Guild Wars 2

Hey everyone.

I was watching woodenpotatoes video on the raid story. I was very surprised at how good it was! However, i find it sad that the story is gated behind content that currently less than 10% of players can complete.

Now don’t get me wrong, i think the raids are awesome right, i’ve killed the vale guardian and i’ve gotten gorceval to 50% with my guild group. Chances are that we will kill Sabetha one day aswell… :P But i also tried raiding with some people from my guild who are not the best, and we only got the vale guardian to 50% when the enrage timer ended.

Those people will never be able to experience story/lore of raids, and they don’t want to try it again because it was hard. So basicly they are left in the dark in terms of raids.

That’s why i think we should have an easy mode, just so people can try out raids, and experience the story., but with much reduced rewards of course!

I have a few suggestions for what could be changed, not necesarily all of them:

Story mode
Mechanics:

• Reduce the health of all enemies by ~20%
• Add a few more minutes to the timers, less than 5 minutes.
• Reduce damage from some attacks, like the valve guardian floor. So it’s less punishing.

rewards

• Remove all shard rewards.
• Reduce gold rewards by 30-60%, maybe more. We dont want hardcore players farming this
• Reduce the chance to get ascended items.
• Replace the garanteed exotic with a garanteed rare.
• Remove all collection items.
• Disable all encounter achievements. But keep the story based once, like soldier tags.

I think these changes will help solve some issues. More people can experience the raidsstory, and the encounters. Even if they are less competent players. It allows for people to practise encounters, so they are better suited for the real thing. This is not supposed to be something people do all the time. It’s supposed to be a way to experience the raids for the story.

TLDR;
We need an easy mode raid, with vastly reduced reward. So people can experience the story, because it’s awesome

If there is no rewards then why not just make it solo …
way you want it, it would be far less frustrating just to go watch the video on youtube

No what this game is doing is basically going back to 1999 when it comes to raids they got decades to catch up to good mechanics like WoW raid finder / casual mode WITH rewards

/signed.

(but arenanet will ignore it anyway)

No offense, but this is how raids got ruined in WoW. If this same crap happens to GW2 as it did to WoW, then I’m done…

Dahkeus.8243:

No offense, but this is how raids got ruined in WoW. If this same crap happens to GW2 as it did to WoW, then I’m done…

You mean LFR Raiding in WoW, where half of the Raid is AFK, while the other half is doing it with just their left Hand and still suceeding? This isn’t Raiding, it has nothing to do with Raiding, its just SW Chestfarm with a Raid Paint.

And I disagree to the OP. Raids don’t need an Easy Mode.

I don’t like the idea of an easier difficulty because it would annihilate the enjoyment you currently get from beating the boss on the normal difficulty. I think this is hard for many people to understand so I expect disagreement, but this will indeed be the case for the majority of players. “don’t play easier difficulty” is not a good counter-argument.

No. They made it with the very intention that not everyone will be able to do it and it should stay that way.

Just watch videos of other people doing it if you want the story that badly.

spoj.3175:

Just watch videos of other people doing it if you want the story that badly.

We could do the same for the whole game, yet people don’t. Some people like experiencing the game in character, almost as if taking on the role of a character in the story. There is a whole genre of games about this sort of thing… what were they again? Oh right, RPGs. This is an RPG, so you shouldn’t be surprised people want to see the story first hand with their character.

I’d like a story mode as well.

TerminalMontage.5693:

No. They made it with the very intention that not everyone will be able to do it and it should stay that way.

Agreed. Something in this game needs to be challenging, I personally am exceptionally happy with how difficult raids are.

This entire game is easy mode, go RP afk auto attack dragons in Vanilla GW2 if you want easy.

Wait what? There is story? You mean this https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Spirit_Vale#Dialogue couple lines of dialog? I don’t think there is a point to rework whole wing just to make couple one liners more accessible. Not until whole raid is out anyway.

Its not really much story anyway. Its just some lore and a non direct storyline that is very easy to miss/overlook. I didnt have a clue what was going on storywise until i watched WoodenPotatoes video. And that was after i had already done all the achievements.

You arent really missing anything if you dont play it. So just watching a video to see the scarce dialogue and tidbits of lore should be enough for those of you that cant beat the raid but still want to “experience” the story.

Without the other wings the story is cryptic, I give you props for providing specific examples of how you’d like to see it done and while it’s nice for practice it wouldn’t be near the real thing. Just keep practicing, you’ll get it eventually and totally worth it.

But how is it challenging if it’s made easy?

Mortifer.2946:

/signed.

(but arenanet will ignore it anyway)

/Signed.

(Agreed).

cocowoushi.7150:

But how is it challenging if it’s made easy?

Well it would allow more people to experience raids, whatever their abilities or gear (Remember we all paid the same price for HoT) people shouldn’t be excluded from content they paid for.

Not everybody wants really challenging content.

I actually think your suggestions on how to implement a “story mode” and what the rewards should look like are some of the best I’ve seen on the forums – props for that.

I have a few counter-arguments though that I’d like to bring up here.

1. Arenanet has specifically addressed this point of making sure they do not gate the story behind raid content. Obviously at this point, we still don’t have next two raid wings, or HoT season 2 (or whatever they’re going to call it), so we don’t know where either story is going. It seems, so far, like the raid story will be completely tangential to the living world story and therefore not a huge deal that some people will be missing out on parts of it. (I know, I know, people will still want to experience it – I’m the same way. I love to find out all I can about lore in-game on my own.) I think Anet made a judgement call and decided that if not every player experienced it for themselves, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. We’ll just have to see where the story goes.

2. Time. Time is a huge factor in deciding what content to work on. It’s possible that Anet looked into making some sort of “story mode”, and realized that it would interfere with them creating new hard-mode raid content in a timely manner, which frankly wouldn’t be fair to the players who find their enjoyment in that caliber of content, because this raid is literally the only thing we have to do at that level. It’s possible they didn’t even consider it. It’s possible it’s being worked on right now and we don’t know about it. Basically, it’s easy for us to sit around and ask for all sorts of new content, but when you’re the developer, you have to prioritize and it seems like a “story mode” is sitting rather low on that list if it’s on there at all.

3. While this may be hard to understand for non-raiders, the existence of a “story mode” would devalue the prestige of completing the existing challenging content, for many raiding players. This type of content is something the game has lacked for three years, and let me tell you, for me and many of my in-game friends who are spending lots of time raiding now, it has felt like our requests for a real challenge in the game have fallen on deaf ears for that whole time. This is the first time we’re seeing content that is really meant for those who want to dedicate a lot of time and effort towards completing content with a dedicated group of players who are just as skilled and invested as they are. To us, it just seems fair that that content would remain challenging so that other people would have to put in just as much time and effort to be as successful as we were. Obviously this is a rather emotional argument and so you can take it how you like. I’m just trying to explain what it feels like from our perspective because I think a lot of the people who are truly enjoying the raid experience are pretty silent on the forums.

Personally, raiding has been the most fun I’ve had playing GW2 in three years and a reason why I will keep playing for as long as they keep making them. I love so much about GW2 – the combat system especially – (which is why I’ve played for three years without raids!) and the fact that I can experience so much of that in a raid environment has been incredible for me.

My advice is to give the raids a few months. We’ll see more and more of the community become proficient at these fights and more open to helping less experienced players complete the encounters. My group has already taken a few different days to run VG with players from our guilds who consider themselves more casual but want to experience the fight, even after killing the boss ourselves (read: no extra rewards for us, just the experience of helping our friends out). I’m sure you’ll see more and more of that over time.

Wahaha.7938:

I don’t like the idea of an easier difficulty because it would annihilate the enjoyment you currently get from beating the boss on the normal difficulty. I think this is hard for many people to understand so I expect disagreement, but this will indeed be the case for the majority of players. “don’t play easier difficulty” is not a good counter-argument.

But how? I enjoyed beating the first boss. How an easy mode would diminish that? I enjoyed when I was able to reach level 50 back when fractal was first released. Someone doing fractal 1 didn’t limit my enjoyment. Does the fact that some people are playing in Emerald Division annihilate the enjoyment of someone reaching Diamond Division in pvp?

softblackcarbon.1537:

3. While this may be hard to understand for non-raiders, the existence of a “story mode” would devalue the prestige of completing the existing challenging content, for many raiding players.

I’m a raider and I can’t see how this would devalued my work. If the easy mode have a big reward yes I can see it. If they just nerf raid, I can see it. But if they add a new easy mode? No i can’t.

First, I definitely don’t think that everyone would feel as if there work was diminished by the addition of a “story mode” but I certainly think that some people (myself included) would feel that way.

The difference between the examples you provided and raids, is that everything you mentioned was implemented as it currently is in the game (fractals are close enough – the principle is the same XD). Raid content was introduced as the first and only content that was designed to be completed fully by a much smaller portion of the player-base, and something we have been waiting for for three years now. There’s a ton of easy content in this game that my friends and I essentially don’t touch because we don’t enjoy it and that content doesn’t have a “hard-mode”. Like I said above, I don’t think this is a super rational argument, it’s just the way I and several other people feel.

Dahkeus.8243:

No offense, but this is how raids got ruined in WoW. If this same crap happens to GW2 as it did to WoW, then I’m done…

The game had a major decline in it’s population after WotLK, because Blizzard’s answer to issue of raid exclusivity was to lower the difficulty of the raids near the end of the expansion while keeping the awards the same. This effectively slapped raiders who had completed the content before the nerf. It kittened off quite a lot of people.

LFR was the answer to that in order to provide some degree of casual experience of the lore, story and aesthetics of the raids themselves at the expense of superior loot and better drop rates on components for the legendary quest.

I don’t see how that “ruined” raids, since the difficulty and exclusive rewards of the harder modes remained intact, particularly because they, in addition, added a fourth difficulty that was harder than heroic. The only thing it “ruined” was a feeling of exclusivity and elitism of having a bunch of content that a percentage of the population would never see to completion.

And despite the WoD expansion being a big failure, the opinion that the difficulty, design and challenge of the raid content was it’s redeeming factor has been expressed by quite a lot of people.

Beyond LFR, the poster you are replying to is correct. Singular difficulty raids is a 1999 concept that hasn’t really been around since Everquest and vanilla WoW. They introduced two levels of difficulty for dungeons in BC and then began that practice with raids in WotLK.

In those instances, there was also a demographic of people who quit and ranted, because “raids and dungeons were ruined”, because more “noobs” could do the content. I assure you I shed many tears during their exodus.

Yet, despite that, WoW sales continued to increase.