Guild Wars 2

So we hear all this kitten about raids not being nearly as hard as anyone says. Enrage is forgiving across the board. Mechanics aren’t that hard.
etc, etc, etc.

But how forgiving is the dps timer on bosses exactly?

Vale Guardian: 22m health
8 Minute enrage.
22,000,000 / (8×60) = Group Dps.
Divide group dps by 10 and you have personal dps required by each member to reach enrage. That number is 5,238.0952—- etc. Lets say 5,239 for the sake of simplicity.
This doesn’t include mechanics or phases where you cannot damage the boss. So lets just be lazy and double that number. Lets just say literally half of the fight you cannot hit VG (kitten that’s some rough splits if that happens)
Each member would need about 10.4k dps.

Meta builds can do 30-40k dps. Nonmeta builds can do 20-30. Bad builds can be anywhere from 5k-10k depending how bad. Healers can do 3k-15k depending. might stacking supports can do about 26k if I remember right? etc.

Point is; even the worst builds can meet the dps timers for vg. A single meta dps build playing perfectly can meet the requirements of 3-4 players.
What kills raiders is never lack of dps. It’s a lack of awareness, lack of mechanical skill or knowledge, or in some cases simply repeated mistakes that cost dps uptime.

Now – lets also be fair.
Optimal dps will not happen in 90% of raids. So really it just means we must pick up classes that can perform under pressure and either ignore completely or recover quickly from botched mechanics.
Chrono is godlike for ignoring mechanics – and allows allies to ignore as well.
Reaper/Necro can shrug off botched mechanics fairly often.
Thief’s healing through rejuvinating strikes or whatever its called also lets them be surprisingly resilient…

Honestly this was almost entirely a thread to vent my irritation at the obsession with dps that sees some classes will seldom see a raid room.
But it also serves hopefully as encouragement. DPS is not the be-all nor end-all of raids, and there are groups out there that will see this and trade longer kills for easier and safer ones.

For feline’s sake my first Cairne kill had four druids and two healing revenants! We hit enrage but nobody went down because we healed through literally everything and killed it through attrition.

i wish the game could be again about dodging and active gameplay instead of just dps rotations on bland bosses…

There is Active gameplay it’s called the mechanics, again people don’t normally fail to not enough DPS and at most 7 people only need to reach 7-10k dps on all bosses, most classes can track 2-5k dps just from auto attacking without full buffs…… so how is it a bland dps Rotation? When all that’s needed is doing the mechanics?

FYI, meta builds do 30-40k dps on a stationary target that doesn’t hit back. Even "realistic " dps on the golems is unrealistic.

Example: on the golems I pull an average of 33-35k with my condi elementalist. On VG last night I pulled a consistent 18k and was the highest dps in my raid. We beat it with a minute to spare

UnbentMars.9126:

FYI, meta builds do 30-40k dps on a stationary target that doesn’t hit back. Even "realistic " dps on the golems is unrealistic.

Example: on the golems I pull an average of 33-35k with my condi elementalist. On VG last night I pulled a consistent 18k and was the highest dps in my raid. We beat it with a minute to spare

FYI, “meta builds” (or at least the DPS ones, e.g Tempest) can realistically pull 40k on VG and 30k+ on other bosses too.
But it also depends a lot on the buffs and strategy.

Condi Tempest can realistically pull more than 30k on VG as well.

Sublimatio.6981:

i wish the game could be again about dodging and active gameplay instead of just dps rotations on bland bosses…

the gameplay sure was active when you pulc corner stack everything cc and burst it

OP’s overall post has a lot of truth. But you have to remember that your build goes hand in hand with your tactic.

Bringing 4 low dps classes to kc is going to make it more difficult to phase.

Doing the stand still method on xera with low dps classes won’t work.

etc.

Raids require a good amount of efficiency and synergy. That is about it. They do in no way require you to play perfectly or bring a perfect “meta group” that can squeeze out insane amounts of damage and blow everything up without any mistakes.

We have had this talk before. There are “non-meta builds” and “non-meta builds”. Just because people have completed raids with three Bearbows doesn’t make it a good build. It simply means the other seven players had to try much harder to make up for everything the other three were lacking.
However, just because something isn’t exactly meta doesn’t already make it a bad build either. A lot of stuff works. All you need is to hit a certain amount of synergy and efficiency which will then lead to good DPS and a good amount of survivability.
Thrag is right about the strategies. The “meta set-up” is build around the “meta strategies” people use. This means those set-ups might not even work that well for your own group if you variate from the “meta strategy” too much. But you might find it hard to use those strategies if you insist on variating from the “meta builds” too much.

Let’s be honest, the raid encounters are forgiving enough (in the DPS department) that you can go without any of the big three (PS, chrono, druid). You will simply have an increasingly harder time meeting the required amounts of DPS with each of those that you end up excluding.
This and the fact that you have the expect the worst with pugs in general is why people insist on bringing a squad that could theoretically reach 200% of the required numbers. Considering how often the worst happens in pugs, nobody can blame them for doing so.

Henry.5713:

Raids require a good amount of efficiency and synergy. That is about it. They do in no way require you to play perfectly or bring a perfect “meta group” that can squeeze out insane amounts of damage and blow everything up without any mistakes.

We have had this talk before. There are “non-meta builds” and “non-meta builds”. Just because people have completed raids with three Bearbows doesn’t make it a good build. It simply means the other seven players had to try much harder to make up for everything the other three were lacking.
However, just because something isn’t exactly meta doesn’t already make it a bad build either. A lot of stuff works. All you need is to hit a certain amount of synergy and efficiency which will then lead to good DPS and a good amount of survivability.
Thrag is right about the strategies. The “meta set-up” is build around the “meta strategies” people use. This means those set-ups might not even work that well for your own group if you variate from the “meta strategy” too much. But you might find it hard to use those strategies if you insist on variating from the “meta builds” too much.

Let’s be honest, the raid encounters are forgiving enough (in the DPS department) that you can go without any of the big three (PS, chrono, druid). You will simply have an increasingly harder time meeting the required amounts of DPS with each of those that you end up excluding.
This and the fact that you have the expect the worst with pugs in general is why people insist on bringing a squad that could theoretically reach 200% of the required numbers. Considering how often the worst happens in pugs, nobody can blame them for doing so.

You’re still focusing on DPS, which is beside the point. The point being, you will likely have the required dps anyway. Mechanics are much, much more important. Mechanics are why people fail at raids. Yet I’ve never seen anyone obsessing about mechanics the way everyone is obsessed by dps.

Feanor.2358:

You’re still focusing on DPS, which is beside the point. The point being, you will likely have the required dps anyway. Mechanics are much, much more important. Mechanics are why people fail at raids. Yet I’ve never seen anyone obsessing about mechanics the way everyone is obsessed by dps.

People don’t fail only at mechanics, you’re mostly right, the priority order would be something like: Mechanics (don’t kill your team) > Survivability (don’t kill yourself) > DPS (kill it before it kills us)

The first two are what most training runs aim to teach and should be mastered first, after being comfortable at both is when it comes executing your damage.

But the thing is that the first two can’t be exactly quantified (ha!) but are expected from the players coming in an experienced group and most of the time people wnat to skip some mechanics and for that usually dps is the main requirement, more dps at VG means less greens (be it distorting them or not), no updraft Gors is easier, more dps on Sab means less cannons to deal with and mobs cleaved faster and so on. While it shouldn’t be the foremost concern, the other two are expected as the basics and dps does makes things easier than just tickling the boss slowly to death while dealing with the mechanics and damage for longer.

I can agree with this. However, focusing on dps should only come after you’ve mastered the mechanics. Otherwise it’s simply pointless.

nsleep.7839:

Feanor.2358:

You’re still focusing on DPS, which is beside the point. The point being, you will likely have the required dps anyway. Mechanics are much, much more important. Mechanics are why people fail at raids. Yet I’ve never seen anyone obsessing about mechanics the way everyone is obsessed by dps.

People don’t fail only at mechanics, you’re mostly right, the priority order would be something like: Mechanics (don’t kill your team) > Survivability (don’t kill yourself) > DPS (kill it before it kills us)

The first two are what most training runs aim to teach and should be mastered first, after being comfortable at both is when it comes executing your damage.

But the thing is that the first two can’t be exactly quantified (ha!) but are expected from the players coming in an experienced group and most of the time people wnat to skip some mechanics and for that usually dps is the main requirement, more dps at VG means less greens (be it distorting them or not), no updraft Gors is easier, more dps on Sab means less cannons to deal with and mobs cleaved faster and so on. While it shouldn’t be the foremost concern, the other two are expected as the basics and dps does makes things easier than just tickling the boss slowly to death while dealing with the mechanics and damage for longer.

Efficiency and synergy do not only concern the offensive of your squad. They are also about using classes in such a manner that you’ll have protection, regeneration, invulnerability, blocks, vigor and all of those defensive tools on top of all of the offensive ones with as little effort as possible. To be able to clear the encounters easily and without a fuss.
The forgiving DPS requirement is the very reason why you are actually able to bring two Magi Druids and even two Minstrel Chronos if needed and will still be able to clear the bosses in time.

Do you need all of that to stay alive and make it smooth? Of course not. Very little of that is required for an experienced group. But those do not have any issues with any of the mechnics either.
However, an inexperienced group will be able to negate and avoid or at least weaken half of the mechnics which are supposed to be instant killers that way. They will be able to help those players with very little experience and make up for some of their understandable mistakes.

Look at everything you can avoid or outheal:
-VG, greens
-Gorseval, no CC
-Sabetha, cannon fire
-Slothasor, poison and adds
-Trio, almost everything
-Matthias, most mechanics
-Xera, aoe, adds, etc.
-Cairn, about everything
-Mursaat, adds, organge AoE
-Samarog, CC damage
-Deimos, blast, other damage

There are very few mechanics that instantly kill a person or even the entire squad. That is why nobody obsesses about mechanics. There is nothing to obsess about. You can practice avoiding some damage and make up for other mistakes by using all of those defenses. Something that you are allowed to do due to the very forgiving DPS requirement and missing need to have a fully offensive team.

Never underestimate the importance of DPS classes doing their job right and why providing a good amount of DPS is fundamentally important in MMORPGs.

nsleep.7839:

Feanor.2358:

You’re still focusing on DPS, which is beside the point. The point being, you will likely have the required dps anyway. Mechanics are much, much more important. Mechanics are why people fail at raids. Yet I’ve never seen anyone obsessing about mechanics the way everyone is obsessed by dps.

People don’t fail only at mechanics, you’re mostly right, the priority order would be something like: Mechanics (don’t kill your team) > Survivability (don’t kill yourself) > DPS (kill it before it kills us)

The first two are what most training runs aim to teach and should be mastered first, after being comfortable at both is when it comes executing your damage.

But the thing is that the first two can’t be exactly quantified (ha!) but are expected from the players coming in an experienced group and most of the time people wnat to skip some mechanics and for that usually dps is the main requirement, more dps at VG means less greens (be it distorting them or not), no updraft Gors is easier, more dps on Sab means less cannons to deal with and mobs cleaved faster and so on. While it shouldn’t be the foremost concern, the other two are expected as the basics and dps does makes things easier than just tickling the boss slowly to death while dealing with the mechanics and damage for longer.

You can quantify bolded, quite easily in fact…..

Murdock.6547:

So we hear all this kitten about raids not being nearly as hard as anyone says. Enrage is forgiving across the board. Mechanics aren’t that hard.
etc, etc, etc.

But how forgiving is the dps timer on bosses exactly?

Vale Guardian: 22m health
8 Minute enrage.
22,000,000 / (8×60) = Group Dps.
Divide group dps by 10 and you have personal dps required by each member to reach enrage. That number is 5,238.0952—- etc. Lets say 5,239 for the sake of simplicity.
This doesn’t include mechanics or phases where you cannot damage the boss. So lets just be lazy and double that number. Lets just say literally half of the fight you cannot hit VG (kitten that’s some rough splits if that happens)
Each member would need about 10.4k dps.

Meta builds can do 30-40k dps. Nonmeta builds can do 20-30. Bad builds can be anywhere from 5k-10k depending how bad. Healers can do 3k-15k depending. might stacking supports can do about 26k if I remember right? etc.

Point is; even the worst builds can meet the dps timers for vg. A single meta dps build playing perfectly can meet the requirements of 3-4 players.
What kills raiders is never lack of dps. It’s a lack of awareness, lack of mechanical skill or knowledge, or in some cases simply repeated mistakes that cost dps uptime.

Now – lets also be fair.
Optimal dps will not happen in 90% of raids. So really it just means we must pick up classes that can perform under pressure and either ignore completely or recover quickly from botched mechanics.
Chrono is godlike for ignoring mechanics – and allows allies to ignore as well.
Reaper/Necro can shrug off botched mechanics fairly often.
Thief’s healing through rejuvinating strikes or whatever its called also lets them be surprisingly resilient…

Honestly this was almost entirely a thread to vent my irritation at the obsession with dps that sees some classes will seldom see a raid room.
But it also serves hopefully as encouragement. DPS is not the be-all nor end-all of raids, and there are groups out there that will see this and trade longer kills for easier and safer ones.

For feline’s sake my first Cairne kill had four druids and two healing revenants! We hit enrage but nobody went down because we healed through literally everything and killed it through attrition.

Mechanics kill raids and lets be fair instead of learning mechanics it is safer and easier to increase your dps. High dps allows you to trivialize bosses and trash mechanics, thats just the way it is. No green VG with high dps needs what 2 greenz distorted? High dps allows you to insta break gorse, you can skip movement during xera, you only need like 3/4 shrooms at sloth.

Sublimatio.6981:

i wish the game could be again about dodging and active gameplay instead of just dps rotations on bland bosses…

You remember the old days a lot differently than I do, apparently. Outside of some awesome stealth skips in dungeons that I wish we’d get in raids, the combat was dull and you murdered every boss so fast you skipped 99% of mechanics.

i wasn’t talking about combat only. im talking about everything. skipping, without stealth, with stealth, pre-blasting, porting, soloing, duoing, consumables usage, control (i.e. immobilizing shoggroth or coordinating deep freeze), actually the whole defiance system was great in dungeons, it only didnt work in open world.
all of this makes for an active gameplay which is now lost and player skill level is now a joke because you only need to gear up and remember rotation instead of all these gimmicks

While some of those things were indeed cool and should be incorporated into new content, I honestly think there’s a lot more that we’ve gained over the years that I vastly prefer to what we used to have. Combat requires a lot more coordination, situational awareness, understanding, and reactivity than it ever has in the past.

I definitely want more solo/utility gameplay using things like stealth / portals / solo sessions in raids and fractals with less linear design, though. I agree with you there.

The raids are forgiving, the meta and people’s elitism isn’t.

Coconut.7082:

UnbentMars.9126:

FYI, meta builds do 30-40k dps on a stationary target that doesn’t hit back. Even "realistic " dps on the golems is unrealistic.

Example: on the golems I pull an average of 33-35k with my condi elementalist. On VG last night I pulled a consistent 18k and was the highest dps in my raid. We beat it with a minute to spare

FYI, “meta builds” (or at least the DPS ones, e.g Tempest) can realistically pull 40k on VG and 30k+ on other bosses too.
But it also depends a lot on the buffs and strategy.

Condi Tempest can realistically pull more than 30k on VG as well.

Sources please; can’t find anything over 30k burst right at the start that peters off down to low 20s later in the fight

UnbentMars.9126:

Coconut.7082:

UnbentMars.9126:

FYI, meta builds do 30-40k dps on a stationary target that doesn’t hit back. Even "realistic " dps on the golems is unrealistic.

Example: on the golems I pull an average of 33-35k with my condi elementalist. On VG last night I pulled a consistent 18k and was the highest dps in my raid. We beat it with a minute to spare

FYI, “meta builds” (or at least the DPS ones, e.g Tempest) can realistically pull 40k on VG and 30k+ on other bosses too.
But it also depends a lot on the buffs and strategy.

Condi Tempest can realistically pull more than 30k on VG as well.

Sources please; can’t find anything over 30k burst right at the start that peters off down to low 20s later in the fight

I realized you may be talking about ArcDPS numbers, which do not ignore the invuln (split) phases, therefore don’t represent an accurate indication of your damage on the boss, comparing to Golem (You can only use those numbers to see how you do in compare to other players in the same group).
If those were the numbers that you are looking at, then you might want to look at Arc logs or BDGM numbers, to see a better representation.

Otherwise, if you weren’t and 20k is what you see on BDGM/logs, here’s an example of some numbers, seen those go up to 40k too, but too lazy to look for a better picture: [img]http://i.imgur.com/O6Ei5Af.png[/img]
(Taken from the moment VG was killed)
Sorry for bad quality.

I wish that someone would make a “dodge meter” that would track mechanics you should have reacted to appropriately and didn’t. Probably make for a lot more success than the current DPS-only state of affairs. Unfortunately I can’t imagine that kind of information is even easily trackable, let alone TOS-compliant. But I for one would have way more use for “stop standing in the fire!” alerts and “what kind of fire did I stand in to die that time?” reports than “here’s how close you came to matching a golem test (before you missed a dodge and died and wiped your group).”

Sister Saxifrage.7361:

I wish that someone would make a “dodge meter” that would track mechanics you should have reacted to appropriately and didn’t. Probably make for a lot more success than the current DPS-only state of affairs. Unfortunately I can’t imagine that kind of information is even easily trackable, let alone TOS-compliant. But I for one would have way more use for “stop standing in the fire!” alerts and “what kind of fire did I stand in to die that time?” reports than “here’s how close you came to matching a golem test (before you missed a dodge and died and wiped your group).”

It exists, Arc tracks all combat information

Sly.9518:

It exists, Arc tracks all combat information

Yeah, all you really need is a parser that looks for those things in the arcdps logs and reports them to you in some meaningful way.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Sly.9518:

It exists, Arc tracks all combat information

Yeah, all you really need is a parser that looks for those things in the arcdps logs and reports them to you in some meaningful way.

Yeah luckily I have a friend that had a fully packaged parser built into ARC

DPS is also still so much required because the higher DPS is the more you can ignore the mechanics

You dont need to be so good if you just have insane DPS and dont need to survive as long as a group that has to cycle through the full boss mechanics multiple times

And yet, most of the players doing insane dps would also be able to do the mechanics properly, while people struggling at dps will usually also struggle at mechanics.

Orangensaft.7139:

DPS is also still so much required because the higher DPS is the more you can ignore the mechanics

This only works if you’re already familiar with the mechanics. You can’t do that with a bunch of players who entered a raid for the first time. And as such, it is irrelevant to the discussion. And it also doesn’t make the dps required. It makes it rewarding.

Feanor.2358:

Orangensaft.7139:

DPS is also still so much required because the higher DPS is the more you can ignore the mechanics

This only works if you’re already familiar with the mechanics. You can’t do that with a bunch of players who entered a raid for the first time. And as such, it is irrelevant to the discussion. And it also doesn’t make the dps required. It makes it rewarding.

…it’s also much less frequently the case that it lets you “ignore” the mechanics than Orangensaft suggests, and more that it lets you reduce the number of times you need to do the mechanics correctly, or the degree you can compensate for people who handle them poorly overall.

Anyway, someone did the math, and ~ 8k to 10k DPS accounting for 50 percent undamagable was what they came away with, so … I think that Feanor is exactly on point here.

SlippyCheeze.5483:

…Anyway, someone did the math, and ….

I really wonder who that someone could be. Man, I forget. What was the OP droning on about?
Some cat urine about vale guardian or something? Oh well. I’m sure it’s nothing.

Also that number was 10.4k and some change. If your splits on VG aren’t literal dog feces and you have someone taking a nap it shouldn’t be 50% dps downtime, those numbers would be much lower.

I was just being generous and lazy at the same time. If you want, I could calculate each individual split’s hp and add that to my calculations. But holy dear god almighty do I not want to do that.

Murdock.6547:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

…Anyway, someone did the math, and ….

I really wonder who that someone could be. Man, I forget. What was the OP droning on about?

I guess that sarcasm wasn’t really as obvious as I expected it to be when I wrote it, then.

VG:
22,000,000 hp.
Split 1:
Red = 540,705 HP
Green = 722,579 HP
Blue = 540,705 HP
Split 2:
Red = 540,705 HP
Green = 722,579 HP
Blue = 540,705 HP

total hp to drain: 25,607,978
timer: 8 minutes (480 seconds)
Group dps = HP to drain / Timer
53,349.95416666666… rounding up to 53,350
53,350dps / 10 members = 5,335 personal dps requirement.

It’s no longer a theory that mechanics are what kill raids vs dps timers.
It is now a proven fact. My godkitten necromancer can beat this dps requirement by just auto attacking in an extreme solo scenario (no ally buffs).

It was hard until people got used to the patterns aka mechanism which is still patterns anyway. The only time when people consider it as hard was during the initial phase where people have to use pen and papers to write down the patterns while figuring out the best strategy to go about it (which is actually just dps strategy like all pve contents). Once all of that is done, it is just optimizing the strategy and we have today so-called easy raid. However, if people do not share all those strategies, I wonder how many would consider it easy.

If I can’t join a raid without being kicked, then it isn’t really forgiving.

runeblade.7514:

If I can’t join a raid without being kicked, then it isn’t really forgiving.

If you join a group with certain demands that you dont have of course you will be kicked, and its not a raid problem. If I doing fractal 100 cm run exp / pots/ food and you join without the title and pots and food of course i will kick you the same with raids.
You wanting to force yourself in other people groups without take in consideration what people are asking for is the problem not the raids.

OnizukaBR.8537:

runeblade.7514:

If I can’t join a raid without being kicked, then it isn’t really forgiving.

If you join a group with certain demands that you dont have of course you will be kicked, and its not a raid problem. If I doing fractal 100 cm run exp / pots/ food and you join without the title and pots and food of course i will kick you the same with raids.
You wanting to force yourself in other people groups without take in consideration what people are asking for is the problem not the raids.

At least I don’t get kicked if I join a daily t4 group where as I do get kicked if I join any kind of raid group.

runeblade.7514:

Raids != Fractals

World isn’t always as easy as you think. It’s still easier to carry deadweight through T4 fractals than through raids.