Guild Wars 2

Giving some feedback on raids:

So far it seems like DPS is really pressured to perform, but it doesn’t seem like the requirements for tanks or healers is quite the same.

Now, to clarify that: I’m not saying that tanking or healing is too easy. I think the mechanics of those roles are sufficiently challenging.

Tanks
However, tanks don’t seem to take enough damage that a player really needs to put much focus into damage mitigation. Making a good tank build seems more along the lines of taking just about any profession and giving them a bit of toughness and damage mitigation to survive while impacting their dps as little as possible.

Healers
Healing is pretty similar. 1 single person is able to heal an entire raid with little to no support and can often do so without really stacking a lot of healing power gear. It’s better than in the beta when people used zerker druids, but it still has a ways to go.

Why this matters:
A lot of people have been looking forward to raids for a long time to be able to have a place where they can play something other than glass DPS in a useful way. Maybe it’s just the people I play with, but I see a lot of people that want to play a support role to some degree who are forced to go DPS since groups really seem to only need 1 healer and 1 tank with 8 DPS (some groups even consolidate the healer/tank and tank 9 dps).

So my tldr feedback is this: I think the encounters need to be adjusted so that there’s not such a high ratio of DPS roles to non-DPS roles.

You just described what any decent tank does in any godkitten game in this universe. They take enough defensive stats and skills to survive, and the rest goes into dps. Or healing, some tanks are also the healers.

On healers: even if it’s not as demanding as the tank role, they still have to be absolutely on point… but as always, healers don’t have to work much if the team is good. Just as it was in trinity games such as gw1, where good parties brought as little support and defensive stats as possible to be faster and more efficient.
Which sometimes meant no healing monks.
But no, clearly, we are “forced” (what is this, a dictatorship? a tyrannical oligarchy? you can leave) to do some damage and not be complete dead weights who overheal and overdefense just because having more defensive stats means more “diversity” and a defined “role”.

This game is never gonna have a rigid trinity, and you still don’t get it. It’s not completely phiws fault, though, because arenanet hyped the druid and raids to hell and back, giving the wrong impression with the stupid “zerk is dead” talk. I knew people would’ve misunderstood. After all, we’ve had trinity complaints for over 3 years now.

P.S. The second boss doesn’t really “require” a “tank” like for vale; it’s a dps check. Woops, my bad.

The problem lies as usual in the design of the encounters. So far we had only encounters where the enrage timer is only checking for the right amount of damage.

Therefore we need fights where the amount of healing is checked too. You could do this by introducing targets you have to heal completely within a certain time or you have to keep permanently above a certain health level.

For “tanking” we need encounters where you have to prevent that the the targets enter/leave certain areas at certain points in time.

like i get your point but it really isnt that easy to do for ANet aswell. The game wasnt designed for raids and stuff in the first place and gw2 players are not designed to use anything other than zerker gear and so on. so while the timer supports high dmg for example making the timer way higher for example will make the raid so easy, basicly everyone can just build full tank and faceroll the boss even if it takes longer.

i get the point of this or that is not optimal but most of the time the alternative isnt optimal aswell. its really hard to introduce raids into a game that wasnt designed to have raids and stuff in the first place.
And if i look on other mmos and i pretty much did my first raiding back in the wow classic age where you needed 40 people and stuff
(does anyone remember like in the first raid mc before all those patches where you needed a long prequest to enter it and a super long quest chain to use a glyph after a boss to continue to the next one and as you had a lot of bosses you needed like a couple people having those and else there was like no way you could even progress any further?) i still have those historical achievments tho.
you allways have those timers in some way and i dont even think raids work without enrage timers at the moment. If you can have like as much time as you want basicly everyone will faceroll it.

i actually think they did a pretty good job so far

I’ve already voiced my opinion on this subject before they released the raid. I saw the DPS check bosses coming from far away to the point that it’s not even funny. In short, GW2 raids are only GW2 dungeons 2.0.

The major issue of GW2 PvE is that the best defense is offense. Bosses/mob are simply designed to be slow hitter that reckt you if you aren’t carefull. This way it only leave one possibility for build : Full DPS.

What pain me is that this design make fury and might vital, while every other boons or profession’s specific effect that doesn’t directly affect DPS are down to be QoL thingy. I’ve proposed a system (that have been massively rejected by the community due to fear of taking damages) where the boss would have an aura that do damage to players around gradually faster instead of keeping this nonsense of an enrage shift where the boss hit normally hard and then after the switch, just destroy your team whatever you do. This would have been a defense/sustain check that would work along the DPS check. In a few word, something that use everything that the game offer instead of just Fury and might.

and another one who prob havent killed one single boss in the raid but is like the one who knows everything about the entire raid and the balance and the difficulty and (manily i guess just copy paste what other people write somewhere else)