Guild Wars 2

As I got into Guild Wars 2, one of the things that sold the game for me was the high degree of creativity one could have with their character, from weapon choices to specialisations, there were numerous builds you could play with in PvE, or even in PvP, and this was one of the most appealing features that got me to buy the game, after starting out as a free player.
Heart of Thorns was finally released, a few months later, I got into it instantly, having only one character at the time with exotic armour, I struggled but quickly learned the new mechanics by myself, and really enjoyed the new story and features introduced in the expansion, and everyone lived in harmony, but everything changed when the fire na when the raids were introduced. At the time, they were a big gap for me, which I was willing to get over by slowly crafting my ascended set and getting more experience with the game. Skip to today, now I have basically mastered the main game and HoT maps, playing with a guild of close friends, and having a good time overall, this is when I decided to go back to look at raids.
Though, instead of the gap, there was a wall, instead of the friendly groups rushing into the raids headfirst for fun, to see what’s the worst that could happen when raids were first introduced, there was now raids looking for “experienced” players as far as the eye can see. I decided to wait and ask around for a few days, and I felt absolutely cast out, joining a raid was like taking a job interview: How many legendary insights do you have? Do you have a full ascended gear? Do you have experience with raiding? But what broke my heart is meta character builds, when the major point that made me buy the game is the freedom you could have with your character.
As for my personal experience with raids so far, from a purely objective newcomer standpoint: I was ignored for 2 days straight, finally got into a squad of inexperienced people, after being made fun of for my non-meta builds some guy joined, took the lead and asked who had done raids before, being an inexperienced group of people, 2-3 people including me said they didn’t beat a raid yet. We were promptly kicked out without prior notice.
“Why not just find a guild that raids?” I was told, but the same scheme repeated itself, and the job interview started all over again, you need experience you get experience, and it’s not my small friendly guild that would be able to do raids.
In the end, I just gave up on raids entirely, the feeling of being left out and the absolute disrespect for newcomers was too much, guess I’ll just go back to normal PvE.

- For a start, there are enough guilds who take newcomers with them and there are also enough inexperienced groups in the lfg that also let you join
If you deny that you aren’t telling the truth!
There you go:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/lookingfor
and I was chilling in the lfg yesterday for hours while watching soccer —> enough training groups there for everybody

- Raids are “challenging group content” – a content made for a base of players that felt bored with 99% of the rest of the GW2 content
Don’t compare raids to dungeons or fractals – they are not comparable and should never be. It’s a different content, not made for everybody like PvP is not for everybody and WvW is not for everybody.

- Due to this content being challenging you cannot walk into raids without a proper built char otherwise this content wouldn’t be challenging anymore.

- While I agree that it’s not easy to establish a complete 10 man guild group for raiding, it is still possible. But it’s also enough to have 1-xx friends that are good enough to go for a challenge and your goal to be successful will be achievable soon.

You just have to try and stop giving up!

tl;dr
Raid teaching guilds don’t exist, even though there’s like 3-4 right here on this forum.

First, thanks Vinceman for the encouragement, I have tried looking there, maybe I didn’t look hard enough or wasn’t patient enough.

Secondly, that second comment was totally uneccessary, I read guides and looked at videos trying to learn raiding, I do have a few characters with meta builds, I gave a lot of effort camping at the Lion’s Arch areodrome looking for a guild or squad willing to help me, both in LFG and by asking in map chat every once in a while, but as I said it was personal experience so far that kind of ruined it for me, I’ll maybe try again in the future, and look for a good guild.

SuikaHakurei.1943:

First, thanks Vinceman for the encouragement, I have tried looking there, maybe I didn’t look hard enough or wasn’t patient enough.

Secondly, that second comment was totally uneccessary, I read guides and looked at videos trying to learn raiding, I do have a few characters with meta builds, I gave a lot of effort camping at the Lion’s Arch areodrome looking for a guild or squad willing to help me, both in LFG and by asking in map chat every once in a while, but as I said it was personal experience so far that kind of ruined it for me, I’ll maybe try again in the future, and look for a good guild.

I am in a guild here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Raid-teaching-runs-Proving-accessibility

Has been extremely helpful and open to all new people, if you really do want to get into raids I think its a good place to start.

You can use your own build as long as you are able to provide the necessary DPS and utility. However since there is no DPS meter the only way to do that is to go into the training raid and show it to your group. That usually takes too much time in PUGS but you can ask the guilds you try to join if you can show them your DPS and explain them why it’s ok.

Also the only reason you could play what ever build you wanted is the same reason why you could play without any traits and utility skills because using the “1” skill on your main hand was enough for most of the content and other players were able to carry you.