Guild Wars 2

Once people understand the mechanics, pure dps will likely be the optimal setup. I am basing this assumption from what I have seen on the first boss. Healer and face tanking is not required.

Meanwhile i dont understand why anyone would want healer in raid.. If you cant manage to stay alive there without healer its l2p issue. As i said its was walk in the park for me, but the timer on it own prevents actually building for anything else than dps.

Summing it up
Zerk is dead, long live the zerk with some cc

zerk always had great cc. Icebow, tremor, gust, basilisk venom, binding blades, temporal curtain and so on.

I really dont like enrage timers, just because you cant take fun builds to raid with your guildies because you will hit it. If the boss have difficulty mechanics that will kill you why enrage?? As you take long to kill it you will have more window to die to these mechanic so its not like it was easier.

and using passive defense makes the fight much harder compared to dps gear?

Burtnik.5218:

Meanwhile i dont understand why anyone would want healer in raid.. If you cant manage to stay alive there without healer its l2p issue.

IIRC, the red dude during split phases pulses unavoidable damage, hence the need for a healer.

Also the seekers are a pain to keep at bay all the time.

Burtnik.5218:

Rising Dusk.2408:

No, the enrage timers are absolutely necessary to ensure difficulty.

Im not sure what “difficulty” you trying to make here. That raid and it “mechanics” were nothing but walk in the park. The funny part is that AN themself says “zerk meta is gone” yet to beat it..you will actually need zerk. Funny. If they want to make something difficult they gotta look up at other games which already do it right. Trying to cover it behind a small time limit and telling me its there to make it look difficult is pretty much laughable to me. If thats all they can do i hope they wont bother with raids anymore and move out of it.

So it was a walk in the park? I take it that you beat it without much effort if at all?

EcoRI.9273:

Once people understand the mechanics, pure dps will likely be the optimal setup. I am basing this assumption from what I have seen on the first boss. Healer and face tanking is not required.

I don’t think that’ll be the case for the average pick up group. I anticipate a healer or a super defensively supporting character will be necessary for average pubs to complete the content, and so they’ll quickly become the norm there. I also anticipate that while it will be able to be done without a healer or super defensively supporting character, most guild groups will find that it lowers the risk of wiping significantly enough that it’ll save time to run one.

And for the record, when I say healer I mean something like a druid in berserker’s or zealot’s gear. The Druid’s DPS boosting abilities in Sun/Frost Spirits and Glyph of Empowerment alone make it invaluable for boosting team DPS in addition to healing. As for super defensively supporting character I’m thinking berserker hammer Guardian or a berserker Herald focusing on protection uptime over other boons. I don’t think a full-on Cleric’s anything will really be necessary for what we’ve seen so far.

optimal and average pick up groups are mutually exclusive. Current pick up groups use bearbows and necros. If you are talking about the current berserker pugs, they just copy what they see dungeon guilds run. Once dungeon guilds find out the optimal strats, then we will come full circle.

EcoRI.9273:

optimal and average pick up groups are mutually exclusive. Current pick up groups use bearbows and necros. If you are talking about the current berserker pugs, they just copy what they see dungeon guilds run. Once dungeon guilds find out the optimal strats, then we will come full circle.

I’m more optimistic that the content will be hard enough that bad players copying speed clear strategies will fail, and they’ll have to adapt with additional defensive support.

Bad player and hard content is subjective. Some groups can run a clerics guardian for fotm/dungeons and do better than if they ran a berserker guardian. All the current non dps oriented builds for the raid are already in the game and was more prevalent when the game was first released. Sonic Boon warrior was insanely popular back in the days when people said dungeons were hard. Over time people got so good at the content that more DPS oriented builds just became better for those players.

I mean you’re right with regards to fractals and dungeons, but I do think there’s a point where the content is hard enough that even if certain guilds can do it in all DPS and with no defensive support, the average pub group won’t be able to. It reminds me of the days when speed clear guilds would trenchway DoA, but no pub could pull it off so every pub instead ran DwG.

I’m hopeful they’ll reach that difficulty and players will have some choice in their role; the lesser used weapons due to the meta are a lot of fun, and it’s a real shame to not use them without holding your team back.

Well here is the thing, information is really easy to get access to today than it was 10 years ago. More players share their content via twitch/youtube/reddit. More players are internet savvy. Was trenchway DoA not something pugs do because most of them don’t know it exists? I mean hell, I know nothing about DoA farming and I consider myself very internet savvy.

EcoRI.9273:

Was trenchway DoA not something pugs do because most of them don’t know it exists? I mean hell, I know nothing about DoA farming and I consider myself very internet savvy.

It was very well known, actually. I would frequently discuss it in pubs that I played with. It just used complex tactics, required an exceptional tank capable of balling the mobs, and had far stricter team composition requirements than DwG did. Because of those skill and class gaps, most players couldn’t handle it or would wipe constantly when trying, and so the fastest approach was reserved for only the best groups.

Don’t remove the enrage timers – they are as far as I can see a necessary thing.

Remove them and replace them with hard failure situations that occur based on failing the twitch/skill use mechanics. Either that or be really lenient on the DPS windows, less we find ourselves in a situation where professions are left out of certain roles because they cannot perform at that role in a fashion required by the encounter. You have stated multiple times that all professions are capable of every role in their own way, I don’t see that at the moment (e.g., support thief leaves a lot to be desired). However, if that is still your goal, you have to be careful about how precise these encounters are when it comes to the numbers game.

SirMoogie.9263:

Remove them and replace them with hard failure situations that occur based on failing the twitch/skill use mechanics. Either that or be really lenient on the DPS windows, less we find ourselves in a situation where professions are left out of certain roles because they cannot perform at that role in a fashion required by the encounter. You have stated multiple times that all professions are capable of every role in their own way, I don’t see that at the moment (e.g., support thief leaves a lot to be desired). However, if that is still your goal, you have to be careful about how precise these encounters are when it comes to the numbers game.

So make it so that the difficulty of the fight relies solely on performing the mechanics otherwise your group fails? Is that the gist of what you really want?

Ayrilana.1396:

So make it so that the difficulty of the fight relies solely on performing the mechanics otherwise your group fails? Is that the gist of what you really want?

Yeah, but the mechanics I’m talking about covers a lot of ground. It covers positioning, using environmental objects at the right time, dodging, soaking damage for others, and literally anything that isn’t damage over time in a raid encounter. If you’ve raided in other games that laundry list is huge.

I also didn’t say they can’t have enrage timers, but they have to be careful how tight they make them, less we get raids where, for example, only 6 engineers in the DPS role can do the encounter. Any combination of classes in the DPS role should have the tools available to them to meet the check, less Anet backtrack on their previous claims about professions being able to do any role, just in their own unique way. We would also find ourselves in the unfortunate situation where players who want to raid no longer get to play the profession they main, because it’s locked out of the encounter by tight timing constraints their profession can’t simply meet. I don’t know about you, but the game would become less enjoyable for me if I needed to maintain multiple characters just so I could experience some content.

Edit: I think Lupi is a good example of an enrage feature based on skill mechanics (not stats). You need to avoid one of his attacks or kill the grubs, less he get a buff that makes him harder. Fail enough times and he becomes unbeatable (or nearly, I have no idea about his current state). Now, many people will say Lupi is easy, but I don’t think so. He’s practiced, not easy. I still run new people through Arah and grubs do spawn and some are consumed. I just run a tanky build, so it doesn’t bother me if he get s a stack or two. I can keep him busy if others are dying, giving them time to get themselves up. This is also a nice example of counter play to soft-enrage features. A pure DPS group would have difficulties with a partially empowered lupi, but one with a tank has an easier time managing it. Of course, even such a group would fail if he gains too many stacks.

Enrage timers are needed to keep people from cheesing the fight, but the enrage timer itself shouldn’t be what defines the difficulty of the fight. That only perpetuates an all zerker meta, which even Anet reps have said they want to discourage.

So, enrage timers should be forgiving enough to allow for support builds (and support armor sets in some cases). The ACTUAL mechanics of the fight, however, should not be forgiving at all – and should encourage/reward good strategy and gameplay.

Relying on super tight enrage timers to create the illusion of difficulty would only encourage a single way to play for everyone (dps dps dps), making the fights boring for anyone who wants to play any other role.

It would also encourage lazy fight design.