Guild Wars 2

so I just got out of the raid (we got to the final boss but the UI glitched out, we crashed and the raid reset), and like a good little test-monkey I have some feedback for the devs

this is a copy of my response on the reddit feedback thread:

red mechanic seemed unclear, our best guess was “use conditions”, it may be a bit easy to brute force however, we one-shot it in a random mix of celestial, zerker, and cleric exotics and ascended despite not knowing what to do, it just took ages.

blue you need to stack in the pillar to stop the raidwide explosion, and use boon removal on the boss to get rid of his shield. the blue orbs need to be body blocked or they remake his shield.

as feedback for the devs: make the blue guy’s shield a boon instead of a square buff to show it can be removed, we wiped once simply because we didn’t know it COULD be dispelled, since square buffs are not usually strippable (to clarify, we read “can be stripped” and assumed it meant “another mechanic will remove this” and spent 3 mins trying to kite it into the Dispersed Magic AoE, not “use boon removal”, because we didn’t realize it was a boon, you should be fighting the enemy, not the UI)

green… we just DPSed it down, we didn’t notice any mechanics. you may want to fix that :/

the final boss, we crashed and the raid reset, it seemed to be a mixture of all the bosses mechanics but powered up (eg, instead of spike damage, not stacking for Dispersed Magic is a straight up wipe)

all in all, it was fun, mechanics were somewhat obscure, but once they were figured out the mobs melted (except the red one, because we didn’t figure it out :/)

I love the “final exam” boss style, though I’ve always been a fan of that type of encounter :P

an excellent start to GW2’s raiding scene

anyone else have feedback to give?

Are these really the bosses or just mini-bosses before the actual thing?

Setz.9675:

Are these really the bosses or just mini-bosses before the actual thing?

minibosses really, the Boss boss is the white one at the end

its just sth like breachmaker fight 2.0
i like that the lore is going for bandits/white mantle

The bosses were too easy. The only reason we didnt kill the 4th one was because some people had to go. I was hoping for a week of wipes before people even manage to kill the first boss.

we got dropped out after getting the boss to the 4th phase with ~2min left

new commander:
its realy nice, but still missing possibility to set targets for each subsquad.
also bit buggy…

mechanics:
every enemy got his weak spot. once figured out its kind of easy with a bit of practice.
splitting and giving some squad member specific roles is nice and the needed communication is fun. but so far i do not see why a “experienced” pug cant manage this once all know where to go when.
apart from this you get some constant dps which dont kill you, but at least lets you use your heal skill. BORING WTF CRAP. come on you can do better!!!

the whole raid so far i didnt realy felt to be challenged on my own. its just coordination and when this fail for what ever reason you die. thats fun when starting over, but the challenge is more to find out what to do and get a team which can execute. It dont feel to push you to your class limits yet.

hope we can get in tomorrow to get this guy down finall!!!

Even though the fights in this aren’t that difficult, it’s definitely the case that the game’s current content is indeed way easier. So technically they are fulfilling that part of their promise— it is definitely requiring more effort and coordination to complete than any fractals or dungeons do.

Anyways even though I don’t really like what I’ve previewed so far and find it to be an overall disappointment, I had fun today. I haven’t seen so many people in my guild online and messing around on TS together like this in a long while and it was just fun to play with so many of my friends at once ^^

The problem is that if these raids aren’t sufficient enough to challenge us and fun to play, this is going to be shortlived.

At this point I have no choice but to be hopeful that they’re only showing us the most basic of what they have in store for us.

The first 3 aren’t supposed to be that hard as they’re only mini-bosses. The last one is the only true boss.

Wasabi Kitty.8247:

The first 3 aren’t supposed to be that hard as they’re only mini-bosses. The last one is the only true boss.

ya rofl, the colour dudes are just trash mobs, it’s nice that op thinks they are bosses i guess lol

Zirith.6429:

Wasabi Kitty.8247:

The first 3 aren’t supposed to be that hard as they’re only mini-bosses. The last one is the only true boss.

ya rofl, the colour dudes are just trash mobs, it’s nice that op thinks they are bosses i guess lol

the first 3 teach you the mechanics of the 4th boss. Which are not hard at all.

It will end like this: People will pull the first 3 bosses at once and then do the 4th boss, essentially doing the 4th boss twice :p

Icebow 5 removes full breakbar in 1 hit. A bit op for a 10 man “end game”.

TheRandomGuy.7246:

Icebow 5 removes full breakbar in 1 hit. A bit op for a 10 man “end game”.

That’s a bit silly. It would be nice if each person could only do a set % of removal on the break bar to force co-ordination and timing.

We spent so long with the squad bugs that by the time we got into the raid the thing was closed while we were on our first try, so i never really had much time to worry about ice bows.

TheRandomGuy.7246:

Icebow 5 removes full breakbar in 1 hit. A bit op for a 10 man “end game”.

This is not true. Ice Bow 5 only removes 45-50% of the trash Guardian’s defiance. There are however some skills that are removing the entire thing with one blow, that are a much shorter recharges than Ice Bow.

Zirith.6429:

Wasabi Kitty.8247:

The first 3 aren’t supposed to be that hard as they’re only mini-bosses. The last one is the only true boss.

ya rofl, the colour dudes are just trash mobs, it’s nice that op thinks they are bosses i guess lol

I never said they were bosses, they drop no loot, they have no lockout, they have no enrage :/

I said they were minibosses, I wouldn’t particularly call them trash since they have mechanics themselves.

for example, look at the Alexander raid in FFXIV, Faust is a miniboss, the Oppressors are the boss, and the goblins in the start area of floor 2 are trash

Raids squads is hard to use, finding ppl via LFG is not fast and time waste. Raids just need a normal 10-man partyes and special tab in LFG panel. No squads, no commanders, nothing. Just party.
Colored Guardians look like a dummy to hide real appearance.

TheRandomGuy.7246:

Icebow 5 removes full breakbar in 1 hit. A bit op for a 10 man “end game”.

For removing breakbar icebow isn’t even the strongest CC. There are at least 2 skills that can daze for 6 seconds and one that CCs continuously.

We got to the boss at the end, then wiped on 2nd phase when all 3 mini bosses coming back. We would continue to try again if Squad UI isn’t disabled during that. Well, from what I see from the raid, it’s worth every cents I spent on this game. Keep it up Anet!

Calcifire.1864:

Faust is a miniboss

*Target dummy to practice rotations on

Don’t know why people insist on calling the red blue and green mobs bosses… even mini-bosses for that matter.

They are tutorial trash. Probably some of the best designed trash for a raid I’ve seen. They’re not there to waste your time, they’re there to teach you how the actual boss mechanics work in a more relaxed environment. Great design; however the red guy was questionable; you either need condition damage to kill him; or, the more likely case, is that you’re suppose to destroy the seekers on top of him to damage him, but the seekers are really difficult to kill before the despawn.

The actual boss has multiple phases, and the 2nd phase you fight all 3 of those guys again, but with a timer and most likely other mechanics happening. Grinding down the red guy with conditions won’t work in that case, so there must be a better strategy.

The only big criticism I have is that the red guy has unclear mechanics. None of them were hard, but like I said, I don’t believe they were meant to be; they are tutorials for the actual boss.

White Hunter.3416:

Raids squads is hard to use, finding ppl via LFG is not fast and time waste. Raids just need a normal 10-man partyes and special tab in LFG panel. No squads, no commanders, nothing. Just party.

It looks like the raid squad system is (thankfully!) their implementation of an actual party leader system. We’ve been wanting this for years, because it cuts down on opportunities to grief tremendously over the current “majority kick” system.

The party system won’t work well for raids — they’re limited to 5 people, the UI doesn’t scale well to large groups, there’s no leader or party control, no ready checks, etc.

So why not just expand the party system to include those things? Well, that’s exactly what they’re doing, they just killed two birds with one stone and revamped the WvW squad system at the same time since there’s a lot of overlap between the needs of both.

The current UI is clunky, buggy, and hard to use, for sure. They’ve mentioned a few times that the UI team is still working on the final version and that what we’re seeing during the beta is just a temporary “barebones” implementation.

Colored Guardians look like a dummy to hide real appearance.

Can you expand on this? It’s not clear what you’re trying to say. You don’t like their aesthetics?

Element Two.7316:

Calcifire.1864:

Faust is a miniboss

*Target dummy to practice rotations on

as an AST: please stop practicing, the SCH isn’t helping and there’s like 50 adds on the OT, I wanna have a few seconds to DPS too :<

dlonie.6547:

White Hunter.3416:

Raids squads is hard to use, finding ppl via LFG is not fast and time waste. Raids just need a normal 10-man partyes and special tab in LFG panel. No squads, no commanders, nothing. Just party.

It looks like the raid squad system is (thankfully!) their implementation of an actual party leader system. We’ve been wanting this for years, because it cuts down on opportunities to grief tremendously over the current “majority kick” system.

The party system won’t work well for raids — they’re limited to 5 people, the UI doesn’t scale well to large groups, there’s no leader or party control, no ready checks, etc.

So why not just expand the party system to include those things? Well, that’s exactly what they’re doing, they just killed two birds with one stone and revamped the WvW squad system at the same time since there’s a lot of overlap between the needs of both.

The current UI is clunky, buggy, and hard to use, for sure. They’ve mentioned a few times that the UI team is still working on the final version and that what we’re seeing during the beta is just a temporary “barebones” implementation.

Colored Guardians look like a dummy to hide real appearance.

Can you expand on this? It’s not clear what you’re trying to say. You don’t like their aesthetics?

I can’t agree. You still can’t list your squad into LFG and find people. Unitl they implement this, it will not be good/comfortable for use. Let us list 10 man squads in lfg, nothing more. Of cource you can create party inside the squad and find 4 people for it. But it not ok, isn’kitten

Luckily, I got to play the raid content with a guild-group before it got shut-down. Like many others, we made it to the vale guardian boss and got thrown out of the instance because of a wipe. I would like to give some feedback on the encounter:

Raid encounter
First of all, it is my understanding that raids are being designed in ways that attempt to combat the current trivialization of content through the zerker-meta. From what I’ve seen in this raid encounter, this is being done through positioning as well as countering (break-bar, boon-stripping, etc.). That these mechanics are being introduced through the three coloured guardians contrary to just let people bash their heads in against the actual boss is something I personally appreciate and hope that this will continue throughout other encounters. However, there are still a few things that I feel could be improved:

1. Explain the mechanics: In my opinion, the challenge should be in executing a counter to a certain mechanic, not having to figure it out through try-and-error. In case of the three guardians, how to combat them wasn’t intuitive in my opinion. Giving or leaving hints through NPC’s or something like that would speed up the learning-process.

2. Design the mechanics to include frequenters: Basically, after one initial raid a player knows how things work. If that player does some reading on community-sites/wikis before the actual raid, it’s even before that. As such, the encounters should be built around that (see point 1: the challenge should be about executing). In case of the three guardians, I’m afraid they will just be meat-shields with too much HP and no meaningful attacks past the gimmick-nature of their specific mechanism. Therefore, I would give them like half the HP but some stronger attacks instead (maybe even make the attacks stronger once they are at like 50% health, ensuring that newcomers get some practise first).

3. Please don’t overdo it on the gimmicks: Like I initially said, I’m aware that this is an attempt to combat the current zerker-meta to some degree, but I would really hate to see those raid-encounters turn into quick-time-events. Step in this circle here, then move over to there, then use skill type X, then step into that circle over there again… fail to do so and restart. To me personally, that would kill any kind of fun for an encounter. I didn’t get enough play-time with the actual boss to make my final opinion on this specific raid, so this is more of a general request.

Raid attunement
While we have been told that there won’t be a raid attunement for GW2 raids, I would like to point out that there is a combination of requirements that I feel come pretty close (if not to say meet my personal view on what a raid attunement is):

1. Ascended gear being mandatory/recommended: I think this was said in a tweet or something. I don’t have a problem with this as such, but add stuff like the red guardian that can only be damaged with condition-specs and we’re facing a situation where a player would have to bring multiple sets of ascended gear on a single character, which I think is completely over the top in terms of grinding.

2. Masteries being mandatory/recommended: If timed encounters (like the vale guardian) are balanced around having those fully available, then we can no longer speak of recommended, but mandatory – with all the grinding that comes with maxing them.

3. Builds/skills being mandatory: I’m thinking of boon-stripping here for the blue guardian or again the condi-damage for the red guardian. I have no doubts that other raid encounters will feature similar or even extended variants for this. This will make some classes preferable over others, maybe even the elite spec of some. Meaning that a player will likely want to have several classes available for raids, depending on what is being asked for. These characters may require anything from enough % of world completion (elite spec?) to multiple sets of ascended equipment (see point 1).

To conclude, if you look at these three points individually, they may not seem like much to some players. However, when you look at all of them combined, I personally think that this qualifies easily as the sort of raid attunement that was claimed won’t be in HoT. In order to lessen these requirements, I think it would be nice if for example the damage role could be filled by either direct-dps or condi (aka no red guardian kind of immunities), while boss timers could be balanced around having an low/average level of masteries and not requiring them to be grinded out completely.

White Hunter.3416:

I can’t agree. You still can’t list your squad into LFG and find people. Unitl they implement this, it will not be good/comfortable for use. Let us list 10 man squads in lfg, nothing more. Of cource you can create party inside the squad and find 4 people for it. But it not ok, isn’kitten

No, that’s not okay, you’re right. I hope this is just one of the limitations of the temporary squad UI implementation and that these features will be available for release.

Edit: There is a list of known issues with the squad UI here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Welcome-to-GW2-Raiding-in-Beta-Weekend-3/first I didn’t see these issues on there when I skimmed it, but I’d really hope things like LFG support are planned as well.

Satenia.9025:

…

Very valid points.

Would be nice if the blue teleport AoEs could be made more visible when the spawn inside the AoE that you have to stand in. Very frustrating to have everyone wipe because 2-3 people got teleported out by AoEs they couldn’t see.

dlonie.6547:

…. I’d really hope things like LFG support are planned as well.

Sadly, I remember perfectly that they said on an interview that they won’t be creating a section for Raids on the LFG tool because they want this contente to be only for organized groups of people.

Can’t find the link to the interview atm, I hope someone can paste it here for me, but I’m 100% sure they said that

Ithir Darkleaf.7923:

dlonie.6547:

…. I’d really hope things like LFG support are planned as well.

Sadly, I remember perfectly that they said on an interview that they won’t be creating a section for Raids on the LFG tool because they want this contente to be only for organized groups of people.

Can’t find the link to the interview atm, I hope someone can paste it here for me, but I’m 100% sure they said that

No. They said that there are no special tools for it and no “find raid” button. You could be able to use LFG as alwayes.
The one thing we need is an ability to list raid squad into LFG. Nothhing more or less.

Malediktus.9250:

Zirith.6429:

Wasabi Kitty.8247:

The first 3 aren’t supposed to be that hard as they’re only mini-bosses. The last one is the only true boss.

ya rofl, the colour dudes are just trash mobs, it’s nice that op thinks they are bosses i guess lol

the first 3 teach you the mechanics of the 4th boss. Which are not hard at all.

It will end like this: People will pull the first 3 bosses at once and then do the 4th boss, essentially doing the 4th boss twice :p

You mean the first three TRASH mobs reach you the mechanics for the first boss.

They are not trash. Trash mobs are just filler with very little threat,easy to kill and usually in large groups. The guardians are far too tanky, have actual mechanics and are 3 single entities. So they cant be trash. Just because they arent the main boss doesnt make them trash. And its precisely because they have mechanics and take some time to kill that they should be made a little more engaging and difficult.

spoj.9672:

They are not trash. Trash mobs are just filler with very little threat,easy to kill and usually in large groups. The guardians are far too tanky, have actual mechanics and are 3 single entities. So they cant be trash. Just because they arent the main boss doesnt make them trash. And its precisely because they have mechanics and take some time to kill that they should be made a little more engaging and difficult.

I’m not sure where you got this definition of trash, but that is not at all what trash is.

Trash are difficult encounters leading up to a boss that teach you the mechanics of the area. They generally take or modify one of the upcoming or previous bosses mechanics and are in groups to help you learn to do/handle multiple things at once.

At least in Wildstar, SWTOR and GW2 this is what trash is.

In wildstar the “trash” encounters were frequently just as hard as the boss encounters until you figured out the mechanics.

Well ok if trash in other games are supposed to be very difficult at times. Then why are people saying we are being absurd for asking to buff those “trash” mini bosses?

The term trash does not imply difficult or mechanic teaching. So it seems like a pretty poor description for such encounters in any game.

spoj.9672:

They are not trash.

Poor guardians. :<

Only in GW2 is this even a discussion.

They say what the team reads and why nobody responds.
And the German community is completely ignored

It might be time to just accept that the term “trash” is nothing more than a subjective label and trying to define it will only result in endless arguments that accomplish nothing.

Trash, mini-bosses, tutorial mobs — whatever. It might be more productive to just move on and focus instead on the appropriateness of their mechanics and difficulty.

I think everyone’s pretty tired of the “Are they trash or bosses?” discussion (or maybe it’s just me).

dlonie.6547:

I think everyone’s pretty tired of the “Are they trash or bosses?” discussion (or maybe it’s just me).

It is pretty inarguable to say to anybody that they are not the boss, and to state that the actual boss is the Vale Guardian. The fact that there was confusion to some people is interesting though.

A few raids managed to get in last night when they enable the squads briefly. It was pretty fun watching them progress over the next few hours. Putting that ascended vendor in at the start was a good idea to allow people to try different things for the beta.

Completely agree. Although you cant really avoid it when as soon as you suggest increasing their difficulty somebody comes in and says “No! They are trash so it doesnt matter!”.

spoj.9672:

Completely agree. Although you cant really avoid it when as soon as you suggest increasing their difficulty somebody comes in and says “No! They are trash so it doesnt matter!”.

Indeed :-( I know that feel well this weekend, spoj.

Raided for about 3 hours last night and a couple of things we noticed.

1. The Teleport red circles are REALLY hard (read impossible) to see in a the bloom around the boss please, please make them more visible (like the orange circles in LS2 or the lightning AOE)

2. Not sure if this is intended or not if its is then fair enough but in phase 3 the Guardian would cast his lightning AOE circle in the energized section of floor meaning you have to take alot of damage to stand in it or wipe. It is doable with heals,blocks,evades and what not and like I said if intended then thats fine.

3. During phase 2 when the guardian splits sometimes the color guardians decide to take long walks for no reason and causes quite a bit of annoyance. The only reason we noticed this as a possible problem is because the aggro system for the Vale Guardian is solid and works very well. (Good Job on that, really. It makes controlling the boss smooth.)

Satenia.9025:

3. Builds/skills being mandatory: I’m thinking of boon-stripping here for the blue guardian or again the condi-damage for the red guardian. I have no doubts that other raid encounters will feature similar or even extended variants for this. This will make some classes preferable over others, maybe even the elite spec of some. Meaning that a player will likely want to have several classes available for raids, depending on what is being asked for. These characters may require anything from enough % of world completion (elite spec?) to multiple sets of ascended equipment (see point 1).

I don’t think this is really something to worry about at this point. The blue boss only has a single boon that doesn’t reapply very often. It’s not going to be hard for a group of 10 people to have at least 1 necro, thief, engineer, or mesmer. Last night I got in and was just messing around against the bosses with a friend and I was able to keep the boon stripped by myself as an engi just by using throw mine.

I expect there will be some complaining about groups that require X profession, but more than likely those groups don’t really need that one exact profession and are just asking for it because they don’t know the other ways to deal with a certain mechanic.

myself and two of my friends manage to put together a group from the map and got in last night. We didn’t use any voice coms at all. One the people we picked up was able to get in earlier and knew a lot of the mechanics. I also watched one of the runs from the night before and read up on reddit of the mechanics, so we knew what to except for each fight. That being said, I think as time moves forward and more and more people go through it and help people, people will understand what to do. So go crazy with mechanics, people will learn!

we got through the three mini bosses pretty easy, but Vale took a while to get a strategy together, and by the time we got it figured out, 2 people d/c. That and we weren’t sure if we changed classes if we would be able to get back in. Our dps was a bit low and probably wouldn’t make it before the timer ran out. So for a comp I see being used is 4 power, 4 condi, 1 boon striper, and 1 tank. The tank holds aggro on the boss and you have 5 people at the boss, the other 5 range it and focus on getting in the orange circle to stop the map wide aoe while dealing with the seekers. The ring is divided into 3 slices, the boss will only spawn the map wide aoe in the slice he is in. whether or not this is a good way of dealing with it, we shall see when we get more time with playing in the raid.

I know my group loved it from the start! We spent about 2 hours in there and it was fun trying to figure out as a group what to do and trying different things. keep it up raid team and I look forward to see what you throw at us next.

Overall!
What I really like about the first encounter (And the rest in the raid) is that when you enter, you can’t leave the area, you can’t run away to get OOC to regain/change stuff, it resets the boss to the middle when you wipe!! You have to either kill it or wipe! Great I love it keep doing that!

Now, make it like this to every other boss encounter in fractals and dungeons! I hate that you are able to do stupid things like run OOC to regain health, change stuff mid fight.

An example I have is the Diviner in the uncategorized fractal. If four people die while you are in the cage, it creates a situation where the boss does not properly reset, and you can go grab aggro again before it regains, and this way just keep dying until it dies at last.
Make it so you can’t leave the room or enter it when the boss is in progress, and also no ooc! Wipe or kill it!

Tutorial bosses!
When I first entered the raid I got confused about the trash/tutorial mobs in the beginning, thinking they where the boss, based on the pictures I have seen, and that my group already half pulled the boss. When we killed all of them and realized that they where just trash I lost my worries.
Now that I have seen in a video how it looks before someone runs ahead and pulls it, I am overall happy with how that works. However I does feel strange to me. The first time I fought them I thought they where supposed to be together because the blue orbs comming for us which I thought was a mechanic for the blue guy stood way in the back. I guess this is how it is supposed to be and I just had to get used to it, but it did feel a little confusing/weird the first time.

The Vale Guardian!
The boss itself we only managed to get to around 75%. We didn’t spend much time trying to optimize our builds so probably why :b We did our last try all of us with some more tankier gear, and had 3 min left at 75% realizing we need more damage.
Good mix of play styles needed for the fight I feel like, and making use of some stats none ever really wanted to use for PvE.
I saw a comment earlier about it feeling like a grind to have to go and get different sets of ascended gear to change builds at different bosses. Please keep it like it is, it is “end game” PvE after all, only the people who want to spend time/gold to optimize themselfs to be able to fill any role should imho be able to do it. It does after all have legendary gear as a long term? reward to get in raids, which is a huge deal. Don’t change the need to have to go and get different sets of ascended before being able to kill all 9? bosses.

Sounds like no one killed the last boss (despite some people puffing themselves up to say how easy they thought the trash/minibosses/whateveryouwanttocallit was.

That’s really good to hear. I’d honestly be a bit disappointed if a group cleared the last boss this weekend, even if it was just the first boss of the raid, especially since people have had so little time to really get into the raid and try it.

This is ANet’s one chance to make a good first impression that they can make difficult content. If the raid is cleared in the first day or so, I think it will be hard for them to hold any more credibility the next time they go around talking about how they ’can’t wait to see tears’ from the players because of how hard they made everything.

Seeing as how pretty much all groups are out of the raid by now and it probably will not open up again this beta weekend, I will talk about it now and shed some light on the boss and my opinion.

Vale Guardian is the first boss of Spirit Vale. The boss is split into 3 phases and 2 add phases. The first phase goes from 100% of his health until he reaches 66% of his health. At this point, he will split into the 3 trash mobs that were faced previously. Once those 3 mobs are killed, he will reform and phase 2 begins. Phase 2 is the same as phase 1 except that he adds more attacks. Once he reaches 33%, he will split again, then you have to clear the 3 trash mobs. Once trash is dead, he will reform again (Phase 3), and will proceed to continue out the fight with some more new mechanics.

I will not describe the mechanics of each phase too much in detail since this post will be extremely long, but I will say the fight itself is not over complicated once you understand the general gist of it, but it is a long one, and 1 mistake from any member of your raid and you will be in trouble of wiping.

My main concern with the fight is the timer added to the fight. You have 8 minutes to complete the entire fight (all phases) otherwise the boss will enrage and gain a 500% damage increase in which he will proceed to 1-2 shot most players. The fight feels very over-tuned and I believe will require some number adjusting from the devs before launch. Without talking specific numbers, the boss itself has a lot of health, so much health that you would need to have the raid pulling a very high dps in order to down the boss in the 8 minutes given. It is difficult to achieve this required dps even standing still and not worrying about mechanics unless you min/maxed the entire group. Talking to a few groups that got to attempt Vale Guardian, none of them were able to successfully maintain that level of dps, while doing the mechanics of the fight on top of it. Also, the fight has two add phases as well, with the red guardian being a purely condition only mob, meaning you have to account for this as well when min/maxing. Brainstorming with other players, it appeared that an optimal composition would have 1 player tank the boss, 6 players in zerker gear, and 3 players in sinister (condi) gear in order to even have a chance at killing him within the 8 minutes. To claim that “the berserk meta will die” with raids coming out is a very false statement when looking at this boss in its current state.

Overall, I believe the mechanics and the fight itself are fair and doable when not under the pressure of a timer. The boss has enough mechanics to where groups will wipe often enough to them alone. I believe that the timer at least needs a 2-5 minute increase in order for the boss to actually be killed within the timer if Anet chooses to go the timer route.

A couple of other observations from last night’s raiding:

1. Environment design reminds me of why I love GW2. NPCs and little bits of lore scattered around, along with the PC voicing observations is a really nice touch. Also the side island with the pocket raptors for necros to charge their shroud on is clever.

2. Green guardian seems a bit forgettable relative to blue and red, which have very distinctive mechanics. The continuous damage field and the standard mechanic of avoid the red circles make it pretty mild relative to blue’s potential instadown and invuln boon and red’s immunity to physical and having to keep the seekers at bay. At its heart, it’s not a “fun” mechanic in the sense that getting teleported around doesn’t really have a lot of counterplay to it other than the obvious Red Circle Avoidance, and the wasted DPS time is a death by a thousand cuts sort of thing thanks to enrage (you’ve lost, but you just don’t know it yet)

3. It might be nice for squad leaders to have a way to quick reset the fight, or trigger a vote for it. The enrage timer seems pretty tight right now and while it’s possible to recover from a missed lightning column downing some of the squad, the DPS loss is almost certainly fatal to the rest of the attempt on Vale guardian. Guilds are already making suicide pact rules in anticipation that squad leaders will want to force a wipe to speed up the try-fail learning cycle, so it would be a nice QoL thing.

4. Difficulty of Vale Guardian seems good. 3 hours of raiding and we only got him down to about 50% before enrage (phase 3) Based on former events like Scarlet’s assault in LA, it seems likely there’ll be another one or two splits followed by a final burn phase, probably with the additional floor damage twist and so on. Given that we haven’t done build optimizations or squad composition optimization yet, it seems entirely doable with more practice once we figure that out. Really looking forward to it.

We had the chance to do the raid for a couple hours last night. We obviously didn’t finish it, but here are some of my thoughts so far:

Getting rid of hard profession requirements: I think this was generally accomplished with this raid. There are no “must-have” professions, as the roles required can be filled with multiple professions, provided they spec appropriately.

Scale of challenge: I like that everyone needed to be planning and reacting properly. Movement/positioning will be required from players. Everyone needs to pay attention to multiple mechanics of the fight (bullet storm, distributed magic, unstable pylon, etc). There weren’t hard specialized roles where some players focus on one mechanic of this raid and ignore the rest.

Boss facing indicator: We generally liked this feature. It helped us understand what was going on, and added to the feeling of mastery when we learned to start manipulating the boss.

Opening might stacking removal: This was a nice touch. It gets rid of another “hassle” that comes with doing content. It is not fun to go through the motions of might stack/food/nourishment/boosters every time players attempt to do content.

Thematic design: I see a lot of effort has gone into the visual design and making it consistent with the mechanics. The Vale Guardian has 3 components corresponding to 3 pylons, the platform is divided into 3 sections, the markings for the 3 seeker spawn points are 3-pointed arrows, etc.

Coordination requirement: From what I’ve seen/heard so far, extrapolated to the entire encounter, I like the amount of communication/planning that players will need to do. You can’t just put 10 highly skilled players together and expect them to finish this raid. One mechanic that did surprise me was that there was no time limit for depleting the break bar of the individual guardians. I was expecting them to recover in some form if we didn’t coordinate a cc spike during that moment.

Here’s how far we managed to get.