Guild Wars 2

Note : This is not a post about having an easy raiding mode.

My raiding experience

I consider myself an experienced raider. I have killed every boss multiple times, have over 100 legendary insights, got my precursor armor, comfortable raiding on many classes / specs, co-founded my own raiding guild, etc etc. I’m not a super star but I think it didn’t do bad at all.

The problem

Still, there is a point about raiding that annoy me to no end : group forming.

You spend more time forming group than actually raiding and that sucks. Even when you have a dedicated group on a dedicated schedule there is always something that happen : “I can’t make it tonight”, “I’m lagging”, “Real life”, “Game Crash” or “any other excuses”. And now you are back to waiting after another player. It was so frustrating to constantly wait and wait that we even started to attempt (successfully) raid boss with less players but it was more difficult and we were more likely to wipe.

All this waiting is an horrible experience for anyone playing raid. This get me to…

Why do raids don’t scale in difficulty like the rest of the game?

One of the best feature of GW2 is that bosses scale (or try to…) according to the number of players around. This make the content relevant no matter how many you are.

This is what raids need.

How I would do it?

I would make 10 players the easiest difficulty. Keep designing raid bosses exactly like you are doing but, when there are fewer players in the instance, remove a bit of the boss health while keeping every other mechanics intact.

For example, remove 8% to the boss health for every player missing. That would give :

10 players : 100%
9 players : 92%
8 players : 84%
7 players : 76%
6 players : 68%
5 players : 60%

Conclusion

I think a change like this would help raid group tremendously to actually play the raid instead of waiting around to form a group because the boss would be killable with less players if you have a decent group.

Dungeons never scalled to player count, fractal the same. Raid will never too. And it would be not only % scale mechanics would need to change.

Nope you don’t need to change mechanics at all. There are plenty of kills with 6 or less raiders without any mechanics change.

Being able to do enough dps for those low man kills is the biggest challenge.

As I said, 10 man should be the easiest difficulty but it should not be the end of the world (for most group) if you are only 8 to show up tonight.

I like the Idea and if it was implemented the raid experience wouldn’t be as frustrating as it is now and I don’t see any major issue that could be against it. One thing though, afaik Xera can’t be completed with less than 6 man due to the 3 platform crystal thing during the first phase .

Also if they implement this the low man kills become far less impressive

EDIT: Also I think you should change the topic’s title or it might be merged with the other one

Leave it as it is, scaling instances would be just utterly stupid.

Scaling instances based on number of people is always a bit hard to tune and often results in optimal strategies of “do wing XX with 8 people to optimize boons and DPS”.

If boss scales on number of players then players’ skills should also scale, meaning SoI should only have 4 targets when 8, number of regen ticks should be lowered on some abilities because you will provide the boon too easily …. and so on

But for your issue of not finding people quick enough, maybe you should consider being more “flexible” for your PUG, it could be that the requirements you have are a bit too high.

You don’t need to change the way boon work or anything like that since the low man version is harder. Not only the boss has more health per player but you also have less player only doing dps.

Let’s take a 6 man of VG for example:

Most players that run for the green circle enter a tunnel vision and stop dpsing the boss entirely even if they can still range him. When you have 10 players, those 4 players focusing only on the green circle don’t matter that much has you still have 6 others that are dpsing. But when you are only 6, only 2 players are left to dps.

Scipio.3204:

I like the Idea and if it was implemented the raid experience wouldn’t be as frustrating as it is now and I don’t see any major issue that could be against it. One thing though, afaik Xera can’t be completed with less than 6 man due to the 3 platform crystal thing during the first phase .

Also if they implement this the low man kills become far less impressive

EDIT: Also I think you should change the topic’s title or it might be merged with the other one

Thank you!

About Xera, I think it’s perfectly fine that you can’t go below 6 players. The goal is not really to be able to kill the boss with any number of players but just to make it easier to raid instead of spending your time trying to form a group.

I dont like this idea, finding 10 players is not too much to ask for.

Malediktus.9250:

I dont like this idea, finding 10 players is not too much to ask for.

Yup, and doing it with lower numbers currently at least gives better guilds more of a challenge.

I also don’t like this idea — it may even lead to more exclusivity, because each additional player needs to justify their spot in the group.

If one or two people can’t make your static each week, it’s really easy to find a pug 10th. Make whatever requirements you want, and boot them if they’re bad.

Absurdo.8309:

If one or two people can’t make your static each week, it’s really easy to find a pug 10th. Make whatever requirements you want, and boot them if they’re bad.

Finding a 10th then kicking him because he’s bad then finding another 10th can easily takes 30 minutes. That’s 30 minutes of wasted time. Here is my break down for this 30 minutes :

- 5 minutes to find the 10th and get him ready (class, spec, food, joining instance, teamspeak)
- 20 minutes to test him, give him chance and realize he’s not ready for a clear run
- 5 minutes to find another 10th

I’m also pretty generous in that breakdown as I found that it usually takes way longer than 5 minutes to replace a player and my group usually give people a chance for much longer than 20 minutes…

If it is just 1 bad pug your 9 people from your static group should be able to carry him. If a raid kill fails because of 1 person that can only happen during specific mechanics like green circles at vg.

domness.6719:

Malediktus.9250:

I dont like this idea, finding 10 players is not too much to ask for.

Yup, and doing it with lower numbers currently at least gives better guilds more of a challenge.

Would it fix that issue if the scaling stopped at 8 players?

10 players : 100%
9 players : 92%
8 players and less : 84%

Gudradain.3892:

domness.6719:

Malediktus.9250:

I dont like this idea, finding 10 players is not too much to ask for.

Yup, and doing it with lower numbers currently at least gives better guilds more of a challenge.

Would it fix that issue if the scaling stopped at 8 players?

10 players : 100%
9 players : 92%
8 players and less : 84%

Well it kinda defeats the point if the bosses health goes down straight away. I enjoy doing 100% with 6-7 people. Even doing it 9 man is an achievement for some people.

How about you just get reliable people to join your raid team?

Gudradain.3892:

Finding a 10th then kicking him because he’s bad then finding another 10th can easily takes 30 minutes.

Never had to wait this long during usual play times (3pm to 1 am).
The only crucial search is looking for a chronotank during monday prime time because the need in pugs is high there.
PS, Tempest, Rev are easy to get because almost everyone is playing them.
Druids are a little less common but also rising in the last few weeks.

Gudradain.3892:

Absurdo.8309:

If one or two people can’t make your static each week, it’s really easy to find a pug 10th. Make whatever requirements you want, and boot them if they’re bad.

Finding a 10th then kicking him because he’s bad then finding another 10th can easily takes 30 minutes. That’s 30 minutes of wasted time. Here is my break down for this 30 minutes :

- 5 minutes to find the 10th and get him ready (class, spec, food, joining instance, teamspeak)
- 20 minutes to test him, give him chance and realize he’s not ready for a clear run
- 5 minutes to find another 10th

I’m also pretty generous in that breakdown as I found that it usually takes way longer than 5 minutes to replace a player and my group usually give people a chance for much longer than 20 minutes…

If you put the 10th in a non-critical dps role, it’ll reduce your chances of failure.

It seems like this is a complicated solution to a simple problem. It’s much simpler to:

1. Have more reliable members
2. Get alternates in advance
3. Get a pug 10th

I have seen two valid concerns about adding scaling to raid bosses. They are :

1. Super hardcore player are scared that it will trivialized their content as they like the challenge of low manning raid encounter

2. Players in general are scared that they might be more likely to be excluded from raid group if the boss have nearly the same difficulty whether you are 8, 9 or 10.

About #1, yes it’s true that complete scaling would affect the super hardcore raider, but it can easily be fixed by stopping the scaling at 8 or 9 players. Killing raid boss with 5-6 players would still be a pretty good achievement.

About #2, I think player are wrongly scared because this change would help people to play with their friends. For example, if you know a friend is going to be late to a raid, you would be able to start clearing with 9 players and invite him right away when he comes online. Currently, our options are to all wait for him to get online before starting or invite a pug and then tell your friend he cannot raid tonight when he comes online or kick the pug.

It’s pretty clear that this change would help guild to play together but I think it would also benefits pug group. I can’t count how many time the pug group I joined were missing that 10th player and how many hours of time we all wasted because of that.

I see boss scaling as very good and simple quality of life change for the raiding community as a whole and I think the benefits far outweigh the issues.

If you think otherwise, please explain your point of view.