My overall impressions of the raid along with profession related stuff…
I don’t care how long it takes to beat something, or if I beat it on the 1st or 100th time, this raid intro was boring. It was also a confused mess of clicking open your hero trait and utility panels, along with bank tabs for gear, in hopes you had the right “tools” for the job(s). And just like in wvw and spvp, raids only serve to highlight what little has been done with regard to profession development, combat mechanics and the systems to back them up.
Years have gone by with enough feedback from your players to make stronger profession and system improvements, but they have been largely ignored and you are introducing content at a much faster pace than what our profession and combat designs receive. Sure, a couple elite specs have been tailored for this content, but 90% of our core profession “stuff” is behind. Overall, I feel you are creating this improved and more difficult content but shoehorning the neglected 3 year old professions into them. The raid intro was not enjoyable and I sat most of the time staring at the screen thinking this is not fun. I’ll try it again today, but I’ll honestly just stick to a dps role because the tanking/taunting and healing/support aspects of professions vs raid design/mechanics is severely lacking in many ways. This raid intro is just a small taste of things to come and hopefully you (devs) can really pound the pavement to bring all things profession and role wise up to par.
Raiders taking up space in VB…
The raid entrance should be located in a separate area outside of any player maps.
QoL systems…
I believe it’s time to put in build templates/savers for the next patch. It’s been way overdue and now it is a necessity.
You also need qol systems for other content too like transparent map overlays to navigate better. A UI box window to place things like food, consumables, boosters and siege for convenient access.
The GW2 Google syndrome…
I know HoT and this raid intro is new, but it’s not fun to have to use 3rd party walk throughs and location maps for everything HoT related. Having players sit there following video after video to find stuff or to navigate maps is frustrating. There is also no realistic way for 99% of the players to find those ever important mastery points located in chests, and not everybody likes those minigames either btw… Also, sitting in a raid while the leader (or some other person) googles up videos and write ups so they can explain each little detail of every encounter was tiresome. I get some things will require searching for help, tips and tactics, but it’s way overused in HoT.
Gear…
You can’t realistically expect us to craft 5 different sets of ascended weapons and armor, along with slotting various runes and sigils for each encounter within a raid. You really need to make improvements to core professions outside of the gear factor if you want to define roles better.
It’s also about time to put in a rune and sigil extractor “vendor” in game so players can swap things out with coins. The gem store upgrade extractor should be retired now.
Taunt mechanics…
You can’t just slap on a general taunt mechanic by using the toughness score because this limits gear choices. Also, you are asking players to “hopefully” draw and maintain aggro through gear and that is another poor design decision. There needs a lot more work on the taunt/aggro end.
Healing Druid in raids is not good…
I made a thread in the ranger section detailing my experience and sharing some proper changes that should be made. Honestly, the astral force-15 second-pop in and out-reticle aim healing is the most not fun healing design I have ever experienced. Reticle aim healing on a timer while everybody and myself needs to move is by far a not enjoyable gameplay experience. Timed reticle healing is frustrating, clunky and poorly thought out and I’ll put in the link to my thread to explain more. The raid had reinforced my ideas in that thread and I’m now fully convinced CA form should be a stance with with all of its abilities, except the #1 skill, click to activate point blank aoe skills. The staff should remain the ranged heal style. Obvious link below…
Identifiers for split grouping….
Maybe it’s time to make a green tag if you want to go with red, blue and green stuff so you can split groups better.
Profession inequality with movement….
You know all those little safety circles (that sometimes spawn behind the camera) we need to get to in 3 seconds that you designed? Yeah…
I get it that you want to make challenging content and to make professions different, but equality with movement skills are a long standing issue. Not giving professions the same access to movement related abilities is a poor design for a heavy movement required game, and this can clearly be seen again at the vale boss fight like it had been for years in wvw. Some professions will be ok movement wise, while others not so much. The ones that are ok will be forced to take certain powers on certain weapons or skills which cuts out some build/weapon/utility variety.
I’d like to suggest that you look at how city of heroes implemented “power pools” for things like this so we can put everyone on equal “footing” with regard to having access to movement. This can be done even with the current profession designs somehow. You could add in a few extra UI bar slots to the side for these general movement skills/abilities.
You could do all sorts of neat things with a “power pool” system like this too. Passive buffs to improve current movement skills. “Newish” stuff like leaps, speed, ports, dashes, phase movements… like we saw with the bazar of four winds that is currently in dry top. You can have all sorts of powers that are not tied to weapons or utilities so we could have greater build variety. Things like taunts, resurrection skills, condition protections/resistance, damage type protections/resistant, extra attribute enhancers, stability toggles… you name it, could be made to help round out our characters and support our groups better that don’t involve gear/traits and such. This could also help push the content envelope farther for developers.
I’m just throwing the “gist” out there, but I’ll come up with some fully fleshed out ideas for this stuff later. In the meantime look this up so you gain a better understanding of what I’m talking about.
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Power_Pools
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Concealment
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Leaping
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Medicine
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Presence
221 hours over 1,581 days of bank space/hot pve/lion’s arch afk and some wvw.