Guild Wars 2

The design philosophy which seemed to undergird the entire main game of GW2 was to rethink what was entailed in an MMO, and that philosophy clearly stands out in most of the design decisions in the main game. HoT, on the other hand, seems to have abandoned this philosophy in many ways, and it makes me wonder whether this was a conscious move on the devs part. In any case, I wanted to submit a suggestion of the following for consideration, as the possible application of that original design philosophy to future content going forward:

Make raid size capable of fluctuation, even if that fluctuation is only slight (i.e. 8-12 players). Obviously, if the raid size fluctuates, so does mechanics (i.e. boss hp, and damage of abilities), but not boss difficulty.

Limiting raid size to exactly 10 members is, in my estimation, the epitome of the opposite of that original GW2 design philosophy of rethinking typical MMO mechanics. I played WoW for several years, and one of the most frustrating things during that time was always getting precisely the right amount of people together for a raid. The pure logistics of getting the right people with the right amount of time together for one or more nights a week was just plain terrible. Now that same problem is all-too-apparent once again in GW2. But why not rethink this design decision, ala the original GW2 design philosophy?

Boss difficulty will change depending on the player count, even if it only reduces the number of possible error sources
there is a reason even blizzard realised that mystic can only serve its purpose with a fixed number

That’s definitely true, and I don’t think there is any way around it. At the same time, the original philosophy of GW2 seemed to be a conscious rejection of that the sort of min/max thinking that underlies a game like WoW, where ensuring that the encounter is of the exact same difficulty for all raids is of utmost concern. It seemed, rather, that GW2 simply cared about presenting a compelling, fun experience for the players.

So, my reply is: if the encounter is 5-10% harder for a 12 person raid compared to an 8 person raid, who cares?

Because tuning the difficulty to a certain number is much easier and resulted in a tighter/better fight. Also, some mechanics are just better designed if you know the exact number of people. For example, at VG you need 4 people out of 10 to go to the green circle. If the number fluctuates, how to balance that? If the 11 and 12 group only have 4 people to do green circle, the DPS increase is way way more than the 10-man group. And on split, if you increase the health of the condi-only boss, you’ll probably need another condi damager then. And so on, and so on.

So basically, tuning the fight to an certain number of people resulted in a better fight.

Raid group size really isn’t something that needs to be changed. It was stated that they wanted the raids to be bigger than dungeons, and ten is a very convenient option because of the five person limit of most buffs. As for raising the group size, if you increase it to eleven, there’s no reason not to make it twelve, or thirteen, or anything. And before you know it raids are just another world boss, and that is not what raids are about. Sometimes people just have to miss out on whatever they’re guild/group of friends is doing. It was the same if you had six people wanting to do fractals or dungeons.

If you have fewer than ten, either attempt it with fewer than ten, or just get pugs. I personally hate getting pugs off the lfg, but for the most part raid pugs have been pretty good, just as long as you know what you’re looking for, and how to figure out whether the person you find is running what you need.

It’s a lot of job to do tbh. I could see 1 version of 6 or 8 people behing done, but variable from 8 to 12? No way.

The HP of the boss are easy to adapt, but the mechanics? You will have to balance version of the boss individually for each number of players. It’s not like fractal, with an algorithm that work for most level and some variable in some table. You need to decide how many player receive the blue AoE at VG, how my ppl need to be in the green circle, how many updraft at Gorseval, do you add a 5th canon at Sabetha? Think about sabetha with 8 ppl. Do you leave 4 canons? 4 on canons + healers, leave only 3 ppl permanently on the boss. Do you remove 1 canons? Do you rearrange them or just skip the west one for example.

My points is that they would need to rebalance each version of the raid and that’s a lot of work, for such a small return on investment. They is a lot of other things they could do to improve raids accessibility other than your solution.

I really really do not want them to implement scaling in raids. Yes it would be nice to not have to take exactly 10 people but as soon as you start doing that all sorts of other problems arise.

You get points where having specific numbers of players will make bosses significantly harder or easier, which effectively cause whole new cap points people will exploit and makes things more frustrating for people who just want to take everyone who wants to raid. And there’s no real way to 100% avoid that unless fights are pretty stagnate, which would be really boring.

There’s also the fact adding scaling would create more opportunity for bugs and exploits to be found/unintentionally created.

Having it just be one size allows for greater variability in mechanics and and overall smoother raid experience.

Brjuntinaar.2436:

That’s definitely true, and I don’t think there is any way around it.

Not having a variable raid group size…