Guild Wars 2

Hey guys,

I have done lots of raiding in the past in a variety of games including EQ, EQ2, WoW, Rift, and Destiny and just wanted to comment about the new raid. Wall of text incoming.

First of, it’s great to have actually challenging content. I went with my guild expecting not to be able to down the Vale Guardian as we had an interesting group composition: 1 Ele, 2 Tempest, 1 Chrono, 1 Condi Reaper, 1 Druid, 2 Warrior, 1 Engi, 1 Necro. We ended up making it to the 3rd phase where we missed getting in the green circles and with our timer around 1:00. The mechanics to get there were very well done and though out. It made you really think and consider your positioning throughout the fight while trying to do damage to the boss. Once he split, we didn’t have enough condi to get the red guardian down quickly.

This leads me into thinking about past raids I’ve done and how they worked with progression. Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have a gear grind which I really like, but I feel it changes how GW2 raids are from other games. The first boss of a raid is typically an entry into mechanics and making sure your team can work well together. You don’t necessarily need the best gear, but you need to nail the mechanics (most of them at least). These usually are a relatively easy kill and a beginning to the gear progression so that when you face them after you have the raid on farm, they’re not as difficult as before. This helps give the feeling of progression in the raid that you can kill the 1st boss with relative ease because you not only know the mechanics better, but have gear to do more DPS. GW2 raids will never be able to have this as there is no gear grind. The only way that this could potentially happen is if they introduced Masteries which helped with certain bosses. I’m not necessarily in favor of this, but it makes it hard to repeat this first boss with other groups that need to learn the mechanics still.

This feeds into my biggest issue with the first boss, the enrage timer. Why the hell is there an enrage timer on the first boss of the raid that it’s mechanics have enough power to wiped you anyways. This shows the glass meta is still existent with the addition of a tank and a couple of healers. I understand you could load up on tank gear and grind it out, but if you do that, you have to deal with the mechanics for longer. Dungeons/Fractals never needed to have glass builds, they just sped up the content. There is no possibility for face tanking with the need to kill when the boss splits and go into the green circles, so I see little reason this timer needs to exist. GW2 has achievements for beating a boss within a time duration so add this as one of the achievements instead.

Finally, I think the stat system in GW2 promotes the idea of a glass build compared with other games. In Rift, you could be a Mage and know you’re going to be outside the thick of things and build yourself to have good Int + Crit Chance gear, but still be relatively fragile. In GW2, you don’t have a stat for your class which promotes the same idea as other games to build for Max DPS to do more damage. The problem in GW2, there is a Max DPS for any class that isn’t the same for every class which I think really hurts certain classes. If the enrage timer exists, this should not punish people to play the class they want to even if their class can’t do Max DPS.

I think there are a lot of good things going for raids, but I definitely think there need to be changes. I understand this isn’t content that’s supposed to be easy and I do enjoy the challenge. I don’t enjoy the fact that we have to play certain builds or classes to complete just the first boss.

TL;DR: Raids present an awesome challenge, but don’t provide the build diversity we were told

We were promised change Obama!

Thanks for the useful comment. /s

I’m trying to share my opinion about it and how raids will turn off a lot of people

Spirit Vale already offers the greatest build and gear diversity that instanced PvE content in GW2 has ever seen. The groups that are winning are bringing Clerics/Zealots/Celestial Druids/Tempests, and even Soldiers Warriors/Guardians. While it’s true that you need a certain threshold of DPS, which means that roughly 80% of your group should be focusing on DPS rotations, the flexibility for supporting and tanking through gear stats as well as build configuration is astounding. It’s nothing like the faceroll that is Dungeons/Fractals.

The enrage timer is incredibly generous; it’s only there to ensure that ten tanky players cannot take thirty minutes to beat the boss. That isn’t showcasing skill at any level, and isn’t what they wanted when they designed GW2 raids.

Truly, I think if you feel pigeonholed into certain “meta” builds you’re simply lacking creativity. The challenge here is not in “being the fastest” when you win, but winning at all; that’s a huge paradigm shift.

ryphez.8250:

Hey guys,

I have done lots of raiding in the past in a variety of games including EQ, EQ2, WoW, Rift, and Destiny and just wanted to comment about the new raid. Wall of text incoming.

First of, it’s great to have actually challenging content. I went with my guild expecting not to be able to down the Vale Guardian as we had an interesting group composition: 1 Ele, 2 Tempest, 1 Chrono, 1 Condi Reaper, 1 Druid, 2 Warrior, 1 Engi, 1 Necro. We ended up making it to the 3rd phase where we missed getting in the green circles and with our timer around 1:00. The mechanics to get there were very well done and though out. It made you really think and consider your positioning throughout the fight while trying to do damage to the boss. Once he split, we didn’t have enough condi to get the red guardian down quickly.

This leads me into thinking about past raids I’ve done and how they worked with progression. Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have a gear grind which I really like, but I feel it changes how GW2 raids are from other games. The first boss of a raid is typically an entry into mechanics and making sure your team can work well together. You don’t necessarily need the best gear, but you need to nail the mechanics (most of them at least). These usually are a relatively easy kill and a beginning to the gear progression so that when you face them after you have the raid on farm, they’re not as difficult as before. This helps give the feeling of progression in the raid that you can kill the 1st boss with relative ease because you not only know the mechanics better, but have gear to do more DPS. GW2 raids will never be able to have this as there is no gear grind. The only way that this could potentially happen is if they introduced Masteries which helped with certain bosses. I’m not necessarily in favor of this, but it makes it hard to repeat this first boss with other groups that need to learn the mechanics still.

This feeds into my biggest issue with the first boss, the enrage timer. Why the hell is there an enrage timer on the first boss of the raid that it’s mechanics have enough power to wiped you anyways. This shows the glass meta is still existent with the addition of a tank and a couple of healers. I understand you could load up on tank gear and grind it out, but if you do that, you have to deal with the mechanics for longer. Dungeons/Fractals never needed to have glass builds, they just sped up the content. There is no possibility for face tanking with the need to kill when the boss splits and go into the green circles, so I see little reason this timer needs to exist. GW2 has achievements for beating a boss within a time duration so add this as one of the achievements instead.

Finally, I think the stat system in GW2 promotes the idea of a glass build compared with other games. In Rift, you could be a Mage and know you’re going to be outside the thick of things and build yourself to have good Int + Crit Chance gear, but still be relatively fragile. In GW2, you don’t have a stat for your class which promotes the same idea as other games to build for Max DPS to do more damage. The problem in GW2, there is a Max DPS for any class that isn’t the same for every class which I think really hurts certain classes. If the enrage timer exists, this should not punish people to play the class they want to even if their class can’t do Max DPS.

I think there are a lot of good things going for raids, but I definitely think there need to be changes. I understand this isn’t content that’s supposed to be easy and I do enjoy the challenge. I don’t enjoy the fact that we have to play certain builds or classes to complete just the first boss.

TL;DR: Raids present an awesome challenge, but don’t provide the build diversity we were told

Going to hit your first point about the Vale Guardian and its enrage timer. The mechanics…if there were not an enrage timer, could nullified fairly easily. Consider the outgoing damage outside of the green circle for a moment, even with most of the group running full glass cannon power or condition, the raid damage is capable of being healed through by one dedicated healer and whatever passive heals or mitigations each raider has. The red orbs would be negligible, the blue teleports would only delay, and the green circle could be absorbed with less people than the normal, and even if a circle were missed the higher vitality members of the group could easily avoid being downed just through sheer health (I believe the damage is about 20k to everyone if no one hits the lightning).

That only leaves the ambient rotating damage floor and well, the boss cleave, again these would be mitigated by health and toughness. People would bring either condition damage, or power, and that’s it. It would take much longer, but it would be a guaranteed kill and people will stick around for 20 minutes for something absolute rather than risk an 8 minute fight for potential multiple wipes. For Vale Guardian, the timer is actually what makes the encounter difficult, since you need to have a certain level of DPS, and pull off the mechanics properly rather than ignore them. In fact I would argue the execution of mechanics is definitely superior to the damage, a few ‘Not quite full ascended’ groups have done the encounter already.

Which ties into your second point, which I cannot say either way on. I suppose the best way to determine if you are right about the DPS on different professions would be to do a Vale Guardian attempt with the lowest power and condition damage profession builds, and do a perfect mechanical run to see if it is possible. But the big thing to take away is that most of what we are seeing with these raid groups and recruiting for them is just the playerbase being discriminatory. I think the fault is more on the players than the encounter. Lastly, we have to be careful if we start thinking about the least optimal profession build for a certain role in an encounter. If we start balancing towards the lowest denominator, everything above that line will be viable if not overpowered for the encounter, thus diminishing its difficulty.

Then either my guilds dps sucked crazy hardballs, or you need something like 12k dps (all 10 ppl) to kill the boss. Many zerker builds cannot sustain 10k damage ,if the does agro’s you (to much damage). The moment you dodge, the boss moves, then all melee damage is countered. So if you don’t have super ranged dps builds you loose to vale guardian? That’s how it feels at least. I don’t want an easy raid, but right now, it feels like ’you need 100k dps or you loose (and no build can do that). In other words: mission impossible.

Basically if this boss according to so many ’pro’s’ is easy, then the lead dps specs (sinister engie I think), should be able to do at LEAST 10% of the boss. Hell some ppl use 2-4 clerics and still win. That means, basically the lead dps (wich from what i read is about 19k), should do 14-18% down hp of the boss. Guess what, my engie wich is full sinister: I did 12k dps at least (sometimes my rotations got nuked due to to much agro, or moving to far to green circle, etc). All my allies also did damagE. Boss ended up 97% after 240 seconds. First of all, from the math above, my 12k dps (average) should have done about 6-7% of his hp down, then my allies, even if they were total crap, should have done also some damage. Didn’t happen, at all.

I want anet to release his hitpoints. So we can do the true math. Now you are just trying and trying, and in the end if one person is playing to safe with a low dps build, whole party is screwed, this shouldnt be the case. Some say it’s 12000 000 hp.

So every player must do 1,2m damage. Very funnely, that makes 2k (constant, no interference allowed) dps the necessity. Quite kitten low imo. If i can do 12k sinister, the boss should have melted, (but didn’t).

Even if it’s 20-30m hp, sometime feels mathematically wrong about this encouter (almost as though the boss has a heal mechanic, wich i think he doesn’t.)

Well it can’t be impossible since people have already cleared it. Last estimates I saw:

Boss has 22 million health, enrage timer is 8 minutes, 10 people in a raid

That means each person needs a minimum average dps of 4583.33 in order to kill the boss at exactly 8 minutes.

That’s easy to achieve by just hitting 1 repeatedly

Not really, for instance, full zerker revenant hits 3k with sword 1 to ‘thoughness mobs,’ 3500 to mediums, and 4500 to squishy’s. Only quickness (impossible odds) improves it. (This is with 16-25 might stacks and sigil of force). The boss is very likely thoughness. Wich means oh right: you only do 3k dps. If the boss punches you 3x it breaks your rotation. I tried druid, and even with celestial (30% heal boost about), i couldnt solo heal up the tank. Full zerker he dook 5k every 3 sec. Except for Avatar form, that cannot be kept up.

I’m not saying make the raids easier.

But atm i feel like trying to kill mai trinn, without anyone knowing the purple aoe makes her vulnerable. You can try, 1000x, trial and error so hard, but you won’t kill her if you don’t strip the invulnerability. I know the green spot mechanic, i know the agro mechanic. I know you need healers/dps’. Etc. I know all of that. But this info is not enough to even go further then 10% hp loss of the boss. Something doesn’t add up, and I hate it. Give me the mathematical proof why what happend to me is wrong and i’ll be way more happy, even if it means i still didn’t beat the raid.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

Not really, for instance, full zerker revenant hits 3k with sword 1 to ‘thoughness mobs,’ 3500 to mediums, and 4500 to squishy’s. Only quickness (impossible odds) improves it. (This is with 16-25 might stacks and sigil of force). The boss is very likely thoughness. Wich means oh right: you only do 3k dps. If the boss punches you 3x it breaks your rotation. I tried druid, and even with celestial (30% heal boost about), i couldnt solo heal up the tank. Full zerker he dook 5k every 3 sec. Except for Avatar form, that cannot be kept up.

I’m not saying make the raids easier.

But atm i feel like trying to kill mai trinn, without anyone knowing the purple aoe makes her vulnerable. You can try, 1000x, trial and error so hard, but you won’t kill her if you don’t strip the invulnerability. I know the green spot mechanic, i know the agro mechanic. I know you need healers/dps’. Etc. I know all of that. But this info is not enough to even go further then 10% hp loss of the boss. Something doesn’t add up, and I hate it. Give me the mathematical proof why what happend to me is wrong and i’ll be way more happy, even if it means i still didn’t beat the raid.

First of all, the vale guardian is light/medium armour.
My revenant hit him for 8k with sword autos recently. But could do more.
Consider the following:
-Sword auto hits MORE than once per second.
-I was not running shiro. I was running Mallyx since i was the boonstripper
-Boss was NOT under 50% health so i didnt get the +20% damage
-I was NOT running the best food/sharpening stones (only 2nd best)
-I did NOT have banner buffs, alacrity, quickness, or necro aura.
-I did NOT have frost spirit buffs.

If you are only hitting for 3k with rev sword auto on vale guardian, either your build is really screwed up, or your group has absolutely terrible buff uptime and you are running with no/wrong sigils/runes/food/utility.

If i dont use any buffs and have no team assisstance, around 4.5k crits is normal for me.