My “unreasonable claim” being that I hold the position that I simply don’t know exactly how much time or resource it would take for ArenaNet to fully support and maintain an “easy mode” version of the raid, except that I believe it is not negligible. (Like you do)
Yes. Given the relative simplicity of what’s been requested, compared to other content already in the game, it is unreasonable to insist that it would take a significant amount of time or effort to produce.
Blizzard developers stated that even one extra difficulty mode doubles the amount of testing needed to be done to verify things are working properly.
First, that’s testing time, not development time, and like with the wing 2 beta they can use players to do that. Second, since the “hard mode” is already finely tuned, and the “easy mode” would have negligible impact even if it turned out to be undertuned, they don’t need to get too fussy about getting it right on the first try. Since it’d just be number tweaks anyways, they could course correct in a simple hotfix over the first few days, no problems.
Keep in mind, the skills would all be the same skills, just with some of the numbers adjusted down. You’d only really need to run through it once or twice to see if they were all working as intended.
I could totally understand your points if this were a significant overhaul, with some skilled removed entirely and other skills added to replace them with different effects, but this really would be “copy→paste, subtract 30% from the damage on this ability, subtract 10% from the damage on that, etc.”
This seems like something they could assign to those outside the raiding team if it would take more than a few hours, but I really don’t see how it could (aside of course from a testing period, which would be outside that team).
You are saying they should make the mechanics “less punishing”, not even knowing what a 1-hit KO attack is. Sorry can’t take that seriously. You just want another Colossus Rumblus where players just ignore his main mechanic and just DPS him down. So much fun.
If people want to do that, then it might be possible, I can’t promise that they could tune it so that this would be impossible. But that’s up to them. It’s like golem MK II, you can choose to melee him and dodge all his attacks, or you can choose to stand in the corner and range him, whichever YOU prefer.
Ideally it would not be so easy to trivialize that you could completely ignore the mechanics, but rather just easy enough that some of the party would avoid them and be able to rez the others and get back into the game rather than “well, that’s a wipe” if a few people mess it up. I could go through each specific encounter and explain how I’d tweak them, but you get the idea, and all it would take is a reduction of the penalties involved, the difference between hitting a person with a live blade, and hitting them with an unsharpened one. You feel it either way, you just don’t lose any limbs.
And then you call it “easy to implement”. What about Gorseval for example? Let’s Reduce Gorseval’s world erosion damage so there is no need to use the Updrafts?
That’s not quite how I would do it. There might be better ways, but my recommendation would be to make it so that it auto-downs any player hit by it, un-defendable, and there would be enough follow-up damage going around that players would be unlikely to self-rez easily. So yes, at least some party members would need to glide to keep the party moving. I never said wipes would be impossible, just far less likely.
The walls I might reduce in HP so that they are easier to break down, but basically players would have every reason to TRY and go through the same motions as a proper party, it would just be easier to accomplish. If everyone gets caught, then yeah. that’d be a wipe, but so long as they try to get out, they shouldn’t have too much trouble at it. If only some manage to get out, they would have to try and rez the rest, in between trying to keep the DPS up. Again, easier to manage than in the hard mode, but same basic idea.
Might they need a quick refresher if they jumped right into the hard mode without watching any tutorials? Sure, but having played through easy mode they would have a better feel for his tells, and the timing of various things, so again, they would not automatically be “hard mode ready,” but would at least be better than a total newb, or even many players that have spent a dozen attempts without getting very far.
Let’s make it so you don’t get debuffed by the Orbs either, it’s too harsh to deal zero damage. Or make them not expand maybe? Or make them instantly die so there is no point in them existing?
It might be possible to leave the orbs alone, with the reduction in the other elements players could just learn to deal with them. It might be necessary to tweak them a bit though, my suggestion being to just make them a bit lower HP so that lower DPS characters could spend less time clearing them than a hard mode would need, but the same basic task would be required.
They won’t learn the mechanics, they will just learn how to avoid them completely and when they do the “normal” Raid they will be detrimental to the team and cause extra failures.
Not if the other members of the raid have any idea what they’re doing. They should know the distinctions between easy and hard raid strategies, and should be able to say “now remember, this works in easy mode, but it never works here, so do this instead.” If the player is still hopeless, they’re still hopeless, but they’d be even more hopeless if they’d never done easy mode, and would take longer to catch up.
“If you spent as much time working on [some task] as
you spend complaining about it on the forums, you’d be
done by now.”
I promise you that it’s harder than whatever you imagine it to be in your head.