Yes, and we might see a level cap increase in the future, or the introduction of a new tier of gear, or the moon might fall onto the earth and end all life as we know it. Doesn’t matter we should worry about any of that now because, you know, it might not happen too.

Plans change, and even if arenanet sticks to their original plan, it’s not in game yet.
Also on why arenanet would encourage ascended: I don’t know, maybe to have people slowly gear up and prevent this current made up issue before it becomes an actual issue.

To simply assume this to be due to balance is assuming much.

The devs haven’t recommended buying higher level gear, so I wouldn’t worry about a level cap. Regardless, you’re using the uncertainty of the future to distract from the point that what you wrote is paradoxical.

You’re saying you don’t know why it is Anet recommends ascended. Maybe it is because, as the hardest content that has ever been released in the game, that ascended provides bonuses that are significant enough give success where there would’ve been failure? That maybe, as the content was designed to be “hardcore endgame content”, that the assumption would be that this end-game content would require end-game materials to beat it? Maybe it is because the gear of tier would be pertinent to the success of the raid in some way, shape, or form? Frankly, the idea of assuming it would have to deal with balance isn’t “much”. It is common sense.

Cyninja.2954:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Yeah, sorry, having an opinion doesn’t make you superior. You are not the next best thing to a word of god. I have demonstrated, time and again, that what you are saying doesn’t make sense, and have provided countless counter-arguments. You are just so full of it that anything you don’t agree with or don’t believe doesn’t count in your own mind.

I do wonder exactly how your brain functions. You first consider yourself absolute authority, then say you are open to opinion and let people say whatever they want, then have a problem with people saying whatever they want because they don’t agree with your beliefs, and that nothing anyone says that disagrees with you can mean anything. There’s a term for this: doublethink

I consider myself above nothing no matter how many times you state this. Do the following, reread this thread or better yet, have someone who’s opinion you value read the thread and ask them: what do you think?

You strolling in here and smokbombing a thread with predjudices and preconceptions from other threads certainly is not a simple opinion. Also no matter how many faulty examples you give, none of them stick unless they make sense.

I see you, too, do not have access to the scroll wheel. I came into this thread and said two sentences along with a quote from the video. The only reason why this discussion exists is because people were not content with the fact that I said the video was of no comfort to the whole “ascended required” debate that rages on everywhere. Every. Single. Thing. I have said in this thread has been a response to people being utterly intolerant to me.

You hypocrites have provoked the beast yourselves. Your words are betrayed by your actions.

Cyninja.2954:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

When I say things, I’m not even sure you understand them.

Wait, what was that about feeling superior and above others? O yeah right, it was me supposedly.

Actually, I’m fairly certain that Vinceman isn’t a native English speaker. The words are misspelled and written oddly, and it seems like every point I make goes over his head. I’ve typed out “the point is” so many times that I am considering making it a macro.

Cyninja.2954:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Likewise, you are being a hypocrite again. You accuse me of being deceptive, while deliberately omitting everything I have said about trinkets. I have to repeat that, out of trinkets, only rings were cheap. Everything else is not. Likewise, I calculated the ascended back item using the Quiver of Swift Flight, which costs 159.2 gold to make. Going by that cost, I underestimated it. Your original statement is omitting something very important: the most statistically significant difference in terms of performance in ascended gear is weapons. Not only because of the additional stats they provide, but because their modifier on weapon strength applies to everything, magnifying the bonuses of every other ascended item. I am not "deceptive’, I am more inclusive.

Also, the trinkets via alternative methods use specific stat sets. It only matters if you can use alternative means to acquire a useful trinket, not a useless one.

So you pick a more expensive backpiece to prove a point? Great, there goes your credibility. I thought we were talking about cheapest possible way.

Actually, I didn’t know that the other quiver existed. I picked the quiver of swift flight because it was listed under the “berserker” section on the wiki.

Cyninja.2954:

Mentioning alternative stat combinations for trinkets too is not in favor of your “trinkets are not cheap” credo since most new stat combinations are based on achievements (if available at all). Again, not a major goldsink. Let’s keep throwing those smokebombs and confusing people.
If your “inclusion” of ascended weapons had been simply inclusive, you would have made a clear distinction of this instead of lumping it with the value of trinkets.

So you can buy berserker trinkets with achievements now? Regardless, I am lumping together weapons and trinkets because they are part of the package. In fact, weapons are far more significant than the trinkets are. So you are saying “at least coughpartchough of the ascended gear is cheap! heyyyyyy, don’t bring up the bigger, more important part. you’re lying! weapons don’t count!” when you moan about how I brought up weapons when dealing with the cost of ascended. You’re trying to catch me on a technicality, but to do so means that you are lying in the first place.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Cherry Picking.

Not at all.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Yes, you did.

" They are dying way earlier due to several mistakes like … being too slow with cc (a.k.a. mouse klicking spells)"

Yes, it is an example. It must not be the fact. It could also be that the player is having disseminated sclerosis and is therefore not able to press/klick fast enough.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Then

“… and I am also clicking some abilities with the mouse. The thing is: I’ve beaten the encounters. Your argument is invalid!”

I repeat myself: It is an example. I can klick fast enough to be successful. I know players that can’t. Easy as it is.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

And now you are saying that it only counts when you say it counts. Mouse clicking doesn’t lead to failure, except in the cases where it does lead to failure. Sounds to me like the problem isn’t actually mouse clicking at all.

Cherry picking. I could also say reaction time. There are many players out there who aren’t fast enough = lack of skill in the game. Sometimes you can watch ppl dying slowly and laugh your a_ss off because it’s hella funny how slow they are moving/dodging w/e – and yes, it’s always the lag.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

And after all that, it has nothing to deal with an enrage timer encouraging risky behavior.

Still the majority of suffering people aren’t aiming for the enrage timer. Get over it!

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

“Practice” doesn’t change the issue. You still have to play risky to maximize DPS. Having exotic gear will kitten your performance.

No, your mechanical performance doesn’t depend on the exotics as KING has proven. Is it harder in exotics? Yes. Is it impossible in exotics? No. Have the mechanics changed while you are using exotics? No, absolutely not.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

They are making mechanical mistakes because the enrage timer forces them to play riskier. We’ve officially come full circle now.

And again I can just pray it from the roof:
If you are having this problem, don’t look at the timer. Take a strip of duck tape and glue it on your monitor. ^^ That is the best you can do and I will guarantee the people will still constantly wipe in phase 3 and 5 on VG, not to speak about Gorse and Sabe.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

If you are constantly dying to mechanical problems and raid mechanics (many of which are OHKOs), then prolonging how much you are exposed to these problems prolongs how likely it is you will die. I.E. the likelyhood that 4 players will miss the circle grows exponentially the longer the fight becomes.

See again, this is no university science course. I am sure you went through it, so did I but this is a gaming forum. Stop putting stupid game content to the next level. Ofc the group of 8 will wipe due to the likelyhood of anything there some day in infinity. But then we need the numbers and these are so little when I expect such a group being in TS and there are technically 8 tanks shouting “GREEN!” and all could be able to run into it at the same time cuz it doesn’t matter who is pulling the VG around.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Vale Guardian is the worst example here. Let me elaborate on the better example: as you fight Sabetha, the platform you are on will take damage. Slowly, but it will accumulate. If you decide that DPS means nothing and go full tank, you won’t be able to kill the minions that cause damage to the platform, and thus it will cause you to fail.

VG is the right example here. Actually we don’t need to speak about the other two in the first place because it’s the VG the majority has problems with. And additionally, I don’t want my example taken to the extent. It was just a simple thought about the fact that you have to keep pressure on players otherwise this content will fall down to fractals and dungeons.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I’ve played other games with raids, and the failure mechanic isn’t always a hard timer. Back in City of Heroes, there was practically a different failure mechanic for each boss in their raids. Sometimes adds could accumulate too quickly, sometimes boss regen would grow too high and you couldn’t out-damage it anymore… one of my favorites was a boss that would create damage patches that did high piercing damage (that is, damage that ignored toughness), and as the fight went on, more and more of these patches of start appearing. If that mechanic was adapted to a raid, after awhile the patches would consume the world and you’d all die.
I’m fine with there being a soft timer like that, because it gives you multiple means of managing the difficulties of the boss. But a hard enrage timer is the worst way to do things. It removes flexibility instead of encouraging it.

This discussion isn’t about a timer, sry. I won’t take this up. It’s about exotics and ascended and both gears have proven to not come in conflict with the timer if the mechanics are well executed.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The timer does play a role. It forces particular builds and strategies to maximize DPS, because otherwise the timer will force a failure. Ascended gear directly affects DPS, and since DPS is pertinent to the timer, ergo the timer is an argument against exotics.

No, it doesn’t. And the pressure isn’t put by the asc gear, the pressure is put by stats because you cannot change condi or zerk exotic gear into nomads asc gear. And overall the gameplay is way more important.
KING has proven it: Exotics plus a good execution doens’t make asc gear necessary.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

My point here is that you completely misunderstood what I said. You still aren’t understanding what I am saying. I’ve said countless times that there is no “magic”.

Look, I’m not going to lie: this discussion isn’t productive. Right now, all you are doing is taking each individual quote, then posting whatever retort that comes to mind regardless if it is relevant (or even rational). When I say things, I’m not even sure you understand them.

Because you haven’t had any valued point so far.

You say: Ascended gear is necessary for raids.

KING, NoTrigger, Cyninja are saying: Ascended gear is not necessary for raids at all.

I mean someone is wrong here and since we have a video proof of our hypothesis, it’s not us who are wrong.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

So if he is a better player than many others will ever be, that implies that many others wouldn’t be able to clear the content in exotics. Dude, logic isn’t just some verbal trickery invented by old guys. It is actually a useful tool to for the betterment of society.

First of all, we are not in a university science course, this is an international gaming forum. I will come to that later again.
To the exotics: Maybe some won’t and you know why? Because they are bad players. I bet, unfortunately I cannot prove this, the players that cannot beat the raid in exotics cannot beat the raid in ascended as well. This conclusion is made by the simple fact I gave earlier: They don’t die to the timer, they die to random kitten they aren’t capable of denying.

So you’re whole point is that anyone who doesn’t fit into your assertion by default doesn’t count? I’m going to be frank, I’m not even sure what you are arguing for. You’ve gone so far into contradiction and nonsense that if I put you into a box I wouldn’t be certain if you were alive or dead. I know exactly what I am arguing: KING clearing is raid in exotic gear is of no comfort to the pressures to get ascended gear. It doesn’t resolve the “debate” in any sense.

Your only defense now is to parody coherent thought?

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Maybe you’ve missed it, but “can” does not mean practical, worthwhile, accessible, or reliable. It means that leet players can beat content with a handicap. See: nude runs. Hell, even fractals only require ascended for agony resistance. “Can” is the most worthless of qualifiers, and is of no comfort to the casual crowd.

No university science course, gaming forum! Can simply means possible. You, me, he, she, it can do et. Nothing more.
That’s it. Mike can do it in exotics. Perry cannot. Why is that so? Cuz Mike is the better gamer, Perry is a loser. End of story.

And therefore, ascended becomes more and more of a requirement.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Cherry picking again.

Ha ha ha! You came with numbers. So I reflected it and now it is cherry picking? Well, this is how to argue, I understand.

This is pathetic. The only response you have to anything is “hey, numbers and numbers”. It doesn’t work like that.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Yes, you did. You said that for raids, there is a right way to do things, and a wrong way to do things.

Nope, I just said, that there are things that are obviously wrong, like rifle warrior and stuff like this where every intelligent player who is able to read traits and abilities must know that he is doing crap. Away from that there are many builds and abilities that will lead to success.

I just quoted you when you said it. Have the least bit of shame and admit you were mistaken.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You also said that the only reason why people can ram their head against the raid wall and not progress is that they aren’t doing it right.

And? Isn’t that right? People are weekly clearing these raids with ease. So the others who aren’t able must do something wrong or they are bad.

Technically it is. “Not doing it right”, of course, includes not having ascended gear.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Now you’re going off on some random tangent about how the thing you disagreed with somehow argues for exotic gear (which it doesn’t. Ascended gear would mean more leeway and more build diversity, so yay ascended!), and are forgetting that for many raids are an insurmountable wall that leaves them perplexed and with no idea how to improve or get better. The whole “10 hours not succeeding” thing is disproof of skill being a sole deciding factor, as after that much practice and experience a person would have all the skill they needed.

No, not at all. You are really believing that? There are so many players out there for being best examples. I’ve seen so many players that were taught to do so or so and till today they are not able to improve their gameplay. Not everyone on this planet is intelligent. We are not equal.
Otherwise people that are playing 20 years of soccer or doing any other sports should be able to achieve the gold medal. This is truely not the case for an obvious reason: They are lacking skill or if they aren’t lacking skill they are missing the (emotional) intelligence bring it on the table.

Let me put it this way: imagine there is a swordfight between two samurai. One has a sword. The other has a cardboard tube. Lets say they fight a third samurai, equally skilled. The guy with a cardboard tube, well, he’s pretty mush screwed, no matter how skillfully he can manipulate that cardboard tube.

Your build and your gear, those are things that are given before-hand. They don’t actually affect your overall performance in play. You can skillfully evade very attack in exotic knight gear with nomad runes, but at the end of the day you’re fighting with a cardboard tube.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You’ve completely missed the point: there is no guiding hand that will suddenly give you this knowledge. This will leave you on a localized maximum performance hill that is insubstantial to complete the content. Ascended gear increases the height of this hill, allowing you to complete content that you couldn’t complete previously.

Nope, ascended gear doesn’t allow you to complete content thant you couldn’t complete previously. You can even see this in lower content: I’ve guided so many peeps through the city. With legendaries and ascended stuff. When it came to Lupicus they constantly wiped and the place was covered with their bodies while I was soloing it. And don’t forget: This content is easier as raids. So, no. Ascended just make it a bit easier but if there is content you cannot complete in exotics, you won’t be able to do so in asc. (The agony of fractals not mentioned here because it is a mechanic that has nothing to do with.)

Yes, it does. It provides 10% budget, 12% full invested additional damage, as well as 3% extra armor. Comparing two groups, one full ascended and one full exotic, the full ascended group can get upwards of a full minute of extra time. So if you are an ascended team, every victory with sub one minute on the clock would’ve failed, and if you are an exotic team then every failure at sub 10% HP would’ve been a success.

If players are making incremental gains towards victory via practice, then ascended gives you that victory sooner.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

And your teammates, who are equally failing, are supposed to know this how? If you test multiple things and still fail, how are you sure that you’ve even done better? It also has a lot to deal with exotics. See local maximum above.

You know it via communication and you know it via the health bar of the boss. If you are good at troubleshooting, you can minimize mistakes and maximize dps. It has nothing to do with exotics in first place because ppl wiping due to mistakes not to gear.

No. The knowledge doesn’t spontaneously erupt because you can type.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

So… you spend the previous two quotes talking about how you should inch incrementally toward getting higher DPS (in spite of having no capability of testing that), then say you don’t need to do the things that would allow you to inch forward.

You completely misread my words. I said you don’t need to do rotation test yourself. You can already watch them on YT. While you are struggling with raids and others not, it means that some have beaten the encounters. You can gain a lot out of that or you don’t. It’s a personal thing but if you don’t succeed and you haven’t tried sources that are accessible don’t expect people to be nice in the forums or being on your side of the argument.
And yes, my point is still standing. Try everything you can to maximize your dps. If you need proper rotation management, do so. If you think you need ascended armor, get it. But that is your personal need and in this case certainly not the one of others.

But emulating what is done for DPS rotations on videos is risky behavior that will get you killed. These max DPS rotations on youtube videos aren’t playing it safe.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

So you are supposed to incrementally step forward, but not use the tools to do that, but then you don’t need to? Anyway, the point is that, since you yourself failed to conceptualize DPS in a debate related to DPS, that other people will also fail to conceptualize DPS properly, and thus will not improve in a meaningful way, as that information is not obvious. Thus, the advantages that Ascended gives become more and more necessary the less leet you are.

I don’t need the tools to do by myself because I am not in the elite range. So I don’t need the PvP-Golem, I don’t need the dmg numbers of the chat and I don’t need a timer. The good thing is, that if I am not on the front, there are players that were doin it for me, so I can be happy and watch some perfect/proper rotations like this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2_S4ubeX7s
If I am not dumb I just need such a video of a player who has beaten the content and I will be able to adapt many things if mines aren’t better (which I would highly doubt here because I am no speedrunner, but NoTrigger is). If DnT is not your optimal choice, take an SC revenant or vC. Or better: Compare their playstyles.
Are you able to adapt the rotations, traits and build to100%? I doubt it, but if you can, you can talk about the difference between exotics and ascended.

You know, I’ve made video guides on things myself. For City of Heroes, mostly. They all suffer form the same issue: nobody really watches them. That video you linked has 4k views. That is a whole lot less than how many players there are in the game.

It is a fairly common problem: Ignorance of a subject also means ignorance of ignorance of that subject. For example, given the whole “big numbers” thing. If a person doesn’t conceptualize DPS properly, then they won’t know that they are missing something when they go for high numbers instead of fast ones. Since they think they know what they need to, they don’t bother to go look it up. And thus, any failure must be your teammates fault, because they know they’re doing good DPS. It is a self reinforcing problem.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

To be fair, the benefits of alacrity on teammates are even less obvious than outright DPS calculations. I’ve been on teams in dungeons countless times where the self-appointed elitist of the group would complain about the wrong things. Heck, every time I try to organize King of the Jungle I have to deal with at least one know-it-all who will fight tooth and nail against the accepted and time tested methods that work. After all, it isn’t like the correct choice is obvious or something that you can come across after several hours of practice.

Sry, but the dps increase with a chronomancer with continuum split compared to a mesmer without is huge. This is one of the main reasons why you are bringing a mesmer within the raid.

Um.. you didn’t say continuum split. You said alacrity.

And now you are shifting to dungeons which makes no sense at all. I must not do it but you are allowed to argue like this? Come on, be fair and in this case you are absolutely wrong.

You’re distracting from the point. It isn’t about the setting, it is about the people: the person who decides that everybody else is doing everything wrong isn’t the person who is correct. It is the person who is the most belligerent and controlling. And so, any “advice” that you get given via annoyed comments on teamspeak or randoms on map chat isn’t necessarily correct, and will often be dismissed. Largely because the other guy has the wit to defend his own assertions.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The whole point being that, with builds requiring custom tailoring and specific sigils/runes depending on team composition, Ascended is even more of a requirement, as it gives that necessary leeway to allow for more diversity and more mistakes in practice. This is enforced, because “skill” is not going to suddenly fill the gaps in the minds of players who are playing this content. Ascended gear will.

Nope, as I stated with the mesmer. It’s a way bigger difference having a skilled chronomancer and a team in exotics than not having a chrono but all peeps are in ascended.

And as I stated before, nope, it is a significant difference between having ascended gear and having exotic. Likewise, what you are talking about isn’t necessarily skill, but builds. And a build isn’t skillful, it is something you can copy/paste 5 minutes after discovering the game.

Vinceman.4572:

The argument of ascended gives a bigger leeway is not debatable, yes. But I still haven’t denied it.

But you have denied it. You have said time and again that ascended will not provide a meaningful advantage, and that it is all skill.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Cyninja.2954:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Just because something is doable in exotics doesn’t mean that Anet isn’t trying to get people to gear up. You can do high level fractals in the nude, too, but that doesn’t stop Agony Resistance from being an unyielding pressure to get you into ascended. I’m also not going to pretend that the consistent debate on the nature of raids and casuals that has permeated this game suddenly doesn’t exist.

Great, so take your bs into those other threads and stop derailing this one. Or did I just misunderstand you basically stating that “since everyone is talking about raids being for casuals, I’m going to blame every topic about raids for doing this?”.
Show me where this was at any point part of this debate.

Also your point on fractals being doable naked if off. That used to be the case but certainly is not with guaranteed agony damage ever since the fractured patch.

Um, no, that’s now how it works. When there is an ever-present topic about something, especially something controversial like raids, then every thread made about that topic is just a more specific line in the entire grand discussion. So yes, everything I’ve said is pertinent to this thread, especially when it has been in response to the small paragraph that I originally posted.

Likewise, your complaint here is that I am right about fractals, but not in the particular exact way that you would like. It is called nitpicking.

Okay, so you decide to bring in points to this topic which were never part of it just so you can complain and moan.

No, my comlpaint is that you are wrong about fractals. Fractals are literally not possible without agony resistance unless the group you are playing with keeps ressurecting you (meaning they are covering for you not having ar). The guarnateed 100% agony damage makes sure of that.

Not sure when the last time you did fractals was. Seems like 2 years ago.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Cyninja.2954:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You’ve made up an intermediary step that wasn’t there. The real line is this: Recommended = Balanced Around. And it holds. Riddle me this: if the raids weren’t balanced around ascended gear, then why would the devs recommend it in the first place? Wouldn’t they say “don’t worry, you can stick to exotic gear?”.
Your end point is also nonsensical. You’re basically just saying that I will be right in the future, and therefore I’ve made a mistake somehow. I fail to see how that follows. And also, this contradicts your first point, because you are saying that yes, ascended will be required for raids, in spite of everything you’ve done to assert the contrary.

Yes, and we might see a level cap increase in the future, or the introduction of a new tier of gear, or the moon might fall onto the earth and end all life as we know it. Doesn’t matter we should worry about any of that now because, you know, it might not happen too.

Plans change, and even if arenanet sticks to their original plan, it’s not in game yet.
Also on why arenanet would encourage ascended: I don’t know, maybe to have people slowly gear up and prevent this current made up issue before it becomes an actual issue.

To simply assume this to be due to balance is assuming much.

The devs haven’t recommended buying higher level gear, so I wouldn’t worry about a level cap. Regardless, you’re using the uncertainty of the future to distract from the point that what you wrote is paradoxical.

You’re saying you don’t know why it is Anet recommends ascended. Maybe it is because, as the hardest content that has ever been released in the game, that ascended provides bonuses that are significant enough give success where there would’ve been failure? That maybe, as the content was designed to be “hardcore endgame content”, that the assumption would be that this end-game content would require end-game materials to beat it? Maybe it is because the gear of tier would be pertinent to the success of the raid in some way, shape, or form? Frankly, the idea of assuming it would have to deal with balance isn’t “much”. It is common sense.

Please use some of that common sense yourself when replying. I stated that you are using unknown future events in your arguments, now you call my train of thought a paradox. Also, no one expected ascended tier of gear until arenanet added it. Going by past experiences, it’s not far off to expect new tiers of gear.

The same goes for endgame. The current raid is not endgame or maximum endgame design. It’s leading up to endgame design clearly seen in the balance and gear one can use to complete it.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Cyninja.2954:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Yeah, sorry, having an opinion doesn’t make you superior. You are not the next best thing to a word of god. I have demonstrated, time and again, that what you are saying doesn’t make sense, and have provided countless counter-arguments. You are just so full of it that anything you don’t agree with or don’t believe doesn’t count in your own mind.

I do wonder exactly how your brain functions. You first consider yourself absolute authority, then say you are open to opinion and let people say whatever they want, then have a problem with people saying whatever they want because they don’t agree with your beliefs, and that nothing anyone says that disagrees with you can mean anything. There’s a term for this: doublethink

I consider myself above nothing no matter how many times you state this. Do the following, reread this thread or better yet, have someone who’s opinion you value read the thread and ask them: what do you think?

You strolling in here and smokbombing a thread with predjudices and preconceptions from other threads certainly is not a simple opinion. Also no matter how many faulty examples you give, none of them stick unless they make sense.

I see you, too, do not have access to the scroll wheel. I came into this thread and said two sentences along with a quote from the video. The only reason why this discussion exists is because people were not content with the fact that I said the video was of no comfort to the whole “ascended required” debate that rages on everywhere. Every. Single. Thing. I have said in this thread has been a response to people being utterly intolerant to me.

You hypocrites have provoked the beast yourselves. Your words are betrayed by your actions.

The video was ment to show people that there is no reason to fret and obsess over ascended gear. You’ve taken this idea and keep trying to pervert it. What the hell is wrong with you? Provoked the beast? You seem very obsessed with yourself.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Cyninja.2954:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

When I say things, I’m not even sure you understand them.

Wait, what was that about feeling superior and above others? O yeah right, it was me supposedly.

Actually, I’m fairly certain that Vinceman isn’t a native English speaker. The words are misspelled and written oddly, and it seems like every point I make goes over his head. I’ve typed out “the point is” so many times that I am considering making it a macro.

So him being a non-native speaker allows you to be condescneding towards him and a general a*** in this topic? Okay.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Cyninja.2954:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Likewise, you are being a hypocrite again. You accuse me of being deceptive, while deliberately omitting everything I have said about trinkets. I have to repeat that, out of trinkets, only rings were cheap. Everything else is not. Likewise, I calculated the ascended back item using the Quiver of Swift Flight, which costs 159.2 gold to make. Going by that cost, I underestimated it. Your original statement is omitting something very important: the most statistically significant difference in terms of performance in ascended gear is weapons. Not only because of the additional stats they provide, but because their modifier on weapon strength applies to everything, magnifying the bonuses of every other ascended item. I am not "deceptive’, I am more inclusive.

Also, the trinkets via alternative methods use specific stat sets. It only matters if you can use alternative means to acquire a useful trinket, not a useless one.

So you pick a more expensive backpiece to prove a point? Great, there goes your credibility. I thought we were talking about cheapest possible way.

Actually, I didn’t know that the other quiver existed. I picked the quiver of swift flight because it was listed under the “berserker” section on the wiki.

Is this your way of saying:“Sorry, I am not omniscent and stand corrected on this point.”

Apology accepted.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Cyninja.2954:

Mentioning alternative stat combinations for trinkets too is not in favor of your “trinkets are not cheap” credo since most new stat combinations are based on achievements (if available at all). Again, not a major goldsink. Let’s keep throwing those smokebombs and confusing people.
If your “inclusion” of ascended weapons had been simply inclusive, you would have made a clear distinction of this instead of lumping it with the value of trinkets.

So you can buy berserker trinkets with achievements now? Regardless, I am lumping together weapons and trinkets because they are part of the package. In fact, weapons are far more significant than the trinkets are. So you are saying “at least coughpartchough of the ascended gear is cheap! heyyyyyy, don’t bring up the bigger, more important part. you’re lying! weapons don’t count!” when you moan about how I brought up weapons when dealing with the cost of ascended. You’re trying to catch me on a technicality, but to do so means that you are lying in the first place.

No, berserker trinkets are easily obtained via (https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ascended_trinket):
- rings – pristine fractal relics – 0 gold (takes about 1 week for both if you get unlucky and can only do low level dailies)
- accessoires – guild commendations +5 gold each – 10 gold total (takes a bit longer, about 3-4 weeks of running guild missions)
- amulet – 30 laurels (20 laurels and 250 wvw badges)- 0 gold
- backpiece – about 80-100g

So again, where is the big cost for trinkets? I don’t see it. Even if we go for alternative methods, the main factor is not gold but laurels which equate time (thus encouraging people to get the items via the primary method of aquisition).

That doesn’t even account for Sinister trinkets (best in slot condition damage) which are all almost completely achievement bound or via bandit crests from farming 2-3 hours of SW. Again, not that big a deal.

I’m not moaning about you bringing up weapons. I’m questioning how you added weapons in to strength a weak point. Yes, ascended weapons are expensive IF you build them (no where near as armor) and are literally the ONLY expensive item you currently need for a decent setup. That’s not even considering alternative methods of getting them which will occur over time if you play the appropriate parts of the game.

I’m done arguing with you. I thought the video was very infromative and could be of interest to people in general who are interested in raiding in this game. Obviously there always has to be some sob to come around and nitpick/spoil the fun just to feed his ego.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You have shown nothing. At all.

Do I have to show you how to get to the trinkets you want to have? I doubt that. Just for me it’s ok if we stay on rings and the backpiece. You told us rings are cheap. Check. You also got a link for a decent backpiece. Check. These three pieces are already bringing a good boost to your dps. All you do is fight against good possibilities and cherry picking at it’s best and reject solid arguments of others.
Edit: Cyninja did it. Ty. So I think I am still right. ^^

You still have to make multiple ascended items, and passing between toons is not a productive solution.

1. You don’t have to
2. If it isn’t a productive solution, get multiple ones. Your choice. The fact is: You are able to pass them!

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You’re not a native English speaker, are you?

No, I am not. This is irrelevant for this discussion.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Anyway, yeah it isn’t cheaper. I’d have to make multiples of weapons, with different stat sets and different sigils. I’m already ending up having 4-5 copies of some weapons, which is basically just making the weapons for the toons themselves anyhow.

You don’t have to. And you don’t need to have different stat sets if you are playing one role. At first, you should try the content with your main char. You want to swap all the time? Don’t make the game responsible for not having enough weapon alternatives. Go out and get them.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

If they aren’t against you all the time, then that means they are against you some of the time. Ergo, bad luck. It isn’t hairsplitting, it is a contradiction: what you have said is the rhetorical equivalent to a cat walking across the keyboard: utter nonsense. You are flailing like an impotent parent when their kids won’t listen to what they say, never questioning whether you make sense in the first place.

See. You are doing it again. Hairsplitting. I handed the spelling victory over to you and you are still not satisfied and have to argue over that again. Stay on the facts: You can have “bad luck” (in your words) but you won’t have it the whole evening.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Lol no. What you are saying is that I personally suck and if I had good teammates I would have to be carried. You have no proof that my the assertion in performance between the median player and a player of phantom skill level isn’t close together, so you just devolved into vague condescending statement about how I would somehow see that I was wrong if I just played with good people.

Maybe you suck, maybe not. I don’t know. My thought here is that friends of mine that have absolutely not deserved to beat this “challenging” content were already successful. They are casual players with no skill almost near to an elite player like NoTrigger or anyone else. So yes, you need skill but you don’t need very much of it. And the fact that they are not completely wearing ascended gear doesn’t fit with your assumption.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Well, the complaints about the raid are, generally, about the raid in its entirety. You’ve spent the whole time only talking about the Vale Guardian, which is the only part where the vid maker said the time was lenient, and instead completely ignore the other two thirds of the raid, where the vid maker said that the time was strict, incredibly difficult, and required peak performance of the whole team. So, when the guy says something along the lines of “ignore what this video shows, and do it in ascended”, this is what he is talking about.

I speak excessively about VG because I haven’t seen that many complaints from unknown players in this forum about Gorse and Sabe, which leads to the funny picture of an unbeatable VG. And we all know that isn’t true. While we are also knowing that VG is the most forgiving encounter in this raid it’s funny as hell to discuss about ascended vs. exotics.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

KING has not proven that ascended doesn’t matter. KING has proven that if you are good enough, the raid can barely be done in exotics. KING has also said that you shouldn’t do it in Exotics until after you have the experience of doing it in Ascended. In order for this to be true, Ascended must have a meaningful impact in the raid.

They have proven that ascended doesn’t matter! Take away ascended armor and we would have a raid that is absolutely possible to run through.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Cherry Picking.

Not at all.

All it is.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Yes, you did.

" They are dying way earlier due to several mistakes like … being too slow with cc (a.k.a. mouse klicking spells)"

Yes, it is an example. It must not be the fact. It could also be that the player is having disseminated sclerosis and is therefore not able to press/klick fast enough.

Dude, just admit that you brought it up, and you were wrong to do so. Is that really so hard?

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

And now you are saying that it only counts when you say it counts. Mouse clicking doesn’t lead to failure, except in the cases where it does lead to failure. Sounds to me like the problem isn’t actually mouse clicking at all.

Cherry picking. I could also say reaction time. There are many players out there who aren’t fast enough = lack of skill in the game. Sometimes you can watch ppl dying slowly and laugh your a_ss off because it’s hella funny how slow they are moving/dodging w/e – and yes, it’s always the lag.

You have no idea what cherry picking is. “Cherry picking” is when you choose specific points of data to pre-fit an assumption, I.E. only focusing on vale guardian when the raid has more than that. Pointing out that your statements contradict isn’t cherry picking, unless you have a series of utterly random posts and I deliberate select the ones that are contradictory to others. Though if you have a series of utterly random posts you have a bigger problem… Anyway, “reaction time” is a better determinant. “Fine motor control” would be a good definition as well.

Regardless, this part of the discussion is a dead end. Mostly because I don’t like watching people fail.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

And after all that, it has nothing to deal with an enrage timer encouraging risky behavior.

Still the majority of suffering people aren’t aiming for the enrage timer. Get over it!

The problem doesn’t go away just because you want it to.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

“Practice” doesn’t change the issue. You still have to play risky to maximize DPS. Having exotic gear will kitten your performance.

No, your mechanical performance doesn’t depend on the exotics as KING has proven. Is it harder in exotics? Yes. Is it impossible in exotics? No. Have the mechanics changed while you are using exotics? No, absolutely not.

Your mechanical performance gets more room for error when you have ascended. KING didn’t disprove that at all. In fact, it is recommended for that very reason.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

If you are constantly dying to mechanical problems and raid mechanics (many of which are OHKOs), then prolonging how much you are exposed to these problems prolongs how likely it is you will die. I.E. the likelyhood that 4 players will miss the circle grows exponentially the longer the fight becomes.

See again, this is no university science course. I am sure you went through it, so did I but this is a gaming forum. Stop putting stupid game content to the next level. Ofc the group of 8 will wipe due to the likelyhood of anything there some day in infinity. But then we need the numbers and these are so little when I expect such a group being in TS and there are technically 8 tanks shouting “GREEN!” and all could be able to run into it at the same time cuz it doesn’t matter who is pulling the VG around.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Vale Guardian is the worst example here. Let me elaborate on the better example: as you fight Sabetha, the platform you are on will take damage. Slowly, but it will accumulate. If you decide that DPS means nothing and go full tank, you won’t be able to kill the minions that cause damage to the platform, and thus it will cause you to fail.

VG is the right example here. Actually we don’t need to speak about the other two in the first place because it’s the VG the majority has problems with. And additionally, I don’t want my example taken to the extent. It was just a simple thought about the fact that you have to keep pressure on players otherwise this content will fall down to fractals and dungeons.

VG isn’t the raid. If an enrage timer is necessary to prevent a full tank group against only one of the bosses, then that just means that the boss isn’t super well designed, while the other ones are. Even then, I’d still see failure as something that can happen in a full tank squad.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I’ve played other games with raids, and the failure mechanic isn’t always a hard timer. Back in City of Heroes, there was practically a different failure mechanic for each boss in their raids. Sometimes adds could accumulate too quickly, sometimes boss regen would grow too high and you couldn’t out-damage it anymore… one of my favorites was a boss that would create damage patches that did high piercing damage (that is, damage that ignored toughness), and as the fight went on, more and more of these patches of start appearing. If that mechanic was adapted to a raid, after awhile the patches would consume the world and you’d all die.
I’m fine with there being a soft timer like that, because it gives you multiple means of managing the difficulties of the boss. But a hard enrage timer is the worst way to do things. It removes flexibility instead of encouraging it.

This discussion isn’t about a timer, sry. I won’t take this up. It’s about exotics and ascended and both gears have proven to not come in conflict with the timer if the mechanics are well executed.

But they haven’t been proven at all. KING just showed that if you have a really good group that the timer is extremely tight, and then recommends that you should go with Ascended to start with anyway. The ticking clock on Sabetha and Gorseval themselves are enough to make Ascended a requirement for any practical purpose.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The timer does play a role. It forces particular builds and strategies to maximize DPS, because otherwise the timer will force a failure. Ascended gear directly affects DPS, and since DPS is pertinent to the timer, ergo the timer is an argument against exotics.

No, it doesn’t. And the pressure isn’t put by the asc gear, the pressure is put by stats because you cannot change condi or zerk exotic gear into nomads asc gear. And overall the gameplay is way more important.

You just said that the timer prevents a bunch of nomad guardians. Therefore, it is removing a passive strategy, and encouraging one that forces maximum DPS. Stay consistent now. While this means a load more for gear prefixes, ascended is just yet another outlet for increasing DPS. Much like build and rune choices.

Vinceman.4572:

KING has proven it: Exotics plus a good execution doens’t make asc gear necessary.

This doesn’t make sense. I’m assuming that you mean “Exotics plus a good execution means that ascended gear isn’t necessary”. But it doesn’t. It just means that you can barely power through in the more extreme circumstances, to which may players are not capable of doing. For any practical purpose, Ascended is a requirement. At least the weapons and trinkets are. This is encouraged by both Deroir and the developers.

Vinceman.4572:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

My point here is that you completely misunderstood what I said. You still aren’t understanding what I am saying. I’ve said countless times that there is no “magic”.

Look, I’m not going to lie: this discussion isn’t productive. Right now, all you are doing is taking each individual quote, then posting whatever retort that comes to mind regardless if it is relevant (or even rational). When I say things, I’m not even sure you understand them.

Because you haven’t had any valued point so far.

You say: Ascended gear is necessary for raids.

KING, NoTrigger, Cyninja are saying: Ascended gear is not necessary for raids at all.

I mean someone is wrong here and since we have a video proof of our hypothesis, it’s not us who are wrong.

Your video itself says that you shouldn’t try what the video did, and should have ascended. It literally disproves itself. You’re whole case is “ignore what he says, thinks, and his advice based on his experiences regarding this content, and just look! He beat it!”, and you are adamant about ignoring that contradiction. You’re spending your whole time championing around a video while anyone with a sense of reason would look back and laugh at how crazy you are being.

Cyninja.2954:

Okay, so you decide to bring in points to this topic which were never part of it just so you can complain and moan.

No, my comlpaint is that you are wrong about fractals. Fractals are literally not possible without agony resistance unless the group you are playing with keeps ressurecting you (meaning they are covering for you not having ar). The guarnateed 100% agony damage makes sure of that.

It was part of the topic, is what I am saying. Likewise, your complaint is that I was right about fractals in the past and my point about it makes sense, but now because instabilities have changed my point… doesn’t make sense? Yeah, nitpicking. You’re distracting from the point.

Cyninja.2954:

Please use some of that common sense yourself when replying. I stated that you are using unknown future events in your arguments, now you call my train of thought a paradox. Also, no one expected ascended tier of gear until arenanet added it. Going by past experiences, it’s not far off to expect new tiers of gear.

You are the one who brought up unknown future events. I responded by saying that, in your claim that the devs saying ascended being a requirement doesn’t count because “it isn’t the true end of the raid”, it means that you have accepted the devs want ascended to be a requirement in raids, there is no ambiguity in that statement, and that it is only by technicality that you can even claim that ascended currently isn’t required in a raid. This, of course, is necessarily contradictory to what you said before, about the devs never saying that ascended was a requirement.

What you did is you doubled back, tried to come up with two points of attack, and failed to realize that they canceled each other out. Now you don’t have a point. You’re just being difficult. You can’t take it back, either.

Cyninja.2954:

The video was ment to show people that there is no reason to fret and obsess over ascended gear. You’ve taken this idea and keep trying to pervert it. What the hell is wrong with you? Provoked the beast? You seem very obsessed with yourself.

So, this topic was about the debate over the necessity of ascended and exotics. So all of that stuff you said above about me bringing in something unrelated? Utter bullkitten.

Cyninja.2954:

So him being a non-native speaker allows you to be condescneding towards him and a general a*** in this topic? Okay.

Not condescending. Literal. I am literally not sure he understand what I am writing.

Cyninja.2954:

Is this your way of saying:“Sorry, I am not omniscent and stand corrected on this point.”

Apology accepted.

Not quite. You are asserting I am lying. I am saying I was wrong. There’s a big difference between the two, in that one is evil and the other is unfortunate. I will apologize for being wrong, but your claims about me being a liar are still unfounded.

Cyninja.2954:

No, berserker trinkets are easily obtained via (https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ascended_trinket):
- rings – pristine fractal relics – 0 gold (takes about 1 week for both if you get unlucky and can only do low level dailies)
- accessoires – guild commendations +5 gold each – 10 gold total (takes a bit longer, about 3-4 weeks of running guild missions)
- amulet – 30 laurels (20 laurels and 250 wvw badges)- 0 gold
- backpiece – about 80-100g

The funny thing is, the first thing I said was only the rings were easily obtainable, and that the amulets and accessories took forever to obtain. You’re basically quoting me to myself word for word to say that I am saying that I am wrong. The “cost” is the large amount of time you need to wait before getting the items.

Cyninja.2954:

That doesn’t even account for Sinister trinkets (best in slot condition damage) which are all almost completely achievement bound or via bandit crests from farming 2-3 hours of SW. Again, not that big a deal.

Actually no. Sinister trinkets aren’t the best for condition damage. Vipers are. It is just that the only place to get Viper’s Trinkets is in raids.

Cyninja.2954:

I’m not moaning about you bringing up weapons. I’m questioning how you added weapons in to strength a weak point. Yes, ascended weapons are expensive IF you build them (no where near as armor) and are literally the ONLY expensive item you currently need for a decent setup. That’s not even considering alternative methods of getting them which will occur over time if you play the appropriate parts of the game.

Well, it is quite simple: it is part of the budget package. If you’ve ever glanced at the spreadsheet for ascended vs. exotic damage, the biggest category (and likewise, the one that everyone recommends) is to have ascended trinkets and weapons. This combo hits that 10% mark of increased damage, and thus it serves as the practical difference between ascended and exotic. Anything less is, well, unsubstantial.

It is here that you get the cost of the whole thing: gold cost of the weapon set and backpack plus the time gate behind the weapon recipes + rings + amulet + trinkets. Overall, it is a ton of laurels, a ton of accommodations, and depending on class a ton of gold.

Cyninja.2954:

I’m done arguing with you. I thought the video was very infromative and could be of interest to people in general who are interested in raiding in this game. Obviously there always has to be some sob to come around and nitpick/spoil the fun just to feed his ego.

Now this is the most self important dump you’ve taken in this thread. Most recently you’ve admitted that this thread was made as part of an argument after adamantly denying it and calling me evil for bring it up, said your opinion was second to word of god, proclaimed a series of value judgements and and outright false information as fact, tout yourself as morally superior for letting other people make decisions while being intolerant of different decisions, and declare anyone who disagrees with you as nonexistent. There’s a term for this. Psychological Projection. You demonstratively have a gigantic ego, and because of this you see everyone else not adhering to your own self importance as being egotistical.

If you want my advice, here it is: You have ears. Use them. Listen to the video as well as watch it. Then you won’t come off as crazy when your source outwardly disagrees with you.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

So you’re whole point is that anyone who doesn’t fit into your assertion by default doesn’t count? I’m going to be frank, I’m not even sure what you are arguing for. You’ve gone so far into contradiction and nonsense that if I put you into a box I wouldn’t be certain if you were alive or dead. I know exactly what I am arguing: KING clearing is raid in exotic gear is of no comfort to the pressures to get ascended gear. It doesn’t resolve the “debate” in any sense.

I repeat myself: Some will clear the content in exotics, some won’t.
- Is it harder with exotics only? Yes.
- Impossible? No.
Are the same people with equal skill successful in ascended but not in exotics? I doubt it unless I am proven wrong. And I am really not in the mood to bring the arguments for that again but it’s simple as fc:
Almost all unsuccessful groups are dying before the timer is running out.
- Is the timer pressuring them? Maybe. Could be. Yes.
- Is the timer not pressuring them while wearing ascended gear? Definitely not.
- Are such groups still dying before the timer is running out. Again yes.
- So is it really necessary for going to have asc armor in the first place? No.
- Can i confidently start raiding on VG with my exotic gear (and asc trinkets) and at least learn the mechanics till I reach the timer? Yes.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Your only defense now is to parody coherent thought?

I leave that almost uncommented.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

And therefore, ascended becomes more and more of a requirement.

Not at all. It’s way more likely that Mike will beat the content in a shorter period of time and Perry will still struggle in his shiny ascended stuff.

This is pathetic. The only response you have to anything is “hey, numbers and numbers”. It doesn’t work like that.

Well, you came with numbers. KING came with numbers. NoTrigger came with numbers. You denied them everytime although they are visible for everyone. ^^

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I just quoted you when you said it. Have the least bit of shame and admit you were mistaken.

Sry, but I am not able to see my mistake here and it has nothing to do with not being a native english speaker.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Technically it is. “Not doing it right”, of course, includes not having ascended gear.

“Doing it wrong” or “not doing it right” is the same here in this place. Again: We are not in a higher spelling or word meaning course. This is a game forum. If you want to make profound linguistics, go make an appointement with my secretary for 2016.
And while we are talking about linguistics, doing != wearing. Doing stands for “performing” and to perform correctly, you need your fingers/feet, proper technical gear for your pc, the game itself and the understanding of the boss mechanic. You definitely don’t need asc gear on your char for that!

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Let me put it this way: imagine there is a swordfight between two samurai. One has a sword. The other has a cardboard tube. Lets say they fight a third samurai, equally skilled. The guy with a cardboard tube, well, he’s pretty mush screwed, no matter how skillfully he can manipulate that cardboard tube.

The difference between the cardboard tube and the sword is way bigger than the difference between exotic and asc.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Your build and your gear, those are things that are given before-hand. They don’t actually affect your overall performance in play. You can skillfully evade very attack in exotic knight gear with nomad runes, but at the end of the day you’re fighting with a cardboard tube.

And now? This is why you dont walk into raids with exotic nomads and change to ascended zerkers. That would be crackbrained in both directions.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Yes, it does. It provides 10% budget, 12% full invested additional damage, as well as 3% extra armor. Comparing two groups, one full ascended and one full exotic, the full ascended group can get upwards of a full minute of extra time. So if you are an ascended team, every victory with sub one minute on the clock would’ve failed, and if you are an exotic team then every failure at sub 10% HP would’ve been a success.

Well, and now comes KING into play. In the video we are about 50 seconds away from enrage timer on a very sloppy try. Deroir mentioned that they had a run with 1.5 minutes left in full exotics. So there is plenty of time, mathematically 18.75% of the whole, for mistakes.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

If players are making incremental gains towards victory via practice, then ascended gives you that victory sooner.

Wow, did you find that out by yourself? Of course it is like that, and again. Nobody has ever denied that.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

No. The knowledge doesn’t spontaneously erupt because you can type.

No? What if I am typing with my keyboard to ask other people that have beaten the encounter before me? And if I ask for hints, do you think “Get asc items” is shouting back at me?

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

But emulating what is done for DPS rotations on videos is risky behavior that will get you killed. These max DPS rotations on youtube videos aren’t playing it safe.

That is why pure “copy-and-paste” is bullkitten. Every halfway intelligent human being should know that. In addition to that you should try it and if it works you can implement it if not, try harder/anything else.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You know, I’ve made video guides on things myself. For City of Heroes, mostly. They all suffer form the same issue: nobody really watches them. That video you linked has 4k views. That is a whole lot less than how many players there are in the game.

So, your argument is that many players do not know about at least good rotations. Then the dps increase between exotics and ascended is even lower than the pure numbers.
I watch some of these videos from time to time and if you can adapt only little parts, it will improve your gameplay effectively. More than the change from exotics to ascended with not knowing to perform better.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

It is a fairly common problem: Ignorance of a subject also means ignorance of ignorance of that subject. For example, given the whole “big numbers” thing. If a person doesn’t conceptualize DPS properly, then they won’t know that they are missing something when they go for high numbers instead of fast ones. Since they think they know what they need to, they don’t bother to go look it up. And thus, any failure must be your teammates fault, because they know they’re doing good DPS. It is a self reinforcing problem.

And this is why I hate to play with people that aren’t self-critical. I have no problem to call out “That was my mistake.” in Teamspeak. Only with guys I can trust and who are admitting their faults, it is possible to improve.
The change from exotic to ascended gear doesn’t change anything here!

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Um.. you didn’t say continuum split. You said alacrity.

And now tell me that continuum split and alacrity aren’t working hand in hand. My buddy wasn’t using wells and continuum split to make it clear. This was a huge dps loss supported by the circumstance he was a circle runner and camped GS. ^^

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

You’re distracting from the point. It isn’t about the setting, it is about the people: the person who decides that everybody else is doing everything wrong isn’t the person who is correct. It is the person who is the most belligerent and controlling. And so, any “advice” that you get given via annoyed comments on teamspeak or randoms on map chat isn’t necessarily correct, and will often be dismissed. Largely because the other guy has the wit to defend his own assertions.

This is why we discuss constructively and with an acceptable tone. Randoms that are annoying, unfriendly and not willing to learn will be booted or I’ll quit.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

And as I stated before, nope, it is a significant difference between having ascended gear and having exotic. Likewise, what you are talking about isn’t necessarily skill, but builds. And a build isn’t skillful, it is something you can copy/paste 5 minutes after discovering the game.

No way! A mesmer not using super helpful skills with alacrity and doing a proper continuum split is useless as shlt. The difference between an exotic mes with these super options is so huge for the damage of the group compared to a mesmer in ascended with autoattacks, some bullkitten utility skills and 1-2 timewarps over the encounter time. I would then rather change to another revenant for having more damage even if he is only autoattacking.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

But you have denied it. You have said time and again that ascended will not provide a meaningful advantage, and that it is all skill.

No, I have never said this. You won’t find any comment of mine where I would have wrote such bs. This is an imputation!

Lol blood red arachnid are you a troll? If you can’t use ascended use exotics who cares, the video did it with their whole group in exotics, but in a real scenerio even in a pug group your whole party won’t be in full exotics. Find a group who will let you use exotics it’s not much of a big dps loss. Even if you were given full ascended you won’t be able to clear the raids, it’s not as if ascended is a magical piece of armor that once worn will allow you to clear the raids in your first attempt. Whether you are in ascended or exotics you will still have to spend hours practicing the boss, unless you are carried, to be able to kill it. If your problem is that people are not accepting you in exotics than its not the issue with the game but more so yourself, there are many groups out there who don’t require you to be in full ascended, most who do are the ones who already cleared and are doing it weekly. If you as a person hasn’t even cleared it once and wants to join groups like those than I have nothing to say. Stop trying to be carried, open your eyes in lfg and you will be able to find groups willing to accept you in exotics.

“Your video itself says that you shouldn’t try what the video did, and should have ascended.”

And what did the video do? It had EVERYONE as FULL exotic. Didn’t the guy in the video even say it was to show you don’t need full ascended on everyone and that experience matters more than ascended, so if there’s say one guy who doesn’t have say ascended armor it’s alright?

Is full ascended RECOMMENDED for raids? Yea, of course it is. Ascended gear is a strict stat improvement over exotic gear. Why would you not recommend people to get the best gear possible to do difficult content?

Is full ascended NEEDED for raids? That is, do you NEED full ascended to even have a chance at completing Spirit Vale? The answer, as this video shows, is no. You can complete the entire instance in full exotics. Is it a lot more difficult to do it without any ascended gear, or any “new stat combos”? Yea, of course it is. I wouldn’t recommend that people go in on their first try with full exotics, as the video says.

Most important question: Can a raid group with mixed ascended and exotic equipment complete the raid wing? The answer to this is also clearly yes. And this group describes the majority of raiders. Getting ascended accessories, rings and amulets is a trivial task. Most people have them just by playing the game and logging in. Getting ascended weapons is slightly trickier, but all you need is 1 (maybe 2, depending on your class) ascended chest weapon drop and you’re set. Or you could simply do collections or craft that weapon.

TL;DR: You don’t NEED to grind full ascended to have a good shot of completing the raid wing. Having mixed exotics/ascended is more than good enough; pug groups have cleared the instance with such gear. Having only exotics works too, but it’s not recommended. Therefore, insofar as it is realistically possible for most people to get mixed exotic/asc gear, and insofar as it is very possible for a raid that is geared as such to complete the raid, saying that raids REQUIRE people to grind full ascended is a false statement.

At the end of the day people who are bad will still be bad whether in exotics or ascended, people who are good will still be good whether in exotics or ascended. Bad people tend to complain a lot, it’s as if it’s a kind of behavior exclusive to them.