Guild Wars 2

NOTE: I’ve written most of this post long before the subliminal announcement of possible future raid content as mentioned by a dev during a fireside chat on Tarnished Coast. So it may be possible that they already have something in place for raid content. Regardless, I’d like to share my insight, commentary, and suggestions about future raid content.

Special thanks to my guildmates of Reddit Refugees for coming up with some of these ideas as well.

Warning: butt-freakin’ huge walls of text incoming. Click here for the TL;DR version.

PREFACE: Clarification of Definitions

• Raid: A larger-than-average group of people designed to take on a common objective. This does not take in regard to difficulty, complexity, or organization of groups for the content in question. The more common term “Zerg” could fit this particular definition, which is commonly found in many popular world boss events like Shadow Behemoth, the Dragon champions, and Orr Temples; and often used amongst Commanders in WvW. The official GW2 term “Squad” (consisting of 6 or more followers) can also be considered a Raid by this definition.

• Raid Dungeon: An instanced area designed to be completed by a larger-than-average group of people. The encounters and events in these dungeons are generally more challenging than the encounters and events normally found in the outside world, even harder than some guild bounties. The GW: Factions Elite Missions, Urgoz’s Warren and The Deep, could be considered Raid Dungeons by this definition since you normally need 12 people to progress through that content instead of 8.

• Ascended <Monster Name>: Any monster name with the Ascended descriptor before it would be equivalent to the Mega Boss monsters out in the open world, like Shadow Behemoth, Golem Mark II, the Dragon Champions, or any boss monster with an extra-large portrait placed on a health bar: http://i.imgur.com/dvg9W2Q.png .

INTRODUCTION

First of all, I love raiding. If it’s one thing I miss from other MMOs, it’s some form of large-scale instanced content that could be done with a guild. However, I also understand that the traditional raid dungeon format may not be very casual-friendly or forgiving for the targeted audience of GW2. So what I would propose is some form of dungeon raiding format that can be suitable for hobby raiders but still somewhat accessible to the casual gamer.

NAME … WHAT SOUNDS GUILD WARS-ISH?

Guild Wars in general tends to use vocabulary that seems to be somewhat different than the traditional MMO. For instance, “profession” for job classes, “disciplines” for crafting professions, “trading post” for auction house, and “missions” for guild-related activities. Seeing that Dungeon Raiding has traditionally been a guild-related activity, perhaps these raids could be called: “Large-Scale Dungeon Missions” or LSDM. “Incursion Mission” sounds kinda bad-kitten and utilizes the word Mission to imply that it’s an activity normally performed by a guild.

RAID DUNGEON vs. MEGA BOSS WORLD EVENTS

Two different design principals involved …

Mega Boss World Events are intended to be much more approachable by even the random passer-by. A hylek screams, “There’s somehting in the water!” and the surrounding people gather to take on Tequatl. In a way, the hylek is telling you to get there and kill a big ugly dragon. Since this encounter is in the open world and in a non-80 zone, it should be somewhat simple to kill.

A Raid Dungeon, on the other hand, is traditionally a dungeon that would tests the meddle of guild groups in trying to clear stronger-than-average monsters, and take on powerful bosses that may not be easily defeated by just a random group of people. In this case, a much more degree of coordination may be required to complete them. These could be similar to what we have in Guild Puzzles; but more killing and looting, and less jumping and flipping switches … though, I see nothing wrong in jumping and flipping switches if it’s something that needs to be done to kill a big monster.

ACCESSIBILITY

Traditionally, Raid Dungeons would require special requirements to enter them, usually by buying your way in or by earning an attunement. However, the price entry ranged from being modest (in the case of GW1’s Elite Missions, based on the market value of Passage Scrolls), to somewhat lengthy and/or annoying (the formally-implemented Attunement quests in WoW).

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In GW1, in order to enter the Elite Mission areas, you would normally have to pay a fixed amount of money to an NPC such as The Voice of Grenth to enter The Underworld or Champion of Balthazar for The Fissure of Woe; complete an assortment of prerequisite quests to enter Sorrow’s Furnace; become invited by the controlling Alliance to enter Urgoz’s Warren or The Deep; or complete the Nightfall campaign to access The Domain of Anguish. Alternatively, you could also pay market price for a Passage Scroll to any of the “exclusive” Elite Missions.

For GW2, similar attunements should be made to enter certain Raid Dungeons, similar to how certain 5-man dungeons need to be uncontested before entering them. There can be a temporary option (like Passage Scrolls), such as buying a pass of some sorts that allows you to enter the dungeon a certain amount of times and/or explore it within a certain time limit; or there could be a permanent option (like Gate Attunements) that allows you to access the Raid Dungeon at any time and explore it for as long as you please. However, creation of the permanent version of these keys should require some time and effort. It could also require a modest amount of gold, but not too much.

If a Raid Dungeon is to be a separate path of an already existing dungeon (as in any of the original eight dungeons that came with the game), then here’s an idea to make yourself a permanent key. You would need to satisfy the following conditions:

• Complete all story and explorable paths of said dungeon. This makes sense since you still have to complete Story in order to access Explorable modes (unless you were ferried through by someone who has already done Story).
• Acquire the Gift appropriate for that dungeon (eg. Gift of Knowledge for Crucible of Eternity)
• Acquire a time-gated item (usually acquired by spending Laurels, Pristine Fractal Relics, Mystic Coins, and/or Guild Commendations)

For unique Raid Dungeons, they may require the completion of certain achievements in order to gain temporary or permanent access to them.

Another alternative is to tie the attunement into the Guild Mission unlock system. The guild leader could purchase a guild-wide attunement that would allow members of a certain rank and higher to join in on guild-hosted Raid Dungeons. Unlocking access to these Raid Dungeons by the guild would require:

• A certain amount of guild members with the Dungeon Master title, possibly 1 for every 20 active members (as opposed to total members to consider guilds who may have members who may be taking a break from the game)
• A reasonable amount of Guild Merits and Influence
• A collective amount of dungeon tokens which can be donated by guild members and placed in a guild-specific currency pool (similar to Guild Merits and Influence).

What if I don’t want to be in a guild? or What if I just want to stick with my smaller-sized or Non-Dungeon-Centric (eg. WvW-focused) guild?

The very moment I mention the word “Guild Commendations”, I’d anticipate one person out there is going to ask that question. I know this is going to sound weird, but Dungeon Raiding has traditionally been a guild-related activity. Also: this game is called “Guild” Wars (yes, I know the game is named after a moment in Tyrian lore, but social-wise, a game called Guild Wars should imply that you should belong to some form of guild, faction, or association).

But if you insist in remaining in your own 1-person or non-dungeon guild, there’s always the LFG tool that’s coming up in a few patches or so. If the hosting guild is advertising for assistance in clearing a Raid Dungeon, then this solo individual can offer to join them through the LFG tool. It would be up to the raid leader from the hosting guild to accept or deny the request. After successful completion of the Raid Dungeon, this individual could be rewarded appropriately (but slightly less than what representing guild members would normally get).

CASUAL-FRIENDLY

Raid Dungeons have traditionally been the kind of content that is normally experienced by people who dedicate a large block of time in order to complete them. This meant that those who don’t have much time to complete them may end up leaving their raid early and putting other raid members at a burden of having to deal with a less-than-average sized group. Though some guilds may have “standby” members to solve this issue, this shouldn’t be wholely relied on in most situations. In addition, content like this is often very pressurizing to the general targeted demographic of GW2, which is mostly the casual player. See the SUGGESTED PARTY SIZE section below.

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SUGGESTED PARTY SIZE

To keep in line of being casual-friendly, the Raid Dungeon should scale with the amount of people in the Raid Party (possibly to a maximum of 50~75 people), but should encourage a minimum to progress. This suggested minimum could also be reinforced by adding non-boss barriers that actually require this minimum in order to open them. For example, a statue boss that would come to life only when ten people step on ten specific floor panels. This would obviously discourage solo-ists from trying to solo encounters normally engaged by a Raid party. I get it that there are people who want to be challenged in trying to solo a raid a boss (as opposed to a 5-man boss), but at that point, I would have to seriously question how the encounter was designed.

Why such a large size? To basically keep larger guild groups together and focused on the same task on equal footing. This is especially encouraged in Guild Puzzles and that same mentality should also apply to Raid Dungeons. This minimizes the chance of drama due to certain members being tossed into a “B-Group” or group of that is artificially labeled that of lesser quality compared to the “primary” group. For reference, this is a screenshot of the many people that showed up to our Guild Missions on a given Sunday. In an older restricted party size setting, we would end up with two 25-man groups, or five 10-man groups, with a few people on “standby”. Personally, I’m not a big fan of “standby” people. There are no standby people in Guild Missions— everyone who showed up to the event gets to participate and earn their share of the glory. It wouldn’t be fair for those who showed up (early, I may add) only to find out they can’t participate because the raid is “full”. Instead, everyone who decides to show up that day should be equally rewarded in proportion to the effort they put in trying to clear the Raid Dungeon.

Organization

First, we need the appropriate raid UI frames to support the display of the health bars of many people on the screen. This is obviously an aesthetics thing which differs from raider to raider. However, with the attempt to make the UI as uniform amongst all the players as possible, the raid UI would have to be neat, practical, and show only relevant information. Perhaps instead of the 50+ health bars on the screen, maybe the Raid Commander or Raid Assistant only needs to pay attention to the health bars of assigned individuals. For other players, maybe they only need to pay attention to health bars of members of their squad, or just the health bars of people within a certain radius.

TIME SPENT

Traditionally, Raid Dungeons required you to burn through weeks upon weeks of time just to get the feel of the dungeon, but that’s something that made sense for the Hardcore of Hardcores. For just about everyone else that at least has some sort of life outside of the game, does that still makes sense? I think not. I should say about 65~80% should be somewhat approachable by Average Joe Raider, while getting progressively harder. Since there will be no gear progression, the only way an encounter would ever get easier is by knowing the fight and repeating it over and over again.

Instead, as we get closer to the end of the Raid Dungeon, I do think that last few bosses of a given Raid Dungeon should at least be quite punishing in certain aspects, but still refreshing and interesting for subsequent re-runs. See the “DUNGEON DESIGN — BOSSES / DYNAMIC EVENTS” section in the next post for more information. For those kinds of encounters, the longer I wait for a “World First” or even a “Server First” end-boss kills posting on websites like Massively, MMORPG.com, and MMO-Champion, the more I feel that the encounter has been designed to be punishing, brutal, and unforgiving. For most end-bosses (and maybe the one or two bosses preceding it), that makes sense. Anything before that just doesn’t feel right.

For those groups who can’t complete the content in a single night, the Raid Commander can choose to save the progress instance and attempt to gather people again to complete it a later time.

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LOCK-OUTS

Do lock-outs make sense? Well, there is a weekly reset on Sundays that resets the rewards earned for Guild Missions. However, you’re free to do that content as many times as you want.

Lock-outs should be loose in a way, but can still reset once a week. For instance, if a guild group clears a Raid Dungeon in one night, they can attempt a second run through the same dungeon the next night but may get lesser rewards for doing so (eg. Diminishing Returns) for that week. The difference is that you can still do the content if you wanted to for the fun of it. In the older lock-out system found in some MMOs, you were basically locked out of doing that content again until it reset on the typical weekly reset day. For people like me, I love raiding so I wouldn’t mind doing raid content repeatedly regardless of the amount of rewards I would get.

DUNGEON DESIGN — BOSSES / DYNAMIC EVENTS

Generally speaking, because we don’t have dedicated tanks and healers, we’ll have to think outside of the box. This would mean utilizing the environment to one’s advantage. Such as the use of combo fields, environmental weapons, traps, supporting NPCs, and perhaps special PvE-only abilities (like the Celestial skills in GW Factions). Of course, the use of gimmicks shouldn’t be the entirety of the fight (in other words, not another Canach) but without the use of a tank and/or healer, there’ll have to be different ways of making these fights interesting without making it too zergy.

A general example: an encounter could resemble a mock WvW-style battle against Jormag’s Icebrood minions. The Raid Commander would have to split their large raid into two or three smaller groups to retake Kodan structures from minions of Jormag. When the structures have been secured, the groups reconverge back into a larger raid and take the fight back to one of Jormag’s elite Ascended Icebrood Dragon Minion. Certain raid members may have to use a special Kodan weapon to weaken the Ascended Icebrood Dragon Minion before it could be harmed by normal attacks.

“DUFLY-PROOF”

I don’t think any boss will be “Dulfy-proof” or “wiki-proof” or so on, but because we’ll never have multiple gear item tier levels within the Ascended category, the harder encounters found much deeper in the Raid Dungeon should be designed in a way so that Dulfy and other guide writers would have to saturate their guides with lots and lots of text to kill one boss. That doesn’t necessarily mean that one particular boss should take three hours for one attempt to kill for an organized group, but the TL;DR version for killing those bosses would be “Pay attention and don’t die.”

One suggestion is to design a multi-phase fight, but instead of the same three or four phases in a set order, RNG could kick in to shuffle the phases around or pull from a pool of many different kinds of phases. The encounters in the Molten Weapons Facility were like this but lets take this to a more extreme:

Example boss: Ascended Giganticus Lupicus (GLv2.0)

The 5-man version of the Legendary Giganticus Lupicus normally has three phases with three set abilities (known in this posting as “Grubs”, “Shadow Walk”, and “Kiting” phases listed in the order they are seen). Each phase is easily documented and just knowing what to do in each of those three phases will ensure victory. But, what if we changed it up a bit?

Perhaps, Ascended Lupicus would decide to start his “Shadow Walk” phase first, then do “Kiting”, then finally end with “Grubs”.

Let’s expand this fight a bit— what if Lupicus had a variety of phases to transition into? You would still fight Lupicus in three phases, but these different phases could include (in addition to the original three phases):

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• “Drakes” — Lupicus summons Risen Drakes to occasionally fill the arena full of poison gas. A few people should be assigned to kill the drakes while others need to acquire air blowers from an NPC to blow the gas away. The air gun can also remove any buffs that Lupicus accumulated throughout the fight.
• “Weapons” — Orrian Animated Weapons appear to assist Lupicus. A few raid members need to be assigned to deal with these weapons. When the weapons are killed, they can be used to remove any buffs that Lupicus has accumulated throughout the fight; but the weapons can come back to life and have to be killed again.
• “Plague Carriers” — Lupicus summons Risen Plague Carriers that must be avoided or their conditions will be inflicted, and could spread to other party members with Risen Necromancers casting Epidemic . A few people must be assigned to take out the Risen Necromancers or their conditions will keep being reapplied to the raid party. The Plague Carriers respawn occasionally during that phase, but the Necromancers do not. The number of Necros spawned at the start of the phase depends on the size of the Raid party.
• “Inquest” — An Inquest Intruder makes a daring entrance from above! Lupicus is temporarily mind-controlled by an Inquest Intruder, uses Lupicus as a mount, and is invulnerable during this phase. The Inquest NPC fires lasers while mounted on top of Lupicus. Due to Lupicus’ erratic behavior, sometimes the Inquest will miss and the laser blast will break chunks of the floor or wall. These structural debris would have to be used to break the protective barriers placed the Inquest NPC so that the little asura can be knocked off on top of Lupicus. Eventually, Lupicus comes to senses, grabs the asura from its head, swallows him. The Inquest asura however uses a kamikaze bomb inside of Lupicus to do the damage required to progress into the next phase.

By randomizing some of the phases in certain encounters, the boss fights can be remain a somewhat fresh and thrilling experience for each subsequent run. It would be up to the Raid to adapt to the paradigm shifts that the encounters may go through.

PROGRESSION — GATING MECHANISMS and GEAR

I originally thought about using Agony Resistance to progress might be interesting. However, since some higher-end guilds have members who maxed out their AR, these would be the kind of people that could potentially clear the content in one or two sittings and rub that in to lesser guilds would play more casually. Using Agony Resistance would have made sense at the time it was introduced, but using it now would just make the content trivial for those who have already accumulated it.

Adding progressively stronger gear could make sense, but as far as I’m aware, ArenaNet doesn’t intend to release tiers upon tiers of gear that somehow get stronger for each new piece of content that gets released— and I agree. By adding more gear with bigger numbers, older content then remains trivialized by having very inflated stats. At this moment, meaning that any Ascended gear we have now will be the maximum stats available until the level cap is increase, if ever (personally, I hope the level cap never increases, but that’s a different topic all together). We won’t be seeing “Tier 1 Ascended”, “Tier 2 Ascended”, “Tier 3 Ascended”, and so on. What we could see is our Exotic armor slowly being replaced by pieces of Ascended gear, possibly one or two pieces at a time (but with this same gear available through many sources so that players don’t feel forced to do very specific content to obtain the highest power potential). Really the only reason why old content should be easy is because the semi-static Raid party has been doing the content over and over again, but not necessarily overpower it with extremely high level gear.

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This means that progression would be exclusive to the Raid Dungeon itself instead of based on completing dungeons prior to it. This allows for a greater window of accessibility. Let’s say four Raid Dungeons tiers are released throughout the life of the Guild Wars 2 expansion/campaign. In the old ways of MMO thinking, you would have to gear up in Raid 1 in order to progress through Raid 2, and then gear up in Raid 2 to prepare for Raid 3, and finally use the gear earned in Raid 3 to do Raid 4. If progressively newer gear comes out with each new raid tier, then it turns into a treadmill, and that’s something ArenaNet wants to avoid. Instead, each upcoming raid dungeon should have entry-bosses that are easy to kill and require little to no damage resistance, while encounters much deeper in the dungeon would need a certain kind of resistances or tools (which can be found exclusively in that particular Raid Dungeon) to advance. However, you shouldn’t need gear, infusions, or special abilities from an older Raid Dungeon in order to progress through the newer Raid Dungeon.

Instead, I proposed that each new Raid Dungeon that does get released have an equal level of entry— do a very simple Attunement (if any, for permanent access) or obtain a Passage Scroll (for temporary access), and just walk in and give it your 110%.

On the other hand, if we won’t ever get any Ascended armor pieces, then stat progression would probably come in the form of assorted Infusions, possibly by introducing a new kind of new PvE-exclusive Resistance stat that may also include Agony Resistance. That way, the power ceiling still remains achievable by the casual player by doing a variety of activities like WvW and outer-world guild missions, while raid-specific stats only affect raid-specific content, similar to how Agony Resistance is only relevant in Fractals and Guard/Lord Buffs is only relevant in WvW.

Another gating mechanism would be the use of stat-enhancing titles in which having a higher ranking title would allow you to progress deeper into content much easier. GW1 had something similar with the Lightbringer title in that for each additional rank earned, you do more damage to demonic servants of Abaddon. This kind of progression system was a little bit more forgiving in that if you had couldn’t make the DoA runs with your guild and your Lightbringer rank wasn’t up to your guildmates’ levels, then you could farm up your Lightbringer rank in other places solo by doing bounties and vanquishing zones while you wait on your guild’s next scheduled run.

POSSIBILITY of COOPERATIVE MULTI-PARTY DUNGEONS

In GW1 Factions, there were missions where two parties started in two different parts of the explorable area but will eventually converge into one spot in that mission. Examples include Vizunah Square and Unwaking Waters .

This could make a comeback somehow that could involve the Pact. Three parties would be formed representing the three Orders, Priory, Whispers, and Vigil, and each of them would start at three different locations of the map. Each side would be around 5~20 people each and eventually, the three parties will converge into a much larger Raid Party in attempt to finish the rest of the mission.

REWARDS

It’s bad enough that the dungeon reward system is kind of … uh … well, Tokens are nice, but how about the chance to get something interesting from a set loot table as well? Really, all bosses should some sort of loot table that is guaranteed to drop one of those unique items out of a small pool unique items, in addition to generic rewards … but that’s another thread all together.

As far as rewards for raiding are concerned, Ascended Armor seems like a logical addition, but since GW2 isn’t about gear treadmills, equally-powerful Ascended Armor would also have to be available in many other parts of the game like WvW, Guild Missions, and even the traditional 5-man Dungeons. I wouldn’t want to see another “Ascended Ring Fiasco” in that at the time, the only way to get those was to do Fractals. Those who weren’t interested in doing Fractals kittened, complained, rebelled, boycott, etc about the situation and Colin basically owned up and admitted it was a pretty bad move on their part.

Besides nicer-looking gear, there could be more rewards exclusive to that individual Raid Dungeon like: crafting recipes, minipets, titles, tonics, achievements, and more. Exclusive tokens may also drop from these Raids, and may be tied into the Guild Mission system in that it may also drop Guild Commendations as well.

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Ascended Armor vendors would be available that would sell stuff that requires a special Raid Dungeon Token, however, Guild Commendations could be used to cover a portion (not all) of the costs. Meaning that it would be worth it to be in a guild. For example, an Ascended coat would normally cost ~300 Ascended Raid Tokens, but with Guild Commendations, you would have to spend 150 Raid Tokens and 150 Guild Commendations. I’m sure those numbers could be tweaked to look more realistic though. Bosses and Events that are much deeper in the dungeon could exponentially drop more badges.

Also, each boss or event should guarantee a Rare, while higher-end bosses should guarantee an Exotic (even Precursor weapons). The end-boss could drop an Ascended token used to obtain exclusive account-bound items (account-bound so that you have something to show that not many people may have). All bosses should also drop a generic raid token or Guild Commendations which can only be earned once every few days.

In this case, you end up more powerful in a “luxurious way” instead of a “statistical way”.

If we use the stat-enhancing titles mechanic, then we could end up with a title that changes as we go up in ranks, similar to some of the titles available in Guild Wars 1.

TL; DR VERSION

Overall, I’d like to see ArenaNet implement some form of Raid Dungeon that guilds of various sizes could enjoy without their members feeling fragmented when placed into smaller static groups. There shouldn’t be any gear treadmills that are often associated with raiding in other MMOs. One-time Attunement gates could still be there but shouldn’t be annoying to do. Multi-party areas (like Vizunah Square and Unwaking Waters) with multiple start points are also cool, too! When it comes to boss encounters, it should feel like a unique experience for repeated runs. In the end, we should be properly rewarded for our efforts with unique skins, titles, and other “phat loot”.

Basically: it should be mostly different, perhaps refreshing, and easily accessible compared to the traditional raid format found in most other MMOs, but still just as rewarding.

Tip my immaterial hat to you kind sir / m’am. Read most of it. Agree with most of it too.

And though, i have no really better idea… i would not go with equipment in order to progress in those dungeons. Or add a special slot to the hero tab to equip such a piece. Said piece can get better and better with “resistance” as further you go in the dungeon and kill bosses. If it were the full equipment… it’s gonna end up like wow (vanilla) where you’ll have normal set, fire resistant set, cold resistant set, nature resistant set… just gonna be a pain in our proverbial backside to have those items on us all the time ^^

Regarding the Lupi fight, going random would not impact the fight in the least bit for those of us who melee him the whole way. But the added skills to the AGL would be really fun

I’d hope any dev being from this game or other could take some ideas out of this.

Thanks again

Chryzo.8906:

Tip my immaterial hat to you kind sir / m’am. Read most of it. Agree with most of it too.

And though, i have no really better idea… i would not go with equipment in order to progress in those dungeons. Or add a special slot to the hero tab to equip such a piece. Said piece can get better and better with “resistance” as further you go in the dungeon and kill bosses. If it were the full equipment… it’s gonna end up like wow (vanilla) where you’ll have normal set, fire resistant set, cold resistant set, nature resistant set… just gonna be a pain in our proverbial backside to have those items on us all the time ^^

Regarding the Lupi fight, going random would not impact the fight in the least bit for those of us who melee him the whole way. But the added skills to the AGL would be really fun

I’d hope any dev being from this game or other could take some ideas out of this.

Thanks again

Any time.

In regards to Resistances, I do remember the olden days of carrying assorted elemental resistance sets. Having to bring a hybrid nature/water resist set to tank that one elemental boss in Serpentshrine Caverns back in the day was a pain in the butt, but I managed. If anything, I would say that instead of an equipment slot that eats up bag space, it could be activated with the use of a Title, similar to the stat-based titles in GW1.

I suppose another alternative would be to craft assorted “keys” to progress deeper into the dungeon. These may be permanent keys or one time keys. The materials required to build these keys would drop off the trash monsters in that dungeon and found as random items on the floor. For convenience sake, crafting stations would be available near a particular gate to “hint” people in wondering why a crafting station is found in the middle of a raid dungeon. With a large enough raid group, you’re bound to have at least one person in the party to have Level 400 skill in that particular crafting discipline.

Ari Kagura.9182:

Chryzo.8906:

Tip my immaterial hat to you kind sir / m’am. Read most of it. Agree with most of it too.

And though, i have no really better idea… i would not go with equipment in order to progress in those dungeons. Or add a special slot to the hero tab to equip such a piece. Said piece can get better and better with “resistance” as further you go in the dungeon and kill bosses. If it were the full equipment… it’s gonna end up like wow (vanilla) where you’ll have normal set, fire resistant set, cold resistant set, nature resistant set… just gonna be a pain in our proverbial backside to have those items on us all the time ^^

Regarding the Lupi fight, going random would not impact the fight in the least bit for those of us who melee him the whole way. But the added skills to the AGL would be really fun

I’d hope any dev being from this game or other could take some ideas out of this.

Thanks again

Any time.

In regards to Resistances, I do remember the olden days of carrying assorted elemental resistance sets. Having to bring a hybrid nature/water resist set to tank that one elemental boss in Serpentshrine Caverns back in the day was a pain in the butt, but I managed. If anything, I would say that instead of an equipment slot that eats up bag space, it could be activated with the use of a Title, similar to the stat-based titles in GW1.

I suppose another alternative would be to craft assorted “keys” to progress deeper into the dungeon. These may be permanent keys or one time keys. The materials required to build these keys would drop off the trash monsters in that dungeon and found as random items on the floor. For convenience sake, crafting stations would be available near a particular gate to “hint” people in wondering why a crafting station is found in the middle of a raid dungeon. With a large enough raid group, you’re bound to have at least one person in the party to have Level 400 skill in that particular crafting discipline.

love love love this idea

-Leave out any gear progression/gating. Both for starting it and for progress trough.
-Leave out the extra grindy requirements (storymodes+gifts+blablabla) – they’re not hard or gating skilled/unskilled, they’re just extra grind. A enter fee (in different forms) is enough.
-More players =/= difficulty increase. Especially in GW2, where more than 5/10 player is just a particle effect mess. 5 man seems enough to me already – but i wouldn’t get over 8-12 players anyway, if you really want more ppl.

This are my main concerns.

There is a issue tho – not related to your suggestion.

First: makes little sense adding more istance content whenn current one is ignored/broken, has huge reward/effort ration unbalance, and meta DPS > all.
Second: as long as the said “DPS > all” thing remains, you’ll just end up with more ppl hitting more stuff or stuff with more hp.
Support needs to become meaningful. Control and it’s interaction with bosses (aka: defiant) needs a revamp. DPS must not be anymore the “i win” for pve before starting any new istance/raid project – especially if involves more than current 5 ppl.

AndrewSX:

• I agree, they really need to work on the spell effects. Typical boss where it is annoying => Crusher in arah… sometimes you miss the hint on the OS of the boss. Maybe go and have a spell casting bar on the boss would be a solution. Though it would go against the animations gives the hint mentality of the game.
• They keep on adding content temporary or not, finished or not (SAB) so why not a dungeon ^^. And they do fix stuff (arah P2 exploit, Caudecus C1 exploit, …) even if it takes them a lot of time

Like the idea of the keys, did not play GW1, but the title idea would be more of a pain to implement i think.

AndrewSX.3794:

-Leave out any gear progression/gating. Both for starting it and for progress trough.
-Leave out the extra grindy requirements (storymodes+gifts+blablabla) – they’re not hard or gating skilled/unskilled, they’re just extra grind. A enter fee (in different forms) is enough.
-More players =/= difficulty increase. Especially in GW2, where more than 5/10 player is just a particle effect mess. 5 man seems enough to me already – but i wouldn’t get over 8-12 players anyway, if you really want more ppl.

This are my main concerns.

There is a issue tho – not related to your suggestion.

First: makes little sense adding more istance content whenn current one is ignored/broken, has huge reward/effort ration unbalance, and meta DPS > all.
Second: as long as the said “DPS > all” thing remains, you’ll just end up with more ppl hitting more stuff or stuff with more hp.
Support needs to become meaningful. Control and it’s interaction with bosses (aka: defiant) needs a revamp. DPS must not be anymore the “i win” for pve before starting any new istance/raid project – especially if involves more than current 5 ppl.

I suppose there shouldn’t be any stat-related gating mechanic … but there should be some way to throttle progression to prevent the super-hardcores from killing the entire dungeon on the day it gets released … maybe? I don’t know … I guess you could put environmental debuffs to hinder progress, similar to the stuff that was in Urgoz, The Deep, and The Domain of Anguish.

As far as Support and Control goes, certain encounters would have to be designed to utilize those. Perhaps there would be a boss that can only be damaged by certain combo fields. While in other fights, one would have to use knockback abilities to force a group of enemies into a certain section of the room. Maybe we can only damage certain bosses if we have a certain boon up. We could probably expand this a bit.

It seems you put alot of effort into this thought,i shall bump for justice

Chryzo.8906:

AndrewSX:

• I agree, they really need to work on the spell effects. Typical boss where it is annoying => Crusher in arah… sometimes you miss the hint on the OS of the boss. Maybe go and have a spell casting bar on the boss would be a solution. Though it would go against the animations gives the hint mentality of the game.
• They keep on adding content temporary or not, finished or not (SAB) so why not a dungeon ^^. And they do fix stuff (arah P2 exploit, Caudecus C1 exploit, …) even if it takes them a lot of time

Like the idea of the keys, did not play GW1, but the title idea would be more of a pain to implement i think.

Though spell bars would be nice, I think it would just turn into a PvUI (Player vs UI) game instead of PvE. I know stuff like Deadly Boss Mods turned WoW raiding into that. Instead, I’d say that some boss encounters would have to contain a variety of audio and visual cues. For instance, you can tell if the Molten Bosses were about to do something bad because they are very big and you can see how they telegraphed their abilities. Mad King was like this as well. Certain world events are like these too like the voice announcements during Tequatl— “There’s something coming from his wings! Stay way!” “It’s about to breathe! Stay back!” “Watch for the tingling vines from the ground!” and so on.

I seemed to have garnered a much more lively discussion about raiding on Reddit than in this thread. Interesting. For those interested, I started a similar thread on Reddit about raiding which you can check out here: http://redd.it/1gb1d4

Arenanet please hire this man.

@mazcrom, I would love to have a job at ArenaNet.

Though, that would probably be asking a lot more than what seems realistic considering that I have no professional game developer experience on my resume, but I guess I could dream, right? :P

I just have a bunch of crazy ideas that I try to make work with the certain ideals and philosophies that hopefully would mesh well together.

It would be nice to get into an interesting debate of how dungeon raiding (or any high-end PvE content for that matter) would work in a super-casual atmosphere of GW2. I think that would be the real challenge since traditionally-speaking, dungeon raiding has been something that hardcore players would generally do (well, before the LFR was implemented in WoW).

I absolutely love this! Though some parts might have to be tweaked and adjusted, but the overall is genius. The fact that a raid could scale from a minimum to maximum would increase guild activities. Currently, the only massive-scale activity is WvW. It would be awesome to do a raid with 50 guild members!

The “commander” pin could be useful in this instance and maybe have more options to it. That would be nice to see the commanders be useful in raid (and not only WvW). I am a PvE player (though I sometimes do some WvW or PvP) and I’m waiting for the day I will be able to use my PIN effectively in PvE content (instead of just popping it out for World Bosses). Imagine if we could split into X teams leaded by 1 commander each with people segregated into these squads. Maybe you could see the HP on everyone that is in that same squad in the instance.

One thing there should be: CHALLENGING boss with GREAT mechanics and NOT a HP-wall that sits there.

I want mechanics that can one-shot you if you don’t pay attention. I want mechanics that force me to move out of certain areas. I want bosses with hazard (like lava, poison, wind, etc.) that could increases the challenge. I want bosses that die fast enough if nobody dies but be much longer if people keep dying. I don’t want dead people to be able to respawn until fight is over. I want dead people to get loot too (not only people alive at the end of the fight).

So many good ideas that could make this the true end-game PvE content and make people come back for such amazingly fun raids.

Thanks for taking your time writing such an awesome wall of pure epicness.

Definitely!

Although, I suppose before we cram 50+ people in a dungeon, we’d have to get rid of PvE-culling first. I guess that’s one of the technical reasons why we have yet to see large-scale instanced dungeon content.

I know the original intend was to use the Commander pin for WvW purposes, but with the release of Guild Missions, I actually have some sort of use for it in PvE besides being a “Fashion Commander” in Lion’s Arch. However, I do think a Squad/Raid UI should be implemented that displays relevant content for these Commanders. At the moment, all commanders have two WvW-centric chat commands and some fancy icons they can add on the main map.

However, if we were going to have Dungeon-Specific Commanders, I think that 100g price tag has to go.

Instead, I’d say the whole Commander System would have to be overhauled and separated into three kinds of Commanders: WvW Commanders, Dungeon Commanders, and Guild Commanders. The former two would be icons that are visible by anyone regardless of guild affiliation and only in their respective content modes, WvW and Raid Dungeons; while the latter can only be viewed by representing guild members regardless of location or purpose. Instead of paying just a hefty lump sum of gold, one would have to spend WvW Tokens or Dungeon Tokens and complete other related criteria. Guild Commanders, on the other hand, could be assigned by that guild’s officers either temporarily or permanently to those who are deemed trustworthy to hold that position.

That’s just a simple gist of how I would fix Commanders— but let’s get back to talking about Raid Dungeons since that’s the original purpose of this thread.

I agree in regards to making challenging bosses with great mechanics. The encounters in the Molten Weapons Facility are great examples of bosses with interesting mechanics— well, assuming you don’t cheese the weapons testing encounter by standing in the corner of the cage— which is another thing I’ll get to next.

One thing I’ve learned when it comes to pugging content is that there are pugs who are very creative when it comes to glitching and exploiting encounters, possibly to the point that it becomes the “meta” way of completing it. I don’t know how many in-house testers ArenaNet has that focus on dungeons, but if a Raid Dungeon were to be implemented, they would definitely need some form of Public Test Realm; but if they want to keep the testing sessions private, they would have to invite guilds (as opposed to individuals) of assorted sizes to help test the content.

I agree with the main ideas in this thread.

I still think it’s possible to have gear progression while not directly interfering with the world itself. We must examine why players don’t like gear progression and perhaps satisfy both areas to make it appear that the individual is making progression on their character.

I asked my guildies why they were quitting and majority of them said a while back that it seemed as if they weren’t making their characters stronger. It felt too much like a single player game with the zerg-like mentality and trash skipping within dungeons.

Exploits, Unrewarding, Lazy boss-scripting, Magic Find, Unsatisfying Guild Content. These were the words to sum up the reasoning for them not playing.

That post was something…
I really like all your ideas especially about the raid size of 50 – 75 people and the scaling.
Also i like the UI part of the bigger groups.

What i miss from WoW is that there were a lot of different marks:
1.Marking a person – square,triangle,circle,moon,diamond,sta
2.Marking the ground with Columns of light – square,triangle,circle,moon,diamond,star
GW2 has only one mark for a person and the Commander icon.That is not enough at all.

Everything that you wrote is really cool.I would love it to be implimented into the game

After a year in GW2, nothing attracts me anymore.. if they add this, I will finally have a reason to play more often.

@ZeroRaiNs.7154

If ArenaNet were to implement some sort of character strength progression in these Raid Dungeons without having it break the world, it would probably exclusive to that dungeon and maybe the surrounding explorable areas. For instance, the Lightbringer title in GW1 allowed you to do more damage to mobs in the Domain of Anguish as well as the surrounding areas of the Realm of Torment. The higher rank you went, the more damage you did to these specific monsters. In a way, you felt somewhat stronger, but you weren’t overpowering in places that didn’t need overpowered players.

As such, I may be more proficient in killing a certain kind of enemy type (in the case of the Realm of Torment, “demonic servants of Abaddon”), but I’ll never be statistically more powerful in killing an unrelated enemy type (like Shiro Tagachi’s Shiro’ken) or even other players in PvP content.

Lets pretend that there will be a raid dungeon involving the Sky Pirates and Aetherblades in the next content update. Initially, we could only do base damage against the sky pirates, but over time, we get special buffs that allow us to defeat the Sky Pirates much easier:

• Novice Sky Pirate Slayer: -10% damage from Sky Pirates
• Veteran Sky Pirate Slayer: +10% damage vs. Sky Pirates
• Elite Sky Pirate Slayer: Weakness, Immobilization, Confusion, and Vulnerability from Sky Pirates are less effective against you.
• Champion Sky Pirate Slayer: Your conditions bypass the resistances of Unshakable on Champion, Legendary, and Ascended Sky Pirates. Crowd Control abilities remove 2 stacks of Defiant instead of 1. +100% Gold Find while in Sky Pirate Raid Dungeon.
• Ascended Sky Pirate Slayer: Environment Effects of Sky Pirate Raid Dungeon are less effective against you. +100% Magic Find while in Sky Pirate Raid Dungeon.
• Legendary Sky Pirate Slayer: New PvE-Only Utility Skill. “I am a Sky Pirate Captain Slayer!” Shout. 1200 Radius. Induces fear depending on distance, then applies 10 stacks of vulnerability to Sky Pirates, and 10 stacks of confusion to Sea Pirates. When used in Lion’s Arch, there is a chance that a mob a Legendary Lionguard Warmaster will knock you out senseless and throw you in jail. While in jail, serve your time or pay 1 gold to use a waypoint.

Okay, that last one might be a little jokey, but I think instead of a flat increase, the title could provide a variety of benefits that would help you defeat the sky pirates. The first few ranks could be earned while outside of the Sky Pirate Raid Dungeon, but later ranks must be earned within the dungeon. That way, the less-than-serious players could at least obtain the basic stuff to fight the Sky Pirates, but the more hardcore types could obtain the buffs that would allow those to fight stronger Sky Pirates much easier.

But these buffs would only apply to the Sky Pirates located in this zone and surrounding areas. In addition, these bonuses would not work on other kinds of pirates, such as the ones found in the seas (with the exception of the Shout ability). Think of it having a perma-slayer potion but with additional features.

@moiraine.2753

I definitely agree that we could use different marks in addition to the Commander icon and the CTRL+T targeting icon. This would allow for easier coordination by setting kill orders, squad placements, and better indication of who will be leading certain squads in the Raid party.

Thanks for the TL;DR version.
…don’t forget that the DEEP also had multiple start locations and was regarded by many as much much more entertaining than the other two more random examples.

I’d say more… but I honestly can’t get over the initial trepidation of the Anet quote in the subject line. … it’s a loaded statement right now that could easily turn into a lollercoaster if they keep doing this “we’re gonna SURPRISE them!” garbage instead of just coming here and asking us directly to participate in their “Iterative Design Process”. ….Hell, even SONY invites a lot more player input on big W.I.P. proposals like this and they’re by historical definition, Evil to the Core. What the hell is Anet’s excuse? They act like they’re all in a Mensa version of the Order(of Whispers) but instead it usually blows up in their faces like an Inquest version of the Nutty Professor.

Great ideas! I think what guildwars really need it high end PVE content.
I feel that bosses haven’t really being explored as well they could have in gw2.
Basing them around “monster hunter” monsters behavior (more phases,attack patterns, keeping the bosses mobile) I feel would be a step in the direction!

A raid though in guild wars would really need a challenge mode to prevent the splitting of the community.

For example

“Normal raid, doable by 10 random Joe’s in yellows, simple mechanics = tokens and no chance at drops”

“Challenge raid: doable by 10 elite min-maxed people on vent, complex mechanics= tokens+x amount of the items you get from tokens drop”

So like if you just wanna play causally you will get your ascended weapon in a month or two but if you play in hardmode it could potentially drop every week.

Ari Kagura.9182:

For instance, the Lightbringer title in GW1 allowed you to do more damage to mobs in the Domain of Anguish as well as the surrounding areas of the Realm of Torment. The higher rank you went, the more damage you did to these specific monsters. In a way, you felt somewhat stronger, but you weren’t overpowering in places that didn’t need overpowered players.

Actually, Lightbringer increased our damage against Abaddon’s demonic servants regardless of where you were. Be it in the Desolation, Kourna or Realm of Torment, any Margonite would take extra damage, but yeah, that system was pretty solid. Might be because I just loved DoA way too much and got like 10mil LB across all my characters..

@ALeetNoob.4830

My problem about “Challenge” or “Hard” Modes is this:

Eventually, people will figure out what to do, the information will be documented on Dulfy, and it won’t be much of a “Challenge” anymore. At that point, Challenge Mode will become puggable and those would wonder: “Why do Normal Mode when you can always do Challenge Mode for better stuff?” Max-stat gear is easily obtainable in this game so the min-maxed numbers would have to come from picking the absolute precise meta-traits, which at that point would cause levels of elitism that could be found in CoF p1 (eg. “zerker only! Must be 30/30/0/0/something something something. Link gear or no invite!”)

Although, I suppose additional stats could be earned through other means, such as the stat-increased titles we had in GW1. In that case, elitists could set some artificial requirement of having a minimum rank before entry.

I suppose a Challenge Mode could make sense but only if you have completed said content in Normal Mode first … that’s how Hard Mode worked in GW1 in that you had to complete the campaign in Normal Mode before activating it.

@Bright.9160

That is definitely true! I guess when you think too much about high-end content, you kind of forget that there’s actually average content that exists for average people. LOL!

Excellent post! Im hoping ANET pays attention to this.

@Aden Celeste.3650

I really hope so too, but I have my doubts. For one, Robert hasn’t made a post on any subforum for the past 16 days. I’d like to think that he may be “hard at work” in his own personal dungeon while he designs dungeons that we can play in at a later time.

On the other hand, it would be nice if there was another voice at ArenaNet that could better communicate within the dungeon-running community while the rest of the dungeon team are knocking heads with each other.

Then again, maybe the feedback from Canach’s Lair caused drama amongst the Living Story and Dungeon teams. Who knows!

I want this thread to get more attention. Did you try posting it in the Suggestions sub-forum?

I haven’t posted this in the suggestions forum yet — I’d like to gauge some interest amongst the general dungeon-running community before I x-post it in the suggestions area.

Though, I suppose the ideas and feedback have been quite understanding, and less of the attached assumptions that normally get brought up when someone speaks of the word “raid”. Perhaps it’s time bring this thread to the open world and see what the greater portions of the Guild Wars 2 player base might think of it.

This game needs a system like this. Cut throat hard and amazing rewards.

I read through the entire post and I have to say that I really like the idea of having content that is designed around a large and organized group of players. With that being said though, what GW2 lacks isn’t guild content. You’ve got guild missions, which provide a variety of things to do. Guild Puzzle I think is especially well done. The only issue is that the missions tend to be really short and are relatively easy once you’ve done them a few times. None of them are actually instanced but that isn’t really a problem.

Design

What ANet has been doing with MWF and AR show that they are capable of going beyond the traditional tank and spank mechanics of traditional MMORPGs. Guild puzzles are also really good examples of mechanics that can be implemented into these raids. I think that guild missions in general are a good indicator of the direction ANet wants to move in. Don’t get me wrong, fights with the trinity can be really complicated but at their core they’re still tank and spank. The reason is that you have a tank who will take damage for sure and a healer who has to keep the tank alive. GW2’s slightly more combat oriented design allows damage to be avoided entirely.

To go into more specifics, the mechanics of a fight should never feel annoying. This notion should not actually conflict with making it challenging. I did mention that AR was done really well but there was one specific issue I wanted to mention. This is in regards to the Mai Trin fight. You first have to remove Mai’s shield, burn her down, and then dodge cannons. Mechanically, there’s nothing wrong with it but I think most people would prefer not having to remove the shield. The real problem is that you have to repeat this three times, the exact same thing, before she finally goes down. While fights should feel long and epic the idea of having to repeat something over and over is not fun.

I think a jumping puzzle boss fight like Shadow of the Colossus could be really interesting but for people who don’t like jumping puzzles it could be really annoying. Of course, you mentioned something about splitting groups up. This could open up more options for players who prefer doing one thing over another. The most important thing is that all damage should be avoidable. That also means bosses or enemies shouldn’t immobilize you or knock you down because taking control of your character away was never perceived as challenging, just annoying. There are far more interesting things that can be done like rotating lasers, rolling boulders, swing pendulum axes, etc. When you are in complete control of your character’s well-being, even if you get one-shotted by a completely avoidable attack you will only blame yourself and not the game for crowd controlling you.

Lockouts and Gating

Gating is probably a really controversial topic since ANet has in the past received a great deal of backlash on any form of content gating. You’ve seen it with the fractals where higher level fractals included an agony condition that you needed the right kind of gear to compensate for. It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal since you could see all nine fractals regardless since the higher level fractals were basically the same except harder. People still got pretty upset because they believed that any sort of content should only be gated by skill and skill alone. Then again, agony was mostly avoidable if not removable unless you count Jade Maw. A better example would be guild missions. You had to have enough influence in the guild to unlock the first tier of missions, the bounties and then you had to do enough bounties to unlock the next tier of missions. The content in this case was gated by guild merits and influence dumps.

If we look at the other perspective, ANet has to have something to keep people busy for a while. Now there are debates on whether following traditional approaches is the right choice. ANet isn’t so much keeping people busy as they are slowing people down. Traditional raids in other games like WoW you have gear gating or some kind of mechanism that controls your rate of progress. With non-gear gating, the thing is you aren’t really making something challenging by preventing you from actually doing it. Gear gating can be annoying but then people looking for a challenge could attempt a fight with sub-optimal gear. That won’t work in GW2 so well since the game is designed around not having a gear treadmill or vertical progression. Artificially extending the life of the content isn’t looked very highly upon nowadays.

What might work would be to have vertical progression limited to only the raid dungeon as some have suggested. I think we still run into the issue of players feeling like the game is artificially hindering their progress. If say ANet decides that skill is the only deciding factor in how far you progress then maybe the only gates should be the challenges in the raid dungeon itself. Let’s say that you have to complete all the objectives in one area to open up the next area. Does that sound like what’s already in place? Yes, most certainly. I think that we’ve simply been looking at things the wrong way. Most games out there that aren’t MMORPGs or RPGs have no gating mechanics at all. While GW2 is still not quite the perfect blend of action game and RPG I think it’s safe to say that certain outdated traditional RPG systems could make way for newer systems similar to action/adventure games.

Now with lockouts it’s not as big a deal since realistically a guild isn’t going to run a full clear of a dungeon every single day of the week. People tend to be alright with the current guild mission weekly reset structure. I think if pugs want to do the content though things could get really messy. You could be locked into a partially completed dungeon that you can’t complete at all since the group was just randomly put together. You could run into issues with scheduling, something very common with traditional raid dungeons, due to lockouts. ANet will have to find their own way of preventing players from going crazy with farming. Maybe they could make that the bosses the player has already killed less rewarding. That way they’re not prevented from doing the remaining bosses or the dungeon as a whole if he/she has already done a full clear. Something like a weekly raid bonus, similar to the current dungeon daily bonus on tokens, should work really well.

Rewards

The reward system tends to be a contentious topic when it comes to doing anything in this game including dungeons. People feel that doing dungeons in general is unrewarding despite getting guaranteed tokens that give them guaranteed loot as opposed to loot drops based on an RNG. There are probably two different things happening here. First is that certain people who came from other MMORPG expect hard, time consuming, and risky content like dungeons to drop better loot than easier content. When they discovered that the best loot can be purchased via karma or even crafted they went ape****. These people probably aren’t around anymore and never appreciated the idea of doing things for aesthetic rewards in the first place. Second, dungeons tend to be stingy when dropping the good stuff. You might get really lucky and get an exotic for a dungeon run but most of the time you’ll get blues, greens, and the occasional rare. While players probably do deserve better rewards, ANet doesn’t want rare things to become less rare. There’s something called an in-game economy which ANet wants to maintain. Maybe if exotics dropped more often in dungeons more people would do them. Then again, ANet did say they are revamping their reward system and will probably have guaranteed skins drop after a dungeon completion or something along those lines.

Whatever rewards you get from a raid dungeon would most likely need to be unique to that dungeon otherwise there would be no incentive to run it. To keep the non-raiding masses happy, if the rewards come in the form of ascended armor then the same level of armor would need to be accessible through other avenues like WvW badges and/or daily laurels. On the topic of incentives, it would also be a good idea to have something like a completion bonus otherwise people would just farm the first boss over and over and not actually want to make progress. We all saw what happened with Arah when GW2 first came out. Leaving the guaranteed exotics to later bosses instead of beginning bosses could help with this as well.