Guild Wars 2

Hi,

I’m a very active leader of a raid group for beginners and started to run a group of completely fresh players 2 months ago. This time I tried a new off-meta composition, because I think the current Meta doesn’t support new players very well in learning raid mechanics. Therefore I start presenting my idea of a beginner comp and discuss about the benefits afterwards.

The main target was to provide a class for each player that is easy to play and allows to concentrate on the boss mechanics and not on the class rotation. There are several easy Meta builds around but as the raid group consists of only one advanced player and 9 completely new players, this could be not that easy to reach. The second main target I want to achieve is that every player needs only one class at the beginning, this is cheaper for beginners and helps again to concentrate on boss mechanics. In addition, every player should have the possibility to get practical insights into all boss mechanics. As an example a PS Warrior usually gets only insight to mechanics that are directly boss related (e.g. no cannons at Sabetha) or everyone except the healers don’t know what it means to heal the whole group or at least the subgroup.
With that in mind I picked up the condition ranger as a class that has several benefits:
- Easy rotation and still very good DPS
- Still decent damage with low buffs
- Possibility to switch to condition druid without effort
- Some survivability in contrast to tempest for example
- A lot of useful utility-skills

I did a lot of test with different buffs and reached 25k DPS with only the following buffs: 5xGOTL, Sunspirit, Banner of Strength, Banner of Discipline, 25xMight and Fury. With these DPS you can easily kill every boss except KC. So now the question was: How can I gain this buffs with only a low number of persons, in order to take as much condition rangers as possible?
As you can see there are no chrono buffs and if you say condition druid and ranger are the same there are already 7 spots for condition rangers. The other 3 are two PS Warriors and a Magi Druid, which will have to tank. This can be improved even more by using my Might-Druid build, which I introduced here (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Refinement-of-Might-Druid-build-for-raids). So the final build was:
Group 1: Might-Druid | 4x Condi Ranger
Group 2: Condi-PS | Condi Druid | 3x Condi Ranger
If you thought Condi Druid is too hard to play for beginners, this is a simplified composition:
Group 1+2: 4x Condi Ranger
Group 3: Condi PS
Group 4: Might-Druid
And this is basically the composition I played in my raid group now for the last months. Before you all flame me for playing such an off-meta comp, let me explain the benefits I discovered:
- Explaining the rotation and practice them is one of the first things you want to do with raid beginners. Having 8/10 players running the exactly same build, players can practise together, talk with each other about their first experience and the leader can explain the build very deeply.
- The organisation is simplified: Basically, you can handle a pool of 20 players without having troubles in building a composition every evening, there is never the common situation: We are enough people but we can’t build a good composition, because a chrono or something else is missing. Basically, the only kind of ‘bottleneck’ was the Condi PS, but I have a lots of experienced players in my friendlist to close that little gap.
- You can swap special roles every time. PS or Chronos usually never see things like Sabethas Cannons, Sloths Slublings, etc. With this comp you can easily swap roles, depending on which player still struggle in some mechanics and need more practise.
- The comp only uses meta-builds, so after successfully trained one boss/wing players can look into LFG and do their kills there, while the raid group focuses on new bosses/wings.
- Players know the playstyle of their teammates. This is often underestimated: Players who know what are the teammates around them are doing can much better supporting each other.

At the end, I want to make clear that I’m not an enemy of the current Meta in general, this only depends to raid beginners. The above comp should be a starting point for new groups, it is recommended to adapt this after some time. As an example, there are already players which are interesting in playing a 2nd class. One guy wanted to play chrono and this was totally ok for me and the group. The group didn’t depend on that chrono but it is nice to have him in.

Here are some videos of one our first kills (at the moment we are at Sabetha):
VG (~5th kill, already with chrono): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFtq4ROSPjE
Gorseval (2nd kill): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0rgP8tzSMw&t=129s

I mean, you can get kills with all Guardians, all Necromancers, or even stranger compositions than that. That said, for a beginner group, your composition is making it much harder for everyone than it needs to be. If you have even one player remotely competent at Chronomancer you could carry the rest of the players extremely hard on a Minstrel’s set with permanent protection uptime, distortion sharing, and ancillary healing. Heck, even swapping one ranger in each for a Guardian would be helpful because they can generate some quickness.

Also, for full awareness, running a second Warrior to guarantee that everyone gets the banner/EA buffs is way more valuable than running another Ranger. Running a second Warrior also means you don’t have to run might-generating Druids. To round this all out, with 4 DPS classes in the standard meta composition you can fill all specialty roles very easily with lots of flexibility and backup potential (Sabetha cannons, Slublings, etc). Adding more DPS classes really doesn’t change that.

P.S. If you do get a single Chronomancer, put them in their own subgroup to share quickness and alacrity to everyone else. I noticed in your VG video that subgroup 1 would never get alacrity or quickness due to the subgroup organization.

Rising Dusk.2408:

I mean, you can get kills with all Guardians, all Necromancers, or even stranger compositions than that. That said, for a beginner group, your composition is making it much harder for everyone than it needs to be. If you have even one player remotely competent at Chronomancer you could carry the rest of the players extremely hard on a Minstrel’s set with permanent protection uptime, distortion sharing, and ancillary healing. Heck, even swapping one ranger in each for a Guardian would be helpful because they can generate some quickness.

Thats is exactly the fact many raid groups didn’t get. You don’t do a new player any favor if you carry him though all wings. People have to learn all mechanics and that includes doging attacks. As an example with, perma protection and double magi druids, you won’t even recognize that it is not a good idea to stay in a red orb @vg or something similar. One important phase of learning is adapt after doing failiures. With this “babysitting” you would not reach that goal.

EpheSOSIayer.6370:

Rising Dusk.2408:

I mean, you can get kills with all Guardians, all Necromancers, or even stranger compositions than that. That said, for a beginner group, your composition is making it much harder for everyone than it needs to be. If you have even one player remotely competent at Chronomancer you could carry the rest of the players extremely hard on a Minstrel’s set with permanent protection uptime, distortion sharing, and ancillary healing. Heck, even swapping one ranger in each for a Guardian would be helpful because they can generate some quickness.

Thats is exactly the fact many raid groups didn’t get. You don’t do a new player any favor if you carry him though all wings. People have to learn all mechanics and that includes doging attacks. As an example with, perma protection and double magi druids, you won’t even recognize that it is not a good idea to stay in a red orb @vg or something similar. One important phase of learning is adapt after doing failiures. With this “babysitting” you would not reach that goal.

Agree. People are always too focused on the win, and not enough in the learning. Your idea is strong.
Respect!

with beginners.. I notice, the problem is the base damage. Remove support, if the base damage of the player can reach average base damage – I mean base damage is damage without any boost from support, then when the support players come in question, it is there to support dps guys to counter mechanics. I believe good chronos and druids can carry the whole team thru all bosses if dps from the guys are good providing not too many mistakes make by players while countering mechanics

I’m a bit confused. How exactly is a comp supposed to be a reasonable beginner comp when it excludes the vast majority of potential beginners, i.e. everyone who doesn’t (want to) play ranger?

Having commanded training runs in the past the problem is usually not mechanics but dps. Most people can learn the basic mechanics of the fight within 3-4 tries and start performing somewhat decent, most of the problems come with lack of dps which takes its toll on the group.

For example: Having bad dps on VG means u will have to deal with a ton of green circles on burn phases, one green circle on bad position means a wipe usually and green circles+seekers are rng.

Having bad dps on gors means u have to deal with a huge amount of orbs and delay the retal phase too long which is risky and usually ends up in wipes.

Having bad dps on sabetha means that as soon as the 3rd mini boss appears(i think its karde) the pressure will be overwhelming on the group since it will die slow thus leading to a wipe.

Same for matthias, xera, deimos, samarog and pretty much every encounter.

Summary: DPS is by far the most important thing for a group cause it lessens the pressure, mechanical expertise will come with time and makes the group consistent.So people need to focus on learning their own classes b4 learning the mechanics of the fight.

Mechanics trump optimal composition. As long as every member in your team knows what they’re doing, and how the boss works, you can kill a boss with 10 druids (trust me, there’s a 2 hour video on youtube where 10 druids kill a boss, complete in healer get-up)

Yup, mechanics first, second step optimize dps to an extent where you have to deal with only a few of them.

I think mechanics are more important than dps, too. In fact, what I did in those training runs, I forced all players to NOT use bufffood. This gave them the time to train more and avoid one of those “lucky” kills. I wanted all players to be able to kill the boss in a more or less clean way, independent of luck. This should not mean that I’m not using food in general, for daily kills everyone used food.

But back to the composition (I don’t want to talk about my training methods here):

I’m a bit confused. How exactly is a comp supposed to be a reasonable beginner comp when it excludes the vast majority of potential beginners, i.e. everyone who doesn’t (want to) play ranger?

Indeed this excludes those players which are not willing to spend some gold to get into the raid. This sounds a bit hard, but has some nice side-effects:
- At first, a lot of new players don’t have any good raid build and even if everyone have one, there will be 4PS and no healer as an example. It is fair for all players to start at zero and gave me the chance to better compare them while they improve.
- Another point is that every player have to spend some gold for armor etc. and this avoid players joining the group which are not 100% interested. It is similar to the commander symbol. If you pay 300gold for a commander symbol the propability of trolling around with it is less.