Guild Wars 2

What say you? Biggest cry-cry in the history of GW2 when only organized guild groups can complete them after multiple tries? Or farm-mode after gw2dungeons.net publishes the strategy? Place your bets now.

Hard at first, eventually will be pugable

I think people are going to be furious because everyone is excited for raids. If they’re as hard as they’re made out to be, you’re going to have millions of people who want to do them who can’t.

I’ve seen a lot of posts along the lines of “haha zerker elitists will be lying in the dust while my ascended soldier’s gear causes us to succeed.”

I doubt that. The zerker meta is never going to change.

The general population and Anet themselves don’t understand why the glass meta will never change, though. The feeling I’m getting from the community is “haha, now my tank will shine in raids and the zerkers will be laying on the ground.” I actually saw a guy on the ranger forum suggestion nomads would ever be a thing.

No matter how brutal anet makes the meta, people will take the most DPS possible. If they want to add tiny ticks of unavoidable damage, people will run valks with assassins or something.

So many anti-meta people think raids are what they’ve been waiting for when I really feel it’s the total opposite. People who oppose the meta will probably not be able to finish raids at all whereas they can do dungeons with really slow times and no down states.

Fluffball.8307:

So many anti-meta people think raids are what they’ve been waiting for when I really feel it’s the total opposite. People who oppose the meta will probably not be able to finish raids at all whereas they can do dungeons with really slow times and no down states.

Yep. Which is why the QQ is gonna run like never before. The question is can anet resist? Stay tuned for the next installment!

Fluffball.8307:

What say you? Biggest cry-cry in the history of GW2 when only organized guild groups can complete them after multiple tries? Or farm-mode after gw2dungeons.net publishes the strategy? Place your bets now.

I’m ok with both. If it’s too hard, I won’t care about raids. If it’s on farm, it’s a nice alternative to other farms.

The one to Rule.2593:

I doubt that. The zerker meta is never going to change.

For raids it’s looking like it will.

ZachAttack.3957:

The one to Rule.2593:

I doubt that. The zerker meta is never going to change.

For raids it’s looking like it will.

Technically yes. But I think people are interchanging zerker with glass cannon to include viper/sinister too ;-)

Edit: been predicting a tear tsunami since trying raids in beta. Unless it’s been nerfed to faceroll, which would be a darn shame.

Artemis Thuras.8795:

ZachAttack.3957:

The one to Rule.2593:

I doubt that. The zerker meta is never going to change.

For raids it’s looking like it will.

Technically yes. But I think people are interchanging zerker with glass cannon to include viper/sinister too ;-)

Edit: been predicting a tear tsunami since trying raids in beta. Unless it’s been nerfed to faceroll, which would be a darn shame.

I don’t think they will have nerfed it. From the actual hardcore audience who wanted these raids, at least from watching WP’s videos, it seems like the overall difficulty is a resounding success!

To an extent you’ll still need to have a lot of offense packed into your team because of the timers (assuming nothing changed from the beta encounters). So, yeah, kudos to tanks and healers, but not going down won’t be a reason to celebrate if you can’t beat the boss in time.

I honestly don’t anticipate as much QQ over the difficulty as some of the devs expect. I’m sure it will be there, but the biggest source of QQ will hands down be QQ over class imbalance.

You can already see this with thieves, but as soon as a meta establishes, there will almost certainly be backlash, particularly if it’s anything resembling the berserker meta.

Outside of that, I agree with The one to Rule: “Hard at first, eventually will be pugable”

Player knowledge and experience goes a long way. Once players start to have detailed guides and get experience enough to know when to dodge, where to stand/not stand, the difficulty will be incredibly different than at release.

Without a gear treadmill to gate content, it will be interesting to see how ANet handles the aging of raids…

ZachAttack.3957:

The one to Rule.2593:

I doubt that. The zerker meta is never going to change.

For raids it’s looking like it will.

Nope, I was one of the lucky ones to beta test the first raid wing. With 8 minutes (unless this was changed) to kill the final boss, if your party isn’t mixed between max physical dps and max condi damage, and possibly 1 support to keep people alive, then you will fail. However, it was found out that the boss follows the person with the highest toughness, so groups should take that into consideration. Zerker and sinisters/viper is a must.

ZachAttack.3957:

The one to Rule.2593:

I doubt that. The zerker meta is never going to change.

For raids it’s looking like it will.

According to whom? the only people to beat vale guardian in beta were in zerker.

Agreed people are going to Q.Q hard. Already seen a raids to hard post in HoT section. I think that a pile of people are going to spew non-sense for a while about meta. Frankly what ever gear combo you manage to do the raid with is good on you. I think raids will allow for some small build diversity but out side of 2 people in the raids rest are going to be meta viper/zerk.

The one to Rule.2593:

ZachAttack.3957:

The one to Rule.2593:

I doubt that. The zerker meta is never going to change.

For raids it’s looking like it will.

According to whom? the only people to beat vale guardian in beta were in zerker.

Must have taken forever to beat that condi only boss if they were all in zerker.

Zerker = glass. A lot of people are referring to vipers and sinister as “zerker”.

How’s the ez mode going? :P

I think a lot of people are unhappy with the zerker/sinister/viper meta since it’s generally a strategy of making everyone in the group min/max their DPS since in other MMOs, there’s a need for players to min/max defense and healing.

However, until we see some damage that really taxes healers and “tanks”, building an ideal raid group is more of a question of min/maxing DPS while maintaining just enough healing and “tanking”.

Dahkeus.8243:

I think a lot of people are unhappy with the zerker/sinister/viper meta since it’s generally a strategy of making everyone in the group min/max their DPS since in other MMOs, there’s a need for players to min/max defense and healing.

However, until we see some damage that really taxes healers and “tanks”, building an ideal raid group is more of a question of min/maxing DPS while maintaining just enough healing and “tanking”.

The argument that has been brought up for years is killing the glass meta is bad for the game.

• A bunch of random damage that can’t be avoided with skill, so force people to passively absorb it with PVT? People are always going to run the glassiest possible spec. If you can get by with 91.25% zerk and the rest valks gear or something, that’s what people are going to run.
• Massive damage? Might as well run zerk and take active defenses/dodge.

I much prefer to use a block at the right time than to wear PVT and just sit there autoattacking.

Zerker, Sinister or Rabid or Party kick.

That’s my prediction for raids. Maybe 1-2 super healing professions. But with the druid healing nerf (nr 4 AF been nerfed super hard), I think druid is in a bad spot now. Useless.

Fluffball.8307:

Dahkeus.8243:

I think a lot of people are unhappy with the zerker/sinister/viper meta since it’s generally a strategy of making everyone in the group min/max their DPS since in other MMOs, there’s a need for players to min/max defense and healing.

However, until we see some damage that really taxes healers and “tanks”, building an ideal raid group is more of a question of min/maxing DPS while maintaining just enough healing and “tanking”.

The argument that has been brought up for years is killing the glass meta is bad for the game.

• A bunch of random damage that can’t be avoided with skill, so force people to passively absorb it with PVT? People are always going to run the glassiest possible spec. If you can get by with 91.25% zerk and the rest valks gear or something, that’s what people are going to run.
• Massive damage? Might as well run zerk and take active defenses/dodge.

I much prefer to use a block at the right time than to wear PVT and just sit there autoattacking.

I think it’s more a matter of getting active AND passive defense to be considered.

There’s no doubt that people shouldn’t just PVT soak up everything. However, players should also be challenged to find a gear set that provides a balance of damage and defense instead of just blindly stacking the highest dps armor.

The idea behind what you are saying is right: Players want to be challenged to think and want to be rewarded for being better at the game.

However, there’s two ways to do this: Reward players for using active defenses and reward players for strategizing the best gear set.

Right now only active defense is being rewarded (although some might question if stacking and AoEing with high dps is really ‘active’). Meanwhile, players can just stack straight zerk gear without ever really having to consider half the stats in the game to be successful.

Ideally there is some damage that’s unavoidable that forces players to take some defense gear while at the same time there’s also some damage that’s avoidable through blocks/dodges/etc. And sure, some players will need less defense than others, depending on build and skill, but allowing players to excel without any consideration for defense at all takes away from the game and removes the depth that many players want for an engaging experience.

Raids will be routinely and easily puggable within a couple months. And only that long because the weekly reward gate means it’ll take a little longer for people to master the encounters.