Guild Wars 2

Now that the first raid has been fully released, we can look back and reflect on the content and discuss a couple of things.

Right now Forsaken Thicket has a few short-term and long-term goals for players to attain. Aside from the obvious Legendary Armor which will take dedicated raiders a couple of months to fully complete (albeit, they can craft full pieces in the interim), we have currency or rare drops for truly unique horizontal progression.

But, as time moves on a year or two from now perhaps, maybe a few lucky raiders would have gotten all the skins and commodities from the First Raid. At that moment the remaining incentive to continue raiding Forsaken Thicket in question might just be for shards to get cheaper Ascended Equipment. Some raiding guilds will likely take new guild initiates to gear them up certainly, but I believe that there needs to be a slight nudge for raiders to continue going into Forsaken Thicket long after they have completed everything base-line that was there.

Here’s what I propose: Raid Weeklies built around Challenge Motes, in which only increase the difficulty of the familiar encounters for an additional, non-exclusive reward.

We see some of this from the Bandit Trio achievement for not using Environmental Weapons, or a very direct Challenge Mote outside of Keep Construct. Such subtle changes can make some encounters marginally more difficult, or outright insane to do. But if given something like weekly repeatable rewards for doing so, I do expect it will take off well with raiders who feel that Forsaken Thicket could have been more difficult.

As for the rewards? We have something like that already, Box of Raider’s Supplies. The Ascended Materials that come from the box are fairly expensive to create or buy from the TP, but if raiders go the extra mile to go back to Forsaken Thicket even after the next few Raids come out, that would be incentive enough.

Furthermore, none of what I request should ever be a requirement for exclusive rewards down the road. I believe that the current Forsaken Thicket is very fair for its rewards to those dedicated enough already, the difficulty was fairly spot on for the first Raid of GW2.

Bind these Weekly rewards to the more challenging encounters, and you have something raiders can look forward to. As for some examples of the kind of challenges that could be implemented, it would have to be a per-encounter basis. Strictly off the top of my head:

Vale Guardian Challenge Mote: Enrage Timer Reduced to 7 minutes from 8 minutes, Distributed Magic Damage will defeat if it downs players.

Gorseval Challenge Mote: Spectral Impact will stomp downed players, Spirited Fusion Stacks raise Gorseval’s damage by 25% instead of 10%, Ghastly Rampage patterns are very different than the normal encounter.

Sabetha Challenge Mote: Sabetha’s Firestorm will alternate directions after each phase change. Flak Shot leaves larger Flak fields. Sabetha’s Champions have 10% more health.

Naturally, these are just suggestions on a direction I would take challenging encounters, and some bosses might be too hard initially for raiders to take the challenge mote on, and they can still do the normal encounter during that same lockout.