Guild Wars 2

I am starting to feel other than being a special boss fight and 10 man groups there is nothing special about raids.

The thing is the stuff in between each boss is a joke there is no sense of achievement of getting to one boss to another, other than defeating the previous boss.

I feel as though arah p4 is more like a raid in the amount of events to get done, in order to get to the last boss of the dungeon especially if you kill the trash mobs along the way instead of just running past them.

I just hope that there is a bit more skill involved in getting from one boss to the other in the next wing as of right now its quite boring.

They should look back to GW1 raid type events they had like underworld, The Deep, Urgoz Warren, Mallyx the Unyielding (quest).

Those were hard and fun. The maps where huge in comparison to Spirit Vale. To me the raid in GW2 is really just special instanced boss fights and nothing more.

I hope any future raid content (basically a 10 man or more party instance) is more like what they had in GW1.

Links below to the GW1 stuff
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/The_Underworld
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/The_Deep
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Urgoz's_Warren
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Mallyx_the_Unyielding_%28quest%29

Yes -well we have been asking for this similar content – you forget one big area:
DoA (Domain of Anguish)

Unfortunately these areas are all instant content “dungeons”… The team is dead.
It died when Robert was fired with a chaos gun.

Ever since ANET has been trying to produce metrics against dungeons..
How they are not popular :they succeeded last patch (with needed rewards) – so less people run them. Now They can justify no developments in this area – took them 2yrs to acomplish this. Funny thing this is backfiring as more people are asking for dungeons such as no.1 Reddit post today.

Make FoTM popular : Suceeded with brain dead levels (someone shoot me).

Make veterans quit instant end content and log on less :Success With weekly raid lockouts. Soon they won’t bother to log on at all -that’s happening now as most raids are face palm for the high end who used to do dungeons as there training and self improvement ground.

IMHO: Anet probably wants those only on for raids to log in once a week.

The trash in raids are just annoying. They drop 0 loot, time gated events which take up ~40% of the raid ughhh.

I actually like the trash – it’s the only thing which gives repeating gold (liquid)… After you have max shard capped.

It’s the only thing that keeps me from redoing the raid to help others after max capped.. I’m enjoying my 1gold/hr.

Let’s be honest. Trash mobs are called trash in every game’s dungeons and raids for a reason. None of the ones I’ve seen in any game are in any way shape or form epic.

I am curious what percentage of GW2 players
1) Actually try the raids.
2) Are successful.
And if (what I believe) those very small percentages are actually what was intended/desired by ANet. I suppose the raids serve their purpose but they do seem like overrated boss fights.

rcs.4120:

I am curious what percentage of GW2 players
1) Actually try the raids.
2) Are successful.
And if (what I believe) those very small percentages are actually what was intended/desired by ANet. I suppose the raids serve their purpose but they do seem like overrated boss fights.

Still haven’t done them yet and probably won’t ever. It’s not, because I am not the demographic that targets them; I have done the whole raiding thing in World of Warcraft and even going farther back then that into Everquest.

It’s mostly for two reasons:

One, I know the experience won’t ever rival what I consider to be the real raiding experience. It’s just not the difficulty of the fight or the challenge; it’s also the rewards which is really non-existent in a game without vertical-progression.

Like the half the fun in raiding in World of Warcraft was not only the challenge, but the rewards of the challenge. It’s beating the challenge and then getting some unique item with an unique look that advanced the power of your character. The possession of that item became personal and a source of intense pride.

Doing raids to acquire the same ascended gear with the same minor stat increases that you can acquire thru crafting or fractals or acquire a purely aesthetic aura from an infusion or parts for a collection that will lead to the recipes for legendary armor in Anet’s endless endeavor to turn the player base into gold-churning hamsters just isn’t satisfying at all. I don’t feel motivation to go thru the trouble of trying to organize 10 people once a week to do it. There is no excitement there for me.

Also, I don’t feel the game is built for it in comparison to other MMOs that were designed out of the box to support raids. It’s mechanics feel layered on top and clunky and awkward. For example, the new raid made healers relevant and if I wanted to craft optimal gear to turn my elementalist into a healer to try and get some of kind priest experience from WoW, I would pay a pretty penny for it to do economic imbalance between stat prefixes thanks to Anet’s forced scarcity and then, what the kitten would I do with the gear outside of that one raid a week? The role of healer is so undefined and unneeded in the rest of PvE game.

Two, raids are just not ever what I wanted out of Guild Wars 2 and never what I asked for. Yeah, sure challenging content, but Guild Wars 2 is the game I go to just log in, immediately join in on something and have fun for a couple hours. I wanted challenging content within that model, not within a model that requires the organization, planning and coordination of 10 players once a week. I don’t want to do that and certainly not for raids that lack any feeling of epicness to them. No epic loot and no epic story; the entire point of the story and progression in a WoW expansion was all leading toward these huge epic raid fights that brought it all to it’s conclusion.

It’s scary stuff, man. After the latest reveal in the midst of general lack of communication from Anet, I antcipate this next “content” patch to be the first one in three years that doesn’t have any content that I actually want to do.

Yeah, sure, not every content patch should satisfy me personally, but I do feel I represent the majority of the demographic. Because if you are in that demographic who is looking for large group oriented, challenging PVE content that requires coordination, planning, practice schedules and commitment, then what the kitten have you been doing in Guild Wars 2 for the last three years when the game was clearly not about that?

rcs.4120:

I am curious what percentage of GW2 players
1) Actually try the raids.
2) Are successful.
And if (what I believe) those very small percentages are actually what was intended/desired by ANet. I suppose the raids serve their purpose but they do seem like overrated boss fights.

Nobody can know what is the percentage of the population do raid except for Anet. But here the number for my guild. We have around 400 active players and around kitten were successful in raid so around 10%. Additionally, I know about 10 people that tried raid in pugs, but I don’t know if they were successful or not. I guess that the number is higher but I don’t know everybody in the guild.

So far the vast majority of people not doing the raid are

1) Casual/new and know they are not ready. They might be trying raid eventually, when they are gear up and have a bit more experience with their profession.

2) Don’t really have any interest in raid.

3) Have a hard time finding a group to do it.

As time pass, more and more people in the 1st category get into raid. At least in my guild I try to get as many people in raid to at least experience it.

The number 3 is kind of Anet fault. They should make raid more accessible. Not easier, but more accessible. A decent LFG, working with Squad. A Raid Lobby, etc. I would also love more difficulty setting like an easy and hard mode to accommodate more people and as a way for people to get experienced in raid before joining the harder version, but I doubt we’ll have that.

I’d like to a fourth.

4) Tried raids and got bored/burnt out

Unless you’re a raid-roster type guild the repeated problem I see is guilds having the same group of experienced players teaching the more novice players week after week. Thus, you end up with a group of players that just end up burning out on the content or getting bored of seeing the same stale encounters.

savacli.8172:

I’d like to a fourth.

4) Tried raids and got bored/burnt out

Unless you’re a raid-roster type guild the repeated problem I see is guilds having the same group of experienced players teaching the more novice players week after week. Thus, you end up with a group of players that just end up burning out on the content or getting bored of seeing the same stale encounters.

Maybe. But isn’t that kind of your fault? I mean we went through that kind of phase with my group and we decide to change how we worked to stop that from happening.

I made some rules for our raids

1) Nobody should be doing more than 2 raids per weeks. You max out shard after like 3 hours of raid. At the 3rd raid per week people are just burnt out so I make sure it never happen.

2) Limit the raid time to 2 hours. We a group can’t complete the raid in 2 hours, better to stop of people start to blame each other and the night is kind of ruined. Everybody go to bed with a bad feeling about the raid.

3) I keep one night per week for just the veteran so they enjoy a nice smooth raid night where everything go well and we don’t have to teach anything to anyone.

That changed the situation a lot for our group. Raid are more fun because we play them only once or twice per weeks, and only for like 1-2 hours at a time.

But as time pass, we gonna get more and more raid. This will make thing better as people won’t be doing the same raid over and over again. We’ll have more diversity.

Thaddeus.4891:

savacli.8172:

I’d like to a fourth.

4) Tried raids and got bored/burnt out

Unless you’re a raid-roster type guild the repeated problem I see is guilds having the same group of experienced players teaching the more novice players week after week. Thus, you end up with a group of players that just end up burning out on the content or getting bored of seeing the same stale encounters.

Maybe. But isn’t that kind of your fault? I mean we went through that kind of phase with my group and we decide to change how we worked to stop that from happening.

I made some rules for our raids.

….

I would argue mileage varies based on what the overall participation/interest level is of the guild.

In my guild we got the same 10-12 people taking a night or 2 to get all of our kills/shard. Then about half of the folks from that “main group” at the very least are trying to do 1-2 nights to get some experience for some of the novice players.

Interest level in raids plummeted with our more experienced folks so we lost the ability to keep a healthy rotation of players. We could only limit our raid nights to once or twice for our veteran players, but that leaves us little to no time to help some of the lesser experienced folks (with whom we’ve seen lose interest after their first kill or so).

Effectively, we’re down to having to pug the lost spot or two for a mixture of reasons from not having skilled enough players to players who just don’t care to raid.

Anyways, on topic with OP original post:

I agree, there’s nothing special about GW2 raids. The sense of accomplishment feels rather cheap, and I too would much rather something more dynamic like Arah p4. Right now the only challenge is when we take along new players. Otherwise the whole thing is said and done in about an hour. Kthnxbye, see you next week.

savacli.8172:

I would argue mileage varies based on what the overall participation/interest level is of the guild.

In my guild we got the same 10-12 people taking a night or 2 to get all of our kills/shard. Then about half of the folks from that “main group” at the very least are trying to do 1-2 nights to get some experience for some of the novice players.

Interest level in raids plummeted with our more experienced folks so we lost the ability to keep a healthy rotation of players. We could only limit our raid nights to once or twice for our veteran players, but that leaves us little to no time to help some of the lesser experienced folks (with whom we’ve seen lose interest after their first kill or so).

Effectively, we’re down to having to pug the lost spot or two for a mixture of reasons from not having skilled enough players to players who just don’t care to raid.

Ya I understand. Raid can be hard to setup. Most group went all in during the first weeks, which is great, but didn’t stop slow down soon enough and burned themselves out. IMO it’s kind of Anet fault. The current system

1) The reward drop by a LOT after the first raid leaving little incentive for experienced players to help new players.

2) The limited support for pugs. No LFG, no squad/LFG intereaction, no Raid Lobby, etc.

3) The limited number of boss. This will fix itself over time, but right now we are kind of at the worst time. Only 1 wing and a lot of group we did it way too much.

4) No easy mode to introduce slowly new players to raid. I all against making raid itself easier. But I’m all for different level of difficulty.

Raids are pretty epic for my group, and everyone still gets really excited about every kill we get. Maybe it’s because we’re a fairly casual group and our wins are still through the skin of our teeth, but we enjoy it a lot. The only part that’s tough for me is sometimes it feels like herding cats, but such is the way of things with any larger group content.

I think raids might need some more serious lore “glue”, but overall I really like the raids.

savacli.8172:

I’d like to a fourth.

4) Tried raids and got bored/burnt out

Unless you’re a raid-roster type guild the repeated problem I see is guilds having the same group of experienced players teaching the more novice players week after week. Thus, you end up with a group of players that just end up burning out on the content or getting bored of seeing the same stale encounters.

This has been my experience for the last month and a half (my guild didn’t really attempt raids until after the holidays). I want to raid with my guild… But getting 10 people who are interested and experienced in the raid online all at the same time is difficult. This results in often having one or two new people in the raid, and it really gets tiring to teach Vale Guardian over and over again for hours (we haven’t even attempted Gorseval as a guild). After a few failed attempts you start to lose people. You lose them after an hour or two because dinner, personal lives, wanting to finish dailies, etc. Or you lose the experienced people who get burned out teaching it for hours every week.

The solution for me was to join an external group, in addition to raiding with my guild. I also pushed for my guild to create one specific day/time for a more serious raid with set members that want to progress at a faster rate.

The experience is epic- for casual guilds. Like others have said, when we do beat it, it’s by the skin of our teeth. I do enjoy the raid bosses, but I fear the hardcore players are still not getting what they want, while the more casual groups are still struggling to down the first boss.

The raids are too easy. They are barely the difficulty I would have expected from fractals 100 or from dungeons at release.

rhapsody.3615:

savacli.8172:

I’d like to a fourth.

4) Tried raids and got bored/burnt out

Unless you’re a raid-roster type guild the repeated problem I see is guilds having the same group of experienced players teaching the more novice players week after week. Thus, you end up with a group of players that just end up burning out on the content or getting bored of seeing the same stale encounters.

This has been my experience for the last month and a half (my guild didn’t really attempt raids until after the holidays). I want to raid with my guild… But getting 10 people who are interested and experienced in the raid online all at the same time is difficult. This results in often having one or two new people in the raid, and it really gets tiring to teach Vale Guardian over and over again for hours (we haven’t even attempted Gorseval as a guild). After a few failed attempts you start to lose people. You lose them after an hour or two because dinner, personal lives, wanting to finish dailies, etc. Or you lose the experienced people who get burned out teaching it for hours every week.

The solution for me was to join an external group, in addition to raiding with my guild. I also pushed for my guild to create one specific day/time for a more serious raid with set members that want to progress at a faster rate.

The experience is epic- for casual guilds. Like others have said, when we do beat it, it’s by the skin of our teeth. I do enjoy the raid bosses, but I fear the hardcore players are still not getting what they want, while the more casual groups are still struggling to down the first boss.

Eh, in my home guild we have set schedules but have only gotten the same people to show up to it. Our “training days” are on the weekend as we try to get the exp’d people through their kills/caps throughout the weekdays.

We actually had our 10th dc on us last run, and we couldn’t find a replacement that fit the experienced bill. We didn’t want to bother bringing in someone new or a pug so we just ran 9 man and killed the VG. So yeah, ubber raid experience for us there…

As far as filling in the gaps in between my home guild runs? I’ve tried the whole side guild/roster-guilds but haven’t found one that matches my schedule/preference. The one roster-guild I found that meets my needs ended being one of those guilds that sell kills/eternal titles so I walked away from it. Right now, I just pug runs whenever I have a free hour or two (and have the attention span for it). Most of them have turned out to be pretty good though I avoid the “15k+ AP | Eternal | Ping insights/gear” try-hard type groups. Of the groups I stick around with they’re generally friendly and willing to work together. I’ve found that at least getting your name out in the “LFR community” has gotten me a healthy amount of pokes throughout the weeks of teams I’m previously pugged with asking for my help again with their kills.

In other words, I get my kills with my home guild and help out players that ask for my help to cap the rest of my shards. We’re not hardcore by any means, but we’re by far not the group that just barely gets their kills “by the skin of our teeth”. It’s just a weekly ritual at this point for me. Not like there’s really anything else to do in the game after dailies get done anyways…