Guild Wars 2

Since Squad UI is primarily used for raids….

I’d like to bring up an additional feature that would be nice. The ability to have more than one tag present. I.E a true sub-squad. It’s okay to have a leader but when it comes to being mobile and having a designated tank it would help to isolate where to drop heals outside the generic on me calls or on the poor mans tag (Target).

I’m not sure how much more functionality we’re going to get either but adding multiple target calls of either different colors or types would be nice, alongside a do not attack target that removes the ability to even target said mob.

TexZero.7910:

insanemaniac.2456:

i only did about 5 wipes worth of tries in a group of 3 friends and 7 random pugs over the course of an hour or two, no gearing or comping up required because we were more amazed that raiding wasnt disabled than anything, but it was really fun and i look forward to the release even more now. we got the vale guardian down to the end of phase 1 and wiped to the 3 trash mobs on our last try, so that felt like pretty good progress considering when we went in only maybe 1-2 of had any idea what to expect.

i like the way raiding is shaping up, except for 1 thing… the use of break bars on the trash felt like a placeholder. the entire fights with them there was no way to proc a break bar window to get a burn phase or short reprieve from fight mechanics, and suddenly when they hit 1 hp we got a simple cc hard check. i hope this wont be the case for the rest of raiding! i want to see break bars worked in more than that, like with core fight mechanics revolving around breaking the bar like wyvern fights.

Those weren’t trash, they were tutorial mobs. They teach you the mechanics needed for each phase of the raid.

ok. they dont drop anything and i doubt they will drop anything. tutorial or not, they are trash. its a good litmus for your groups mechanical prowess, but theyre still just in the way. would you rather i call them “adds” instead in the future? im not interested in quibbling over names.

however, i am genuinely curious to see if there was a break bar mechanic i missed out on because i didnt get far enough into the fight. or if other bosses will incorporate that design element. because its kind of a big thing that HoT is replacing defiance with break bars, but so far what ive seen of raids only uses this big thing as a teeny tiny awareness check. but frankly i can wait for HoTs release and to group up with my friends and have fun with them instead of finding the video of 1st kill world.

After experiencing the beta raid, I feel the meta will simply shift from zerker to zerker/sinister. Doesn’t sound like that big of change as Anet is describing.

If anything, the enrage timer actually makes damage even more important than before.

On the contrary, I don’t feel dedicated healer or tanker are needed at all. During my pugging, we only had one druid healing and I don’t feel that much HP pressure w/o knowing a lot of boss’s attacks.

Surely, this is only the first boss of raid. There could more requirement for latter ones.
But maybe, just maybe, Anet should tune up the damage and tune down the HP?

Skip to the end for a TL;DR. The raid was great. I think they nailed a ton of what they were going for and now I’m extremely excited for this new aspect of PvE, but I’ve got to put my two cents into this mix. Forgive me if its been said a million times (i haven’t seen it yet). It’s true that the trash mobs were a fun tutorial to the Vale Guardian; but I’ve seen people praising this set up, begging that the devs keep this design of pseudo-boss mobs to teach the raid group how to fight the boss, and suggesting that all trash or non-boss related mobs be removed from future raids…

Well, and here’s my two cents, if you remove the trash from raids you destroy it’s ambiance; I would hate walking from boss to boss with only the walls (trees?) too look at. Likewise, if you place pseudo-boss mobs in front of all bosses you trivialize the fun of learning the mechanics real-time mid fight. There is truly nothing better than struggling through area specific trash then wiping on the first pull of a boss that used a mechanic that you’ve never seen before.

I would love to see raid groups wiping on trash pulls (not named pseudo-boss mobs but actual trash). I want to have beef with bandit keep-guard #3 for being the one that killed me last time we wiped.

TL;DR: The Vale Guardian was cool, but don’t spoil the raid mechanics of a boss fight before the actual boss is engaged. Also, bring on the trash; I’m ready to have to fight my way through hoards of evil enemies in order to have an epic final show down with a boss.

I have to applaud Anet for making this encounter also approachable for non-hardcores. Hear me out!

I went in with a pug group, fully expecting that we won’t last a minute. The 3 trash mobs were a really good source of teaching the mechanics of the encounter. It was also a good choice that you can pause between the encounters and reset them just by running back. We had a few good suggestions in squad chat about what we could change to adapt to the next encounter.

All of this knowledge we could use in the bossencounter. But again: I thought we wouldn’t survive the first minute.

Well, we didn’t at first, BUT we really improved on each try. In the end we made it to the splitting phase. We probably wouldn’t have made it to the kill with that what we had since the timer was low when we died… but it’s really encouraging to try again, and try again, and try again – everytime with little tweaks.

In my opinion the most perfect first raid boss I’ve ever seen. Highly motivational even for pugs. Yes, we didn’t deserve a kill, but with each try we deserved it more than before.

THANK YOU!!

(PS: don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the boss was easy, because we came far with a pug group. I’m saying that a pug group will have a very hard time when they don’t adjust and the timer becomes more important. We, as a pug group, grew with every try, but we still saw our limits.)

MFranco.9514:

If the times run out, the boss gets a 500% damage buff.

For those of you complaning about the enrage timer, that is needed to keep the challenge of the raid. If you remove the enrage time you remove the dps requirement and you trivialize the content.

Only if making a gear requirement is (and should be) the main difficulty of the encounter. But then you really shouldn’t call it a difficulty.

There are actual party-wipe mechanics, if you fail them, then going full nomad tank+healer won’t save you. And with full bunker you will have many, many more chances to fail. Remember, that extending the encounter by lowering your dps results in increasing strain and exhaustion, that will increase chances of you making mistakes even with relatively simple things.

MFranco.9514:

If some of you can show a away of getting ride of the timer and somehow keep the challenge, because if you remove the timer after the game is released and after two wipes, people will just go to the easy mode and be all tank/healers… and then will complain that is very easy and as no challenge.

Did you even do that encounter? Do you really, honestly think that you can just facetank autoattack this boss if you run bunker builds?

MFranco.9514:

Also as i said before triple trouble wurm without a timer is pretty easy

If you think it is easy, you are likely freeloading it and do not understand the fight at all. If you fail to mitigate some of the more problematic fight mechanics then no amount of zerging is going to succeed. In such a case you might be sitting there for 10 hours straight, and be no closer to finishing than at the beginning.

Inverse.2967:

As I pointed out before, without a timer a full blown Drood Moonkin group would have more leeway to recover from the less deadly mishaps, yet they would force themselves into the additional challenge to perform sufficiently well at meeting raid-wipe mechanic checks for a far longer period of time which is nothing trivial at all.

This. While going full tank/healer does decrease your chances of failing combat mechanics, it increases the time of the encounter (and thus number of times you’d have to keep not failing) to a much, much greater degree. And while removing enrage timer might slightly lower overall difficulty of the encounter, it is a small price to pay for the double gain of not forcing (and this time, unlike in dungeons, it is forcing) everyone into zerker meta, and by switching the emphasis of encounter difficulty from gear to skill.

Because currently you can be less skilled, and still have a chance to finish it, but not being in proper gear will fail you 100% of the time.

Rash.6514:

Calcifire.1864:

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 :/)

Satenia.9025:

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.

With all due respect (and I mean it, no disrespect to you), I believe you are not so used to raiding in other games. Part of the fun is actually discovering what to do. GW2 is kind enough not to charge for repairs (anymore), think of other games with raids that didn’t explain the mechanics and you still had to pay for repairs. WoW (just to give a popular example, not to compare) lived with no boss explanation for a very long time. It just worked. There were videos on the internet, different strategies. I fear that if ANet gives away too much of the mechanics, everybody would simply execute the bosses the same way, no creativity. Tequatl has no in-game explanation and people figured it out. The Marionette was temporary with no in-game explanation and people figured it out. The final boss at Silverwastes has no in-game explanation and people figured it out.

So to be quite honest, I don’t think ANet is wrong or faulty here. Besides maybe explaining things like: this boss has these boons and throws these conditions, but not telling how it uses them.

I’ve done all of coil and A1S in FFXIV, and completed all raids in WoW up to dragon soul, so yes, I know how raiding in other games works.

my opinion of raids is that you should fight the boss, not the UI (unless you’re a healer, in which case you fight the lemmings that are your teammates), if an enemy uses an ability, it should be intuitive what it does.

using the first floor of alexander in FFXIV as an example:
there are enemies that tether to the first person that hits them.
the tether is visible to show that they are the tank for that add.
the enemies create a pool that minimizes (reduces damage done) things when they die.
there are 4 enemies that spawn.
the boss launches 4 nukes shortly after the enemies spawn.
the nukes will wipe the group if not dealt with.

it’s fairly intuitive that you should grab an add and kill it so the pool minimizes a nuke, and none of that required reading a tooltip in battle.

at 50% HP another boss spawns, it will tether to the first boss. your immediate reaction is “GET IT AWAY FROM THE OTHER BOSS”, which is correct, being close to the other boss gives them a stacking buff

the one untelegraphed thing is that the bosses need to die within 15 seconds of each other, and even then, that could be guessed by both bosses having the same HP when the second boss spawns (and because logically, why would they include a second boss if they wanted them to be killed one at a time?)

the red mob gave no indication that it was immune to physical damage, not even a buff to say “hardened skin” like mordrem hulks have, we thought that the AoE orbs had something to do with making it die, even in the guides people put out they said “try killing the orbs near it” not realizing that they were accidentally cleaving the boss with conditions.

the green mob…I never even realized it had a mechanikittenil someone mentioned it displaces you.

the blue one, there was no indication that the lightning needs to be stacked in besides the name (which only appears in the combat log), nor that simple boon removal is how to remove its shield, ESPECIALLY considering that it uses the “unremovable boon” square as its icon.

when enemies are hard to fight just due to ignorance of obscured mechanics, and faceroll once understood, that is NOT good encounter design, it should still require good execution even for those who know what they are doing.

you point out tequatl, but his scale mechanic is pointed out in the tooltip “can be removed by hylek turrets” and the turrets say “removes hardened scales”, the “defend the things” is just “kill the adds”, undertow pops up “swim to the surface!” if you get caught, the one unhinted mechanic is the wave stomp, and even then it’s intuitive to dodge through. the reason it was hard at first was because people didn’t try to spread to the other batteries. and even then it was beaten less than 24 hours after launch (I was actually there for the first EU kill, goooo Deso :P)

Vinewrath’s mechanics need to be more punishing IMO, I still don’t trust people to fill the honeycombs,and the amount of people not jumping on the obvious platform is saddening, yet they still survive.

sadly I was away for the Marrionette, I wish I could have done it, everyone raves about how fun it was.

change the blue mob’s buff to a boon arrow instead of a square, give the red mob a buff that says “hardened skin” (or shielded plasma or whatever), and that will remove both of my major complaints.

we went into the final boss still not knowing what we did to kill the red mob, which is so wrong froma design point it isn’t even funny.

insanemaniac.2456:

im not interested in quibbling over names.

however, i am genuinely curious to see if there was a break bar mechanic i missed out on because i didnt get far enough into the fight. or if other bosses will incorporate that design element. because its kind of a big thing that HoT is replacing defiance with break bars, but so far what ive seen of raids only uses this big thing as a teeny tiny awareness check. but frankly i can wait for HoTs release and to group up with my friends and have fun with them instead of finding the video of 1st kill world.

There is a reason why i said tutorial mobs.

Yes its a mechanic (in the fights), its one you really should be paying attention to as it is not only an awareness check but a mechanical check, if you blow your cc’s and have them all on CD during the split phase you’re waiting anywhere from 10-60sec based on the strength of CC used. (Ignoring thief cause cooldowns don’t exist for their cc).

Big thanks to the developers and the entire raid team. This is the kind of content we needed since day 1.
Please do NOT nerf this boss in any way and do NOT have easier bosses in this raid. The difficulty is low enough to have pugs get him to 50% in a beta but high enough to require some preparation. Excellent for a first boss.
Looking forward to the story aspect as well.

Crystal Reid.2481:

Jerus.4350:

I’ll say I’ve always liked soft timers best. 500% is probably a bit much to call it a soft timer, but hey at least it’s not one of the “and you’re dead” type enrages.

I actually just reduced this to give you a little wiggle room to (as my raid says) kittenroach the boss down if he’s low enough.

Love that filter. I wouldn’t have even thought of anything dirty there if it hadn’t over-kittened xD

BTW, I was thinking about the green guardian again. Regardless of what difficulty he should be at (which seems to be a big source of debate), he doesn’t really do a great job of teaching the teleport mechanic. Experienced players simply won’t encounter it because it is super easy to avoid the AoE.

I think a simple and effective way to improve that is to make the AoE larger and have it time out faster. It should require a lightning-fast dodge to avoid so that more players will have to experience it at least once. It might need to come out less frequently to be less annoying (constant teleport spam would obviously not be enjoyable), but it should be harder to avoid, especially since we’re supposed to be learning to deal with it at that point in the encounter.

BTW, I realize this is a nitpick and that the mechanic is pretty easily sorted out during the actual boss fight. Take this as more general feedback for tutorial monsters — their mechanics should be more difficult to avoid.

Agree dlonie, from watching the videos seemed pretty easy to avoid on the last guy, which is fine, the difficult part of that is having all the other things to worry about (plus particles) but on the training guardians should probably be a little more intense to ingrain it into your memory.

GW2 works with a soft trinity (support, dps and control). The enrage timer is obviousily the easiest away to deal with the dps requirement, since affects all of the fight, instead of put a dps requirement for a specific part of the fight. The timer allows people to do more free builds and expriment alot more combinations. Also the meta is changing for the raids, no more team build arround max dps because even in zerk gear you can be “out of meta” (dps and support, is not meta in dungeons, people kicks you if you are using hybrid builds and they discover on lfg zerk groups, the builds use on the first kill were not meta builds for dungeons).

Almost all of you forget the gear is not the only thing that defines your role on the battle, is a combination of gear, sigil, runes, traits, weapons and skills. I can give you 2 builds with zerk gear of an elem in cof for ex. and one of them does alot more damage than the other, but the other will survive alot more:

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-o;4g2WX0C5Z0-Z0;9;4032;0036236157;45c1;3udbTudbTo-F74;6EbE6FbF6GbG62o-Gs1k;9;9;9;9;9;9;0VR75n Almost like meta build

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-o;4B2VU0B5wMFZ0;9;41G2;0057156037;45w0;3m9fgm9fgo-F9Ym;5EbE6FbF6GbG62o-Gs1k;9;9;9;9;9;9;1_75q random build, already saw people using something like that, but they were on kinght gear, the point is to show that gear is not everything and is far way from define your role. If you look to the first build and change to a combination of knight, cavalier, you will probably do the same damage as this one, or more thanks to multipliers.

The control and support can be defined by the boss mechanics, for example the amount of damage you can mitigate will define the ammount of defensive support you gonna need and how to build your team arround that. And is in there that developers can work and suprise us, i liked the raid (i don’t had time to play, but i spoke with people that played and i liked what i heard and what i saw), also will be in this that will define the amount of dps that the players can bring or if they can or not use the glass cannon builds.

About dps requirement for raids. Tanks, Healers and even hybrid builds are op in PVE. If you already did pvp you know what i am talking, for example the hybrid celestial ele, high support and great damage (no one uses full dps team on pvp = easy win for the other team). Also you probably already saw some videos on youtube of people afk and killing bosses solo, i already saw a warrior take all of alpha aoe attacks and survive (dodge is to mainstream). If raid does not have a dps requirement you can just take your time and tank alot of damage, and only focus on the mechanics and you do damage when is safe. Don’t forget that is wrong to ban gears from content, so developers should not develop anything that does not allow anyone to go for example on kinght or zerk gear, so if that guys can survive if support from others and do the content, a full party of tanks will just take more time to do it, but it will be easy mode because you just need to focus on mechanics and do dps, instead of focus on mechanic and also on dps. Also alot of people complained about gw2 dungeons being easy, that they don’t even require you to dodge they just take time and give litle rewards compared to world farm. You know why? this is a statement that i heard when i reached level 80, after the karka world event. Most people of my guild played with soldier gear and range weapons and everyone had a zerk warrior only for cof and dwayna on arah p4, they only did arah p4 for dungeon master but it taked along time, i remember people be there for 6h+ (most of them did in 3-4h) because of bad team build. Everyone wanted to be in soldier gear or cleric gear to ignore the game mechanics, so they don’t need to dodge, buff, debuff… in most parts of the game.

I killed triple trouble wurm alot of times on TXS (pink team, i was in some records runs), i don’t do anymore because my rng does not like me (never won the ascended armor box, and you need 18 for complete all colection -_- ), i probably should whining more. The boss is good for the world boss (i can only complain about the rewards), you just need coordination, if you remove the timer becomes 10times more easy, you just need to make sure that the 3 wurms die arround the same time, and is easy to comunicate that on map chat. You can miss some harpons/barrels phases, and do it calm since there is no stress about timers, also the last phase becomes very easy without that 2 min. timer.

for everyone who say: “raising the enrage time makes the boss easier” i would completely disagree with. i would even say its the contrary. so let me explain why i think so:

1. the only “real” dmg source that would work for 100%dmg group = harder would be the dot. the lightning field doesnt effect the sustain, cause onehit is onehit, no matter what gear.
2. lets assume u have a good group and u get the lightning field covored by 4+ people at a 99% rate. this would make the bossfight for 100% dmg group easier, cause they are faster. so the number of lightning fields will be smaller. lets assume a 100% dmg group gets 5 fields and a 60% dmg group is getting 10 (just an example). what does that mean:
   99%^5 = 95,1% => 4,9% chance of failing by a lightning field and causing a wipe
   99%^10=90,44% => 9,56% chance of failing
   Thats why i love math. even with a chance o 99,9% coverage of the lightning fields u will still have a harder fight when u have to fight longer. and yes, a larger number of fields is an indicator to a harder fight (more chances of failure)
3. with a 60% dmg group u need longer for the sec phase. that means, and we had this problem not only 1 time, there is a bigger posibilty that one of the colourd guys walk to another and stack the dmg up higher. (maybe on good groups u will kite 2 of them together anyway in the future, but for now lets assume it makes the fight harder)
4. phase 3 is very much about movement. maybe u can argue that a small fail causes more problems on 100% dmg groups as it would on 60% groups. i would totaly agree with that. But again time will bite u. longer fights always mean higher chances of someone to fail.

And for everyone argueing with normad gear groups. i am NOT against an enrage timer. letting people fight 3 hours with tank gear isnt really a good thing. But makiing a very close enrage timer, like it was if u need full dps groups, is not good too. it just reducs the variety of builds and make the encounters more dps-race than mechanic-challanging at all.
my solution would be:
design the enrage time for a 50-70% dmg group. this would cover most builds with 2offensive + 1 defensiv stats and alows a way bigger variety of builds. for example:

100%dmg group —- /1,5 —-> 66,7% dmg group
480 sec —-- x1,5———> 720 sek => 12 min

having a more “open for all” timer would:

1. let this encounter seem like a real skillchallange and not like a dmg-race
2. allow more variety on builds
3. not even effect 100% dmg groups. and of cause if there are good guides in the future, it will be meta to walk full dps (as always). But with a more friendly timer u would not exclude player like me, who dont like to go full dps and enjoy longer battles with challanging enemys. (doesnt mean this playerbase is less skilled and deserve to fail cause of the dmg. that would be just unfair)

i hope this feedback is reaching even someone. cause as it is now, it dont keep the promises for huge metachanges. it doesnt even keep the promise of colin saying: if u are 10 druids with cleric gear u can fight the boss 3 hours non stop IF U ARE GOOD ENOUGH.

steffen.4317:

for everyone who say: “raising the enrage time makes the boss easier” i would completely disagree with. i would even say its the contrary. so let me explain why i think so:
…

i hope this feedback is reaching even someone. cause as it is now, it dont keep the promises for huge metachanges. it doesnt even keep the promise of colin saying: if u are 10 druids with cleric gear u can fight the boss 3 hours non stop IF U ARE GOOD ENOUGH.

I’m also good on math and let me tell that your caculations are correct only and only, if the chances of failling are indepent of the build you are using. And let me tell you, they are not. A Defensive build allows you to make more mistakes without going down or worst perma death (= out of fight). And let me tell you another thing if they remove dps requirement means than fight can be done solo, yes you heard solo (if someone solos raids, that will be a joke… even if you are the best player in gw2 you shouldn’t be able to solo group content, because that means that group play isn’t important at all, compared to your skill)!!! There is a video of guy fighting the last boss on solo, he soloed the 3 mini bosses. Ofcourse is alot more dificult if you do solo, but if they get 10 guys with that build they will do the content on an “easy mode”. By the way is impossible for 10man do that on that build because dps is to low for what i saw. I hope that you can see the true power of a defensive build on gw2.

Learn the mechanics, the fight is douable and everyone can do it. After the raid is released people will get some strategies. If you can’t beat just copy them or build something arround that, i almost could put my hands on fire that the actual meta will not survive in raids (actual meta aka zerk meta is defined by building a party that allows you to have the max uptime dps possible with 5 guys to clear the content as fast as possible, if defensive utilities are used, is normally for dps. A block is used so you dont have to dodge and lose your dps… not because is really needed. there is some exceptions but most of the fights on dungeons works that way).

u wouldnt be able to solo the boss with raised enrage timers. i dont even think u would be able with 5.
+ even def stats get oneshotted by for example the lightning attack.

and once and forever!! i am not completly against enrage timers. but i am against designing enrage timers on 100% dmg. u shouldnt be doomed to lose a bossfight if ur party COMPLETLY understand the mechanics and dont fail on them, only cause u did 1-40% to less dmg. alowing people to have 1 def secundary def stat, isnt gonna make them invul! wrong hits still hurt a lot.

My only issue is the tutorial mobs.

• Any mechanics they can teach will get explained by players in much higher detail within one day.
• The low threat and high health makes them very boring to play against.
• They are low threat which allows you kill them without understanding their mechanics.

I propose two solutions:

1) Buff them

• Make green guardian spam displacement AoEs so people learn to avoid them.
• Make blue guardian one shot the team when they miss the AoE.
• Make red guardian spawn more seekers.
• Lower their health a bit.

2) Move them away

• People can practice them if they want.

steffen.4317:

u wouldnt be able to solo the boss with raised enrage timers. i dont even think u would be able with 5.
+ even def stats get oneshotted by for example the lightning attack.

and once and forever!! i am not completly against enrage timers. but i am against designing enrage timers on 100% dmg. u shouldnt be doomed to lose a bossfight if ur party COMPLETLY understand the mechanics and dont fail on them, only cause u did 1-40% to less dmg. alowing people to have 1 def secundary def stat, isnt gonna make them invul! wrong hits still hurt a lot.

yes the blue lightning attack oneshots you, thats exactly what the attack is supposed to do -> punish you for failing to do the mechanics.

and again the enrage timer isnt built around 10 max dps builds. people have killed the boss with one minute or more left on the timer, so even if you dont do perfect dps rotations or use the most optimal team comp there is plenty of room for error.

the enrage timer doesnt only enforce dps, it enforces good execution, well timed interrupts, coordination, teamplay, and survivability.

if you fail to kill the boss before the timer runs out you are most likely doing a lot of stuff wrong. just look at the bigger picture, each time one of your mates gets teleported its a dps loss, each time the boss is kited and you dont use your mobility skills to catch up and ensure a high dps uptime its a dps loss, and thats just two examples.

if you get a good and clean execution done and still fail to kill the boss before the timer runs out, then you can complain (or simply use better builds and team comp).
good raid bosses force you to deal as much dps as possible (and use as little defense as you can) but also make it nearly impossible for you to survive. the only solution to this is becoming a better player.

this is not a personal attack btw, its just how things in a raid environment work.

also you should be pretty happy with the current state of the fight. if this was a wildstar boss, the enrage timer would be 6:00-6:30 and each time you fail to interrupt within 3 seconds, the bosses/boss would heal himself for x% hp.

NoTrigger.8396:

good raid bosses force you to deal as much dps as possible (and use as little defense as you can) but also make it nearly impossible for you to survive. the only solution to this is becoming a better player.

So true. Not sure why people think enrages turn people into turrets that just hit the optimal buttons for their DPS. Mechanics should make this nearly impossible people who can pull off an optimal rotation while dealing with complex boss mechanics are quite skilled. Yes, PVE does involve skill, individual skill and group skill all factor into how well you can execute on a boss. Just because the boss is scripted doesn’t mean any joe can walk in read a guide and execute at a high level.

steffen.4317:

u wouldnt be able to solo the boss with raised enrage timers. i dont even think u would be able with 5.
+ even def stats get oneshotted by for example the lightning attack.

and once and forever!! i am not completly against enrage timers. but i am against designing enrage timers on 100% dmg. u shouldnt be doomed to lose a bossfight if ur party COMPLETLY understand the mechanics and dont fail on them, only cause u did 1-40% to less dmg. alowing people to have 1 def secundary def stat, isnt gonna make them invul! wrong hits still hurt a lot.

You should lose a fight if all most of your team ignores dps builds, and only focus on the mechanics and support/tank damage. Also like i said before, your gear does not define you is a combination of gear, weapons, traits, runes and sigils. So you can be a full tank, a hybrid tank or even a condi tank (dire is op, just ask anyone that plays wvwvw roaming, that combo does not exist on spvp). So for what i saw the timer is good for that fight. I think that the timer in raids is probably ballanced arround a team with 2 tank builds, 2 support builds, 3 condi builds and 3 dps builds, probably with some variations because of the mechanics of the fight. Also don’t forget that the partys that beat the boss, weren’t on full dps builds, they had zerk/sinister gear but there team wasn’t buid arround dps… you are just looking to the gear and forgeting about the other things, they had alot of support also staff revenant is pretty good to remove defiance bar… really too good (i think it needs a nerf). Also they can do alot better and they had 1min+ on timer… so i think the timer does not need a buff at all.

TexZero.7910:

insanemaniac.2456:

im not interested in quibbling over names.

however, i am genuinely curious to see if there was a break bar mechanic i missed out on because i didnt get far enough into the fight. or if other bosses will incorporate that design element. because its kind of a big thing that HoT is replacing defiance with break bars, but so far what ive seen of raids only uses this big thing as a teeny tiny awareness check. but frankly i can wait for HoTs release and to group up with my friends and have fun with them instead of finding the video of 1st kill world.

There is a reason why i said tutorial mobs.

Yes its a mechanic (in the fights), its one you really should be paying attention to as it is not only an awareness check but a mechanical check, if you blow your cc’s and have them all on CD during the split phase you’re waiting anywhere from 10-60sec based on the strength of CC used. (Ignoring thief cause cooldowns don’t exist for their cc).

almost the same for engi. perhaps i dont think its interesting because i play engi, and i can trivially solo the break bar with skills i dont normally have on cd for my dps rotations (and at least half of my other ccs come up within 10 secs), and its kind of… disappointing. for what i see as an awareness check to be all that happens with such a potentially defining mechanic.

but of course not every raid group will have 4 engis like the 1st kill world. or so we hope.

Many things have already been said by other people that i agree with, so i will try to add something from my self.
The things i liked:
1. Job diversity: i love about gw 2 that there are different roles that are being filled by players that are different from ordinary “holy trinity”. The idea of having a need for a boon stripper or a dedicated controller is very good and it makes people feel important. One of thing that was lacking before in instance content of gw 2 was that the diversity of roles was not important. Yes , having a might “stacker” or a reflector would make some encounters easy, but roles (not specifically these) were usually filled by 1-2 players from 5 which makes more than 50% of people feel unimportant.
2. The learning curve: i like when we players are not treated like mentally challenged and are meant to learn the mechanics by our selves by hitting our faces into the brick walls(in my opinion it is very important socially for a guild to tackle problems together). In the end those people that don’t like it , can use guides.
3. Gear: i think that it is good that we need latest gear to complete the boss, because that gives purpose to work on gear (i was running rares first 2 years of my game time and had no incentive to go exotic or ascended till i started doing fractals higher levels)
Also it is nice to have specific things needed to be readied by the guild before the raid, like some specific resistance amulet crafted from materials every one in guild pitched in for.

The things i did not like or might not like:
1. Trash: from what i understood you made 3 mini bosses as mechanic teachers, but no trash mobs. In my opinion, trash mobs or specific trash encounters (like igniting 3 torches at the same time) is nice touch that livens the raid between boss encounters, and to bad you did not have that in this raid, though i hope i am mistaken and that is only the first boss.
2. Repetitive mechanics: i cannot say if that is something that you did , because we did only 1 boss, but would be nice if we did not need the same exact things every boss( i mean having x amount of condy player, x cc, x healers) so that the bosses will have some kind of diversity. I think that would be nice if people would need to change builds to specific encounters.
3. Drop rates: i understood that the drop rates are gonna be 100% of something dropped, but i am afraid that is gonna take away the replay-ability of the raids. Or the need to go on next raids , once you unlocked your legendary armor. Though if the raids are gonna be hard, it wont be a problem because most people will loose more time trying.
4. Unseen red circles: the boss would some times put aoe that would port players away, and if you have players that have a lot of circles them selves, it is almost impossible to see the boss attack. Don’t know how you should address it , since i like the visuals of the game and would not want you to change them. But one thing is certain, the birds that ranger summons with war horn should not grow with the monster they are attacking.

Something general:
In my opinion the raid was hard enough, for some people to fail it in first 10 seconds. In addition, i think there should be more randomality in the raid, it seemed as if the some attacks of the boss were timed, and i bet some players might have apps working that would time the attacks of the bosses , which would make the encounter way easier then it should be. It would be nice if the boss suddenly pulled a skill when no one anticipated it.I think it ll add to replay ability of the raids and wont make raids feel mundane, though it might cause problems like some times the players will get lucky and the boss will use the ability at the most comfortable moment and sometimes the other way around.( i don’t know about other players , but i really hate to rely on luck)

I honestly thought the raid was very well designed, but I have a feeling that it will be much easier than the BWE3 difficulty if we unlock the mastery point system (?) thing. There were speed mushrooms that could have granted permanent swiftness or even superspeed which means getting into AOE circles could have been much less stressful and easier to deal with. And also with constant damage from the Vale Guardian and red orbs (thankfully they can be blinded/cced) going all out sinister without perfecting the strategies could only mean spending more time downed and rezzing instead of DPSing or kiting.

I truly believe that the raid we tested over the weekends were definitely good signs of how GW2 raid is suppose to be. We as a group/guild could not blame other people for not healing/dpsing/tanking. It was all through individual effort combined with coordination and knowledge of class. For exampe in my group I was in charge of calling out the AOE lightning circle but I was also expected to kite, DPS, and cc all the time. I had to pay attention on location of the boss, 2/3 of map damaging myself and the group, constantly ccing the red orbs away from myself and the group, and saving my ccs for breakbars and preblasting mights to make the fight go much faster.

This was the challenging group content I was looking for, and it definitely included GW2’s holy trinity: CC, active defense, and DPS. Raids should not force all players to go all tank or all DPS, but rather give opportunities so that different groups and players can theorycraft and attempt the raid.

Rash.6514:

Calcifire.1864:

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 :/)

Satenia.9025:

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.

With all due respect (and I mean it, no disrespect to you), I believe you are not so used to raiding in other games. Part of the fun is actually discovering what to do. GW2 is kind enough not to charge for repairs (anymore), think of other games with raids that didn’t explain the mechanics and you still had to pay for repairs. WoW (just to give a popular example, not to compare) lived with no boss explanation for a very long time. It just worked. There were videos on the internet, different strategies. I fear that if ANet gives away too much of the mechanics, everybody would simply execute the bosses the same way, no creativity. Tequatl has no in-game explanation and people figured it out. The Marionette was temporary with no in-game explanation and people figured it out. The final boss at Silverwastes has no in-game explanation and people figured it out.

So to be quite honest, I don’t think ANet is wrong or faulty here. Besides maybe explaining things like: this boss has these boons and throws these conditions, but not telling how it uses them.

Thanks for bringing this up. To clarify, it’s not about (the lack of) raiding experience (personally, I know raiding since before WoW was even released), but rather about consistency and intuitiveness.

To give two examples based on this raid:
First of all, the red guardian has a direct damage immunity. The game promotes a soft-trinity of damage/control/support, yet at no point prior to this raid encounter you needed to specifically spec for condi damage to fill the damage role. There are some mobs/bosses with damage immunities, but they all require you to interact with your actual environment in order to combat them rather than simply specing for condis. Given how the current NPE works, I consider it an inconsistency to not cover this somehow.

Secondly, the blue guardian features an icon that doesn’t match the current one used for boons. Personally, I consider this a sign to look for a new kind of counter-mechanism (again, through the actual environment) rather than simple boon-stripping through existing skills. Again, consistency as well as intuitiveness.

Now, I understand you think that figuring out such a base mechanic is fun or someone else even said that doing this as a group is part of why they are playing the content. In light of a MMO and replay value (see my initial feedback point 2), I ask to consider how the discovery part is that much relevant. To understand a direct-dps immunity or a boon-stripping mechanism is a one-time occurrence in your first (few) attempt(s). For any attempts past that, your focus will be on the actual execution/counter.

Therefore, when I said “explain the mechanics”, I didn’t mean to say that a player should get served everything on the silver platter with the whole raid strategy being laid out. On the contrary, properly balancing your group composition and builds is what I consider a key element of replay value for raids. However, personally I felt that never before seen stuff like direct-damage immunity or the green boon icon could/should have been hinted at better. To me, it was unnecessary downtime.

Satenia.9025:

Therefore, when I said “explain the mechanics”, I didn’t mean to say that a player should get served everything on the silver platter with the whole raid strategy being laid out. On the contrary, properly balancing your group composition and builds is what I consider a key element of replay value for raids. However, personally I felt that never before seen stuff like direct-damage immunity or the green boon icon could/should have been hinted at better. To me, it was unnecessary downtime.

OK, so we totally agree here. Yes, indeed a proper indication would be necessary. On WoW people would use add ons such as DBM or Vox (thank God we don’t need them on GW2) to tell them when to dispel something or what exact boss mechanic was active at that moment so the players would know how to react. Since we (again, fortunately) don’t need them on GW2, some visual indication of the boss mechanics would be necessary. WildStart did that as well.

About the icons and indications, that is still beta. So this is a good feedback to give to ANet. I don’t know how to give that message away, though. Like: “you are about to face a condition only boss” is way too much. Big red texts with sound on the screen, personally I think is too. One thing I truly love on Guild Wars 2 is that all mechanic indications are visual. Like the boss preparing a huge attack: Teq preparing for a big step on the water to create waves, Lupi raising his hand, etc. That is what Anet should focus as visual indication of bosses mechanics, in my humble opinion.

One of my posts got merged into “Squad UI Feedback”, but I think it fits better here now that I found this thread.

I think it would be fun/interesting if raids had a challenge mote (Like in some of the Story Missions) that would active a raid with a higher difficulty level than whatever is settled on as “standard”. The higher difficulty could have better drop rates as a reward for it, maybe. Something like that.

Anyways, just tossing this idea out there.

Apologies if someone has already mentioned this in this thread.

There are some mobs/bosses with damage immunities, but they all require you to interact with your actual environment in order to combat them rather than simply specing for condis. Given how the current NPE works, I consider it an inconsistency to not cover this somehow.

Mordrem Husks are very resistant to normal damage but not to condi damage. Though this seems to be true to varying degrees depending on what version of Husk it is. i.e. Husks encountered in living story don’t seem very resistant, probably to make life easier for the player.

While I haven’t done the raid, from watching videos and stuff it seems a little easy ( tho granted this is the first boss ). Here are a few suggestions:

1. The Vale Guardian needs to have some AoE attacks.

Right now you have to dodge the teleport AoEs and that’s pretty much the only thing you have to dodge. I feel like he needs some quick 360 attacks or AoEs to make use of the dodge mechanic more.

2. The breakbar when he uses his AoE attack needs to have a stronger breakbar or have its CD reduced.

Right now it’s too easy to interrupt it. And you will have all your CCs back up by the time he uses it again especially with alacrity.

3. Enrage timer is too lenient.

The world’s first had over a minute left on the timer with no offense a slightly sub optimal comp.

4. The red mini boss that spawns at 66% and 33% HP needs to have a different mechanic.

Condition damage builds are going to be taken even without this mechanic. All it does is make the condition damage guys go to the red boss.

5. The blue bosses invulnerability with the boon up is pointless. Mesmer auto attack strips it. Either make the mesmer auto attack no longer strip it or change the mechanic.

6. The green mini boss needs to be vulnerable to condition damage.

Zerker builds are still good this mechanic changes nothing just like the red boss’s immunity to direct damage.

To repost my thoughts on hard enrage timers:

Bezagron.7352:

The thing is there will always be profession imbalance. It’s just that hard enrage timers exasperate this further encouraging forced role/builds & which professions can fill them.

This typically comes down to DPS & only the playstyles that can fulfil the DPS in the time limit over player skill of role/profession & execution of the encounter mechanics. This excludes other non DPS focused groups from this content as although they might be able to execute the encounter mechanics perfectly due to the time limit they fail.

What I would prefer which would also for greater playstyles (skill requiring skill) is soft enrage timers that begin to make the encounter more & more difficult. This then means as time goes on it becomes harder & harder to survive. This allows for greater role/build/profession diversity. What this could be is at different enrage levels theirs different metas:

• Un-enrage completion – Speed clears
• Enrage tier 1 – Standard guild clears
• Enrage tier 2 – Pug clears
• Enrage tier 3 – Survival clears (if after punishment)

Each providing different challenges & level of rewards with the hardest being the un-enraged & enraged tier 3. Objectively the boss could get at each level:

• Increase attack damage (starts hitting harder)
• Larger AoEs (less room to position)
• More adds (greater pressure on everyone)
• New mechanics (encounter changes)

This is still at the hard level of content but having it a soft enrage provides sub challenges & greater re-playability while also allowing that role/build/profession diversity.

I was able to test the raid the last day. Spent a couple of hours on it, got it to about 30-20% before the beta ended (not rly great times for it to be open on EU during the weekend tbh). Prob woulda killed it if we had an hour extra.

Anyway, I finally have some time to write my thoughts about it. Honestly I thought it was very enjoyable and for the most part the right difficulty for a first encounter. A few things bugged me though.

1. Being the tank of the group, honestly I gotta say it’s prob the most boring job there. For quite a few it’s a very fun, mobile encounter but as the tank I kinda just stood there for the entire time. Some kiting, repositioning was obviously necessary but all in all it wasn’t very active. My suggestion here would be adding an extra threatening melee attack that you need to dodge, it’d increase the difficulty of the tank job a little bit and adds some classic GW2 combat to it.

2. To elaborate on that last comment… Don’t forget the type of combat in dungeons/fractals. We’ve been playing these encounters for years at least partially because we think it’s fun. I think you created a nice but much more classic raid boss. I was personally hoping for more action-type encounters like in fractals. The mechanics of the fight are fun, but I don’t think it’s a good thing dodging is more a movement thing there rather then an active defense. A mix of both more puzzle-y mechanics and action style combat would be the best imo.

3. Forcing condi. It’d be all good and well if condi was even slightly balanced between classes but as it stands it’s even worse then the differences with power builds. All this does is heavily favor 1 class, the engi, which was going to be in there regardless of whether you force condi builds or not because it’s just a great build anyway. It is what it is for this fight, but I hope you refrain from this type of mechanic in the future.

Hi I wrote a reply to the Druid feedback that I think is also very relevant to raid feedback in general:

Here was my major issue with the fight as a druid:

The increase in healing power scaling and decrease in base healing is a great decision that will force people out of berserker druid. However, there are no useful ascended stat distributions to support this change (specifically for the vale guardian fight). I ran zealots armor and staff with a mix of berserker and clerics trinkets to attain ~800 healing power. The problem is that clerics (and many other healing power stat sets) adds toughness – the only aggro mechanic for the Vale Guardian. Running clerics forces my tank to run more toughness than needed just to keep aggro, hurting the min-max nature of raids.

suggestion: consider adding some ascended zealots trinkets to the game, or perhaps a stat set with healing power, ferocity, and not toughness. I understand that exotic zealot trinkets are essentially the same, but I would rather just have them available for fracs. At the least, add more magi’s trinkets than just the two accessories (attained from an honestly quite annoying source).