Guild Wars 2

I really enjoy seeing the development and growth of the development team behind Raids. They are clearly taking inspiration from other games, and taking the GW2 twist to it rather well. The new Raid Wing had its pros and cons, but I just want to preface and say thank you to Arenanet for continuing to support this still relatively new PvE End-game to us.

That sappy stuff out of the way, let’s talk for real. Bastion passes but there are some substantial setbacks I do NOT want to see implemented in later raids. I get that there’s a lot of experimenting involved, and this is still technically the second raid released. But some of the decisions I dislike heavily here, that I feel could have been a greater opportunity to expand and even promote Raids in a more constructive manner.

For instance, I liked how this raid wing had yet ANOTHER theme behind the encounters. In case you weren’t paying attention, Spirit Vale was all about Tanking, balancing Power and Condition DPS, and CC with some roles here and there. Salvation Pass was about testing individual players on typically RNG mechanics that were simple if done properly but devastating if messed up upon. And Stronghold of the Faithful was testing your patience with bugged encounters that break more with every patch. At this point I am convinced that every-time we defeat Keep Construct and he goes boom, it actually breaks his code more for the next reset and thus the devs can never fix him. That’s the only logical reason behind that fight.

This raid focuses on how the raid handles unstoppable CC, positioning and INSTA-DEATH. And in actuality I believe the theme behind Bastion is both a good AND a bad. It’s good because it’s definitely a different feel, but it’s bad because the encounters are…easier because of it. I would say 3/4 of the encounters have no real outgoing pressure that makes it difficult to recover, it’s really easy to rez without being pressured. If the encounters had just a bit more tuning to that regard, I think the healers would have been awake more during them.

Specifically:

Cairn the Indomitable, aka “Dwayne Johnson”, is a knockback fest and an overall disruptive fight. But disruptive doesn’t mean hard, and the pressure isn’t there. I assume everyone saw the Marathon Druid solo the boss in a world-record speed-filled time of a little over four hours. This is largely due to the mechanics not being that painful for the individual, the pressure comes from the Agony of which for some reason when you get downed with the agony, it is NOT damaging to your allies until you get back up. The boss’s method for wiping the group mainly consists of forcing you off the ledge, and hoping that you don’t handle the star circles properly so you actually take a moderate amount of damage. I do want to note that the stars and circles mechanic is something I actually liked about the encounter, might have been the only thing, nice job!

Mursaat Overseer, aka “Tribulation Mode DPS Golem”, is given a lot more hate than I believe it should be. No seriously, and I’ve got the perfect response to why you guys aren’t giving it enough credit. Ready? It’s because it’s another version of No-Updraft Gorseval. And in fact with the enrage timer being a record-low 5:20, things are supposed to pace fairly quickly. It’s testing your DPS, keeping the movements to a minimal, you can lava font bad things at a distance that will make your life hell if you let them live too long. And the more DPS you have, the better things play out. We’ve been training on the strategy for this boss for months. The exception being, Gorseval actually does pressure with Retaliation, this boss is a literal structure that does nothing but live while you dodge the damage floors and DEATH spikes. Position and DPS are key, and the only real source of damage pressure is when Soldiers spawn which can be negated quickly. The CM version of this fight makes the positioning and mechanics much more important and critical, and it disappoints me that a full mechanic is removed from the normal mode. I’ll rant later on that.

Continued:

Samarog the Warden, aka “Arenanet plays Dark Souls”, is a thing of design beauty. And what’s this Cinematic Intro? Outstanding. I was expecting a gothic-choir boss soundtrack during the fight (Wink) but I understand that costs money, so I was ok with the Gorseval theme again. This encounter was actually really close to being a good fight. I won’t rant too much, but I felt like you guys should have made more spears fall down in the middle of the arena and really promoted the lack of space. It felt like cheating having the raid group able to never get impaled on the side when you tanked him in the middle of the room, more damage/CC pressure from spears spawning in the middle would have given the raiders a trade-off: Either dedicate more resources to killing spears and making more space, or focus on DPS and just avoid all the knockbacks. Because everything else was really good! The Add Phase mechanic is really cool and unique, having two people stand outside the raid to stack is good, his attacks and changing fixation were fine! But again not enough pressure to force risks! Ughhh, this boss disappointed me the most honestly.

And of course, Deimos, Agent of the Unseen, aka “BDSM Hand Fetishist”, was on-point. Unlike the other bosses, Deimos didn’t mess around and had several sources of raid pressure, coupled with the theme of several insta-death and wipe mechanics. Bringing back Lich King’s ‘puddle’ mechanic was marvelous, a great fit to this encounter and I would say keep it unique to Deimos. I keep hearing about how Deimos was easier than Xera and Matt and I heavily disagree. He’s like a blend of Xera Positioning and AoE, with Sabetha “We wipe if so-so dies and if anyone dies above XX%”. There’s a frustration about wiping so late in the fight but he feels more engaging than Sabetha when you wipe. The only disagreement I have is that he’s such a sharp increase in difficulty and execution from the previous bosses mainly because the other bosses were too easy.

That goes into my next point. This raid is easier for new raiders to get into and get boss kills. Dwayne John- erm I mean Cairn can take the usual metabuild raiders, but his mechanics are I believe more player friendly than VG or Slothasor. And the Enrage Timers are way off. The Mursaat DPS Golem has a proper timer because of the pace of the encounter, Cairn can enrage if people start dying around 50%, but Samarog and Deimos?! Are you joking? Deimos I can forgive because he’s got more mechanics than hands, but you gave way too much time because I assume you thought we couldn’t figure out how to do his Add Phases in a timely fashion. We aren’t that bad, cmon now.

But I imagine the real reason behind the timers is because, sigh, they are meant for the non-repeatable challenge mote. I’ve touched on it before in a different thread but it deserves reiterating. It was a great disappointment to find out that the Challenge Motes were not-repeatable despite having unique mechanics behind them. It’s an entirely real possibility that this raid is an easy-mode raid and that the Challenge Mote was a clever decoy to hide from it. I really didn’t want to say it, but I have to just because it was a grave mistake to not provide even a small gold incentive to repeat the challenge motes every week. Cairn gets a bit more trolly, Mursaat adds another level to death floors which prevent a ‘No-Updraft Gorseval’-ish fight, Samarog gets a tighter enrage and Deimos is unbelievable.

Unfortunately, those who wanted more challenging encounters have enough incentive to do each of those fights, once. And never again, there’s nothing to gain, you can actually LOSE gold due to wasting food, IT HURTS RAIDERS TO DO IT MORE THAN ONCE!!! And that’s the biggest problem by far. Please Arenanet, you can ignore all my other comments if you would not do this again, not without it being repeatable.

Thank you for reading so much, I still appreciate the content, it was just a little underwhelming when it’s all said and done. I loved the story and the location of this raid, the environment was outstanding.